About the Book:
Far From the Land: An Irish Memoir
The setting of Far From the Land is rural Ireland in the 1950s. Thomas Rice has written a riveting memoir about a way of life that no longer exists: no running water, no toilets, no electricity and little access to education, jobs or basic health care. Early on we are drawn into a culture with a recent memory of famines, a culture still showing the scars—from the homestead ruins that pockmark the landscape to the ghost towns and villages that never recovered from The Great Hunger of the 1840s.
The 36 chapters (in three sections) cover all the touchpoints where lives intersect and identities are forged in the crucible of everyday and often public struggles. Writing on his own search for identity, the author recalls the night his absentee IRA father returns from England for the first time in ten years. Known as “The Voice” because of his tenor’s talent, here is the impact of his first song, Thomas Moore’s haunting tribute to the sweetheart of his martyred friend, Robert Emmet. The poem is titled, “She Is Far From The Land.”
“No one in the kitchen that night ever forgot it. It was the perfect song, sung by the perfect voice at the perfect time. There could never be a better moment. The song had all the right ingredients for this audience: unrequited love, hero and heroine, loyalty, heartbreak, tragedy, treachery and martyrdom. Though these were universal themes in human affairs, we assumed the song was about us. By the end of the first verse, several people, women and men alike, were openly weeping. Some were actually sobbing; big shoulders heaving. Handkerchiefs were out and being passed around.”
The memoir has the benefit of five decades of retrospection as the author brings each of his characters to life in a way that he could never have articulated as a 16-year-old. Told with startling honesty, without nostalgia or cliché, we still enjoy the hallmarks of the Celtic storytelling tradition: attention to detail, nuance, appreciation of human foibles and compassion for the anguish of struggle and loss. We come away with a renewed respect—and pride if you have any Irish bloodlines or identity—for rural Irish culture and the people who carry it forward with quiet dignity against the tide of their colonial history.
