Book review: Jordan tells of tectonic cultural shift through one simple vignette

Screenwriter and author steps away from the conventions of memoir writing when he dedicates a few chapters to films he would like to have made but didn’t

Screenwriter and author Neil Jordan speaking about his new book titled 'Amnesiac' at the Seafront venue as part of the Dalkey Book Festival. Picture: Conor McCabe Photography.

• Amnesiac: A Memoir 
• Neil Jordan 
• Head of Zeus, €16.99 

MEMOIRS, and their first cousins, autobiographies, are as varied as those who write or read them.

Some are thinly disguised, well-upholstered CVs. Others, often from politicians denied their Everest by a suspicious electorate, are hectoring admonishments — a genre mastered by Hilary Clinton.

The better ones are thorough and honest excavations, leavened by perspectives won by the author since the events described occurred.

The best are undertaken by perceptive, objective, articulate, and self-confident writers with a story to tell.

Neil Jordan, surely one of the most creative Europeans of his time, ticks those boxes.

Those qualifications are strengthened by random circumstance, by a spin of the roulette wheel of timing and birth.

Jordan was born in 1950, on the very cusp of an unimaginable — and well resisted — revolution in Ireland’s social thinking and behaviour.

Like many of us, he remembers family photographs of gaunt ancestors standing empty-handed outside thatched cottages.

His family history records a not-so-remote time when opportunity remained an imagined and longed for possibility.

That grounding, and his parents’ capacity to be part of an evolving Ireland, gives a second dimension to this memoir.

It records some of Jordan’s Irish memories, but it also records how our parents’ generation — primarily — moved goal posts, that for centuries were immovably rooted in theology or colonialism, to build a more tolerant, better society.

The pious, observant John A Costello was taoiseach when Jordan was born, yet Jordan went on to make powerful films about gender identity — The Crying Game (1992) — and one about a kind of family-cum-community hysteria, The Butcher Boy (1997).

It is hard to underestimate the breach in conservative Ireland’s redoubts these films brought and, with the benefit of hindsight, how they contributed to undermining the near universal consensus — albeit one already fading — of the day.

That tectonic shift is told in one simple vignette.

Jordan tells of how he was all too briefly a national school pupil in a class taught by the wonderful John McGahern — whose memoir is, coincidentally, a wonderful example of how to record a life.

McGahern was infamously driven out of his Clontarf national school teaching job when he married a Finnish divorcée Annikki Laaksi shortly before his second novel The Dark was published in 1965.

That novel was banned, as parts of it were deemed “pornographic”.

For decades, the received wisdom was that an offended school management and inevitable clerical bullying sealed McGahern’s fate.

However, Jordan tells us that neither the school principal nor parish priest wanted to sack McGahern, and that his teaching career was brought to a very early end by a strident cabal of offended Catholic parents.

It is just one of the delicious and reassuring ironies in Ireland’s last half century: A schoolboy with a fertile mind and imagination, denied the teaching of “an absent-minded genius”, went on to produce films, documentaries, novels, and short stories far more explicit than anything McGahern ever offered — work which would have turned those offended parents incandescent with spluttering tribal rage.

He tells too of how his well-qualified father was denied a professor of education position at UCD when it was, as expected, given to an entirely unqualified cleric.

Another reminder of the darkness that gripped this impoverished country in the 1970s and 1980s is related by Jordan, when he tells us he was threatened with prosecution by the State and — more worryingly — the loss of his dole, when he was identified as a participant in a street theatre production trying to entertain Grafton St boulevardiers for pennies.

Bridges and ghosts are recurring themes or images in Jordan’s work — particularly the bridge over the River Nanny, near his mother’s birthplace in Mornington, Meath.

His father died of a heart attack under that very bridge while he was in LA promoting his second film, The Company of Wolves.

Stephen Rea and Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game.

The Nanny bridge is used as a meeting place for Michael Collins and detective and spy Ned Broy. He also uses the location in The Crying Game.

It’s hardly coincidental and is a reminder that Jordan, his films, and his wonderful writing, can in par be seen as bridges to some remnants of an Ireland swallowed in the quicksand of modernisation.

A bridge too to the imagined realities — vampires, ghosts, or wolves disguised as men — so alive across all his work.

He also points to a widely indulged reality when he uses the making of the biopic of man-made-myth, myth-made-man Michael Collins to discuss the imperative of authenticity when making films based on actual events.

Unlike Ridley Scott, Jordan did not write a script for the section of that film showing the treaty debates.

Instead, he had the actors reproduce, word for word, the record of that important moment.

He does take a certain justified glee in the fact that lines he wrote for the film (“Give us the future. We’ve had enough of your past. Give us our country back. To live in. To grow in. To love.”) have been used by presidents, various taoisigh, and several ministers at the annual veneration of Collins at Béal na Bláth. How very appropriate — myth venerated through mythology.

JORDAN steps away from the conventions of memoir writing when he dedicates a few chapters to films he would like to have made.

He was enthused about the possibility of casting Marlon Brando as King Lear, an ambition that seems almost overly courageous and daunting.

Brando did not, at that late stage of his career, share that enthusiasm.

Brando insisted that no American can properly play a Shakespearean part. Indeed.

Amnesiac is a platform for what, in other hands, might be regarded as name-dropping.

Everyone from Tom Cruise to Princess Anne, from Harvey Weinstein — described as a nasty crook — to Daryl Hannah, Cillian Murphy, and Sinéad O’Connor are remembered.

This litany of the good and glittering — one that includes Stanley Kubrick — is little more than a reckoning of the achievements realised in an impressive career. The cast colours Jordan’s sharp memoir — which is mainly a review of his film career and leaves the door open for a review of his usually underestimated writing.

How wonderful it would be if that project was undertaken.

This is a fine memoir, one that sensitively but firmly tells the story of the origins of a very fine Irish artist, whose growth runs parallel to the growth of his country of birth. An enriching and enlightening publication.

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