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3.97 AVERAGE
3.97 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
adventurous
funny
informative
reflective
medium-paced
funny
lighthearted
reflective
medium-paced
i love memoir and this is definitely an unconventional one. brendan behan has an irresistible voice, you can’t help but laugh when he wants you to laugh. the book is filled with such bare honesty and yet so much is hidden, and sometimes you can’t tell what’s really true (after all, he admits to being a good liar). but that’s what all memoir is and what all memories are besides. makes me want to read his entire body of work. honestly his wit and attitude towards society & life remind me of wilde— i’m not surprised by the extra shoutout wilde gets in this book
also my god. charlie.
also my god. charlie.
emotional
funny
hopeful
medium-paced
This one is hard to review.
I had heard so much about the story that I had built a certain image of what the book was like and it wasn’t that at all.
I was expecting a Dickensian tale of misery and abuse and in the end it was a book about friendship and how to get as many cigarettes as possible.
So I don’t know.
On my hand I’m disappointed because it wasn’t what I thought but on the other hand it’s well written and I learned a good few bits about that time period and the culture of my country of adoption.
It’s a good memoir.
I had heard so much about the story that I had built a certain image of what the book was like and it wasn’t that at all.
I was expecting a Dickensian tale of misery and abuse and in the end it was a book about friendship and how to get as many cigarettes as possible.
So I don’t know.
On my hand I’m disappointed because it wasn’t what I thought but on the other hand it’s well written and I learned a good few bits about that time period and the culture of my country of adoption.
It’s a good memoir.
Touching and surprisingy story told in the way that only Beahan can.
A teenager arrested for planning to plant bombs for the IRA ends up finding friendship and respect amongst British peers going through the youth prison system.
A teenager arrested for planning to plant bombs for the IRA ends up finding friendship and respect amongst British peers going through the youth prison system.
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
slow-paced
Feel like this book was at the edge of what I can read right now. It's hard to review memoir cos it's real and personal. But the pre-Borstal stuff was hard going! The Borstal side of it was an interesting, funny, informative account of life in Borstal in those days. Behan writes with wit and kindness, taking every man (and usually it is a man) as he finds him. I would say he stretches that a bit far sometimes but that's open to debate about forgiveness. Some of the language is of its time -including some racism and anti-semitism - but other bits, like the Cockney dialect, are a joy to read. The only thing he censors is some stronger swearwords. You get a real sense of being there, day to day.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Violence, Excrement, Police brutality
Moderate: Colonisation, Classism
Minor: Racial slurs, Rape, Sexism, Antisemitism
“As I stood, waiting over the lavatory, I heard a church bell peal in the frosty night, in some other part of the city. Cold and lonely it sounded, like the dreariest noise that ever defiled the ear of man. If you could call it a noise. It made misery mark time”.
I don’t really know where to put this, truthfully it’s more like a 3.5 than a 4 but given it’s Behan’s 100th anniversary this year, I’ll round it up. Ar son na cúise, mar a deirtear.
I came in with high expectations for this story of Behan’s arrest at 16 and subsequent imprisonment in jail and, of course, Borstal. The opening nod the journey from confinement to confinement had me hooked initially. The unfolding of the locations and procedures, so unfamiliar to the narrator, really evoked a sense of powerlessness against a hostile English machine. I enjoyed these early sections the most. The fact that it was something of a battle for survival made Behan’s emerging friendships among the YPs that much more affecting. Not in the ‘they found friendship in the hardest circumstances’ way, more in the ‘children and teenagers will behave like children and teenagers wherever you put them’ way.
On that, I became very attached to the characters (even Joe and Knowlsey). Under the macho blustering, they truly read like teenage boys. Even through the eyes of an older Behan writing it up, the characters came off like boys trying on the costumes of workmen, husbands, murderers, thieves and so on. That’s why, I’m sorry to say, I found it harder to sympathise with Behan himself throughout - god forgive me. As his sentence goes on, his skill as a liar only increases. What the other Borstal boys consider Irish ‘blarney’, I read as a cunning means of survival. It was disturbing. He just seemed blue to say anything to get by, which had me questioning the friendships which so moved me initially. The latent politics of the book (Ken’s class isolation, Tom’s forced conception of ‘socialism’, the ‘dead’ repression of the Irish, and so on) were interesting but not as sharp as I expected. I say this of Behan the character in his book, not Behan the real man.
Borstal Boy has been the first book to make me laugh out loud while reading in a long time. More for the odd turn of phrase or aside than anything else. Like early on when he talks about the pigeons grunting on the windowsills, or the ‘Haw old boy’ accent of the priest. Those were the parts where it really came alive, like you were hearing the story rather than reading it. It dragged on a bit but what can you expect from a book describing a carceral environment. It was interesting that I found fewer really remarkable bits of writing in the latter part of the book, when the pace of Behan’s imprisonment began to slow slow slow. I keep trying to convince myself that the drop off in detail at the very end, and sudden ending, was evocative of being set free after so long unfree. It just happened. And maybe he didn’t care as much after his chinas were gone.
All in all, a funny page-turner, but not as strong or hard-hitting as I had expected. Read it on the beach so you can pop in for a swim in the sea in Behan’s honour.
I don’t really know where to put this, truthfully it’s more like a 3.5 than a 4 but given it’s Behan’s 100th anniversary this year, I’ll round it up. Ar son na cúise, mar a deirtear.
I came in with high expectations for this story of Behan’s arrest at 16 and subsequent imprisonment in jail and, of course, Borstal. The opening nod the journey from confinement to confinement had me hooked initially. The unfolding of the locations and procedures, so unfamiliar to the narrator, really evoked a sense of powerlessness against a hostile English machine. I enjoyed these early sections the most. The fact that it was something of a battle for survival made Behan’s emerging friendships among the YPs that much more affecting. Not in the ‘they found friendship in the hardest circumstances’ way, more in the ‘children and teenagers will behave like children and teenagers wherever you put them’ way.
On that, I became very attached to the characters (even Joe and Knowlsey). Under the macho blustering, they truly read like teenage boys. Even through the eyes of an older Behan writing it up, the characters came off like boys trying on the costumes of workmen, husbands, murderers, thieves and so on. That’s why, I’m sorry to say, I found it harder to sympathise with Behan himself throughout - god forgive me. As his sentence goes on, his skill as a liar only increases. What the other Borstal boys consider Irish ‘blarney’, I read as a cunning means of survival. It was disturbing. He just seemed blue to say anything to get by, which had me questioning the friendships which so moved me initially. The latent politics of the book (Ken’s class isolation, Tom’s forced conception of ‘socialism’, the ‘dead’ repression of the Irish, and so on) were interesting but not as sharp as I expected. I say this of Behan the character in his book, not Behan the real man.
Borstal Boy has been the first book to make me laugh out loud while reading in a long time. More for the odd turn of phrase or aside than anything else. Like early on when he talks about the pigeons grunting on the windowsills, or the ‘Haw old boy’ accent of the priest. Those were the parts where it really came alive, like you were hearing the story rather than reading it. It dragged on a bit but what can you expect from a book describing a carceral environment. It was interesting that I found fewer really remarkable bits of writing in the latter part of the book, when the pace of Behan’s imprisonment began to slow slow slow. I keep trying to convince myself that the drop off in detail at the very end, and sudden ending, was evocative of being set free after so long unfree. It just happened. And maybe he didn’t care as much after his chinas were gone.
All in all, a funny page-turner, but not as strong or hard-hitting as I had expected. Read it on the beach so you can pop in for a swim in the sea in Behan’s honour.
funny
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Parts of this book were difficult due to the dialect, slang and Celtic phrases. However, you can get most of it. It is a really interesting period piece (1940's) with more humor than I expected.