Dancehall Days brings the narrator to his father’s house in Monkstown, Dublin, to dream of a college education and of twisting the night away. Instead, he experiences the vicissitudes of a beloved but disunited family, digs and bedsitterdom, getting by as a messenger-boy, trainee electrician and aspiring writer, until the strainings of an innocent sexuality in the capital’s dancehalls, the distant music of an unfamiliar individuality and a ‘tumbling through to exits’ culminate in migration to England. The dynamics of Dublin in the early Sixties pulse across this narrative, evoking cosmopolitanism in street styles and cultural happenstance, in music, dance and cinema, as city and chronicler come of age. The precise creation of atmosphere, the palpable connection of experience with memory and insight, the discovery of self through portals of books read and people encountered, make this emerging portrait one of the finest Irish autobiographies of its time. Dancehall Days fulfills the promise of The Village of Longing, a work hailed by the author’s peers and awarded the supreme accolade of the Silver Medal for Irish Literature in 1988. Both volumes are being co-published with Viking Penguin in 1989. Out of Our Minds, the final panel of the triptych, will take the story to London, Oxford and Paris during late Sixties, so completing the voyage to maturity.
