Kevin Ireland: Backwards to Forwards

By MARGIE THOMSON

There are two talents that Kevin Ireland has in abundance. The first is writing. This latest work, second volume of the memoir he began with the award-winning Under the Bridge and Over the Moon, is fresh, amusing, vivid.

It is illustrated not with photos (which is a shame), but with the colourfulness of his adventures, and also by his poems, which he sprinkles here and there when he's demonstrating the emotional character of some experience or other.

The second talent is for friendship. He seems never at a loss for a new close friend, usually someone full of outrageous idiosyncrasy whom he's dug up from among the literati, artists or bullshitters of the cafes or, more often, pubs of any country in which he finds himself.

The pages are littered with empty bottles of wine or other more dangerous substances (Bulgarian mastika, for instance, which leaves him spreadeagled on the cobblestones) and subsequent hangovers which are scattered like shrapnel through his mornings, but no remorse: every hangover is simply the fair price for an astoundingly good time. Ireland, we realise, is an all-or-nothing kind of guy who has lived life to the brimful. It makes for a good story.

The first volume of his memoir left off as he was about to head overseas for the first time, to Australia to marry a nurse he'd had a brief affair with. That didn't eventuate, and so he kept going, buying a cheap ticket to London aboard an about-to-be-scrapped ship.

He arrived without his address book, but managed with great ingenuity to track down the one person he knew there, who turned out to be excellently well placed to find him both a place to stay (in "a stunning little atelier in the middle of Soho") and a job.

Tinny, you might say: it was a job in an avant-garde art gallery, just on the fringes of Carnaby St on the eve of the swinging 60s, working for a madly social crossdresser who ate the most fashionable food and drank the best wine.

This is absolutely typical of Ireland, who always manages to find himself right alongside some of the most momentous events of last century. "I may have caught a whiff," as he puts it, "of the odours and a flicker of the shadows of the times through which the whole world drifted."

After Carnaby St came Eastern Europe at the height of the Cold War; Vienna, where he quite by accident witnessed Kennedy and Khrushchev take their historic, unscheduled stroll through a park; Fleet St at The Times as it entered the final phase of its crumbling before Murdoch sacked everyone and moved the newspaper to Wapping. (Ireland, naturally, escapes with a respectable cheque in his fist after nearly 20 years of "hilarious occasions, fine friendships and a lot of never-to-be-repeated molly-coddling".)

The story shifts, as the title suggests, back and forth in time, not worrying too much about strict chronology yet on a loosely defined path that eventually brings us to the present - a journey of more than 40 years.

That's a lot of living, especially where Ireland is concerned: he travels to Bulgaria with a friend, just for a visit, but ends up falling in love and marrying the enigmatic Donna. (I say enigmatic not because she necessarily was, but because Ireland is steadfastly reluctant to tell us much more about her than that she looked like Ingrid Bergman. He clearly relegated her to the backblocks of his mind after they separated 10 years later, would probably rather not have to remember her at all, and in fact the book opens with a hilarious but telling episode where he fails to recognise her when they meet at a funeral.)

He lives and works in Sofia for several months before bringing his new wife back to London, where over the years they host so many visiting Bulgarians he considers hanging a sign outside their door saying, "First stop after the Iron Curtain". He oddjobs and then finds work at the Times, the perfect sinecure for a man whose true occupation is as a poet, and who simply needs to earn enough money to live.

He leaves his first wife and immediately moves in with the woman who is to become his second wife, Caroline, hardly less enigmatic than the first, although far more fondly remembered.

He enjoys their new, more organised domestic arrangement and adopts her two sons. After leaving the Times he works as a plasterer before moving to Ireland, accidentally buying (after too many Guinnesses) an old bakery and then doing it up into the most beautiful home he has ever owned.

But the magnetic pull of New Zealand is too hard to bear, and so, at book's end, he comes home to the North Shore, completing what he describes as "a kind of roughly circular symmetry" and discovering that, after a lifetime's wandering, in some crucial ways he has not actually travelled very far.

The real narrative drive, though, is not the chronology but the larger-than-life characters met along the way, who like "the fool and bandit" Captain Ted Falcon-Barker (who was arrested smuggling drugs, although he may, as he claimed, have been working for MI5 or MI6) existed "to introduce disorder into all our lives just when we needed yet again to be rescued from being sucked down into the quicksands of conformity".

Which seems as nice a way of describing Ireland's own energetic application to sociability as any. "I was an oddball, I'd been liked for being one," as he says.

Ireland muses in his opening Author's Note on the subjectivity of our sense of history, and on the act of memory itself - this book, he says, reflects the erratic shape of remembrance, which is why it meanders, rather than being a series of steps towards an outcome.

This seems a lovely approach, worthy of a fine poet, and perfectly fair enough and of course, in a memoir one can do what one wants. It's the liberating nature of the genre. However, a lot of that skipping around is, frustratingly, right over the top of certain events or emotional episodes that would allow us a fuller sense of his life.

We learn little about his wives and occasional other relationships (at one point he surprises with an effusive memory of a certain Shirli; he then embarks on an introduction of Caroline, although when it comes down to it we learn far more about the faulty plumbing in their new home than we do about the woman herself), and are unsure in the end whether he came back to New Zealand alone or with Caroline. (He has that old-fashioned male habit of using "I" when he, perhaps, means "we".) Although, having said that, when asked for a photo of those days to accompany this review, he sent over one of his family.

Does it matter? It's true we've become overly accustomed to the stripping bare of public figures, and Ireland says he's not interested in writing a kiss-and-tell account of his life, but there's a kind of obliqueness, an apparent and surprisingly gauche evasiveness that he employs whenever he simply can't avoid mention of his personal life, that unsettles and unsatisfies.

But, that quibble aside, you can't help but be charmed by the hail-fellow-well-met attitude with which he has made his way through life, counting everyone from his local publican to leading British painter Francis Bacon among his buddies. It's an oddball spyglass on days we have now spun past, recounted with great good humour by a natural -born storyteller.

Vintage

$29.95