The celebrated actor brings his youth in Dublin to vivid life in a tender account of how failing as a priest and a plumber led him to Hollywood
“How many times have I returned in my dreams to this hill?” asks Gabriel Byrne in the opening sentence of Walking With Ghosts, immediately setting alarm bells ringing in my head. For the following few pages, it did indeed seem that I had entered all-too-familiar territory, what the historian Roy Foster called “the Vaseline on the lens” genre of Irish memoir.
The initial signs were not good: “gold and green fields… a dark-haired girl… an old farmer woman sat on a one-legged stool”. As someone who read an extract from Frank McCourt’s acclaimed Angela’s Ashes thinking it was a parody of an Irish misery memoir in the vein of Flann O’Brien’s satire The Poor Mouth, I found myself wondering if this might be a celebrity version of the same. I am relieved to say it is not.