Wednesday Books: When Irish eyes are misty

44: A DUBLIN MEMOIR BY PETER SHERIDAN, MACMILLAN, pounds 14.99 PEGGY BY PAULINE NEVILLE, ARCADIA, pounds 10.99

RODDY DOYLE has a lot to answer for. His exercises in Dublin exorbitance and incorrigibility - and their reception - have given the go-ahead to a host of writers whose talents most likely lie elsewhere. The playwright Peter Sheridan can now be added to the list. His 44: A Dublin Memoir is choc-a- bloc with working-class hyperbole, endearing opportunism, guile, innocence and knowingness, cute-acute observations, unruly behaviour and unquenchable spirit. Irish home life in the 1960s is presented as the usual full-hearted free-for-all, presided over by Ma and Da and with assorted siblings and lodgers contributing to the uproar.

Everyone is a character. "Me oul' fella's in here drunk. Me oul' wan's not far behind." Thus the narrator's best friend, Andy, who gets sent to a reformatory for persistent skiving, escapes wearing girls' clothes and is stuck as a girl for some time afterwards, with the full co-operation of the neighbours. "Mary" is his new name.

Mary accompanies the narrator, Shero, on an errand to get his father's false teeth fixed. Shero endures an episode of sexual molestation on a train. He helps his father fit a television aerial on the roof in the snow, and conceives an ambition to play the guitar. All this and more, much more, is recounted in short sentences and jokey jargon.

At the centre of the book, though, is a family tragedy, the death of a brother; and here, by means of understatement and mundane dis-tress, something of the urgency and horror of the situation is indicated. But soon we're back with television valves, rock'n'roll bands and the dump at Finglass, the confiding tone and the unstoppable demotic. In the end, for all its fluency, 44 boils down to not much more than an urchin insouciance, a facile warmth of feeling and abundance of Dublin froth.

Some recent Irish autobiographers such as Aidan Higgins, Dermot Healy, Ciaran Carson, Denis Donoghue and Cal McCrystal have turned out works of great resonance, idiosyncrasy and astringency as they go about reinvigorating this traditional form. It's possible to make an enticing enterprise of getting to grips with one's own past. But there are still many ways of getting it wrong.

Pauline Neville has not come under the influence of Roddy Doyle and the Dublin street-smart school. If the diction of Peter Sheridan seems at times almost cloyingly casual, her memoir Peggy has us up in the clouds contemplating "the granite sweep of the Mountains of Mourne" from the word go. Peggy goes in for antiquated story-book phrases. "You'll be from the old country?" says the (Irish) nurse attending the dying woman - the narrator's cousin - to whom this memoir is addressed. Peggy and Pauline are cousins and lifelong friends, and a lot of the book is about remembered childhood holidays in County Down during - I think - the 1920s.

It is hard to be certain about dates because the time sequence of this memoir is terribly askew. (The author can't tell whether his cousin's granddaughter is five or 12). The first outbreak of "Troubles" must be that of the early 1920s - but the Mountbatten assassination and other more recent episodes of violence are cited in connection with people in the narrative whose ages simply do not fit. However, since Neville seems to believe that 19th-century Irish peasants sat in their reeking cabins on the west coast dressed in potato sacks and quoting Yeats and Joyce along with Homer and Ovid, we needn't expect too much from her in the way of reliable chronology.

This vagueness extends to topography: she thinks the Irish Republic (or Eire, as she prefers to call it) is visible from the other side of Strangford Lough (she calls it "Loch") when the Lough in question is, of course, Carlingford. Possibly her senses have been deranged by over-exposure to Irish mists. Never mind - she knows her own failings and makes out a case for the unimportance of facts: "Images, smells, sounds, conversation, ideas have a priority position."

Her heart is in the right place even if her angle of vision isn't. Affection drives her to re-examine the past for her cousin's sake - the diving competitions off the Black Rock, the whitewashed cottages, the servants of the Protestant family who were themselves "of the Faith" (note the capital "F"). Pauline Neville conveys something of the glamour and intractability of Northern Ireland for a visitor with a lot of family ties to the place, some Anglo-Irish spirit, and always her own ideas.

Patricia Craig

The reviewer is editor of `The Oxford Book of Ireland'