The Bodhrán Makers E-Book

John B. Keane

• Herausgeber: Brandon
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Life is harsh in close-knit community of Dirrabeg, a community on the Dingle Peninsula facing extinction in the mid-1950's. Many of the young have left for England or America, where there are opportunities and chances for secure lives. Those remaining behind love their land and their independence but fear for the future as the bogs get thin, the yields are poor, and the children have little hope of success.  'We never died a winter yet.' A wickedly funny and insightful novel from the author of Sive, The Field, The Year of the Hiker, and many other classic works. In the Kerry village of Dirrabeg in the 1950s, the annual wren dance is a moment of light within the dark winter, especially for bodhrán player Donal Hallapy, whose skills are in high demand. But this paganism, and the singing, dancing and drinking that take place, are anathema to Canon Tett, who resolves to crush the old customs. Donal Hallapy, devoted father of a large family, is a bodhran player. He is always in great demand whenever the once-a-year wrendances take place, a day long festival on St Stephen's Day, which can be traced back to pagan times. This paganism, the secret nature of the celebrations, the singing, dancing and drinking that takes place, and the fact that the church has no control over them has made them anathema to "the clan of the round collar," in the person of Canon Tett, an ultraconservative and downright sadistic priest determined to bring the free spirits of Dirrabeg to bay by ending the fun of the wrendances. Wickedly funny and full of insight into age-old conflicts and a lifestyle long passed into memory.

Leseprobe

Praise for

THE BODHRÁN MAKERS

‘This powerful and poignant novel provides John B. Keane with a passport to the highest levels of Irish literature.’

The Irish Press

‘At once a rueful elegy to a vanished spirit and a comic celebration.’

Publishers Weekly

‘Furious, raging, passionate and very, very funny.’

The Boston Globe

‘Told with a vigour and vivacity which keep the attention riveted.’

The Irish Times

‘Sly, funny, heart-rending … Keane writes lyrically; recommended.’

Library Journal

‘A riveting read.’ Belfast Telegraph

‘A tale that goes straight to the heart – the heart of the reader as well as the heart of the matter. Keane gets beneath the skin of Irish culture, past and present, and provides a view tourists will never see.’

The Bloomsbury Review

‘A thorough, pained, loving account of a lost world – with the novel itself an act of cultural survival.’

Kirkus Reviews

THE BODHRÁN MAKERS

John B. Keane

To Elaine with love

Bodhrán (bow’rön): the first syllable is pronounced as in the bough of a tree, the second syllable as in drawn without the d. The bodhrán is a shallow, single-headed drum of goatskin which resembles a tambourine but is larger; it is played with a small stick called a cipín, or else with the hand.

Contents

Title PageDedicationEpigraphForewordPrefaceOneTwoThreeFourFiveSixSevenEightNineTenElevenTwelveThirteenFourteenFifteenSixteenSeventeenEighteenNineteenTwentyTwenty-OneAbout the AuthorCopyrightOther Books

Main Characters

Canon Peter Pius Tett – he rules the presbytery with an iron hand and expects to rule the lives of everyone in the parish in the same way.

Donal Hallapy – desperately poor, he moves between Dirrabeg and Trallock, a strange but generous man driven to rebel.

Nora Devane – the Canon’s eyes and ears, she has an uncanny ability to smell the slightest whiff of potential scandal.

Fred and Minnie Halpin – proprietors of the Bus Bar, a haven of relaxation from the tensions of the town.

Monty Whelan – a thorn in the Canon’s side, he teaches at Dirrabeg school but shows a marked reluctance to bow to the Canon’s authority.

‘Bluenose’ Herrity – his hands are no longer steady but he is still the best bodhrán maker of them all.

The people of Dirrabeg live in dread of ‘the clan of the round collar’ until the Canon goes too far and provokes a revolt.

Foreword

BY CONOR KEANE, SON OF THE AUTHOR

THIS BOOK IS of a time and a people now long gone, and it could well have been called The Last of the Bodhrán Makers. The extraordinary men and women who inhabit these pages and live in the fictional townland of Dirrabeg were as real to John B as you and I. All that is portrayed here is based on real people and, to a lesser extent, real events – confabulated into extraordinary characters and a remarkable tale by a gifted storyteller. Prepare to read about the interaction of the clan of the round collar with the begetters of wren dances and porter balls, of an Ireland little remembered, of a noble people and an era that should never be forgotten.

When my late father’s first play, Sive, rocked the Irish theatre world in 1959, two men-of-the-road were essential to the unravelling of the play’s sinister plot. When the tinker duo Pats Bocock and his bodhrán-wielding son Carthalawn pranced onto the Irish stage, this Kerry version of a Greek chorus unleashed pagan memories and heralded a revival of bodhrán making and playing that continues to this day.

Sive was the first time the vast majority of Irish people came into contact with the bodhrán. The now near-ubiquitous percussion instrument was in its death throes in 1959. In some corners of the land, the country people’s drum was hanging on by its goat’s skin.

Writing in The Irish Times in its series Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks, Fintan O’Toole said of Sive that its ‘mix of melodrama and myth was a cocktail so powerful that it blew the head off a country that was tired of a stifling orthodoxy’.

O’Toole continued: ‘What gives the play its raw power is that this sociological drama is fused with Keane’s “pagan” worldview, in which the forces of darkness and of light, the devils and the angels, are at war. The force that Keane unleashed on the Ireland of the late 1950s was one against which it had no protection, because it came not from the new ideas of urban intellectuals but from the depths of a dying tradition.’

Welcome to this Ireland, the land inhabited by the bodhrán makers that a young John B first encountered in rural North Kerry. Here he found the raw material for the bulk of his work that he forged into this book and plays such as The Field, Sharon’s Grave and The Year of the Hiker, in particular.

John B loved these people with all his heart. The Bodhrán Makers is a homage to their beliefs, customs and idioms, but above all, to their ability to eke out a living from meagre resources in 1950s Ireland, all the while remaining true to those from whom they came and where they came from.

It seems this appreciation was shared by the people of Ireland, as The Bodhrán Makers sold well over 100,000 copies when it was first published by Steve McDonogh of Brandon Books in 1986.

Finally, it has to be recorded that The Bodhrán Makers is also a tribute to John B’s great friend, and often co-conspirator, Sonny Canavan of Dirha West, Listowel, who passed away on 28 April, 1977. Sonny Canavan has been described as the Antonio Stradivari of bodhrán makers, but for the people of North Kerry he was, and always will be, the last of the great bodhrán makers.

Preface

THOMAS CUSS TURNED carefully off the main road and drove slowly through the open countryside of Dirrabeg. He parked the Mercedes next to a five-bar iron gate. The gate opened onto a spacious roadside field of sixty-one acres. The field in itself was marginally larger than the entire home farm from which he had just driven.

‘We’ll count separately,’ he told his seven-year-old grandson, ‘and see if our figures correspond.’

Tommy Cuss stood on the uppermost bar of the gate, a hand on his grandfather’s shoulder, eager eyes working in conjunction with silently moving lips as his gaze moved swiftly from bullock to bullock.

‘Sixty-seven,’ he shouted triumphantly, awaiting his grandfather’s tally which always took longer than his. Tom Cuss smiled and continued with his count.

‘You have a good head,’ Thomas Cuss conceded at the conclusion; ‘sixty-seven is right. Let’s go on now and count the others in the next field but let us give more time to it because now we’ll be taking stock of yearlings and two-year-olds. They might not stand still as obligingly as these sober chaps here.’

The grass in the seventy-two acre, second field was fleecier and of a richer green than that of the first. The cattle had only begun their grazing the day before. At the rear of both fields were eight-feet-high turf banks no longer in use. These ran parallel with the roadway and enclosed the acreage, vast by local standards, in a long green rectangle.

Grasslands, turf banks and a blackthorn ring-fort astride a small uncultivated hillock accounted for the total domain of Dirrabeg.

‘There were people and houses all along here one time weren’t there granda?’ Tommy Cuss turned to his grandfather hoping he would dwell awhile for the umpteenth time on the poverty-stricken but colourful lifestyles of the smallholders who had resided in Dirrabeg when Thomas Cuss had been a young man.

There was no sign now of human habitation, no paths or byroads nor trace of the high whitethorn hedges and deep dykes which once divided the tiny fields. The remains of Dirrabeg National School, roofless and crumbling, were the last visible testimony to a vanished community.

Thomas Cuss did not indulge his grandson at once. He remembered only too well the humble abodes and the colourful characters. It had taken him twenty-five years and countless thousands of borrowed pounds as well as sleepless nights and constant anxiety to raze the dwellings and outhouses before reclaiming the soggy cutaway which had once supported the scraggy cows of the Dirrabeg smallholders.

Thomas Cuss had no qualms of conscience after the exodus of the early fifties. He had paid a fair price for the cutaway and there had not been a solitary smallholder who had not wished him well. The one thing to which he would never accustom himself was the mortifying silence imposed by the broad tract which he had reclaimed.

One

‘CAN I COME to town with you?’

Donal Hallapy applied the finishing touches to the clamped sods which towered perilously above the confines of the assrail before answering. Between the shafts the Spanish mare arched her rump uneasily.

‘There’s too much snow,’ he replied, not unkindly, ‘and anyway there won’t be any shopping.’

‘Not even the pub?’ his eleven-year-old daughter asked, prompted by her mother who stood behind her, hidden by the dark interior of the kitchen.

‘Not even the pub,’ he answered patiently. Trust his beloved spouse to come up with one like that, using the innocent child to throw out her barbs.

‘Go on now,’ he addressed himself to the mare, ‘you’ve carried heavier in your time.’ The animal started slowly, carefully, picking her steps along the snow-covered dirt passage which led from the house to the by-road. She paused uncertainly at the junction where there was a steep incline, awaiting his guidance.

‘Look,’ Hallapy told the eleven-year-old, ‘I could be late. I have business to settle but I’ll bring you something and for God’s sake tell your mother not to wait up for me.’

‘She has no such intention,’ young Katie Hallapy echoed the wifely sentiments coyly. At the top of the incline he took the reins in his hands and flecked them gently. The mare strained at the ancient harness, her rear hooves failing to find purchase. He draped the reins over the hames and seized the back shafts in his powerful hands.

‘Hup girl,’ he shouted, lifting and pushing with all his strength. She responded gamely. Between them they managed to power the ponderous cargo, intact, onto the by-road.

The clamp had swayed, even shuddered, but not a sod had moved. He smiled grimly, remembering his father.

‘You’ll remember me, you son of a thatcher,’ that worthy had once told him as they sat drinking at a wren dance. ‘Whenever you build a clamp on an assrail or start a winter reek you’ll remember what I taught you.’

Others might not agree but his friends would boast that when Donal Hallapy clamped turf it stayed clamped. The narrow bog road which led from the house to the main road was covered with freshly fallen snow as were the many turf reeks. As yet it had made little impact on the heather-covered boglands. There was the faintest impression of white, no more. It would need several inches to envelop the heather. The surrounding hills were white and so would the roadside fields be white as he proceeded to town.

The town: it was a bad time of evening to make the four-mile journey. Darkness was beckoning and the main road would be slippery, not that he worried for the safety of the turf-load. The mare could take care of herself but there would be cars and lorries to contend with and it wasn’t the widest road in the world. Still there was no frost, at least not yet. With such a heavy load the mare, for all her experience, would not be able to cope, not with frost. He tightened the sugán rope which bound his heavy black coat and turned down the tops of his Wellingtons.