My review of Angela’s Ashes, by Frank McCourt

Angela’s Ashes

by Frank McCourt

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

One of my all-time favourite reads, this Pulitzer Prize-winner is far from your typical memoir format (whatever that is), reading instead more like a great classic novel. It won the 1996 National Book Critics Circle Award (Biography), and the 1997 Boeke Prize. The vivid, multi award nominated big screen adaptation, starring Emily Watson and Robert Carlyle, won Watson the London Film Critics Circle Best Actress award and Alan Parker the Vary International Film Festival award for Best Director, despite some box office disappointment.

Angela's Ashes chronicles author Frank McCourt's childhood after his family must return from the USA to their native Ireland, due to financial strife and domestic complexities surrounding his father's drunkenness. We follow young Frank's challenging life in 1930s and 1940s Limerick, Ireland, and his gruelling quest of slowly earning his way back to America.

Despite being written first person, never was I distracted into thinking the narrator a biased story participant, only a remote, observant storyteller. He somehow distances himself from the immediacy he describes, omitting any hint of self-pity or cry for reader sympathy - no small feat for anyone recalling themselves or loved ones in such dire straits. That love wins out, over entrenched impoverishment, is a constant unstated subtext.

Frank McCourt's rich, filmic scenes cover the many subtle and dramatic shades of Irish slum life in years gone by. His characters are there, in the room talking to you as you read them, so intensely real are they you could smell them, reach out and hug them. You truly love or dislike many of them.

Like many tragic depictions of life and the human condition, this rides on a wry, quirky humour to assist the reader (and characters) through the trauma of human deprivation, working to stunning effect.

I was not depressed by this poignant tale which, penned without a note of self-indulgence or bare sentimentality, kept me eagerly turning the pages and concludes optimistically and philosophically.

Mesmerised throughout, I was left feeling humbled by this high calibre read and privileged to be told Frank McCourt's early life tales.