Customer Reviews

McCarthy's Bar: A Journey of Discovery In Ireland

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(20)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

As a native Irishwoman I thoroughly enjoyed this book from start to finish. Mr McCarthy definitely understands the Irish at their best and worst. He truly captures the Ireland and Irish of today and not the American version that includes scenes from The Quite Man or chapters from Angela's Ashes. I would recommend that anyone who is of Irish descent or plans to visit Ireland read this book it will give you a good understanding of the Irish people: were an irreverant, funny and unique bunch.

Pete McCarthy and his aging Volvo, known as the Tank, spend a picaresque summer pottering around Ireland, flittering from pub to bed-and-breakfast to pub and back to another pub again. McCarthy's mother was Irish (although he himself was raised in England), and this fact has generated in him an Irish lilt to his prose, if not to his actual voice.

McCarthy's tone exactly captures an Irish skill for simultaneous disdain and affection for everyone he runs across. All tourists, including himself, are faintly (or more than faintly) ridiculous. McCarthy gets chased by cows while out looking for prehistoric Irish monoliths. He gets admonished by priests with spitshined brogans while on a barefoot 3-day fasting pilgrimage. He drinks a lot (a LOT), and for some odd reason, he seems to stop at every Chinese restaurant in Ireland.

If you can overlook McCarthy's paradoxically happy good-humored dislike of almost everything (and you should), you'll find the book funny, appealing, even charming. McCarthy would be a very entertaining fellow to run into at the pub. A perfect read in anticipation or in memory of your own vacation to Ireland.

I was unsure about buying this book, but for the price I thought "what the hell!"

I opened it and read the first sentence on the bus...what a mistake! I roared with laughter, much to the chagrin of my fellow travellers who weren't sharing in my experience. For your information, the first sentence is: "The harp player had just fallen off the stage and cracked his head on the Italian tourist's pint." Another sentence, and this is only from the prologue, I haven't even reached the first chapter yet, is: "At one point, the harp player fell off again, only backwards."

This book is an amazing insight into the Irish way of life, and those who visit Ireland, by one who desperately wants to discover his Irish roots.

Pete McCarthy is an astute and accurate observer.

If you found the sentences I've quoted humorous, this book will have you in stitches.

I'm not one to roar out loud to a book, but this one creased me up time and time again.

For the craic, if nothing else, buy it!

Pete McCarthy's style quickly reminded me of America's P. J. O'Rourke, who has made a significant contribution to humorous travel writing. McCarthy is English-Irish and his affinity for his roots shows through his writing. He looks for and finds humor in the little things about travel - talk radio, second-hand cars, hitch hikers, tourist traps, off-the-beaten-path finds, bad food, good company, pleasant and unpleasant surprises, nosy hoteliers, apparent (to McCarthy and the reader, at least) ironies, rapid changes in the weather, obnoxious tourists, embedded cultural curiosities, and, well, you get the picture.

For an American reader, some of the history, terms, and geographic references are not unexpectedly foreign. Some humor and lessons are lost in the 'translation'. And McCarthy is pretty hard on American tourists in Ireland, although not noticeably harder on them than on other foreigners searching for quaint elements of Irish tradition or cheap land to buy. Hippies, yuppie Englishmen, rich Germans, and other demographic and ethnic groups earn his disbelief and, often, mild contempt. He catalogs the changes he has seen in Ireland in his lifetime, and many of them are not pretty. The Celtic Tiger has lost some of its charm and sold out some of its character to tourism and those eager to buy inexpensive land.

Consistently observant, funny and insightful, my one, major negative from the book is that it left me much less likely to visit Ireland. There may still be a chance to save the country from foreign invaders, so I'll do my part.

While it is old news, I just completed a google search to find out when Pete McCarthy might be releasing a new book. I was stunned and saddened to hear of his passing in October following an 8 month bout with cancer. I had no idea.

I loved this book. If you don't take yourself too seriously, nor are you one easily offended when someone takes the mickey out of the Irish, then you too will find yourself howling as you read Mr. McCarthy's observations. Look at the reviews. Obviously, Pete McCarthy was not for everyone. I however, thought he was the most hilarious travel writer out there. It is one of those books that I can pass along to someone and say, "If you don't think this is funny, then we have absolutely nothing in common."

Next time I'm in a pub, I'll steal a quiet moment, say a small prayer, drink one for Pete McCarthy and look for something completely absurd happening around me. Rest in peace Mr. McCarthy.

Author and humorist Pete McCarthy, son of an Irish mother and English father, has an identity crisis. His feeling of belonging in the English Midlands having gotten lost somewhere along the way, he searches for his roots and a sense of "home" in the west of Ireland - a journey of discovery and social commentary as related here in McCARTHY'S BAR, the first of his two books on the joys and angst of an Irish heritage.

Whether he's climbing to the top of Ireland's holiest mountain, Croagh Patrick, stopping for a pint at every "McCarthy's Bar" he stumbles upon, enduring a three-day ordeal of fasting, sleep deprivation and barefoot praying at the country's last remaining place of rigorous religious pilgrimage, St. Patrick's Purgatory at Lough Derg, crashing the touristy medieval banquet at Bunratty Castle, taking the dodgy cable car across treacherous waters to Dursey Island, or seeking out the "Ryan's Daughter" commemorative stone on the Dingle Peninsula, McCarthy's narrative is a revelatory introduction to Eire's rugged western counties. And, Pete's strength is always his keen eye for and pungent commentary on the absurdities of the local human condition.

"Outside the church (in Castletownbere) half a dozen shifty-looking men are lurking by the porch, observing their obligation to attend mass, but without actually entering the building and being spotted by the priest ... Hunched and restless, their furtive, well-practiced body language doesn't say 'Church' so much as 'Unemployment Office' or 'Magistrate's Court'. Ireland may be becoming a more secular society, but some deeply ingrained vestige of belief has convinced these guys they're more likely to avoid eternal damnation if they spend an hour every Saturday night having a few smokes outside the church before going out for a skinful. It's a complex business, modern theology."

McCarthy and Bill Bryson are my two favorite travel essayists. But whereas the latter's gentle observations are fueled by a certain bemused inquisitiveness, Pete's, though basically benign, seem to be colored by a mild case of indigestion. I can't say that I prefer one over the other; it depends on my mood. Certainly, if McCarthy proves to be as prolific a writer as Bill, then his publisher is assured of my dollars.

McCarthy perhaps hit his stride with his second book, THE ROAD TO McCARTHY, to which I awarded five stars. McCARTHY'S BAR seemed a bit forced at times, e.g. in the chapter about the author's travails in St. Patrick's Purgatory. However, as a half-century resident of Southern California, in which place I've never felt entirely comfortable, I can relate to the quote attributed by the author to his friend on Inishmore Island, Father Dara Molloy, a Catholic priest - now married with three children - gone rogue from established Church doctrine:

"The Celtic monks would wander round Europe until they found the place that was calling to them ... They had an expression for it: seeking their place of resurrection. They believed that they were beneath that spot in the firmament that would one day lead them to heaven."

PS: Today, 7/19/05, I received an email from Pete's literary agent that the author died of cancer in October 2004. This is a great loss to the travel essay and humor genres.

Thank You Pete McCarthy for giving me the gift of enjoying reading, I up until I bought your book would only read technical or factual books,(not that the bar is one of fiction). But I hope you know what I mean, I bought it by pure chance at Heathrow airport while waiting for my grilfriend who was arriving from South Africa, I was strolling through the book shop when the cover couaght my eye, I picked it up and read the back cover, and purchased it. You know those special moments in your life when you can actually pin-point a change in your habbits, well that was one for me, I couldn't put it down, normally I might read ten or fifteen pages and that was it for the book. My friend thaught I was cracking up, but they couldn't see the caracters that could and some that I could relate too as people I knew in Ireland! I would laugh out loud on the tube, I loved it, My brother on his way back from Crotica read it while stopping over for a couple of night, he loved it, even my South African Girlfriend loved it! I am reading 'The Road To McCarthy at the moment, Another one please Pete.

As an Irishman living in the US I often encounter misty-eyed Americans who long to visit "the ould sod". Seldom, if ever, do these hapless travelers have any idea of the magnitude of the departure from their sensible and predictable life state-side that they will encounter in their idealized mental vision of the Emerald Isle.

This book provides a Windex clean window through which to peer at the idiosyncratic Irish (and would-be Irish) that dwell within McCarthy's Bar.

I never dreamt I would read a belly laff review of a place such as Lough Derg, that stark, brutal and monastic bastion of Irish Catholicism in the wilds of Donegal.

I recommend this book to anyone who dares to remove the shamrock-green colored glasses before venturing forth to meet the larger than life, hilarious (to some) characters that will inevitably be encountered in the unpredictable terrain of economic boom Ireland.

Pete McCarthy is a highly skilled comic writer. This book had me in stitches with great belly laughs throughout. Born to an Irish Mother, but growing up in Warrington, he can adopt both an insiders and an outsiders perspective of life in Ireland.

McCarthy finds humour in the simplest of things. He points out how his home town of Warrington is an unlikely place for Irish imigrants, being the home of Oliver Cromwell, scourge of the Irish.

As he says himself, his "research" for this book was far from unenjoyable, involving as it did long trips to ireland, days on end spent in pubs chatting to locals and tourists and downing copious amounts of alcohol.

He gives us the secret for measuring the level of value or rip-off you face in any town in Ireland - the singapore noodle index.

He spends a lot of his time when outside of pubs or bed and breakfasts searching for neolithic and pre-celtic monuments. He trudges up lonely hillsides searching for standing stones and stone circles, avoiding where he can the ones that contain a tourist office or interpretive centre. He brings you to realise the depth of history that lies around every bend and on every hill in Ireland. He also points out in the most gentle way that the Irish walk over, abuse and even paint over this unique heritage, often without knowing what it is.

Along the way McCarthy meets Americans, Italians, Germans and English touring or living in Ireland and manages to cram in plenty of hilarious national stereotypes into his encounters. I especially like the story of the German taxi driver in West Cork, who came for the relaxed lifestyle, but insists on to the second punctuality from his fares. Give him time I say, we'll wear it out of him.

The climax of his travels is the pilgrimage to Lough Derg. This is a brutal pilgrimage undertaken by Irish Catholics who must sin like divils all year to deserve to go. It involves three days of starvation, sleep deprivation and being forced to hopple bare footed over cruel sharp stones. Strangely enough people volunteer to do it. McCarthy's description had me weeping I was laughing so hard. In particular I loved his description of the daily meal (dry toast or oatcake with black tea or coffee) where he describes it in the form of a review for a fancy restaurant.

The question posed by McCarthy in the book asks if it is possible to have a genetic tie to place. Is he in some way Irish? The answer to this is easy. Anyone reading this book can see instantly that such a witty raconteur can only be an Irishman.

This is more than a travel book - it's an entertaining group of tales of the past and present in the style of Bill Bryson, with all the funny bits (some may think more so!)
Pete McCarthy travels around an Ireland that has changed immensely from his childhood holidays but, despite the exhorbitant price of Singapore noodles, is essentially still the same.
A fabulous read for both armchair and real traveller.