What Real Hard Work Means: Excerpts from Linnane in London

Abstract

Linnane in London is a slightly novelized documentary book studded throughout with the author's own poems. This 120-page hybrid deals with the lives and labors of Irish construction workers in London in the 1970s. To write it, the author, Kieran Furey, worked for four months alongside the men concerned, concealing his own academic background. This is, in other words, a “deep immersion” project, somewhat in the spirit of Barbara Ehrenreich, journalist and book author. The result is sometimes poignant, always interesting, and never less than comic, with the joke—as often as not—being at the author's own expense as he discovers what real hard work means.