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Two McCarthys for the Road
The Road to McCarthy:
Around the World in Search of Ireland
by Pete McCarthy
Fourth Estate, 2004. 368 pages.
McCarthy’s Bar: A Journey of Discover in Ireland
by Pete McCarthy
Griffin, 2003. 374 pages.
“If you travel in hope rather than with certain knowledge,” writes Pete McCarthy, “something interesting usually happens.” On the evidence of his first two books, McCarthy is an infinitely hopeful traveler; wherever he goes -- a pub in a small Irish town, an Irish bar in a big American city, or a sparsely populated Alaskan burg that bears his name -- something interesting indeed happens. And McCarthy has the storytelling chops of a seasoned raconteur, liar, or sage (choose your term; they’re interchangeable) and the willingness to take us as his companion. We do well to go along with him on his spirited and hilarious journeys.
McCarthy’s first book, McCarthy’s Bar, begins with the eighth rule of travel: “Never Pass a Bar That Has Your Name On It.” Born to an English father and an Irish mother, and with an upbringing in England punctuated by extended visits with his mother’s family in Cork, McCarthy wonders, “Is it possible to have some kind of genetic memory of a place where you’ve never lived, but your ancestors have? Or am I just a sentimental fool, my judgment fuddled by nostalgia, Guinness, and the romance of the diaspora?”
He may well be an accidental mystic or a fool, but he is above all a pilgrim in search of roots, a sense of home and history; and his stories range well beyond bars named “Pete’s” or “McCarthy’s.” The cast of McCarthy’s Irish adventures include keepers of public houses, fellow McCarthys who treat him as family, tourists from around the world, and people like Mr. Goggin (“surrounded by sixteen or seventeen of his children,” he has “the look of a man who lives in constant dread of being asked if he plans on having any more kids”) and an unnamed “little lady” with “some kind of mystical Tír-na-nÓggish vibe going on” who seems to appear from the mist to offer advice, tea, and biscuits, and then fades into the mist again.
Early in his journey, McCarthy focuses on St. Patrick’s Purgatory, Lough Derg, as a particular destination. There, at a “unique centre of Celtic spirituality,” he will participate in a three-day pilgrimage of sleep-deprived fasting and barefoot devotion to the Stations of the Cross. But first he will climb Croagh Patrick (a.k.a. The Reek), a Mayo feature:
Its near-symmetrical pyramid form is like the blueprint for an archetypal mountain, the resonant shape of a fairytale peak from a children’s story book. It is here that St Patrick is said to have issued the exclusion order banishing all snakes from Ireland when, in 441, he spent forty days and forty nights fasting at the summit.
McCarthy’s account of the climb includes the touristically ridiculous:
The final ascent to the summit is a steep one, scrambling over loose rock and shale that’s been badly eroded by the constant passage of pilgrims. As I’m taking a breather and munching on a life-enhancing apple, a woman comes bounding down the precipitous slope at a tremendous pace. . . . It’s Vicki, the Kiwi hitch-hiker I picked up a few days ago, timing herself in some kind of masochistic speed trial against the mountain. New Zealanders will never walk up or down anything if there’s a chance it will hurt more to run instead. Theirs is not a country so much as a fitness camp. Why look at something, they reason, when it will toughen me up if I charge at it with my head?
. . . and the sublime:
My hips and knees are aching from the impact of walking down, which always hurts more than walking
up, but I’m feeling good for having done it. And it’s not just the physical buzz from working off the squid and black pudding. There’s a spiritual element too, and it comes not from any inherent power or magic the mountain possesses, but from what’s been bestowed on it by the people who have gone there every hour, every day, for millennia. And for once, my delight in a place has been enhanced by having lots of people around, knowing that they’re all still furthering that process.
Lough Derg and its three-day fast and pilgrimage have been written of poetically by some of Ireland’s greats, notably Patrick Kavanagh and Seamus Heaney (“Lough Derg” and “Station Island,” respectively). McCarthy, with what is, by this point in the book, his trademark wit, can be counted on for a rather different sort of view:
As the boatman welcomes me with a steely glare, I feel like Edward Woodward as the doomed policeman heading out the island at the beginning of The Wicker Man.
Except, of course, that he didn’t know how The Wicker Man ended. I do.
His account alternates between seriousness and humor as he counts up the prayers prayed and examines the good priest/bad priest dynamic utilized by the retreat leaders. By the end, though, he is not afraid to admit that there was something to it:
The lake is shimmering like the Mediterranean under a bright sun as we cross back to the mainland. If it were a film, this would be a grotesque cliché, sin and gloom transformed into grace and sunlight by the redemptive magic of the pilgrimage. As it’s actually happening, I’m doing my best to ignore its symbolic significance, and just enjoy the weather. I can’t deny, though, that I’m feeling good. There’s a crispiness and clearness to things that has nothing to do with the sunlight. This has been powerful medicine. If it can do this to me, what must the true believers be feeling?
The reader can be excused for hoping that Pete McCarthy never quite figures out who he is; that way, he will need to keep looking. In his second book, The Road to McCarthy, the search continues. This time he ranges farther afield -- to Morocco, Tasmania, Montserrat, New York, Montana, and Alaska -- each time on the scent of a McCarthy trail that begins in Cork and follows one of the many directions of the Irish diaspora. As might be expected by now, it is not the achievement of certain knowledge, but the pleasure of the chase, that keeps McCarthy going and keeps the reader enthusiastically turning pages.
Right from the start of The Road to McCarthy we know that McCarthy’s Bar was no fluke. Describing two of his fellow passengers as a flight to Gibraltar experiences turbulence and other troubles, he writes, “They have taken on the haunted look of men who are about to plummet from 36,000 feet and don’t know whether to use their last seconds to proposition the hostess or order more gin and port.” In Tangier, we share his anxiety as he tries to learn a difficult city and contact the McCarthy brothers who were supposed to meet him at his day-late plane and whose phone number and address he has left on a piece of paper in England. In New York, his wild tale of a series of coincidences that leads to several good ends, including a free ticket to a sold-out play by an up-and-coming Irish playwright and a friendship with a musician who plays Irish republican hip-hop, is almost too much to believe, but too good to disbelieve. He can break our heart in Tasmania, where a site of brutal imprisonment of the Irish by the British Empire became a place of tourist massacre at the hands of a “sane” gunman in 1996. And his trip to the tiny, isolated town of McCarthy, Alaska will have fans of the old TV series Northern Exposure feeling a sense of déjà vu, only better.
As McCarthy regales us with his travel tales, we grow less concerned with the actual upshot of all of his exploration, and more and more taken by the sense that his stories themselves are the thing. One of the objects of his travel is to track down Terence McCarthy, the purported chief of the McCarthy clan whose claim to the title has been discredited. Another McCarthy, in New York, says of the scandal surrounding Terence,
“Here’s the way I see it. I’ve read Terence’s books and I thought they were great stories. I read ’em, I close ’em, and I put ’em back on the shelf. And d’you know what? I don’t want to know whether they’re true or
not.”
He takes a drink and a pause for thought.
“It doesn’t actually matter whether they’re true, or whether his claim to be prince of Desmond was true. The point was, it brought people together. It was a fraternal organization. C’mon! We knew we weren’t really related. So what? It was a starting point. It’s shot to hell now with this scandal.”
The McCarthy story is perhaps the human story writ small. Put in headline form it might read: “Claims that Unify Trumped by Divisiveness.” It’s time to let the stories do their stuff for the human race, absent of politics and power claims. Pete McCarthy knows how to tell a story. Here’s a good place to once again find that groove.
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