I was first introduced to Delaney when i started listening to his podcasts on James Joyce's Ulysses. So while Ireland offered so many writers and many Booker Prize winning ones among them, I still went with Delaney as I felt I owed him something for his free podcasts on my other labor of love!
Ronan O'Mara's life is changed forever when the itinerant storyteller halts in his home for a couple of nights enthralling everyone with his stories about Ireland. Encouraged by his dad John and his aunt Kate, he spends every spare moment of his boyhood looking for clues about the storyteller who disappears from his life all too suddenly but only after stirring in him a love for history and mythology. In ways unbeknownst to him the stories come to Ronan and collecting them becomes his only connection to the storyteller. As Ronan enters college to pursue a degree in history, his life takes a turn for the worse with the sudden death of his father. Shielded from any uncomfortable situation during his childhood and boyhood life, Ronan is completely unprepared to handle this loss and walks out after a bitter fight with his aunt Kate.
Knowing not what to do, he decides to become an itinerant himself in pursuit of the storyteller. He traces the stories he has heard over the years and follows the road which the storyteller had taken and along the way meets interesting people and collects stories about their lives himself. Will the prodigal son return home? Will he find the storyteller? Will he unearth the family secrets that almost everyone but him knew? These questions are answered as the novel meanders about, and I use the word meander because i felt Delaney could've used some help with editing.
This is a fantastic novel if one wants to get introduced to the history and myths of Ireland which are at the very foundation of the nation and its colorful people. There are so many great stories in the novel which combine myths and historical facts that it is quite hard to separate them. Starting from the pre-historic age to the 1916 Easter Rising and "The troubles" the stories help Ronan (and the reader) recognize the country and the people and their blessings and curses.
As a mother of a precocious 6 year old who can't get enough of stories, I am often at wits' end trying to make one up during bed time, and very often I recounted lives of my long gone grand parents, my dad, uncles and other people from my life who are no longer around and narrated them as stories just to satisfy her. In that process I got curious myself and would often look up historical events that happened at that time which were somehow interwoven into the life stories. As the storyteller says "Indeed our story is finally all any of us owns, because ... a story has only one master". I am a big fan of oral histories and people's histories and maybe that was also the additional appeal of the novel. Whatever the reason, despite a few minor flaws, I loved this book, and not just because it gave me material for some bedtime stories.
