Well-remembered Days is the hilarious rendition of the putative life of one Eoin O'Ceallaigh, a 20th-century Irish Catholic, written by Arthur Matthews, better known for his role as co-writer of the Channel Four series Father Ted. With one foot in surrealism and the other knee-deep in the muck of an Irish bog, this series of comic sketches echoes with the voices of Ted and Dougal and touches on all the same themes of sexual repression, racist abuse, sexist caricatures and alcoholic mishaps. Told by the 90-something Eoin, once-raging founder of the League of the Mother of God Against Sin and most active employee of the National Censorship Board, most of the tales are carried off with an impish satire that veers between fondness for the Irish and viciousness at the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church. Some might think the stories far-fetched but only recently priests in the South were advising farmers to sprinkle holy water on cattle and themselves in a bid to stop the spread of Foot and Mouth. Eoin begins his reminiscences with a very funny attack on the extremities of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes.

The poverty that McCourt harps on about was confined to a handful of malcontents (probably no more than 10 or 12), who, if pressed, would probably admit that their lot was not so bad after all.... My own memory of Ireland... is that everyone was blissfully happy all of the time.

Rather than mourn the loss of one of her children, his own mother says, "So feckin' what?" He muses that the notorious Black and Tans were "very unpopular". Introduced to nude wrestling by his Christian brother teacher, he goes on to scribe a pamphlet which outlines the spiritually confused Protestant mind and wonders why it is deemed fascist and not distributed further. He's relieved to marry Noreen, an ugly woman "with the sexual urges of a corpse", whose illnesses plague him for the rest of the book. The highlight of his life is being thrown off "The Late Late Show" by the Gardai and welcoming Pope John Paul II to Ireland in the 1970s, upon which he declares, "It's hard to think of a more momentous moment in world history." With sardonic swipes at Fergal Keane, Sinead O'Connor, Ru Paul and "feminesbian" poets, Mathews brilliantly captures some of the bizarre, absurdist quality of Ireland in the midst of a cultural and economic boom. --Cherry Smyth

2008-05-13 One Trick Pony

A tedious book based on a single joke (have a character say things out of character and make these pronouncements obscene). I laughed once, so it deserves one star. That's it.