The Other View

Issue No.1 Summer 2000

Angela's Ashes Review

By Deborah Crawford

Angela's Ashes was a publishing phenomenon. Frank McCourt's critically acclaimed lyrical memoir of his Irish-American childhood won him the Pulitzer prize, the National Book Critics Circle Awards, the Royal Society of Literature Awards and the Los Angeles Times Awards, amongst others, and rapidly became a word of mouth best seller, topping all charts world-wide for over two years.

For the most part, Angela's Ashes took place in Limerick. Not the Limerick that is known today - but the slums! The lanes, where all the families had to share the one toilet was beside the McCourt's house. What makes the book so readable is the fact that it is written as seen through young Frank's eyes. Therefore, what we read is only his understanding of the events that occur.

McCourt has been accused by some critics of romanticising his childhood, by fabricating events here and there and inventing people. Theses comments, however, should not overshadow any element of the book at all. The events that occur are told to us as vividly, harrowingly and sometimes as hilariously as they happened. This is a credit to McCourt's writing. If we were to place the McCourt Family in a room, we could safely say that they would not remember the same events, the same way.

The McCourt childhood seems to be filled with hopelessness and poverty. We see the power of the priests and the church and the tight grip with which they hold the people, all based on fear. Even the St Vincent de Paul men, who are in a position of power and have the ability to make things better, do not. They use their power to humiliate and degrade.

The main people in Frank's life, his father and mother, are very different. Frank's father could not hold down a job, as soon as he got the wages he drank them. Frank's mother was forever begging and borrowing food and money to feed the children. If Frank's father did not drink, this would have made a fundamental difference to the family's lives. He knew what he was doing to the family, but he had 'the weakness'. Frank's mother on the other hand coped. She faced the poverty, she overcame the humiliation, 'the shame'.

There are lighter moments in the book, things that make you laugh out loud or think that things weren't so bad after all. We are left astounded at the end of the book as to how they ever survived at all. We of course know that there was nothing else but to cope and to carry on.

Some have asked, "Was the book all that it was hyped to be?" - That question cannot easily be answered because the book was not hyped up as such. It became a best seller through word of mouth; many did not know just how famous the book was until the film was made. If the book was 'hyped up' at the start Angela's Ashes would certainly have been all it was hyped up to be.

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