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The Straight and Narrow Path
When an anthropologist, on holiday in an Irish village, contributes an article on local customs to an English newspaper he is unprepared for the results.
245 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1956
70 people want to read
About the author
Honor Tracy
34 books3 followersHonor Tracy is the pseudonym of Lilbush Wingfield, who was a British writer, born at Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk.
Tracy joined the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force from 1939 to 1941, working in the intelligence département, then she was attached to the British Ministry of Information during the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945, as a Japanese specialist. She worked for The Observer newspaper as a columnist and as a long-time foreign correspondent. She wrote also for The Sunday Times and for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Tracy is best known as a travel writer. Her novels satirize British-Irish relations and Ireland itself with wit and occasionally bitterness. Her best-known novels are The Straight and Narrow Path (1956), The Quiet End of Evening (1972), and The Ballad of Castle Reef (1979). Her best-known travel book is Winter in Castille (1973).
She settled in Achill Island, Co. Mayo, Ireland and died in 1989 in Oxford, England.
Tracy joined the British Women's Auxiliary Air Force from 1939 to 1941, working in the intelligence département, then she was attached to the British Ministry of Information during the Second World War, from 1941 to 1945, as a Japanese specialist. She worked for The Observer newspaper as a columnist and as a long-time foreign correspondent. She wrote also for The Sunday Times and for the British Broadcasting Corporation. Tracy is best known as a travel writer. Her novels satirize British-Irish relations and Ireland itself with wit and occasionally bitterness. Her best-known novels are The Straight and Narrow Path (1956), The Quiet End of Evening (1972), and The Ballad of Castle Reef (1979). Her best-known travel book is Winter in Castille (1973).
She settled in Achill Island, Co. Mayo, Ireland and died in 1989 in Oxford, England.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
January 26, 2008
This is a book about English Aristocracy living in Ireland in the fifties(?). More specifically, about an English man who is sent to Ireland by his doctor to rest and improve his health. Whilst there he peeks over a fence and sees some nuns jumping over a fire in a pagan fertility festival.
He writes an article about what he's seen to an English newspaper. The nuns then sue him. Chaos ensues.
The book is hilarious and colorfully written. The characters are so vibrant that I often find myself thinking of them... half believing that they actually existed. The book is full of intelligent insights about human nature.
I learned a very important truth from this book. I learned that traditions in the U.K. and Ireland are nearly unbreakable-- like steel. And clung to with the passion of a mother to her child.
He writes an article about what he's seen to an English newspaper. The nuns then sue him. Chaos ensues.
The book is hilarious and colorfully written. The characters are so vibrant that I often find myself thinking of them... half believing that they actually existed. The book is full of intelligent insights about human nature.
I learned a very important truth from this book. I learned that traditions in the U.K. and Ireland are nearly unbreakable-- like steel. And clung to with the passion of a mother to her child.
July 28, 2025
loved the ending learned a useful lesson from the book
November 24, 2012
This is an engaging and often funny book, well written and perceptive. It recounts an Englishman's experience of local politics and culture in the Irish Republic of the fities or sixties. Asked to stand in for an inebriate freind to pen a sort of Alistair Cook style "letter from the Republic" for an English newspaper the innocent Anthony Butler (Butler! the name alone will make Fenians growl ominously) faithfully recounts, like the scrupulous, intelligent but somewhat unempathetic anthropologist he is, nuns jumping over a fire in what he, with scientific detachment, surmises to be a pre-Christian fertility rite. His paper with thoughts more on paper sales than joy in a new anthropological discovery, publishes his piece and both jwriter and paper are promptly sued for libel, unleashing a chain of sometimes absurd, sometimes grotesque events, mishaps and intrigue. My impression is that the writer has a profound knowledge of the Ireland of the time, very much in thrall for better and for worse, to the sway of the Roman Catholic Church. She also well understands the Roman Catholic mindset, so hard for those of other religions to grasp, which may and often does embrace at one and the same time, robust cynicism and scepticism toewards articles of the faith and ministers of the church with a sometimes blind unthinking if not idiotic devotion to same, especially when same are earnestly challenged. The characters are drawn sympathetically but without illusion, and this could be said of the writer's portrayal of the Irish people, whose personal faults and whose corrupt politics are made plain for all to see. What especially impressed me was how true to life all the charcaters seemed to me to be, an element of self parody and caricature hangs over them, but this seems to me to be a fact of Irishness, the Irish often in my experience very often performing some kind of self-parody in the way they present themselves and live their lives, not taking themselves seriously and yet paradoxically taking themselves deadly seriously. Honor Tracy has captured this paradoxical charcateriustic of Irishness (especially in those days when the Church was more influential in Ireland than it is too today) brilliantly.
Honor Tracy would I think have been a first class writer of whudunnit had she so wished: her psychology, intelligence and ability to wield a tight and very readable plot indicate the right predisposition.
The conservative Canon, who is prejudiced, greedy, hypocritical and callous could easily have been portrayed in the darkest colours as a punch bag for liberal writers and readers. In this story he is revealed as he is but for all his manifold faults stands as a pillar of order, whom one is hesitatnt to sweep away, because if swept away but that crass materialism for which the Irish are second to none and looking at Ireland today in which the chruch is enfeebled, that materialism dominates the land uncompormisingly. In thsi account from the Ireland of its still religious time, injustices can and are accepted as aspects of life which should be accepted and modified over the rim of a whisky glass or a strong porter or a cup of tea and not combatted at all, unless as part of a strategy rather than than in the name of objective justice. Life is too short to be spent worrying about injustices which are nothing before the wide sweep of Eternity. Are, there you go, I am talkling like an Irish sky-pilot already!
Come to think of it, was the writer herself constrained at the time she wrote the book, from denouncing Church or Republic too freely? Did she herself or her publishers experience anything similar to the outcry which followed the publication of the article about the nuns by her Andrew Butler in her book? If so, that would be another twist to the tale and a further peel of irony in the Gin and Tonic. There is after all, a seriousness, a darkness which lingers or should I say on words the Canon might have chosen, malingers, at the edges of the plot? This book is light hearted but vaguely one recalls there is a dark side, a very dark side indeed actually, both to Irish Republican legends and to Roman Catholic purity and tradition. And there again, to laugh misfortune and suffering to scorn, is that after all, not the essence of Roman Catholic Faith?
All said and done, this story is a delightful almighty storm in a teacup.
Honor Tracy would I think have been a first class writer of whudunnit had she so wished: her psychology, intelligence and ability to wield a tight and very readable plot indicate the right predisposition.
The conservative Canon, who is prejudiced, greedy, hypocritical and callous could easily have been portrayed in the darkest colours as a punch bag for liberal writers and readers. In this story he is revealed as he is but for all his manifold faults stands as a pillar of order, whom one is hesitatnt to sweep away, because if swept away but that crass materialism for which the Irish are second to none and looking at Ireland today in which the chruch is enfeebled, that materialism dominates the land uncompormisingly. In thsi account from the Ireland of its still religious time, injustices can and are accepted as aspects of life which should be accepted and modified over the rim of a whisky glass or a strong porter or a cup of tea and not combatted at all, unless as part of a strategy rather than than in the name of objective justice. Life is too short to be spent worrying about injustices which are nothing before the wide sweep of Eternity. Are, there you go, I am talkling like an Irish sky-pilot already!
Come to think of it, was the writer herself constrained at the time she wrote the book, from denouncing Church or Republic too freely? Did she herself or her publishers experience anything similar to the outcry which followed the publication of the article about the nuns by her Andrew Butler in her book? If so, that would be another twist to the tale and a further peel of irony in the Gin and Tonic. There is after all, a seriousness, a darkness which lingers or should I say on words the Canon might have chosen, malingers, at the edges of the plot? This book is light hearted but vaguely one recalls there is a dark side, a very dark side indeed actually, both to Irish Republican legends and to Roman Catholic purity and tradition. And there again, to laugh misfortune and suffering to scorn, is that after all, not the essence of Roman Catholic Faith?
All said and done, this story is a delightful almighty storm in a teacup.
September 17, 2012
A friend found this book in a box under her grandmother's bed in Dublin and introduced it to me. I mostly remember that it was very funny, and I'm looking forward to reading it again to remember why. I was reading it on a plane and I was laughing so much the folks sitting around me all wanted the name of the book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews