I might as well state it plainly: this book is the stupidest scholarly work I have ever read. I gave it up halfway through, and thus read twice as much as I should have.
As a kid growing up in Ireland I remember our primary school teacher telling us about the important work carried out by Irish monks beginning in the sixth century, where they preserved and copied many important works of the ancient Western canon and slowly helped to re-illuminate Europe during the Dark Ages. Since then I've always preserved a certain curiosity about the story at the back of my mind. As a colonized people, Ireland's indigenous culture was suppressed for centuries, so could it be true that in a pre-colonial period the Irish had helped to save Western civilisation? When I saw this book on the shelf I bought it straight away.
In fairness, I should have been more circumspect. The reviews on the back cover used phrases like "shamelessly engaging, effortlessly scholarly" [Thomas Keneally]; "lyrical, playful ... entirely engaging" [NY Times]; "entertainingly told" [Sunday Telegraph] which should have rung all sorts of warning bells. Keneally (who should know better) is accidentally correct when he uses the term "effortlessly scholarly" since it's plain as day that no scholarly effort at all went into this researchless mess. I have not the space here to describe the crazed prose flowing from Cahill's out-of-control pen, nor the arm-chancing shallowness of his unbearable pseduo-intellectualism. With little of any substance to comment on, much of the book's intellectual pedigree can be can be judged from the prose style alone. Cahill plainly takes himself quite seriously as a scholar, but the mask just keeps slipping. The following are some examples. [Asterixes are mine]
Here is Cahill imagining the mindset of a Roman encountering a Greek:
"By Jupiter, don't they look the other way and let those fagg*ty tutors they hire b*gger their own children?" [p. 44]
On St. Augustine:
"a sweaty little nobody, dashing around the Mediterranean basin" [p. 56]
Following a description of Cuchullain's chariot:
"How these people would have loved the Batmobile!" [p. 86]
On the ancient Celtic world:
"They pursued the wondrous deed, the heroic gesture: fighting, f*cking, drinking, art - poetry for intense emotion, music that accompanied the heroic drinking with which each day ended, bewitching ornament for one's person and possession." [p. 96]
More than once Cahill chooses to pad out his book with long citations of largely irrelevant passages from other authors. My favourite is when he quotes four (yes, four) pages of Plato. In his premable to this block of viscous prose he says: "It is worth our while to take a few moments to receive Plato in his own words". In the next breath: "Most of Plato is impenetrable on first reading. If it begins to give you a headache, skip to the end of the passage - and just take my word for it." So apparently it's *not* worth sparing a few moments for Plato's own words. After the passage is cited, and the reader is expecting an explanation of how all this is relevant to the subject matter, the author attempts to cover his intellectual nudity with the following remarks: "The difficulty one experiences in understanding [Plato] is not a difficulty based on superficial obfuscation but on his genuine profundity. No one grasps Plato by reading him through quickly or just once." (Or by being encouraged to skip over him completely, one presumes.) Anyway, we're still waiting for the explanation. What happens next? A new paragraph begins; Cahill changes the subject. It was all bravado. He simply runs away from his own scholarship for fear of being found out. [p. 51-55]
Personally I blame a lazy publisher. As an Irishman I'd like to hear this story told - and told well - and even I think it's obvious that this manuscript should never have made it into print. A great issue is waiting to be explored about the veracity of the claim that Irish monks, endlessly chivvied by Viking raiders, still managed to make an important contribution to saving the Western intellectual canon. Cahill simply isn't up to the task. Moreover, his academic spivvery has done immeasurable damage to the claim itself. If there ever is any truth to it, and a genuine scholar ever does publish a worthwhile tract on the matter in the future, they will always find themselves facing the post-Cahill lampoonery of "The last time we were told that...".
The crowning achievement of this book's daftness is that it has somehow managed to recklessly digress and yet still remain worryingly brief. The book wanders magestically off the point almost from the very beginning, makes little effort to discuss its own thesis, and yet the text still weighs in under 220 pages. Not exactly a sign of rock-solid, lucubrating research.
