Peter Costello
John Quinn [centre] at a reception for him in his native place. Photo: Westmeath Chronicle The Passing Year: Remembrances, Recollections, Ruminations, by John Quinn (Red Stripe Press, €12.99 / £11.99)
Come the end of the year everyone’s memories have a tendency to cast themselves back, not only on the last twelve months, but inevitably on the years before, often taking us back into our childhood, for Christians, Christmas time is especially a time for children and by extension, on through the family and the wider connections that our relations bring us.
Interest
As a writer John Quinn will be familiar to many readers. This book is of special interest. The author explains that over the course of 2024 he kept a personal journal of “remembrances, recollections and ruminations”. He has now passed those pages into print as The Passing Year, inevitably as I bring to mind the passing years. For those who enjoyed Goodnight Ballivor, I’ll sleep in Trim and so many others, this new book will be a welcome treat. A former teacher, he made his name in due course as a popular broadcaster. Today he lives in Co. Galway.
❛In keeping with my mother’s tradition, I opened the door at midnight ‘to let the year’s bad luck out’”
To give a sense of what is in the book, I cannot do better than to open it on Monday, January 1, 2024. This was in fact the start of the author’s 83rd year: “Last night, in keeping with my mother’s tradition, I opened the door at midnight ‘to let the year’s bad luck out’.”
Leads
This led on to thoughts of his parents exactly a century ago. This would have been just after the Civil War and his father was a member of the very new Garda Síochána, the peacekeepers of the new state.
(Remember that the old Royal Irish Constabulary had been an armed rural force, akin the gendarmes of Europe and Iberian America. But the new force adopted its title from the civic force in Spain, as a sort of protector of the peace and people rather than (as some then saw the RIC) an armed force of occupation.)
❛A wonderful book, well aware of the state of the world, but recorded with a wit and imagination”
This opening leads on to thoughts of the world of today, “a dark and dangerous place”, what with the wars in Gaza and the Ukraine. The reader will be able to fill in the other dangers present for themselves. He ends with a line from the late Derek Mahon that ‘Everything’s going to be alright’, an indication that hope springs eternally in more than the poet’s breast.
The book ends as it must on a gloomier note, but John Quinn retains that sense of hope, that sense that there is a future still to make. The cover of the book shows a country road, somewhere in Galway, with stony walls on the side, winding away into the distance, which is vague and obscure, but is there to be reached, however crooked the road.
Altogether a wonderful book, well aware of the state of the world, but recorded with a wit and imagination that raises the heart.
Ruminate
In those pages, he mentions the closing of Veritas, the publishers of some fourteen of his books. But look, he has found a new more energetic publisher, and so, thankfully for the writer, life goes on as it must.
This is a book to read, and for the many readers it will have much to ruminate on, chewing the cud of wide grazing to get the full nourishment out of it. He evokes the famous opening lines of Dickens’ novel A Tale of Two Cities, about it being the best of times and worst of times. That is the fabric of life, ever since Eden some might feel.