An exuberant Angela's Ashes meets When Did You Last See Your Father?; an intoxicating memoir of Ireland and being Irish (and Anglo-Irish as well) from one of literature's most flamboyant characters.John Walsh is one of literature's party animals and ever-present commentators, and he writes with terrific wit and panache. The Falling Angels is a book about being Irish and about the way the Irish see the English and vice versa; and how it feels to fall in between. It opens with the death of Walsh's mother, 'the Widow of Oranmore', as he learns the Irish Way of Death: 'the rosaries and mass cards and lilies and amaryllises, the curious mixture of innocence and guile with which distant in-laws from Kerry and Dublin would coo and sigh and claim close friendship and act at being saints, the increasingly direct conversations that the neighbours (and I) had with Mother about death and what she could expect in Heaven. Above all, there was my mother's own struggle with her growing doubts about Go