Books of 2022: Michael Duggan picks mountaineer Helen Mort's memoir, and more

Michael Duggan picks his books of 2022, a literary selection of memoir, essays, Anglo-Saxon traditions and the biography of a renowned Cork bishop

Poet and mountaineer Helen Mort’s ‘A Line Above The Sky’ combines memoir, her feelings about motherhood and a philosophical consideration of what compels people to climb.

I have read plenty of books this year that I’ve liked, but not all of them have stuck around in my head for very long. The ones I’ve selected here, however, became touchstones of a kind in a world where it’s very, very easy to bounce around ceaselessly in an input overload.

Helen Mort’s memoir A Line Above the Sky is a deft exploration by a poet and climber of what it was like to become a mother for the first time. Mort retained her desire to escape “into silence and height”. “I need edges and stone,” she writes, “something I can stand on the brink of”. She teases out how these urges could be reconciled with her new life devoted to caring for and nurturing a helpless infant, while also revisiting awkward teenage years spent as an only child in ex-industrial Derbyshire, when climbing began to form both a release and an obsession.

Mort mixes her own memories with pondering, over and over, the life and death of the great English climber Alison Hargreaves, who climbed the north face of the Eiger when she was six months pregnant with her first son, Tom, and who continued climbing as her family grew. In 1995, Hargreaves was the first woman to make it to the summit of Everest alone, but, three months later, she died with six others on the way down K2. Tom Hargreaves grew up to be a climber and he also died on the mountainside, during an expedition in Kashmir.

A Line Above the Sky is moving and heartfelt, an immersion in the author’s deepest concerns. But, thanks to a kind of austere watchfulness over language (that perhaps comes from Helen Mort’s career as a poet), it is never mawkish and always compelling, leaving you with a new appreciation of the climber’s call: “The rock asking, What would you do for me? How much do you love me? What would you give to feel like this forever?”

Show Your Work is a collection of essays from the pages of The Dublin Review, chosen by that publication’s editor, Brendan Barrington. There are 24 pieces in total, most of them first published in the 2010s. The contributors span writers now in their 50s and 60s, including generational talents such as Anne Enright and Colm Tóibín, to a cohort still in their 20s and 30s, led (of course) by Sally Rooney, whose essay on the university debating scene, ‘Even If You Beat Me’, is included here. (“Even if you beat me, I’m still the best.”)

Of the old guard, Tóibín provides one of the standout contributions, revisiting some of the most significant judgments and personalities of the Supreme Court of the 1980s. When reviewing Show Your Work, I wrote that anyone with the remotest interest in Irish society should read this essay. One of its most interesting elements is Tóibín’s recollections of his encounters with some of the conservative justices of the time who were his sworn enemies, politically speaking: Brian Walsh “did not have a posh accent”, was “sharp and fearless”, and “spoke about writing his judgements like a novelist might”; Rory O’Hanlon, who had been “a great demon” in Tóibín’s mind was “remarkably likeable”. These men reminded Colm Tóibín that he “was not from Dublin, that he had been brought up in a conservative, deeply nationalist household in provincial Ireland”; “my liberalism,” he writes, “did not quite belong to me”.

Elsewhere, Mary McCloskey recalls theatre director David Bolger, in the midst of the disarray following the implosion of full-throttle, Celtic Tiger materialism, asking whether the Ireland envisioned in Éamon de Valera’s famous/infamous St Patrick’s Day speech of 1943 — “the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living” and so on — might be a world “we should not so loftily dismiss”.

Other highlights include Arnold Thomas Fanning’s account of rough sleeping in the midst of a complete mental breakdown, full of delusions, hallucinations and paranoia, that did not come to an end until he found himself, quite arbitrarily, in the care of staff at a hospital in Basingstoke, Hampshire; Caelainn Hogan’s ‘Death of a Fisherman’, remembering a trawlerman friend of her father from Castletownbere who was cut from a different cloth to most of us; and Doireann ní Ghríofa, pondering her great-grandfather who escaped the Black and Tans by dressing as a woman leaving the church where he was attending Mass. Here too a vanished Ireland edges into view.

But where Show Your Work really sinks in its hooks is in a clutch of essays by some of the youngest writers in the collection in which — sometimes with total candour, sometimes under veils of skilful irony and humour — they present for inspection their neuroses and often fearful isolation. I’m thinking of pieces like ‘Brain Fever’ by Patrick Freyne and ‘The Purge’ by Darragh McCausland. And ‘Night Gym’ by Roisin Kiberd: “It is possible to practise habits of self-improvement, and at the same time continue to long for your slow destruction.” It’s an uncomfortable, unsettling vision of the Irish psychological landscape.

I’ve long been a fan of Eleanor Parker’s blog ‘A Clerk of Oxford’ where for several years she acted as an eloquent, judicious guide to the treasures of Anglo-Saxon literature and art. I find it an easy period to love, both for its own merits and because it was a time when the biggest bone of contention between Ireland and England was the correct system for dating Easter and when the largest invasion was the peaceful one carried out by countless Irish monks, bringing the light of learning and faith south from Iona and Lindisfarne. So I was delighted to see Parker’s talents and erudition take book form this year in the shape of Winters in the World in which she leads readers through the Anglo-Saxon year, exploring the festivals, customs and traditions that were used to mark the different seasons. It’s a book I’ll be turning to for years to come.

Finally, a word on a book I’m reading right now that is on its way to lodging itself in my head. It’s actually a fairly academic tome on a relatively obscure subject (or at least it was so to me).

John England was a Cork priest of the early 19th century who became deeply involved in the various debates surrounding the question of Catholic emancipation. In 1820, England was made the first ever bishop of the Diocese of Charleston and took with him across the Atlantic various lessons learned and opinions formed in Cork, becoming an advocate for various ways in which the American Catholic Church could find a modus vivendi within the American republic.

In the words of Patrick W Carey, author of An Immigrant Bishop, John England should be remembered as “a primary apologist for a Catholic understanding of civil and religious liberty”. In the words of Daniel O’Connell, England was “one of the cleverest, and I think one of the worthiest men I ever knew”.

This book is a revised version of its 1982 original, inspired in part by the author’s ability to demonstrate (as previously he had been unable to) England’s authorship of many pseudonymous articles published in the Cork Mercantile Chronicle.

The insights into an earlier period of Cork newspaper publishing will add a further layer of interest for some readers, as it did for this one.