A man ripped with unhealed grief and misplaced guilt for his father’s death when he was a child, who’s in the process of crashing out, wavering on the edge of the wagon, inherits his Irish grandmother’s estate contingent on him holding it for at least 2 years. He wants nothing more than to flip it all to pay off his creditors who are in the process of pulling everything out from underneath him back in Sydney.

Many of the chapters are direct allegories for various steps, and I’d bet money that the author has rubbed elbows with a couple of drunks. In repairing a boat that was built by his grandfather, maintained by his father, and enjoyed by himself in his youth – under the mentorship of a seanchaí (a storyteller, sponsor de facto), the man begins to fix the things he can, plank by plank, and finds meaning in his life.

I could feel the planks reverberating under my hand, not trembling as they had at first, but reverberating, as if some lost integrity was striving to re-establish itself.

The book addresses powerlessness, atonement, and the paradoxical notion that losing everything you have can sometimes be the best thing to ever happen to a man. The author illuminates a hearty representation of Irish culture and even subculture (yankee mainlanders and the goatherding folk of the Aran Isles that keep to themselves). Beautiful lyrical themes are presented as seemingly-schizophrenic poems; guiding the troubled man in crisis – pushing him towards willingness, open mindedness, and fixing his life where he can before becoming concerned, and thus overwhelmed, by those things that he can’t change.

“We’re not here to patch things up, we’re here to find out what’s rotten and remove it.”

The book addresses causes and conditions – a generational message that needed to be heard by more than one Murphy. I can’t think of a recommendation more singly inspired and insightfully given from a grandfather to a once-troubled and always troubling grandson.

As the man departs Inis Mór, he turns and sees the nameless captain saluting him from the dock – this part brought a tear to my eye – Bill and I salute one another.

related