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Climbing Patrick’s Mountain
Climbing Patrick's Mountain by Des Kennedy (Brindle & Glass $19.95)
Patrick Gallagher is a fortyish Irish bachelor whose only love is his garden in Southlands, equestrian playground of Vancouver's landed gentry.
Bootless and unhorsed, he lives in the posh neighbourhood on the sufferance of a landowner who provides a cottage and greenhouse on the grounds rent-free in return for his tenant's botanical expertise.
That expertise is prodigious. Gallagher spends weeks, months and years meticulously cultivating exquisite roses prized by fanciers across the country and beyond. His "introductions"; are renowned equally for the delicacy of their blossoms and the indelicacy of their names.
Gallagher christens his gardening creations for certain attributes of his favourite female entertainers: Shania's Thighs, Pamela's Panties, Nicole's Knickers and so forth. He speaks to them with a lover's affection while guiding their pollination, in passages that are at once scientific and unabashedly erotic:
"With utmost delicacy he touched Nicole's exposed anthers with the tip of his little finger and then ever-so-gently rubbed the fingertip against Michelle's sticky stigmas. 'Ah,' he sighed breathily at the sensuous touch that marked the moment of pollen transference.";
He is utterly content with his sliver of fame, his modest home and his verdant laboratory-until his sponsor dies.
The owner's son wants to develop the property for housing, leaving Gallagher in a panic. Desperate for "dosh,"; he agrees to return to Ireland as the hired pro for a garden tour on the chance that he might find among his charges a female patron of a certain age and position-a financial strategy only slightly less pathetic than his weekly Lotto ticket.
Although it's a week in his homeland, with expenses paid, plus two grand in his pocket, it's not a prospect he relishes. Gallagher has done his best to forget his family, his boyhood sweetheart and his not-so-savoury pals, all of whom he has betrayed in one way or another. But it has been twenty years and more, and he reckons that if he keeps his head down he might emerge from the tour none the worse off and possibly better.
There, in a geranium pot, are the seeds of the tale-and who better to tell it than Irish-born gardening ace Des Kennedy?
Based on Denman Island, Kennedy is a popular speaker, broadcaster and writer on all things green and growing, with a résumé that includes a gardening column, four books of essays and two novels.
Author and character share the gift of the gab, and there are a few touches of broad humour, as one might expect from a three-time Leacock Award nominee. Gallagher can spin a comic yarn to impress the ladies, slathering on the Paddyisms -Jaysus, poxy, bollixed-like butter on soda bread, stopping just short of "faith and begorrah.";
(For someone born in the mid-1960s in Cork, the most southerly and fiercely republican county in Eire, Gallagher is strangely given to Scots-Irish terms-"blootered"; for drunk, "gossoon"; for lad-popular in Northern Ireland half a century earlier.)
Kennedy has a whiff of what writer Conor Cruise O'Brien called the "gift-traditionally esteemed and feared in Ireland-of saying wounding things in a memorable manner."; We snicker at the officious tour guide whose cell phone ringtone is "The Happy Wanderer,"; and at the plump tourist who wags her finger "so that her bracelets jangled and the dangling fat of her arm wobbled like a water-filled balloon.";
But this is neither a comic nor a sentimental portrait of the auld sod. From the moment Gallagher sets foot in Ireland he feels the ghosts that would undo him closing in, and his blarney and bonhomie soon succumb to darkness.
Instead of gushing descriptions of the countryside and its many hues of green, there are sharp observations of downtown Dublin, "where tourists swarm like spermatozoa up onto Grafton Street."; There's a nod to the modernity and wealth (since collapsed) of the "Celtic Tiger"; but there are still corners plagued by the cassock and the gun.
Kennedy propels his narrative mainly through dialogue, but he also has a way with a telling detail: the progress of a sowbug across Gallagher's kitchen counter while he's on the phone, the wind rattling a loose piece of metal during a chilling interrogation.
The supporting characters are minimally limned, appearing only to play off Gallagher. The protagonist himself is unremittingly weak, cowardly and self-absorbed, and it's a measure of Kennedy's craft that we care what happens to him.
There's a sudden left turn in both plot and voice at the last, in the chapter that explains the title, however opaquely. It's a bit of a head-scratcher, but to say more would give away too much.
9781897142394
-- review by Shane McCune
[BCBW 2009]
Patrick Gallagher is a fortyish Irish bachelor whose only love is his garden in Southlands, equestrian playground of Vancouver's landed gentry.
Bootless and unhorsed, he lives in the posh neighbourhood on the sufferance of a landowner who provides a cottage and greenhouse on the grounds rent-free in return for his tenant's botanical expertise.
That expertise is prodigious. Gallagher spends weeks, months and years meticulously cultivating exquisite roses prized by fanciers across the country and beyond. His "introductions"; are renowned equally for the delicacy of their blossoms and the indelicacy of their names.
Gallagher christens his gardening creations for certain attributes of his favourite female entertainers: Shania's Thighs, Pamela's Panties, Nicole's Knickers and so forth. He speaks to them with a lover's affection while guiding their pollination, in passages that are at once scientific and unabashedly erotic:
"With utmost delicacy he touched Nicole's exposed anthers with the tip of his little finger and then ever-so-gently rubbed the fingertip against Michelle's sticky stigmas. 'Ah,' he sighed breathily at the sensuous touch that marked the moment of pollen transference.";
He is utterly content with his sliver of fame, his modest home and his verdant laboratory-until his sponsor dies.
The owner's son wants to develop the property for housing, leaving Gallagher in a panic. Desperate for "dosh,"; he agrees to return to Ireland as the hired pro for a garden tour on the chance that he might find among his charges a female patron of a certain age and position-a financial strategy only slightly less pathetic than his weekly Lotto ticket.
Although it's a week in his homeland, with expenses paid, plus two grand in his pocket, it's not a prospect he relishes. Gallagher has done his best to forget his family, his boyhood sweetheart and his not-so-savoury pals, all of whom he has betrayed in one way or another. But it has been twenty years and more, and he reckons that if he keeps his head down he might emerge from the tour none the worse off and possibly better.
There, in a geranium pot, are the seeds of the tale-and who better to tell it than Irish-born gardening ace Des Kennedy?
Based on Denman Island, Kennedy is a popular speaker, broadcaster and writer on all things green and growing, with a résumé that includes a gardening column, four books of essays and two novels.
Author and character share the gift of the gab, and there are a few touches of broad humour, as one might expect from a three-time Leacock Award nominee. Gallagher can spin a comic yarn to impress the ladies, slathering on the Paddyisms -Jaysus, poxy, bollixed-like butter on soda bread, stopping just short of "faith and begorrah.";
(For someone born in the mid-1960s in Cork, the most southerly and fiercely republican county in Eire, Gallagher is strangely given to Scots-Irish terms-"blootered"; for drunk, "gossoon"; for lad-popular in Northern Ireland half a century earlier.)
Kennedy has a whiff of what writer Conor Cruise O'Brien called the "gift-traditionally esteemed and feared in Ireland-of saying wounding things in a memorable manner."; We snicker at the officious tour guide whose cell phone ringtone is "The Happy Wanderer,"; and at the plump tourist who wags her finger "so that her bracelets jangled and the dangling fat of her arm wobbled like a water-filled balloon.";
But this is neither a comic nor a sentimental portrait of the auld sod. From the moment Gallagher sets foot in Ireland he feels the ghosts that would undo him closing in, and his blarney and bonhomie soon succumb to darkness.
Instead of gushing descriptions of the countryside and its many hues of green, there are sharp observations of downtown Dublin, "where tourists swarm like spermatozoa up onto Grafton Street."; There's a nod to the modernity and wealth (since collapsed) of the "Celtic Tiger"; but there are still corners plagued by the cassock and the gun.
Kennedy propels his narrative mainly through dialogue, but he also has a way with a telling detail: the progress of a sowbug across Gallagher's kitchen counter while he's on the phone, the wind rattling a loose piece of metal during a chilling interrogation.
The supporting characters are minimally limned, appearing only to play off Gallagher. The protagonist himself is unremittingly weak, cowardly and self-absorbed, and it's a measure of Kennedy's craft that we care what happens to him.
There's a sudden left turn in both plot and voice at the last, in the chapter that explains the title, however opaquely. It's a bit of a head-scratcher, but to say more would give away too much.
9781897142394
-- review by Shane McCune
[BCBW 2009]
Submitted on September 3, 2009 in By David.
