Any recovery of national language, custom, or identity will be partial only territory can be fully reclaimed. Seven centuries ago Ireland lost her equilibrium in the Norman Invasions and has been fighting to regain it ever since. In large measure, Irish comedy is the comedy of pain.

And throughout most of the memoir Leonard refers to himself in the third person, a distancing device that separates the childhood of John Keyes Byrne (an adopted child, like Joyce) from his later life as a professional writer with the pen name of Hugh Leonard.ĭespite the comedy, a good deal of pain seeps into all these fissures, and Leonard doesn't disguise it. In addition he has a remarkable gift for extravagant comic simile ('trying not to offend him was like crossing a minefield on crutches'). Perhaps the most obvious and pleasing lies in the elaborate texture of his formal prose, which slides incongruously into the colorful 'begobs' and 'bollixes' of working-class Dublin slang. His social comedy arises from a number of dissociations. Some of Leonard's passages make one laugh aloud.

Much of the memoir recalls the Joycean archetype - the young artist struggling to escape family, religion, and social mores - to escape Ireland itself in order to survive. He guides us through his childhood in Dalkey, a village just south of Dublin, during the economically depressed 1930s, through maturity in the war years, to his decision to leave Ireland in the late 1950s after 14 years in the civil service.

Not only do we find Leonard's wry and silly Da here, but also his grandmother, mother, neighbors, friends, and employers. but my father clung to the theory that the dog simply detested the colour black.' Hugh Leonard's delightful autobiographical evocation of his Dublin childhood in the thirties and forties is like an Irish 'Cider with Rosie' - crammed with people and conversations, rich in poetry, full of love, laughter and rare pleasures.This title captures the poetry and drama of a child's experience of Dublin in the 1930s and 1940s and presents recollections recounted with humour and insight.'Home Before Night' ventures into the territory of author/playwright Hugh Leonard's recent Broadway success 'Da,' giving us a wider view of his Irish homeland and compatriots than did the play.

Home before night by hugh leonard