Going Home Again: Songdogs by Colum McCann

Loved Let the Great World Spin so much, looked for another Colum McCann to read and selected his first novel, Songdogs. It is told by Conor, a half-Irish, half-Mexican man, who returns to the home of his aged father on the west coast of Ireland after years of looking for his missing mother in Mexico and the American southwest. Although a shorter and much simpler story than LTGWS, Songdogs introduces themes and techniques that I am assuming remain in McCann repertoire: characters in many different settings and these locations determining not only the patterns of their daily lives but also their ethos.

Although Conor never finds out what happened to his mother and although his at death's door da never dies, Conor can better define himself as an adult by reassessing his parents' loves, longings and disagreements. He is restless like his mother and drawn to warm, windy, open spaces; he is calmly philosophical like his father, pacing myself with a daily routine and rhythm that feels like the weather rushing on to the island from the Atlantic.

Many readers, here I'm thinking of the gosh awful recent trend to add book club discussion questions at the end of a novel, might over-focus on whether the story's theme is on the societal and family effect of pornography. Trying not to divulge too much of the plot, Conor's father wants to be a professional photographer and he takes many art pictures of his mother dishabille. These pictures are kept stored away but once in Mexico when the townsmen break into his dark room and discover them, the family is driven out of the country. Again later in life when Conor's dad meets a slick businessman who convinces him to publish them in a collection in Europe, although banned in Ireland, they make there way across the waters, and once again led to the destruction of the photography lab and family itself.

Both Songdogs and LTGWS leave me with McCann's sense of forgiveness and understanding of human foibles, temptations, and maturity. There is not a phrase of accusation in either book. It is the underlying faith of the Irish people, not there Catholic clergy, that becomes the moral yardstick. And then, once again, is McCann's lyric language.

I did a Wiki search this morning to learn more about him beyond his many laureled awards. He graduated from UT and currently teaches in the Masters creative writing program at CUNY. Would that he venture north to our Writers' Institute!