Eden Halt

'We read, as if memory is being assembled in front of us. It is that precision, the beautifully executed detail, makes Eden Halt a deeply moving memoir.' RODDY DOYLE. Shaken by the end of his marriage and the pressures of his profession as lecturer in Trinity College Dublin, Ross Skelton embarks on the retrieval of his strange childhood, scribbled on the margins of an Irish seashore. He describes growing up there in the company of his taciturn grandfather, a UVF veteran and caretaker of the local big house. His father, an aspiring writer with connections to Louis MacNeice and the artist Raymond Piper, is given to sudden absences, tramping the roads and sleeping rough, as the family tumbles from comfort to extreme poverty, fishing and beachcombing in a tiny community of wooden bungalows on the wild Antrim coast, a land that God forgot'. In primitive surroundings, post-war and pre- electric, Ross absorbs local Orange Order lore, contrasting with his father's liberalism and increasing mysticism and his mother's avid reading. A boyhood is sensitively evoked in this memoir: the ceaseless quest for driftwood by a sea with its restless and violent moods, escape to the hills on a home-made bicycle, raising racing pigeons in a make-shift loft, later brutally dismantled. A spell as a mechanic in the RAF finally signals the end of adolescence. In his reconstruction of a time and place long vanished, its sounds, echoes and smells, Ross Skelton pieces together the crystalline fragments that constitute a life, and gave rise to his career as both psychoanalyst and writer. The poignant clarity of this vivid word-portrait reveals a quest for self and a topography of mind that mark out Eden Halt as a modern classic, recalling as it does a world dismembered, remembered and restored.