Leaning on Gates/Standing in Gaps

Leaning on Gates by Seamus O'Rourke

****

It’s been a day since I last wrote a book review. But it’s not everyday you receive not one, but two books written by one of the country’s best loved theatre makers. The re-release of Seamus O’Rourke’s debut autobiography Standing in Gaps, and his latest publication, its follow up, Leaning on Gates. The first two instalments in what appears to be an ongoing memoir. The inimitable O’Rourke taking a stroll down memory Leitrim in the 1970s and 80s. In which a gormless giant with aspirations of Gaelic immortality negotiates family, school, work, and growing up in a county full of the maddest, wildest, most endearing characters. The maddest, wildest, and most endearing being O’Rourke himself.

With Standing in Gaps, O’Rourke lays the foundation, beginning with his auspicious birth and carrying on through schooldays as an inside outsider and his passion for Gaelic football, and culminating in his late teens. Offering an episodic daisy chain of connected events and characters held together by chronology. O’Rourke’s understated tone, humour-filled observations and deceptive opaqueness proving irresistible as he talks about family, friends and local misfits. Indeed, O’Rourke doesn’t like the spotlight, more often glimpsed as he shimmies past in unguarded moments like an embarrassed shadow. Hidden behind a rich, colloquial language and a cast of wild, exuberant characters. Like his delightful grandmother. O’Rourke happy to direct your attention to the community so you won’t look too closely at him. His awkwardness, shyness, his wanting to fit but not sure if he does. His taciturn Father, from whom the absence of criticism passes as praise. Their love unspoken, as likely to wound as to help. Their relationship a through line threading everything together, with O’Rourke’s mother knowing and seeing all.

Leaning on Gates and Standing in Gaps by Seamus O'Rourke

Narratively there’s no great events or plot twists. The life of a Leitrim farming family having few great upheavals. But upheavals eventually arrive in the form of the 1980s. Booze, work, women and New York peppering Leaning on Gates with something akin to unrest. Traversing through his early twenties and his beginnings in theatre, O’Rourke’s sequel is a much more robust affair. The writing stronger, the observations more layered and nuanced, its humour and anecdotes richer than ever. The conversational tone slipping into confessional as he describes his relationship with drink, with women, with being utterly lost be it in a bedsit in Dublin, a construction site in New York, or back home with his family. Truths hidden behind laughter becoming clearer, more heartfelt, more visceral, even as sentimentality is never overly indulged. Emotion a luxury neither he nor his Father subscribe to, even as it wants its pound of flesh. O'Rourke's mask slipping, but never coming off. No surprise when you think about it. What comic hasn’t used comedy to hide behind?

Like the exaggerated characters in his superlative shows, O’Rourke fashions himself into a larger than life character. A relatable, no nonsense, bemused and bewildered wise man without brains, or so he’d have you believe. One who loves Gaelic football, working with his hands, and who tells a great story and tells it well. Like fellow Leitrim local, Michael Harding, behind the veil of bemusement there’s something honest, vulnerable, wild and longing that fuels it all. If McGahern’s reputation as Leitrim’s finest writer won’t suffer too much in comparison, similarities aren’t as far fetched as you might think. A love of Leitrim, its people, places and peculiarities are richly rendered with some impressive turns of phrase. The colloquial rich language ensuring readers are elected, whether remembering oft forgotten phrases or marvelling at the poetic and supple way language was once used; O’Rourke’s mastery and memory impressive. But you need a community for that kind of language, the fragmenting of which underscores O’Rourke’s bitter sweet sense of encroaching modernisation, even if it does mean a bigger house.

 Seamus O'Rourke

Like Tarry Flynn, written by that neighbour up the road, Standing in Gaps and Leaning on Gates capture a fading world and a young man’s changing relationship with himself as he faces into a dreaded, exciting and uncertain future. If you belong to that community you’ll find much to enjoy here. If not, you’ll still find much to delight. Especially, but not exclusively, if you’re from Leitrim. Showing hints of the richness of McGahern, the probing of Kavanagh, and the insights of Harding, all wrapped up in O’Rourke’s seanchaí stylings, you’d have to be mad to miss out. Treat yourself, or a loved one, and buy both

Roll on the third instalment.

Leaning on Gates and Standing in Gaps by Seamus O'Rourke published by Gill are available from all good booksellers.