Dances with Hooves

I was down in the random and unexpected stacks of Borrowbox and picked John Connell's 2nd opus off the virt-shelves: The Running Book: A Journey through Memory, Landscape and History. That's quite weird because, being glued to the sofa, I can only run in emergency mode. Maybe I thought it was a sequel to The Running Sky: a bird-watching life by Tom Dee [wch prev].  Here's the story: young John grew up on a farrrm outside of Ballinalee - a blink-and-miss-it kind of place in Co. Longford. Even he, who cherishes his home place, agrees that Longford is a county which visitors pass through on the way to somewhere more photogenic. Respecting this, I've found a picture of an unspectacular crossroads [L] close to the Connell family farm which John has probably run through many times. If you pause, and breathe, and listen, on the way to your destination, you'll find something to celebrate in the ordinary. The ordinary bounty of everyday nature as Connell quotes Patrick Kavanagh.

As a kid, he won a few medals for athletics, not only running, but also had an aptitude for the written word and went to DCU for Journalism and thence to Australia where he dug into the life and times of the indigenous people. Five years later he was mind-broken and returned home to Longford to farm . . . with his Dad, who thought, and occasionally said, that his son had 'failed' out there with implications of 'wimp' and 'general uselessness'. In a sense running became Connell Jr.'s escape: something he could def'ny do (something his Dad couldn't [be arsed with]?). But after he'd clawed his way out of Journalism burn-out, he started to write again and that task eventually became his critically acclaimed 1st novel informed by lived experience The Cow Book. Reviewed I've not read it.

For The Running Book he is experimenting with form like Joyce did with Ulysses, and like Karí Tulinius did with Entropic Nature a month ago. As a Protestant, I'd hold that regularity & discipline gives a more robust product than free-form: writing a Blob-a-Day for eight years was much better for the craft than gearing up to write something (special?) once every while. Connell reckons that stopping in a long run - for water, or traffic-lights, or a toilet - can fatally scupper the whole endeavour: the energy of re-activation can be insuperable. Connell has constraint-structured his book into 42 chapters, each 1000 words long: that's a marathon converted from words to metres!  The conceit is that, at the beginning of the book he sets off on a 42km run and, after a Cooks' Tour of the county, walks the last bit in (rather than calling his Mam for a lift!). So similar to a villanelle or Petrachan sonnet . . . but longer‽

These ramblings while running include reflections on the Civil War; Strongbow; Longford literati; stretching; sundry Anglo-Irish families; Seneca; running shoes; Ann Lovett and Granard forty years on; Colm O'Connell coaching Kenyan athletes; bovine midwifery; Murakami; Sonia O'Sullivan; the Andaman Islands as a proxy for Irish colonization; Michael Collins and Kitty Kiernan; The Wall;  The Navaho; The Titanic. As a scion of the Ascendancy, I think that Connell uncritically accepts the standard narrative of "300 years of Tory misrule" - it's an easy out to blame the colonial boogieman for all the ills of Irish history and therefore Ireland in the present. Like me, me!, being invited to go back where I came from because my grandfather rode a horse in King's County in the 1890s OTOH, he bookends his 42K musathon with quite compassionate assessments of some of the actual people who embodied colonial oppression. Quite so. It's hard to Other folk whose story, whose tragedy, whose loss have been recognised.
What the Longford Leader thinks about John Connell.