Before the wax hardened (Revised edition.)

On his first trip abroad, Adrian Kenny observes that the signs are in one language only.

There is no need for translation: there is nothing behind.

Not so in his suburban childhood and adolescence, where Mayo is behind Dublin, poor fields behind bourgeois drawing rooms, wildness behind authority.

Attached to both, his attempts to reconcile them take him from close certainty to total collapse in the year of change - America 1968.