Beyond Consolation: How we became too "clever" for God and our own good

by John Waters

In the late spring of 2008 the acclaimed Irish writer Nuala O' Faolain went on a national Irish radio programme to tell the Irish people that she was dying of cancer. She was frightened of death and of the short time left to her. 

Here was a spokesperson for a generation which now conjured up an abyss for itself, reviewing a culture she had inhabited and helped to create one last time. She believed neither in an afterlife nor in God.


With Nuala O' Faolain's broadcast as his point of departure, Waters examines this trajectory of Irish Culture to this point of despair. How reasonable is it to believe in nothing? He explores a new language to excavate the journey of Irish society from what appeared to be profound in its traditional faith to this moment of what might easily have been taken as a moment of nihilistic clarity. What modern men and women suffer from in modern culture is the lack of an idea of the infinite and the eternal.

240 pages, Paperback

First published February 25, 2010

About the author

John Waters was born in Castlerea, Co Roscommon, in 1955. He held a range of jobs after leaving school, including railway clerk, showband roadie, pirate radio manager, petrol pump attendant and mailcar driver.


He began part-time work as a a journalist in 1981, with Hot Press, Ireland’s leading rock ‘n’ roll magazine and went full-time in 1984, when he moved to Dublin. As a journalist, magazine editor and columnist, he has specialised in raising unpopular issues of public importance, including the repression of Famine memories and the denial of rights to fathers.

Reviews

[Theresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bottom line, we each answer the question of meaning in life for ourselves. Here, Waters opens with the radio interview of Nuala O'Faolin, influential Irish writer and his colleague, in which she answers this question, as she faces the time-line imposed by her cancer diagnosis. He moves then to his own meditation on the same question. The clarity and rigor of his thought is provocative. How the culture in which we live and breathe defines our thought and language, how history shapes our public dialogs, and what decisions we make or fail to make in becoming aware of and evaluating these powerful factors deep within our personal reflections forms the rest of the book. I'm very glad to have read it.

[James Gaffney · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmmm. Having been given this book a few years ago, I was reminded of its existence when my parents told me that their Sunday mass had a guest speaker tagged on at the end of it. Phrases such as "a fanatic" and "I didn't hear a Christian word from him" were used to describe a speech in which the Holocaust, the horrors of Stalin's Gulags and poor Alfie Evans were invoked in his speech against repealing the 8th Amendment. Anyway, I approached the book with a curiosity, to say the least. A good few chapters are his reactions to two interviews on the Marian Finucane Show, and a letter to the Irish Times. And for someone who was once a member of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, he showed precious little understanding of how live radio works. He rails against an ambiguous concept called culture throughout, something that he never really defines. There also features some ranting about gyms, the phrase "going forward", and TV audiences unversed in the science of meteorology who nevertheless believe the words of blonde women weather forecasters. Lots of chapters called "The CONCRETE NOUN of ABSTRACT NOUN. The passages describing his fondness for town life as opposed to the city or countryside contained some nice writing, the rest was all very personal despite making much use of the pronoun "we". Oh, and interestingly, he asks at one point if you'd be kicked out of heaven if you told someone who was annoying you to Fuck Off, and also, writing about the beauty of Ben Bulben, he says that that majestic mountain makes you just want to exclaim Yes!