The Road to McCarthy
Around the World in Search of Ireland
by Pete McCarthy
Fourth Estate, 368 pp., $25.95
WITH THE ROAD TO MCCARTHY, Pete McCarthy has produced a travel book in the vein of Bill Bryson and Paul Theroux--in this case an account of one man's search for the history of his name. "McCarthy" is a common name in the southwest of Ireland where the McCarthys used to be kings, back when Ireland still had kingdoms. Since then the clan has had a checkered history, reflecting the history of the Irish diaspora. McCarthy's quest takes him from England to Dublin, to Tangier, Australia, Tasmania, Montana, Montserrat, Alaska, and finally back to the place where the odyssey of the McCarthy clan started, the Beara peninsula in West Cork. Along the way, he encounters a variety of strange people and exotic landscapes in true travel writer fashion.
But The Road to McCarthy is a travel book where the exotic and strange are often to be found in the most ordinary of circumstances, and most often in pub stories. Beginning in Cobh, Ireland, McCarthy is particularly attracted to two stories: that of the Young Irelanders, whose failed 1848 rebellion led to banishment in Van Diemen's Land, now Tasmania, and to the less well-known story of the Bearna miners who, in the 1880s, fled economic hardship at home and headed west to Montana and Alaska. At the end of the book, as he contemplates the poignant story of a young McCarthy boy who died in appalling circumstances in a nineteenth-century penal colony for children in Tasmania, the author realizes that this is the point to which his search has led him: "A name can connect us to people and places beyond our experience, and take us close to a specific, singular identity through which we can imagine a distant place and time."
With an Irish Catholic mother from West Cork and an English Protestant father, Pete McCarthy grew up in Warrington, southwest of Manchester in England, but spent his childhood summers on a farm near Drimoleague in West Cork. His mixed identity leads to some personal confusion and, at times, apprehension (as when he finds himself in an Irish pub in New York surrounded by Glasgow Celtic fans).
But the Irish diaspora has ensured that such mixed origins characterize many McCarthys---indeed, the Irish generally. McCarthy has already mined this double identity in his successful first book, McCarthy's Bar, where he frolicked around Ireland in search of pubs bearing the name "McCarthy," an often hilarious look by a semi-outsider at the quiddities and oddities of Irish life.
In The Road to McCarthy, the author's search for his dynasty begins with a visit to the purported chief of the McCarthy clan, living in exile in Tangier. Most of the human interest and humor here is provided by the author's relations with a pair of Moroccan guides who attach themselves to him for the duration of his visit and whom he suspects of wanting to hijack him for his kidneys. We eventually meet the strange and eccentric McCarthy Mór, who describes himself as the last "goose" of "the wild geese" (a group of eighteenth-century Irish political exiles), and who clearly has found a suitable home in the whacked-out atmosphere of Tangier.
Next stop is New York, through which so many Irish emigrants passed on their way West. We encounter the city through McCarthy's eyes: a -hockey game in Madison Square Garden (where, used to the thuggery of English hooligans, he marvels at the amiable, violence-free drinking of the spectators); the eccentric denizens of the New York Public Library; the New York City policemen whose weight sends out the menacing subliminal message: "Don't run away. We can't chase you, so we'll have to shoot." St. Patrick's Day is described with all its rituals but in the end perceived as a tradition frozen in a vision of an Ireland that no longer exists.
FROM NEW YORK, McCarthy picks up the other route taken by his forefathers and heads to Tasmania in what proves to be the darker side of his journey--crisscrossing the island and revisiting the places associated with the Young Irelanders. Here, in what is perhaps the best section of the book, we get a vivid sense of the island's beauty, and of its desolate, silent landscapes. At Queenstown nobody talks, in sharp contrast to the denizens of the other Queenstown (now Cobh) in County Cork. At Macquarie Harbour, he hears the story of the convict Edward Pearce, who survived the wilderness by cannibalism. We revisit the Point Puer, the prison for young boys where the chosen method of treatment was absolute silence.
The bleak and stark beauty of Tasmania is balanced by the sunshine and noise of his next stop, Montserrat. There in the shadow of the volcano that exploded in 1997 leaving half of the island uninhabitable, we meet a loquacious people in whom Irish and West Indian inimitably meet. We follow the McCarthy trail north to Montana, whose snowy landscape would seem an even more unlikely home for Irish emigrant miners. But in 1900 Butte was the most Irish city in America. Facing the statue in Helena erected to Thomas Meagher--a convict in Van Diemen's Land and later governor of Montana--McCarthy finds another end of the Young Irelanders' journey. Yet further north, in Alaska, the miners' trail runs out in the desolate town of McCarthy, supposedly named for a Beara man who may have settled there in the 1890s.
At times, the conversation palls in The Road to McCarthy as the author's compulsion to be funny leads him to extract humor from conversations and encounters best forgotten. Too often McCarthy presumes he is talking to people who share the same cultural baggage he carries--which is a curious oversight, for his cultural allusions fix Pete McCarthy as primarily an Englishman, the references to contemporary Ireland being few and somewhat clichéd. At other times McCarthy seems to lose focus, getting lost in the innumerable detours of his journey and giving a "one damned thing after another" account of his trips.
Yet McCarthy's finely tuned sense of place and sharp humor triumph. He can give pertinent and often hilarious expression to familiar travel experiences. Visiting America, he remarks on the generous breakfasts, the friendly people, and the powerful showers ("Why do American showers knock you over, while ours have all the oomph of a dolly's watering can?"). Like any good travel writer, he has a keen eye for foibles and an acute ear for conversational tones. On a flight to Tangier he meets a hearty English businessman with a Winnie-the-Pooh tie (he's called "Winnie" within a few hours) who keeps telling his fellow passengers from Estonia "very boring things in a loud, slow voice with all definite and indefinite articles removed, like whisky trader talking to injuns about heap powerful thundersticks."
IN THE END McCarthy's forte as a travel writer is his uncanny ability to be the recipient of zany stories, which he retells with zest, beginning with the true story about the unemployed man in Cobh who won the Lotto and bought "the fecking dole office" that he had till then frequented, converting it into a Titanic-theme bar. Perhaps the funniest is the story McCarthy hears, toward the end of his quest, in a pub in Tipperary called, yes, McCarthy's. Recounted by a man reminiscing about his days as an itinerant circus hand in Britain, it is a hilarious narrative of mishaps with ostriches, elephants, giraffes, Shetland ponies, and chimps. It is the kind of story you hear only in Ireland. For that, if nothing else, The Road to McCarthy is worth its price.
Maria Kelly is an Irish writer living in Belgium.