Tom Phelan, pt 2

Last summer, while attending an artist residency at the Tyrone Guthrie Center (Annaghmakerrig, Ireland) with Mark Roper, I met an Irish author named Tom Phelan. He was recently awarded an Isherwood Foundation Fellowship for 2008. He is an intelligent and engaging writer with an equally intelligent and engaging personality (and funny).

Tom left the priesthood years ago and pursued writing. I certainly can’t claim to know why he left the priesthood, but I expect it had an enormous effect on what kind of writer Tom turned out to be.

At the residency, he did an amazing reading from his novel, The Canal Bridge. I immediately bought the book from him that night and read it over the next couple of days.

The Canal Bridge is simply fantastic. “F’ing brilliant” was how I put it to the other residents gathered around the dinner table, to which Tom and Pat teasingly replied they’d like to quote me on the dust jacket.

I eventually also bought another one of his books, In the Season of the Daisies. I decided not to read it right away so I could save it as a treat the next time I needed a good book (you know, one that I didn’t feel would be a gamble).

Fast forward to January 1st when I found myself on a 13 hour flight to New Zealand. Perfect time for such a book, right?

I should have anticipated the grand and blunt ferociousness of the book (thought it is certainly also moving and poignant)...

I planned on reading just a few chapters on the plane so I could savor it over the span a few lazy nights during the residency. On a side note, I had also downloaded games for my iPhone to break up the flight (thanks to an iTunes gift card Diane gave me for Christmas). In between attempting to sleep during the flight and playing games, I figured Tom’s book would be the perfect way to break up a very long and monotonous flight from LA to Auckland, or read some during the several extra hours of travel time after landing in Auckland.

Instead, what happened was that I barely played the games at all (all good iPhone games, incidentally: Rolando, Crash Kart and Toy Bot 3), and instead, I plowed through Tom’s entire novel before I made it to Auckland. I couldn’t put it down so that I could savor it later, as I had originally planned.

I am no writer. Neither am I a book reviewer. That said, I do think I know a good book when I read it. With that preface, here is my reaction:

Brutal, brilliant, touching, challenging, passionate, angry, profound... A book ostensibly about both the misguided brutality of the IRA and the love between twin brothers and family. Really, though, it is so much more. It is about larger concepts such as sin and redemption. It doesn’t waste chapters on irrelevant personal character minutia. Neither does it assert a haughty omnipotent understanding of human nature, nor try to explain it. It is simultaneously personal and universal on a level few authors can achieve. An amazing read.

It is not exactly an optimistic book with a favorable outlook on fairness and faith, however. Rather, it is a book only a dissolutioned ex-priest could write. One who understands sin and redemption in ways most never recognize, but also one who has possibly lost a piece of his faith in a loving supreme being, but almost certainly also lost an equal amount of faith in humanity, in general.

Brutal in several ways, yes ... but brilliant.