[Book Review] Walking with Ghosts: A Memoir by Gabriel Byrne

UNITED KINGDOM
Morning Star

December 7, 2020

By Fiona O’Connor

Fiona O’Connor finds that Gabriel Byrne breaks the celebrity mould in his unflinching account of an Irish childhood and subsequent success as a screen actor

“Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood.” So wrote Frank McCourt in the opening of Angela’s Ashes, his bestselling spawner of the genre dubbed misery-lit.

In his new memoir, actor Gabriel Byrne has generated his own take on the legacy of an Irish childhood, thus creating perhaps a unique form — that of the celebrity artist opening up to scrutiny many of his most intimate experiences.

In it, the iconic figure, hero and anti-hero of Hollywood classics, offers valuable insight on male vulnerability, particularly so in light of recent church child-abuse scandals and the #metoo movement.

Walking with Ghosts is an account of a working-class upbringing in the harsh economy of 1960s Dublin. Byrne’s father was a cooper in the Guinness brewery, laid off when barrel-makers’ skills were no longer needed and his mother, a nurse, maintained the family.

It was a time when deep faith and submission to rigid Catholic authority was still a social given. Byrne’s excitement in becoming an altar boy and the awe involved in rituals of preparation — boys dressing the priest in his pristine robes, boys learning their Latin — is ended when he was thrown against the wall of a trusted priest and sexually abused when he was 12.

Decades later, Byrne is still unable to confront this man with his crime.

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