| Author: |
Robert Ziegler |
| Dated: |
Friday, January 29 2010 @ 01:48 PM EST |
| Viewed: |
332 times |
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 Climbing Patrick’s Mountain: Anything But a Rose Garden
Des Kennedy’s newest novel, Climbing Patrick’s Mountain, unfolds, petal by petal, from a garden of hybridized roses grown by an eccentric misanthrope named Patrick Gallagher.
Patsy, as he is later sneeringly referred to by an old IRA cohort, had fled Ireland and its thorny politics when he was barely out of his teens, eventually setting tentative roots in the Southlands in Vancouver, on the rolling green grounds of an estate owned by an absentee baron who also worshipped roses. Patrick breeds his roses in a most erotic way, but, unlike the conservative botanical titles typically bestowed, he names his after gorgeous celebrities: Shannia’s Thighs, Pamela’s Panties, Nicole’s Knickers, or Jennifer’s Jewels. One day, Patrick’s sublime relationship with his blossoming beauties is suddenly interrupted by the death of his donor, forcing Patrick to consider accepting a paying job as a tour guide for an elite group of Canadian gardeners through some of the most celebrated botanical estates in Ireland.
Patrick wrestles like Lord Hamlet with this ultimately fateful decision: to return to a homeland rife with danger and ill-boding, or refuse and witness his beloved “rosary” and humble home vanish and find himself homeless. Begrudgingly, he accepts. And that is when Kennedy’s curtain inexorably rises, thrusting Gallagher back into the ubiquitous rain and gloom hanging just outside the familiar smoky pubs, back through the bogs and echoing sea caves of Yeat’s mythical Ireland, back past the Celidhs and Banshees his battered and superstitious mother nightly warned him about, and into the grasp of the still seething tentacles of his own treacherous and shadowy past, back into the emerald land of bad winds.
Kennedy weaves his tapestry as skillfully as the spunky Gallagher spins his amusing webs of self-serving blarney, and the web grows steadily tighter and tighter. Gallagher’s past will not let go despite the fact that his mistakes were only those of any youth and, despite the fact that he clearly had little choice, given the brutal misery of his childhood, his poverty and the inevitable political snares that snatched-up many of Ireland’s young men one way or another, Gallagher’s pipers are summoned one after another and they wait impatiently outside every rose-embowered garden gate he passes through . . . and they will have their due.
Kennedy’s characters from both Ireland and Canada are believable, likable or deplorable people cultivated and twisted by the soils they were set in and the cultural storms they weathered. He blows breath into Gallagher’s dreams, resurrects forgotten members of his original family, and forces his exiled dreams to bloom anew. But, as they say, it’s a long, long road to Tipperary, and Gallagher’s vision of what he wants for his happiness and Kennedy’s vision for what he more fundamentally needs are two different stories. In the final chapters, Kennedy takes the reins firmly, whips up the heavenly stallions, sets the bit deeper into Gallagher’s soul, and drives him to his destiny.
Kennedy’s familiarity with the situation that is Ireland, allows him to blend the rich, enigmatic mythology of this ancient country with the enchanting poetic dialect, which helps provide the necessary comic relief in a tale as dark as any and, in my estimation, lifts Kennedy’s novel a notch above many best sellers, ushering it into the realm of literature, a near-allegory simultaneously ancient and modern, a universal tale of Everyman’s potential tragic ruin and possible redemption, a book well worth the reading.
Victoria, BC: Brindle & Glass, 2009.
Paperback: 288 pages. $19.95
ISBN-10: 1897142390
ISBN-13: 978-1897142394
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