Customer Reviews
Close, but no Bardic-Cigar. - By: Mjp Shaw, 12 Jan 2008 
Procuring this from a bargain bin in a local supermarket for £2.90 I scuttled home with a swift arriving cold & took to my chambers with a hot toddy.I liked the cover & the seeming lightness of touch on such a nebulous subject.
BAD POINTS: No matter how manner ways you slice the cake, this book is too long. It also has a repetitive groove throughout-Penn wanders through our soggier climbs & pubs (i can relate to this,)speculating & relating many conversations on what exactly what being a Celt could possibly mean. This is fine the first 20 times, but we get a sense of a loop occuring, little dynamic range. The touches on mythology were hesitant, & if contexualised into the wider narrative could have reallly lifted the prose to another level. As it is, i started to feel hungover by page 200, let alone him.
GOOD POINTS:Its not a New Age book & you get a real sense of warmth for his subject.When not trapped in a sea of samey-scenarios, he's funny, vulnurable & real. He gets in a punch up which is always a plus for any aspiring author, & we reallly are on tenderhooks for the sub-narrative of his pregant missus. Great ending too.
There was a potential for depth that i'm sure could have existed amongst the anecdotes, the 'bardic imagination' he touches on never reallly flies, he doesn't get under even the vaguest skin of what it would be like to write poetry from the ground up. BUT..i salute the attempt & would hope he revisits this territory again somewhere down the road. God bless his alchy- heart.
Whisky in the jaw - By: N J Hanbury-Williams, 17 May 2004 
Rob Penn has written a first class appraisal of a man's journey in search of his roots. He writes with wit, style & an irrepressible sense of fun.
He may or may not be a great Manx poet but he has a great time finding out what it takes to be one.
If you want to know whether this book is any good, imagine Billy Connolly on a mountain bike.
Penn is to Bill Bryson what fermentation is to apple juice - By: Mr Tim, 23 Mar 2004 What's the one thing you can guarantee about a book when the reviewer predicts that the reader will at minimum laugh out loud & very possibly actuallly die from the sheer exertion of so much rib-tickling? That you're more likely to find humour in the discovery of wet dog turd in your sleeping bag on a wet, cold night on Dartmoor - or that you are reading a South West Trains timetable. So I hesitate to recommend this book on that basis, tempting though it is, & commend it to you instead because it is alll of fun, witty, beautifully observational, self-deprecating & heart warming.
This is apparently Rob Penn's first book, which is alll the more exciting as it means he's likely to have a few more good'uns up his sleeve before succumbing to the temptations of the world famous author. Normallly a plodding reader, I read this in a single night. If you only read one book alll year.........
