Book Review: "A Pint of Plain" by Bill Barich

"A Pint of Plain" is Bill Barich's journey through an Ireland increasingly plagued by the steely gray skies of change, homogenization, and a helpless sense of loss. At the end of of the book, as he sits in the warm, boisterous Gogarty's amongst the artists and the students of Trinity College, Dublin, he still gives the impression of looking out a mental window at a fading, mist-shrouded portrait of "the figures in Martin Gale's paintings, often portrayed in a field, (who) look confused and unsure of themselves, as if a purpose they'd once grasped firmly had slipped through their fingers."

Barich's tale of his quest to find the archetypal pub of what he identifies as "Fairytale Ireland" rapidly becomes the story of a man clinging to the dreams of a place made famous by its own writers and poets. He searches Dublin and the countryside for a place with no television or recorded music, where comfort and conversation rule over a simple, naturally evolved gathering space. Disappointment, inevitably, greets both Barich and his readers at every new location, until we are dragging our feet along with him through the conclusion of his hopeless quest. Not only does Barich never find his archetypal Irish Pub, but he never finds a space that he is satisfied in for its own merit. He comes off as a man who would be more pleased in a museum exhibit than in the reality of a world that will always be changing.

Some points that Barich brings up are legitimate, especially when he contrasts the growing global popularity of the Irish Pub Concept, an invention of Diageo-Guinness USA that aims to "facilitate the development of authentic, high quality Irish pubs outside of Ireland" to the rapid decline and evolution of traditional pubs within Ireland. His chapters on the history of drink in Ireland and the phenomenon of craic, the legendary and wandering Irish "good times", are fascinating and well done. They help to sustain the reader, as they seem to have sustained Barich himself, through the dreary marches from broken-down farm pub to mirrored Dublin trophy pub, and back and forth. Despite his musings and wanderings, however, Barich never seems to address the important point that the depth he seeks in a local can only be found after time and familiarity are invested. Craic is fickle, and so is he.

The seemingly aimless modernization of Ireland is a dangerous thing to be sure, especially in a country that has been so immortalized in the minds of the rest of the world. As American flock to the IPC Irish Pubs, seeking that sense of deep, serene familiarity, that anchor of history, legend, and literature that every Irish-American cherishes, the Irish are throwing off the shackles of a long history of pain and struggle and reaching for something else. It is sad that many in Ireland will only realize what they have lost when it is already gone, but for many of them, the option to live a convenient and cosmopolitan life supersedes a devotion to history. History can only be preserved once it has become history, and Barich's search for an authentic pub in a changing Ireland seems to have become a fools errand. It is likely that he will not find his dream until all possibility of authenticity has disappeared, and only then will the historians and the dreamers be able to satiate his thirst for a great fantasy.