Reading Group Guide
Introduction One evening in 1951, an itinerant storyteller -- a Seanchai, the very last practitioner of a tradition extending back hundreds and hundreds of years -- arrives unannounced at a house in the Irish countryside for an evening of storytelling. One of his listeners, a nine-year-old boy, grows so entranced by the storytelling that, when the old man leaves abruptly under mysterious circumstances, the boy devotes himself to finding him again.
Storyteller extraordinaire Frank Delaney takes his readers on an epic journey through the history of Ireland, stopping along the way to evoke the dramatic events and personalities so critical to shaping the Irish experience. This is the true story of Ireland and the Irish -- of how the character of the land and its people were shaped by history, by neighboring England and by the Irish themselves-written by a native son possessed of his own prodigious storytelling gifts.
Questions for Discussion
- Is the storyteller a phenomenon unique to Ireland?
- Why is Ronan enthralled before the storyteller even begins to speak? Can you imagine why Alison is so repelled?
- There's nothing quite like Newgrange in the US -- or is there? What do public monuments represent in the United States? Were they built in anything like the same way?
- Why is Ronan so much more interested in history than girls? What is it about the Storyteller that has made such a deep impression?
- The Storyteller has a very specific method for reaching his audience. Is his method similar to that of an actor or a writer?
- The Penal Laws made it very difficult for Catholics to become educated. How is a culture that is forcibly denied the growth and insight available through education and learning able to keep itself vitally alive?
- In following the Storyteller for so many years, has Ronan, in fact, become a Storyteller himself?
- Between the Norman-Irish and the Anglo-Irish, it seems difficult to define, who, really is "Irish." Is this similar to how "American" identity is formed?
- How would have Ronan's life been different if he knew his family's great secret all along?
- The book is called Ireland. To what extent is the country itself a character in the novel?
About the author
Frank Delaney was born in Tipperary, Ireland in a time and a place where itinerant storytellers, like the one featured in his novel Ireland, still haunted the country. The Irish oral tradition he celebrates may have played a part in Delaney's own choice of profession -- he began a career in broadcasting, first in Ireland and then in Britain, that earned him fame across the United Kingdom. Frank Delaney is a long time BBC reporter and contributor who has reported on subjects as diverse as the "troubles" in Northern Ireland, literature, and the arts. His first non-fiction work, James Joyce's Odyssey, was a top 5 bestseller in the UK, as were his next books, Betjeman Country and The Celts. He has been a judge for the Booker prize, writes frequently for American and British publications and has been a columnist and lecturer on many literary and historical subjects. Now, Frank Delaney has brought his considerable charm and talent to the United States. Ireland: A Novel is his first book to be published in the U.S. He now lives and writes full-time in New York City.
Read an Excerpt
HOW THE HARP WAS INVENTED
Here in Ireland we've received most of our inner riches from Mother Nature. In olden days, the monks in the abbeys made art from natural matters. They were inspired by the sights they saw every day -- a rabbit leaving its burrow; a fox running across a hillside with its red brush of a tail streaming out behind it; a horse standing in a field, its back to the rain; a hawk making its point far up in the sky. And even their painting materials also came from the non-human world -- bird's feathers and colors from the earth.
So: all our expression, all our means of saying what's in our souls, came first from the universe that we see every day all around us, out under the air. We were not alone in this. For example, Man made his first music from blowing air through reed pipes and kept rhythm by tapping a stick on another stick.
But here in Ireland we made music from one very unusual source. It's our greatest musical instrument, it's very contrary to play and it had its roots in the sea. This is the story of how we invented -- the harp.
Once upon a time, before swans learned to swim and before bears wore fur coats, the wife of Breffni O'Rourke, a Sligo chieftain, liked to walk the sands at Rosses' Point. She enjoyed looking out over the Atlantic hoping to see whatever glories might lie far away to the west. As she walked she listened to the crawk of the gulls, the hiss of the tide, the ocean's hush.
One morning, however, she heard a new sound. It was strange and wondrous, it was a melody so tinkling and beautiful she thought she must capture it forever. She looked around to see where it came from -- but nobody walked near her, the sands stretched white and empty and she could not find the source of these harmonies.
It was all very peculiar. The noise grew louder and then fainter and then louder and then fainter. She asked herself, "What comes and goes, and then comes again and then goes again?" After a moment's thought, she found the answer rising in her brain -- the wind! The wind comes and goes, and comes again and goes again. So the Lady Breffni looked in the direction the wind was coming from and she found the source of the glittering tunes.
On the sands of Rosses' Point, near the original Coney Island, lay the beached carcass of a whale, high and white like a monument. The silver noises she heard came from the ribcage, where the sea breezes danced through the bones. For many minutes the lady stood and watched and listened to sounds that moved her to tears. She returned enthralled to her castle and immediately summoned her musicians who played every night at supper.
"Visit straightaway the sands at Rosses' Point," she instructed them, "and listen to the sound of the wind in the bones of the whale and then come back here and devise a means of making that music."
The musicians mounted their horses, rode off to the beach and dismounted by the carcass. They also found the sound enchanting and they spent hours there that day, scratching their heads, walking north, south, east and west of the white shape, trying to divine how the music was caused. What structures, they asked, what tensions would be needed to create something so lovely? Like scientists, somber and grave, they debated and they questioned and they considered.
On their return to the court, they began work immediately with Breffni O'Rourke's carpenter. Some weeks later they produced a very large, ponderous-looking, wooden instrument with long thin staves running from top to bottom across a frame curved like a whale's ribcage. They wheeled this contraption into the castle yard and, as good fortune would have it, the wind blew from the west that very day. To their great delight, their instrument made sounds even more beautiful than the carcass of the whale.
Next, they wheeled it around to the front door of the castle and sent a messenger to tell the lady her music was ready. She emerged at once and could hear the melody as she approached; in fact all the people in the castle turned out when they heard these heavenly notes. As they stood and listened, some people felt that a miracle had come to the great house of Breffni O'Rourke.
But -- there were two problems. First of all, this instrument was as big as a van and the lady pointed out that she could only listen to it in the open air; it wouldn't fit through the castle door and, like the rest of Ireland, Sligo isn't a place where you can listen to music out of doors all the year round. The second point she made -- it was now late afternoon and after a time, as the sun began to sink in the west, the wind dropped. And, of course, the music ceased. The Lady Breffni looked at the musicians and said, "Where's my music?"
They replied quite reasonably that the instrument only played when the wind blew, to which she said, "Then how am I going to hear it when we sit to dine?"
The musicians looked at the carpenter and the carpenter looked at the musicians.
"Place it in the yard outside an open window of the dining-hall," suggested the carpenter, trying to solve two problems at once.
"But the wind may not always blow through that corner of the yard," answered the lady. "And if it does, it'll make the room too cold to sit in."
One of the musicians said, "Perhaps if the carpenter were to make some bellows, like a blacksmith uses for blowing on the fire?"
"I don't want a blacksmith's bellows inside or outside the banqueting hall," said the Lady Breffni. "Are you all dolts or something?" She was cross by now.
A child wandered forward, a boy of nine or so, blond and inquisitive. He leaned in to look at the great instrument, reached out to touch it and drew his fingers across the long, tall staves. But he pulled back his hand with an expression of distaste on his face.
"I'm surprised the wind wants to play this," he said.
He was the son of Lady Breffni's housekeeper and renowned in that house for his cleverness and powers of observation. The musicians knew him well because he spent a great deal of time listening to them and observing how they played; one of them had begun to teach him the whistle.
"What's wrong with it?" asked the carpenter.
The boy thought for a moment.
"It's too -- unfriendly," he said, after struggling to find the word. "These wooden bones -- they offer no welcome."
"And what would you find welcoming?" asked one of the musicians.
"Something easy, a supple thing," the boy said. "Something that would bend to the fingers. Then you wouldn't need the wind. Any of us could learn to play it."
"But how would that make music?" asked the carpenter.
"These don't make the music," said the boy, indicating the wooden slats. "The music is made down here, where the vibrations echo from the blown bones" - and he laid his hand on the broad frame of the instrument.
"He's perfectly right," said the musicians.
"And it could be a lot smaller," said the boy, "provided the box was deep enough to reverberate."
They carried the huge instrument away, removed the wooden staves and replaced them with long strings of gut taken from the stomachs of cows and waxed with the grease of a goose. It took them no more than a few hours. They wheeled it back into the castle yard and that night, the Lady Breffni O'Rourke of Sligo sat down to dinner, listening to music that seemed even sweeter than that melody she had heard in the skeleton of a whale. Next day, they made a much smaller version and brought into the castle that very night. It was even sweeter than the first. And that, my friends, is how the harp was invented.
Did you know, by the way, that Ireland is the only nation on earth to have a musical instrument as its national symbol? Canada has the maple leaf; New Zealand has the silver fern; Scotland has the thistle; England has the rose; Wales has the leek; America has the eagle -- and Ireland has the harp.
Read a Sample Chapter
Ireland
By Frank DeLaney Harper Paperbacks
Copyright © 2008 Frank DeLaney
All right reserved. ISBN: 9780061244438
Chapter One
Wonderfully, it was the boy who saw him first. He glanced out of his bedroom window, then looked again and harder - and dared to hope. No, it was not a trick of the light; a tall figure in a ragged black coat and a ruined old hat was walking down the darkening hillside; and he was heading toward the house.
The stranger's face was chalk-white with exhaustion, and he stumbled on the rough ground, his hands held out before him like a sleepwalker's. He looked like a scarecrow deserting his post. High grasses soaked his cracked boots and drenched his coat hems. A mist like a silver veil floated above the ground, broke at his knees, and reassembled itself in his wake. In this twilight fog, mysterious shapes appeared and dematerialized, so that the pale walker was never sure he had seen merely the branches of trees or the arms of mythic dancers come to greet him. Closer in, the dark shadows of the tree trunks twisted into harsh and threatening faces.
Across the fields he saw the yellow glow of lamplight in the window of a house, and he raised his eyes to the sky in some kind of thanks. With no fog on high, the early stars glinted like grains of salt. He became aware of cattle nearby, not yet taken indoors in this mild winter. Many lay curled on the grass where they chewedthe cud. As he passed, one or two lurched to their feet in alarm and lumbered off.
And in the house ahead, the boy, nine years old and blond as hay, raced downstairs, calling wildly to his father.
The stranger's bones hurt, and his lungs ached almost beyond endurance. Hunger intensified his troubles; he'd eaten one meal in three days. The calm light in the window ahead pulled him forward in hope. If he held their attention, he might get bed and board for a week - and maybe more. In the days of the High King at Tara, a storyteller stayed seven days and seven nights. Did they know that? Nobody knew anything anymore.
With luck, though, the child in this house would help. Children want stories, and the parents might stretch their hospitality, fired by the delight in the boy's eyes. Unlike last night's billet; high up on a hill farm, he had slept in a loft above the cows, where the east wind got at his bones. The ignorant people there, who had no use for stories, gave him no food and closed their fireside to him. It happened more and more.
But this house would surely prove better; and it was, after all, Halloween, the great time of the year for telling stories, the time of All Souls', when the dead had permission to rise from their graves and prowl the land.
Over the last few hundred yards the fog dispersed into flitters and wisps. At the house, a small white gate opened from the lane into a country garden, which in summer would shine with bunched roses and morning glories and tresses of sweet pea. The tall man in the black coat rapped twice on a brass knocker. Immediately, the husband of the house opened the door.
"Aha!"
The stranger and the householder exchanged a solid handshake, eye to eye. Behind his father, the boy waited in the hallway, jigging from foot to foot.
"God save all here," said the stranger; he hunched his shoulders nervously.
Over the years, his voice had grown deep and rotund. His manner and speech had an unusual formality, with trace elements of stately English from an earlier century and a hint of classical learning. Consequently, his language rang generally more colorful than the speech of the people he met every day.
The man of the house smiled and stood aside.
"Come in. You brought clear skies to us."
"With your permission, I'll bring clear thoughts too."
"Your coat is wet - let me take it."
The man extended a cold, bony hand to the boy peeking around his father's waist.
"A fine boy. God save you too, ma'am!" called the Storyteller to the woman of the house.
She looked irked, and he guessed that he, this stringy, unwashed man, with skin like canvas, would disrupt her rigorous household; nonetheless she set a place for him while her husband, pleased and comfortable, poured the visitor a drink.
The boy watched the stranger attacking the food like a tired hound. He sensed that the man's hunger fought with the man's decorum. Nobody spoke because the newcomer seemed too famished to be interrupted. The boy examined the man's face, saw the long, thin scar, wondered if he had been in a knife fight, perhaps with a sailor on some foreign quayside.
And the sodden boots - in his mind he saw the stranger fording streams, climbing out of gullies, traversing slopes of limestone shale on his endless travels across the country. Did he have a dog? Seemingly not, which was a pity, since a dog could have sat guard by the fire at night. Did the man ever sleep in caves? They said that bears and wolves had long been extinct in Ireland - but had they?
That evening, in that white house among the fields, a boy's most passionate dream came true. His father had long talked of the traveling storytellers. He said they possessed brilliant powers; they brought the long-gone past to life vividly, without what he called "the interference of scholars. Those professors," he said. "They dry out history in order to put it down on paper." In his father's view, a tale with the feeling taken out of it had "no blood and was worth very little."
But the old stories, told by traveling storytellers round the fireside on winter evenings - they came hurtling straight down the long, shiny pipeline of the centuries, and the characters, all love and hate and fire, "tumbled out on our own stone floor."
Continues...
Excerpted from Ireland by Frank DeLaney Copyright © 2008 by Frank DeLaney. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
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