Donkeys Years

by Aidan Higgins

In this racy memoir, Irish author Aidan Higgins dissects the folie de grandeur of a Catholic family in County Kildare. He examines the mystery of growing up, his rearing on a rundown estate within the English Pale, the decline of a family fortune and the wide world that he discovers in London and South Africa. He also digs up family skeletons and rattles their vertebrae. The state of Ireland during and just after World War 11 is tackled boldly in this bawdy memoir which reads like a picaresque novel.

288 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Aidan Higgins was an Irish writer. He wrote short stories, travel pieces, radio drama and novels.

Reviews

[A. Mary · Rating 3 out of 5]

In truth, this is a rather complex memoir, but it doesn't go so far as an examined life story. It doesn't draw explicit conclusions, but they are there all the same. Large swathes of the life are ignored without explanation or apology. Structurally, the book is an example of how memory works--tangential, fragmentary, vivid, vague. Arranged chronologically, the stories from the earliest part of life are mere flashes, vignettes. As the child Higgins grows, the scope expands to include other boys and local people. The description of the butcher's delivery man is outstanding. Many of the book's descriptions are outstanding. The steady, inexorable decline of the family, in every way, is an exemplar of the decay of the entire landed class, fraying around the edges, descending into drink, spending until the money is gone. The four boys are not close, although Aidan and his younger brother "the Dote" are necessarily companions, being close in age and isolated in early life. The book is a grim read, detailing the violence of the Catholic boarding school, the mental illness of the eldest brother "Dodo," adolescent sexuality, the estrangement of brother "Bun." The happiness of courtship and marriage is so subdued as to barely register. Mumu and Dado, the parents, are shiftless and once the inherited house and lands are lost, they move by stages ever down the social scale until they end in the basement level of a terraced house. It's dismal, the family broken, yet Higgins' devotion to his mother is clear. He undertook the writing of this memoir "hoping to catch some lost cadences of my mother's voice." He was the only one of her children with her at her death and the only one to attend her funeral. I wished for a greater understanding of what happened to those boys to fracture them from each other, but the memoirist is under no obligation to tell. So, he doesn't.