Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt

Introduction

Angela's Ashes was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1997 and since then it has become an international best-seller.

Frank McCourt was born in Brooklyn in 1930 to Malachy and Angela McCourt butthe family soon returned to Limerick because of poor prospects in America. This memoir recounts the difficulties of growing up in poverty and surrounded by death and illness. Frank explores the his mother and father's trouble relationship with themselves and those around them. Although incredibly moving this compelling memoir is also surprisingly uplifting.

Reviews

'An astonishing book… completely mesmerising - you can open it almost at random and find writing to make you gasp.'
Sue Gaisford, Independent

'Writing in prose that's pictorial and tactile, lyrical but streetwise, Mr McCourt does for the town of Limerick what the young Joyce did for Dublin: he conjures the place for us with such intimacy that we feel we've walked its streets and crawled its pubs.'
Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Extract

I know when Dad does the bad thing. I know when he drinks the dole money and Mam is desperate and has to beg at the St. Vincent de Paul Society and ask for credit at Kathleen O'Connell's shop but I don't want to back away from him and run to Mam. How can I do that when I'm up with him early every morning with the whole world asleep? He lights the fire and makes the tea and sings to himself or reads the paper to me in a whisper that won't wake up the rest of the family. Mikey Molloy stole Cuchulain, the Angel on the Seventh Step is gone someplace else, but my father in the morning is still mine. He gets the Irish Press early and tells me about the world, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco. He says this war is none of our business because the English are up to their tricks again. He tells me about the great Roosevelt in Washington and the great de Valera in Dublin. In the morning we have the world to ourselves and he never tells me I should die for Ireland. He tells me about the old days in Ireland when the English wouldn't let the Catholics have any schools because they wanted to keep the people ignorant, that the Catholic children met in hedge schools in the depths of the country and learned English, Irish, Latin and Greek. The people loved learning. They loved stories and poetry even if none of this was any good for getting a job. Men, women and children would gather in the ditches to hear those great masters and everyone wondered at how much a man could carry in his head. The masters risked their lives going from ditch to ditch and hedge to hedge because if the English caught them teaching they might be transported to foreign parts or worse. He tells me school is easy now, you don't have to sit in a ditch learning your sums or the glorious history of Ireland. I should be good in school and some day I'll go back to America and get an inside job where I'll be sitting at a desk with two fountain pens in my pocket, one red and one blue, making decisions. I'll be out of the rain and I'll have a suit and shoes and a warm place to live and what more could a man want? He says you can do anything in America, it's the land of opportunity. You can be a fisherman in Maine or a farmer in California. America is not like Limerick, a grey place with a river that kills.

When you have your father to yourself by the fire in the morning you don't need Cuchulain or the Angel in the Seventh Step or anything.

At night he helps us with our exercises. Mam says they call it homework in America but here it's exercises, the sums, the English, the Irish, the history. He can't help us with Irish because he's from the North and lacking in the native tongue. Malachy offers to teach him all the Irish words he knows but Dad says it's too late, you can't teach an old dog a new bark. Before bed we sit around the fire and if we say, Dad, tell us a story, he makes up one about someone in the lane and the story will take us all over the world, up in the air, under the sea and back to the lane. Everyone in the story is a different colour and everything is upside down and backward. Motor cars and planes go under water and submarines fly through the air. Sharks sit in trees and giant salmon sport with kangaroos on the moon. Polar bears wrestle with elephants in Australia and penguins teach Zulus how to play bagpipes. After the story he takes us upstairs and kneels with us while we say our prayers. We say the Our Father, three Hail Marys, God bless the Pope. God bless Mam, God bless our dead sister and brothers, God bless Ireland, God bless de Valera, and God bless anyone who gives Dad a job. He says, Go to sleep, boys, because holy God is watching you and He always knows if you're not good.

I think my father is like the Holy Trinity with three people in him, the one in the morning with the paper, and the one at night with the stories and the prayers, and then the one who does the bad thing and comes home with the smell of whiskey and wants us to die for Ireland.

I feel sad over the bad thing but I can't back away from him because the one in the morning is my real father and if I were in America I could say, I love you, Dad, the way they do in the films, but you can't say that in Limerick for fear you might be laughed at. You're allowed to say you love God and babies and horses that win but anything else is a softness in the head.

Readers Comments

A sense of humour in the most wretched circumstances.

Despite the desperate poverty what is amazing is that the book still make you laugh out loud (it's been a minute since my last confession - I loved that!). Frank's father makes you despair but you can see why Frank loved him. The characterisation of his family is brilliant especially as it is all seen through the eyes of a child. The style I think captures the way a child would think and speak so you relive his childhood rather than being talked through it through the eyes of an adult....

A reader from London, England, December 2000

It should have made me sad but I found myself laughing. This book could only have been written by an Irishman. The themes are grinding poverty, parental and marital abuse, but I found it funny from start to finish. If you like Ireland, and it's lovely people you will love this.

A reader from Bath, England, December 2000

Simply the best book I have ever read.This book grips you from start to finish. You know the characters and you have walked the streets. A vivid, sad, funny and amazing book from a man who I would love to meet. A must for anyone and I defy anyone not to finish it.

A reader from Liverpool, England, November 2000