This compendium makes a significant contribution to Behan’s centenary year
It is shocking to realise that it’s a hundred years since Brendan Behan was born. His writing still has a freshness and modernity about it. And yet he has been dead for more than half of that time. The roaring boy stereotype has begun to fade and his writing can now be assessed on its own merits. He had considerable achievement in various genres: in a play like The Quare Fellow, in his poems in Irish and in that masterpiece of autobiographical fiction, Borstal Boy.
The columns are a testimonial to Behan’s fluency in, and knowledge of, Irish poetry and song. Although in English, scarcely a column goes by without the cúpla focal and frequently there is more. Poems and songs are quoted verbatim. Behan provided no translation; they were offered without apology in the original Irish.
Many of the columns take place in the company of, and with, the salty repartee of three regular inner-city pub denizens All of this serves to enhance the intimacy which is key to Behan’s writing in the column, the sense that you are sitting beside him in the pub.
The impression the columns convey is of someone continually on the move. After traversing Dublin, he travels the length and breadth of Ireland, as far south as Wexford and as far north as Belfast. In the latter, he displays a particular interest in contemporary writers like Forrest Reid or Joseph Tomelty; and when he gets stuck among a group of Ulster Protestants, wades lustfully into Orange ballads.
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