Give me a reason (to love you) (The Road to McCarthy - Pete McCarthy)

Member Name: theediscerning

Product:	The Road to McCarthy - Pete McCarthy
Date:	08/04/06 (94 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Some interesting places

Disadvantages: Many diversions, and no purpose

Pete McCarthy is no Dave Gorman. This might be good news to you, however there is a reason for this to be a negative comment. Were this book to be written by Dave Gorman, or Tony Hawks, or anyone else of that ilk, it would feature a focus for the meandering travels contained herein. Perhaps more importantly still, we would be told that focus, and engage with both it and what comes of it as a result.

The Road to McCarthy isn't a road. It's more of a sailing boat's path, tacking and drifting across the map, until McCarthy, Alaska (population 15 or so) is reached.

You will notice the connection between the author's name and that town's name. Along the way there are various McCarthy references - possibly not as many as in the author's first book, McCarthy's Bar, where he travelled Eire looking for pubs also with that moniker. It is obvious when reading this book that things related to the name, and some Irish politician /freedom fighter /criminal types in the 1830s and their legacy, gradually drift into being as the book's raison d'etre, but this is never stated definitely.

As a result, we drift from someone in Tangier of all places, pretending (or not) to be the king of the McCarthy clan of all people, to Tasmania, where said Irish people of old were put into prisons located within prisons within isolated settlements upon an isolated island. (Let's just say, the British didn't think much of them.)

We also get some pages back in Ireland, and a couple of other McCarthy bars - if the first book wasn't definitive we might have to think again about reading that... Other interesting places are written about too, but the book contains flaws that stop it being as engaging as it should.

First and foremost is, as stated, the reluctance of McCarthy to define a reason for, or even anything found from, his travels. The second is a reluctance to place any of his travels in time. References to trivial UK news he encounters randomly are made, and this might tell us when he was in a certain place, but we aren't told how his meandering fits into the wider world.

In an earlier age, McCarthy was a reporter on British Channel 4's travel reportage show, Travelog, and there, given the right place, he was very enjoyable - engaging, amiable, lucky - as any travel reporter can't fail to appear to be, and so on. There's a vague memory in this writer's head of him witnessing the chapel in the prison in Tasmania, which would be the only place, and the only hour of the week that isolated criminals would ever see anyone's full face - and that solely of the preacher, as they sat in a huge pigeon hole contraption and couldn't see the person to the side of them.

This however was decades ago, and not during these travels, and so if this is a true memory, McCarthy has fictionalised the timeline a heck of a lot. If so or no, he does protest too much about the state of life there.

He much prefers the state of life on Montserrat, where for some bizarre fluke of history a great Irish heritage is, er, actually quite well hidden. Yes there are many Irish names in the phone book, but no-one there seems to register the fact that a lot of islanders are descended from Irish that the British packed off there at the same time as populating the island with African slaves, thus creating a very strongly defined three-tier class system.

More recently nature has cursed the place just as badly as any Tasmanian inmates would have felt - with a great swathe of the island smothered in volcanic fallout, including the capital city. Here Pete McC can become our man in the field and tell us how the state of play looks, but this is a rarity in this book. Oftentimes he is so eager to jump into a bar and chat to amusing people with anecdotes or more, so he doesn't seem the most reliable person to tell us anything about the field, or even if there's one nearby.

Being at least half-Irish McC has interest in all things Paddy - not only the great is-Irish-Guinness-better-than-British? debate - and so goes to the New York St Patrick's Day parade, finds how political an event it is (homosexual groups being barred, the whole thing a British invention in the first place) and wrangles a place in the centre of things - not for the first time, it would appear. Irish music whenever he hears it has to be debated too - is it maudlin, mawkish sentimentality, or something people actually want to hear?

So what we have is a volume that successfully covers various parts of the world we'd possibly (and sometimes most definitely) never find ourselves, even if there's no rhyme nor reason for it. You get a good sense of place at times, even if the place is a venue for the author's readings, and the threat of it being drowned out /bottled off by Celtic fans. But you can hardly write a travel book these days without it being humorous, can you?

Well, to tell the truth, Pete McC tries. There are hardly any great laughs - in fact the nearest to hilarity is reached by a reported anecdote of a man with his trained egg. There is a funny 'Irish' joke that will stick in the memory, and a couple of times towards the beginning you can tittter as he tricks us with made-up details.

But on the whole it's not that amusing. His musings on 'pillow menus' are old hat - if he didn't know of their existence, surely most of us do - and surely this is another pointer to this book being written over decades.

To its credit the book has more moods, especially considering the Tasmanian scenes, and politics elsewhere, and a peculiar sentence where the author is entrusted with a fact about himself he is not allowed to declare to anyone for two or three years.

This is much more important to consider when you know that within two years of this book being launched, the author had died. The active mind makes this spooky, if it wasn't already.

And so we come to deciding whether to praise or damn the book, and we find we can do neither. It is an interesting read, if ten per cent too long, but you'd be hard pushed to call it a classic. Pete McCarthy proves a fairly good host - a flukey chancer who can get his feet in doors we might not be aware of, but one who has his own interests, and sometimes disappoints when we'd rather be shown other details. Those interests don't come as well defined as we'd like, which if you haven't gathered is a bit of a sticking point.

If you can't find this in your libraries, it is quite commonly in charity shops, and some people have very good condition copies for just a penny on amazon's marketplace. It's hard to recommend it for purchase, but for a lazy weekend it'll go down quite well. It serves as a memorial to an artist and author whose best work was surely before him.


It gets three stars and a mild recommendation here.

Summary: Global travels with no real thread, which lets this book down.