Word: finnbar
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Plied with Whisky. The Hard Life's crazy old man is Mr. Collopy, a sixtyish sack of Biblical malapropisms whose ruling passion is a campaign to get the Dublin City Corporation to install public rest rooms for women. The book's narrator-a boy named Finnbar- and his older brother Manus come to live with the old man as orphans aged five and ten. In nightly colloquy at Collopy's, the boys listen as a forbearing Jesuit priest, Father Fahrt, is plied with Kilbeggan whisky and tried by his host's assaults on the Society...
...What in the end spoils the fun is that O'Brien does not keep the goings on entirely in the cartoon world of outrageous literary parody and exaggeration where death, as Brendan Behan puts it, has lost its "sting-aling-aling." Grimy realism crops up occasionally. In Finnbar, fleeting touches of gentleness and humane disgust at the proceedings undercut the parody and encourage the reader to take him seriously as a man rather than a manikin. Even at that, O'Brien has made a point: burlesqued or not, life in Dublin is no bed of Four Roses...
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