Get Hold Of A Goats Song Engineered By Dermot Healy Accessible Through Textbook

of the most beautiful books I've read, One of my favourite books of all time, Pure poetic fiction about a drunk who has lost the love of his life, The sadness is so palpable tangibly beautiful the imagery will sweep you away, Simply put, Healy is a master with words and A Goat Song delivers in so many ways,

It's just one of those books I can never forget and think about often, for no particular reason, except for how well it's written.
When a book is this well written, it doesn't matter what it's about,

I'll be reading everything by Dermot Healy, that I can promise, I enjoyed this book immensly, Dermot Healy draws you into his book with his raw and straight from the heart nononsence way of writing, Amazing amount of historical information and the enormous struggle with alcoholism and complex relationships, The lovely description of the landscape, the sea simple things like turf fires and candles burning and the way people speak, Im a great fan and sad to know that this master of words is not amongst us anymore.
But I will be reading more of his work, This book was one I had meant to read for some time and when I heard it being namechecked recently by Kevin Barry on a Topbooks podcast, that tipped the odds in its favour.


Very briefly its about a tortured love affair, set mostly in the Mullet peninsula of Mayo but with excursions also to Belfast and the heartland of Ulster Unionism.
The characters also seem to lead lives that encompass abnormal ie, way too much levels of alcohol, In fact its pretty clear that the main character is a full blown alcoholic,

I think the way all of the places involved are described is first class you really get a sense of the elemental nature of life on the West coast and how the wind is ever present.
In Belfast, there is a great sense of claustrophobic society, how everyone seems to know what the other person is doing and what religion they adhere to.
The description of the way that the female characters father an RUC man finds a bolt hole on the West coast of Ireland is well handled and the examination of his prejudices and misconceptions is very credible.


No point in recycling the entire plot line, but I really enjoyed the way the characters were drawn, the sense of place in multiple locations, and the way people talked was very true to life.
I thought the descriptions of nature were excellent and the use of language was lyrical there was a great flow to them, On the negative side the book did go on and on and on a bit however, and some of the philosophising sections were hard to read.
It wandered a bit too much for my liking,

So not an unqualified success, and not a book to read if you give up easily, but if you give it the time and make the effort it will give you glimpses into parts of Ireland and Irish society that dont normally get this level of interest.
And it is a very convincing dissection of a number of key characters and a sense of what makes them tick, A good book, maybe not a great one though,
While I can't comment on the veracity of the elements of purely Irish history myths and the Troubles and geography, the writing itself is splendid and succinctly captures the intensely destructive flame of lust that is consuming both its main characters.
Its Irishness is not alienating, but rather enlightening as in, you feel enriched after having read it, not put off, as in 'I can't understand where this is coming from.
. . '. Well worth the read. I gave it aas parts of this book were excellent, lyrical writing,

BUT and it's a big one, The story meandered. And meandered through lashings of drink and drunken fights, I didn't know what was real and what was imagined, And perhaps I wasn't meant to but it added to the confusion,

The good parts were very good, The description of the Northern/Southern Ireland conflicts, the differences in even the life of the towns, He catches all that and well,

The most interesting character in the book was Catherine's father, Jonathan Adams, I honestly thought the book should have been about him, A wonderful, complex character. Unlike the two leads who bored me with their endless drunken shenanigans and whining, I have the Harvill hardcover edition with a blurb written in the inside of the dust jacket by Patrick McCabe: A fiercely passionate, gutwrenching book.
Its description of the west of Ireland is like no other book I've ever read, This is a book that will stay with you long after you've put it down, its definitely framed in such a way that makes it not for the faint of heart, id say as long as you can stick it out

to part, youre probably going to like this book, it says on the back that it covers the whole of ireland, and im not going to presume that im an authority on whether or not thats true, but its the first book ive read since i got here that comes close.
so many books ive read since i got here have been inaccessible, but this one is so much less so than all the others.


and the ending is very paul newman and a ride home, if you know what im saying, dont know if i liked it but i appreciated the effort, An intensely personal, rambling, poetic book telling the story of an alcoholic writer in rural Ireland Healy what a gifted writer,

A Goat's Song is free of those novelistic tricks and turns that make fiction laborious, free from that awful sense of writerly contrivance that pollutes so many novels.
It's so full of irrepressible human truth and life,

Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, Another of those Irish wordsmiths, . . so good. The story of a guy trying to do the sober thing and the woman he lost, . . A very refreshing voice. Voice of an alcoholic, whose confession can hardly be grasped by anyone who has not gone through the experience themselves, Voice of a person who makes efforts to occupy the middle ground between two religious traditions in Ireland, but reapeatedly fails, Voice of a writer who mistrusts words, Voice of a man who is not afraid to live in a woman's body,
My eyes actually filled with tears as I was reading the third page of this book, so I was not sure what will happen by the time I finish it.
The first lyrical part, in which Jack ruminates on his failed relationship with Catherine and, among other things, ends up in a psychiatric hospital, is followed by the second part, which traces the fate of Catherine's father, an RUC man, who becomes one of the main participants at the Bloody Sunday in.
This day changes his life and makes him search a refuge in the Republic of Ireland, where he tries to hide his identity,
The next part of the book concerns the tumultuous relationship between Jack and Catherine, marked by overwhelming emotions, alcohol and violence, until, in a circular movement, we get back to the beginning of the book, just as the high tide follows the ebb at the Mullet coast.
Quite strange at times, and it took me some effort to make it through, But there are a lot of observations that are eerie in their truth, . . all the more so because they are largely painful ones, An astonishing, gutwrenching, heartbreaking masterpiece, A windswept, tumultuous novel telling of the clashes between the different communities of Ireland and Northern Ireland through the prism of a doomed romance between Jack Ferris, an alcoholic playwright and his actress lover, Catherine Adams.
You're never quite sure what's true, what's misremembered, or what's imagined, as Jack's wild, selfdestructive nature is brought to the fore, The most intriguing and interesting parts of the book deal with the life of Catherine's father, John Adams, a retired RUC officer, whose moment of uncharacteristically violent infamy caught on camera years ago haunts him for the rest of his days.
.stars. An Irish playwright reimagines his estranged lovers past in this “rare and powerful book”E, Annie Proulx whose “melancholy beauty resonates with the deepest truths” Boston Globe,
'A Goat's Song' is what I would class a perfect contemporary Irish novel and a perfect modern love story by love I mean starcrossed love.
The real skill in the story is the format, which flits forwards and backwards in time, between different characters and their perspectives but this is effortless.
Healy does this with real skill, It's rarely confusing, always extremely literary but original and not laboured, The story flows beautifully from Jack Ferris complex, alcoholic writer, fisherman, lover, to Jonathan Adams RUC man haunted by his failure in the church and violence in NI.
His desire to conquer Irish language and mythology land back to Catherine wreckless, beautiful, talented actress, promiscuous flawed, real seeming characters caught up in their place in time, tangled by the politics of Ireland and NI.
The book spins a modern mythology with the tragedies of ordinary lives reflected in it,
The complex webs between the characters become a metaphor, symbolic of the tragic relationship between Ireland and the North, Two places that can never be together and can never be apart, I didn't know a lot of the context in which some of the events took place and the book set the scene for these really well, which as an Irish person helped to explain this recent enough part of our country's history.
For example, I didn't know how sever the tensions were between people and how opening your mouth to express yourself was genuinely dangerous, At times the plot can meander a bit more than I liked but this was a small flaw in brilliant book,
The scenery in Belmullet is like an added character, I loved the occasional references to goats throughout the tale too,
Additionally the book is a very honest account of how alcoholism can play out in Ireland and this is rarely confronted so honestly in our novels, films etc.



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