Peter Costello
The World of Books
There is an old saying that one should not judge a book by its cover. But that is exactly what I propose to do. Or rather to judge the publishers and promoters of the volume, rather than the author of the text. That will be left to another hand.
The book in question is the current choice for the “One City, One Book” celebration in Dublin run by Dublin City Council. When this event was begun it seemed to be aimed at reviving current interest in a classical title, in danger of being forgotten by the rising generation.
That was a very worthy aim. But lately the scheme seems to have changed course, and to become yet another aspect of the books promotion industry which pre-selects the books that will be made into ‘best sellers’, in effect removing the chance for readers to discover a new masterpiece for themselves. Indeed, many of these over-promoted titles are always going to be well and truly as dead as doornails in a year or two.
The present book, Echoland (New Ireland) by journalist Joe Joyce, by all accounts an intelligent effort to recreate an era, is being promoted nationwide with posters and leaflets. Indeed the image cannot be escaped by most of us, wherever we go. Yet whatever about the historical truth of the text, the cover is in effect a lie.
Emergency
The book, as many readers will be aware, is set in the years of the Emergency, as the Second World War was calmly called by the Irish government and people. But the cover shows, unbelievably, not, O’Connell Street as it was in 1940, but as it was some 14 or 15 years later in the mid-1950s.
The cars may have a war time look, but the lamp posts do not. More importantly, in 1940 the Dublin city trams were still running in all their glory – the last of the Dublin tramway services ceased to operate with the running of the last car to Dalkey on April 18, 1948, after which the tracks were ripped up.
This is not a simple mistake. It arises from a notion that it doesn’t matter, the past is dead and gone, no-one is really over concerned to get the details right. Many of the books from Irish publishers make use of images from the great collections in the National Gallery of Ireland.
But these are used for their aesthetic quality rather than their relevance – for instance the painting by Harry Jones Thaddeaus, The Wounded Poacher c.1881, on the cover of Liam O’Flaherty’s deeply troubled novel about the Great War (1914-1918).
Even worse in my opinion is the almost universal habit of using early films to illustrate the past. I have seen in documentaries about the great Tudor tyrant clips from either Henry VIII (1911, directed by Arthur Bouchier) or Cardinal Wolsey (1912; directed by Tefft Johnson). Images taken about 1900 have been used in supposed documentaries to illustrate Paris under the Third Empire, over a generation before.I have wondered if five-year-olds now think there were movie cameras in the time of the Pharaohs to record the suffering of the Jews building the pyramids – a sort of layer cake of historical inaccuracy.
Illustrations
On that point, many of the films clips relating to 1916 and the events in O’Connell Street in Easter Week were illustrated by shots of the Free State National Army in the summer of 1922 firing on the Republicans in the Fours Courts from the bottom of Bridge Street. To a picture researcher whatever is on the index card or the computer tag is the truth, and they are unable to tell the difference between the two very different events.
As a result I am increasingly wary about TV documentaries, let us say on abuse in industrial schools, and the images used. But as these also include dramatic ‘reconstructions’ of recent events, a presentation of actual reality is not being aimed at. These are the ethics of the Hollywood blockbuster.
It almost seems that we are now moving, in this ‘post truth’ era, from fake news to fake history.