Angela’s Ashes used to be on Showtime when cable TV was a thing and my family was a subscriber. Wow that was ages ago. It’s like talking about playing Snake on your phone and thinking that it was the best thing since sliced bread. I never watched the movie because my grandma thought that it was depressing.
But you can’t ignore the popularity of the book, and for that I have to read it. And is it depressing? Yeah, you can’t deny the story is a bit of a downer, endlessly frustrating, but all of this comes from a very real place. And there is no pitiful tone to ask for sympathy here, asthe events that happen in the book are described objectively, through the eyes of a young Frank that hasdto grow up faster than he should.
“When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all. It was of course, a miserable childhood: the happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.”
The premise of that sentence in the beginning of the book already dictates what McCourt is emulating: how the mélange of those identities were seminal factors in his childhood. What was more, McCourt’s family moved back from America to Ireland, homeless and penniless. What is worse, the father Malachy, is a Northerner with patriotic tendencies which does not mix well with the rest of Limerick. More than the staunch nationalist streak (waking up his sons to pledge their lives for Ireland at 3 in the morning filthy drunk), the root cause of the issue, the cancer of the family, is the father’s drinking problem and his recurrent relapse.
For the Irish, drinking is a cliché of sorts, that we just automatically associate the Irish with drinking pints of the black stuff copiously, but beneath that cliché is an ugly truth and the consequences of alcoholism: unemployment, poverty, dead children. I guess this is what makes the book so brutal — that the McCourts lost a handful of children in such a short period of time. And all the struggles with poverty for the simple things. You can see alcoholism at its extreme worst in Angela’s Ashes.
It is a frustrating read. But who can question addiction and put some rationale behind it? Some people cannot control themselves, and the issue is prevalent. Frank, in looking for his father, often met other men like his father who reeks the same way. All money for the salary and the dole would go down the drain to the bar in an instance, leaving the rest of the family hungry and desperate. It was not until that Frank was old enough that he can support the family, and by that time, the father figure had receded into almost irrelevance.
I can’t help comparing this book by another tearjerker, A Little Life by Yanahigara, which was one of the worst books I read last year. But where Yanahigara’s story seem contrived and soapy — drama for drama’s sake, Angela’s Ashes comes from a real place, a personal place. Though A Little Life was well written, I prefer McCourt’s tone, which reflects the mind of an adolescent, yet not lacking poetry. McCourt infused the book with songs that he’s familiar with in childhood, many of them songs that his father used to sing. The book is a difficult read for its content, not so much its style.
Can we blame the alcoholic man, and the culture that supports this sort of addiction? It is the hallmark of toxic masculinity where men drink with their own kind in a bar for testosterone’s sake and fails to feed his family, and loses his job the next day. But it seems that while many families struggle with this, Malachy is on a whole another level. Out of all the village idiots, if you put them all in a village, he’s the village idiot.
Angela’s Ashes is also a snapshot of the time and place where the world was in constant turbulence — the First World War, the Great Depression, World War II. The period during World War II exposes the strain of the Irish who hates the English but who do not want to side with Hitler. Plenty of Irishmen moved to English factories (including Malachy) so that they can remit their earnings back home. The hatred for the English must be shelved for a while so the family can eat. At least for most.
There are plenty of poignant scenes here that just absolutely kills you, like when Angela waits for the first paycheck via the telegram, and constantly asking for the messenger boy for a telegram that doesn’t come. The money’s being pissed all over bars in England, and the pattern repeats. There are little details that’s planted in the book which just exacerbates this sense of poverty — the smell of ham from the neighbour’s houses during Christmas, picking up coaldust from the side of the road, the evolution of a shirt from new garment to a rag — all told from the viewpoint of a child. Yep, as an autobiography is it a rare read.
Frank’s journey ends in his country of birth, in the states, as a teenager with the horizons ahead of him. His journey to adulthood is portrayed in the second of this autobiography in ’Tis. I’m looking forward to find a copy and to devour this eagerly.
