Walking with Ghosts: Gabriel Byrne delivers profound reflection on mortality and memories

Sensitive memoir: Gabriel Byrne

Mia Colleran

November 14 2020 02:30 AM

I had not seen a single one of the 80-plus movies that Gabriel Byrne has starred in when we met in a café in Manhattan in January of this turbulent year. Nor had I seen him in The Riordans, Bracken or in the TV show that won him his 2009 Golden Globe, In Treatment.

I had only been in New York a week at the time and the meeting was arranged in a flurry; nevertheless, I remember walking to see him, anxious about my lack of silver screen knowledge. Luckily for me, he is also a bookworm and we spent almost the entirety of our two-and-a-half-hour-long conversation speaking about books — good books, great books, Irish writers past and Irish writers present, prevalent themes in contemporary Irish novels and books we thought could have been a smidge better — so it should come as little surprise that Walking With Ghosts is both filmic and literary in style, an accurate and eloquent account of the author’s two passions.

Mortality is clearly weighing heavily on the actor’s mind in this honest and humble second book. His first memoir, Pictures In My Head,was published in 1994. Though some of the same anecdotes crop up in Walking With Ghosts, their telling has been reworked and the 26-year gap between the two has sharpened Byrne’s perception and articulation. There is a general sense that he is arranging, probing and nostalgically gazing at past memories, deriving meaning and learning to accept his own mortality.

Yet there is surprisingly little about his 40-year acting career thus far. Instead, he documents his youth openly, all the while emphasising the cast of characters (most of them now deceased) who shaped him in some way, large or small: Paganini the plumber, Mrs Gordon and his childhood friend Jimmy Mulligan, to name a few. They and many others are conjured up and remembered with a melancholy that sticks to the reader. Every page is haunted by time and its passing. A refrain is evident throughout the book: “This is where Ned lived”, “This is the street where Jimmy Mulligan used to live”.

Perhaps Byrne’s is a talent borne of decades spent listening, watching, contemplating and emulating “the theatre of the street”, as he refers to it, coupled with an impressive ability to recall phrases years and years after they were spoken. The result is a memoir that pulses with nostalgia and an honesty palpable from the opening pages: “Here I stand now, a man longing to see as a child again, when every smell and sound and sight was a marvel.” He writes about his life at the seminary near Birmingham at age 11 and the power the Brothers abused, his sense of failure a few years later, “a failed plumber and priest”, throwing up, drunk, while serving Mass, his father’s unexpected redundancy and his circular relationship with alcohol for years and years before becoming sober.

Irish readers won’t take as much note, but the memoir is tuned to a Hiberno-English ear; his use of dialogue is playful and pulsing, carrying the stories along and allowing the reader to become acquainted with the characters instead of reading flat accounts of things passed and said. He has a sparse, sometimes wry tone that lends itself to the filmic qualities of the memoir; memories mostly fade in and out as vignettes with minimal authorial input. It is often easy to forget that this is the man who starred in the film The Usual Suspects, which received a 10-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival in 1995. The unobtrusive addition of some advice he received from his hero, Laurence Olivier, or that time John Boorman offered him a leading role in Excalibur are comical when compared with his earlier stories of his nativity-play acting debut and flying to Venice with a plastic bag because he had pawned his suitcase.

Some celebrity memoirs have a penchant to exclude the reader, “here is my dazzling career” they seem to say, but Walking With Ghosts is nothing of the sort. Its tone is “here is my life, make of it what you will”. Byrne arrives at a truth greater than an honest and sensitive memoir; he verges on a profoundly touching articulation of our short time on earth, time that will make of each of us nothing more or less than a ghost.