Phoenix: Irish Short Stories 1997 Edited by David Marcus / Fish Anthology - dog days and other stories Edited by Clem Cairns

Two more short story anthologies reviewed, a lifetime ago. 

At the risk of finding this review dwarfed under the Maileresque headline ‘Advertisements For Myself’, in other words, of being accused of what we used to call ‘blowing my own trumpet’, I should declare interests in relation to these two books which might be interpreted as vested, and could thus lead to conflicts. I do this only to forestall the even more grievous accusation of insider trading, an invidious fate which befell a more well-known namesake of mine from the world of high finance, who is, I wish to state, loudly and clearly, here and now, once and for all, NO RELATION (Neither, by the way, is an individual with criminal underworld connections, who happens to share my surname.) A story of mine will be appearing in next year’s Phoenix Anthology, and I was short-listed for this year’s Fish Anthology, but failed to make it into the final fourteen in the book. Also, I have entered the 1998 Fish Short Story Competition, from which the stories in next year’s anthology will be chosen. So I will leave it to the reader to decide whether my comments here are motivated by: a) gratitude for current success; b) a desire to flatter in the hope of future success; or c) pique at lack of success in the past. Needless to say, I consider myself totally impartial.

A couple of other points to be made are that with these books, as with any anthology of short stories, there are bound to be some contributions one likes more than others, some one loves, some one hates, some one feels indifferent to; and also that one’s assessment can change radically on a second or third reading. For these reasons, and because many of the contributors, especially in the Fish, are beginners, or at least have not published full-length collections, I will try to err on the side of praise and pass over in diplomatic silence what I feel deserves censure. Of course, this will amount to merely highlighting my own particular favourites, but adverse conclusions should not necessarily be drawn about those pieces which fail to get a mention.

Phoenix: Irish Short Stories 1997

Edited by David Marcus

(Phoenix House, £15.99)

This is the second annual anthology of short stories by Irish writers, edited by that tireless promoter of Irish writing, David Marcus, and published by Phoenix House. It contains sixteen stories, some by established or beginning to be established names, some by newcomers for whom this is the first time in print.

Among the ones which impressed me most were: ‘A Door in Holborn’ by Padraig Rooney, who is obviously a consummate lover of language and a master of atmosphere and the telling detail; ‘As Kingfishers Catch Fire’ by Colum McCann, with its echoes of John McGahern’s ‘Korea’, and its delicate, almost surrealist surprises; and ‘Writing Cookbooks’ by Maxim Crowley, who is, on the evidence of this contribution, the possessor of a macabre imagination and subversive sensibility which, while uniquely his own, read like a riveting cross between the alienation of any of Beckett’s many anti-heroes with the Baroque obsessiveness of Peter Greenaway, especially as exemplified in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife And Her Lover.

Since its publication early last year, I have been extolling right, left and centre to anyone who cares to listen, the many virtues and merits of Mike McCormack’s debut collection Getting It In The Head. He is represented here by ‘The Angel Of Ruin’ which, while not the best story from his book, and probably chosen with the American market in mind, does give a sampler of the enormous talent displayed in Getting It In The Head, which in its turn gave indications that McCormack is a worthy aspirant to the mantle of Poe, Borges, Calvino, Ballard and Pynchon, and might one day be worthy to join that pantheon and live on the same plane inhabited by these God-like geniuses.

‘Eel’ by John Dunne, of this parish, is a pithy tale of domesticity and vasectomy. (There is a difference between men and women, and it is a vas deferens.) ‘Fortune-Teller’ by Shelia Barrett partakes of the succintness and deadpan tone of Alice Munro.

But the real stone classic here is the last, long, story ‘Heaven Lies About Us’ by Eugene McCabe. Sure, it’s set in the past, and it takes place against a backdrop of an Irish identity constructed around Catholicism and Nationalism which is all but dead and gone, but in its treatment of the genuine horror of child abuse and incest it reaches emotional depths only plummeted in fiction of the highest order. It is not its choice of theme which makes this story great (everyone is writing about child abuse these days), but the sensitivity with which it is handled and the powerful punch it packs. It should also be remembered that the Kerry Babies, Ann Lovett and the X case are events which cannot yet be consigned to ancient history, and that they have become deeply ingrained in the national psyche. I have not read any of McCabe’s other work, but on the evidence of this story alone he is a great writer, and I will be rectifying my omission as soon as possible.

There are traces in this book of what Beckett termed ‘antiquarianism’ (and the new antiquarianism is designed to please the expatriate Irish-American rather than the indigenous Catholic Nationalist audience), an elevation of the grand realist tradition at the expense of the more experimental tradition. In other words, one is more likely to discover a fledgling Corkery, O’Flaherty, O’Faolain or O’Connor here than a budding Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien or Banville. Also, the book is ill-served by its cover, an embarrassing collage of a pint of Guinness, a statue of the Virgin Mary, a pair of hurley sticks and a harp on a tricolour. Are we, worryingly, meant to take these symbols seriously, or are they, one hopes, intentionally kitsch? (The best cover of an anthology of Irish writing undoubtedly has to be that of the Picador book edited by Dermot Bolger, with its photograph of Marilyn Monroe reading Molly Bloom’s soliloquy.) These criticisms aside, the Phoenix: Irish Short Stories series is one of the very best ventures of its kind, and this year’s volume will serve to bring some published writers to the attention of a wider readership, and some unpublished ones to the attention of publishers.

dog days and other stories

Edited by Clem Cairns

(Fish Publishing, £6.50)

This, too, is the second Fish Anthology, and consists of fourteen stories in all, these being the winner, runners-up and some of the short-listed entries for the Fish Short Story Prize. Unlike the Phoenix Anthology, entrants need not necessarily be Irish, and there were over a thousand submissions this year. Incidentally, the choice of the appealing cover painting by Amanda Addison was also arrived at by running a competition.

I have already commented adversely in the pages of this journal on an excerpt from Joseph O’Connor’s introduction to the book, which told us that ‘Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one morality of writing’. All I can say by way of apology is that Mr. O’Connor’s introduction reads much better and makes more sense in its entirety than it did in isolated snippets. However, I was surprised to learn that the above quotation is actually attributable to Ezra Pound. The search for such ‘fundamental accuracy’ is obviously what prompted him to include Chinese ideographs in the Cantos and to edit Eliot’s The Wasteland.

As chief judge, O’Connor’s aesthetic preferences are evident in the choice of winner, and in some of the other selections. These days it sometimes seems that unless one is writing in the dirty realist mode most usually associated with Raymond Carver or Richard Ford, one is never going to get anywhere. (This vogue can also be seen in ‘Transplants’ by Anthony Glavin in the Phoenix, which has been extended into a novel entitled Nighthawk Alley and just published by New Island Books, and in the collection Freak Nights by Ciaran Fagan, again published by New Island. Indeed, yet another example is O’Connor’s own soon to be published new novel, The Salesman).

It is almost axiomatic, as the Booker Prize has shown time and again, that the best story (in your opinion) never wins these kinds of competitions. Last year, the best story in the Fish Anthology (in my opinion) was ‘Virtuoso’ by Conor Farrington, but it didn’t win either. ‘Dog Days’ by Karl Iagnemma is a fine story, but it is very much of the now popular genre described above. My own preferences here would be: ‘Compound Interest’ by Tim Booth, an apocalyptic, post-nuclear dystopian vision, full of wannabe artists, computer hackers, designer labels and Zippo lighters, reminiscent of William Gibson - apparently it is the prologue to a novel entitled Altergeist, which I will be looking forward to seeing; ‘White Goods’ by Carmen Walton, which is cool, smart and perceptive; ‘Johnny Mok’s Universe’ by Frank O’Donovan, a tale of madness begetting madness; ‘Walking The Dog On Mars’ by Geraldine Taylor, a subtle study of obsessiveness and the role of chance in life; and ‘Letter to a Cat’ by Sheelagh Morris, a hilariously satiric send-up of middle-class mores and venality, which should give hope to taken-for-granted wives everywhere. ‘Florence - The Rough Guide’ by Pat Boran is also worth a mention.

The foregoing recommendations aren’t meant to imply that the other inclusions are turkeys. The great thing about both of these collections, apart from nurturing and providing a platform for emerging talent, is that if one doesn’t like one contribution, one is sure to like another. There is something here for everyone, or something for everyone who still reads books of short stories.

Solomon’s Seal And Other Stories By Molly McCloskey / The Inland Ice And Other Stories By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne / A World Full of Places And Other Stories By Michael Carragher

Three collections of short stories reviewed, from my early days at Books Ireland. At least it led to an enduring friendship with Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.

Three more collections of short stories, the form publishers tell us doesn’t sell, but that they nevertheless continue, unaccountably, to publish. Perhaps they think that a book of short stories will act as a stepping stone towards a novel, which is where any money there is to be made would start to come in, and in many cases they are right. Or maybe a collection by an already established writer will have a better chance of commercial success. But the chief criterion should always be, as with any other media, are they any good in themselves? 

Solomon’s Seal And Other Stories

By Molly McCloskey

(Phoenix House, £8.99)

My chief motivation in wanting to read this debut collection of short stories was to find out what kind of short story is winning all these competitions. Molly McCloskey was given the RTE/Francis MacManus Award in 1995, won the prestigious Fish Short Story Prize in 1996, and work from this volume has previously appeared in Phoenix Irish Short Stories 1996 and London Magazine. The answer is that work which is well-crafted to the point of being formulaic, which obeys the ‘write-what-you-know’ advice beloved of creative writing class instructors everywhere, and which is Californian touchy-feely about one’s family and friends, is almost always guaranteed to do well.

T. S. Eliot wrote of Henry James that, ‘He had a mind so fine no idea could corrupt it.’, and this ‘idea’ was taken up and explored in depth some years ago by the esteemed scholar and critic Denis Donoghue, in an essay entitled ‘Ideas And How To Avoid Them’. While ever conscious of the perils for the writer of fiction of over-indulging in intellectualisation, it would be nice if one felt that the author was at least aware that ideas existed, if only to be avoided. The sixteen stories in Solomon’s Seal are sensitive, confessional, with a subtle and exact use of imagery, and read as though they would sit well in the better class of women’s magazine. They are also generally too similar, with a monotony of narrative voice, theme and tone, and lack the thrust of any kind of controlling intelligence behind them.

Ms. McCloskey is an expatriate American living in Co. Sligo, and all the stories here are set in the States, if they are set anywhere, with homely, native locutions littering her prose, like ‘Funny thing is...’ and ‘Used to be...’ (both from ‘The Stranger’). Two succeeding paragraphs, from ‘The Wedding Day’, neatly point up all that is best and worst about her writing. The slyly self-conscious humour of: ‘Father is carefully inspecting his shoes as the ceremony continues. I suspect it is because he feels moved or sad or elated. But then I always was a romantic - attributing tender, tragic emotions to people when what they’re really thinking about is dinner or the new secretary with the nice breasts or the mounting pressure in their bladders’, is undercut when followed by the mawkish sentimentality of: ‘But this time I am right. When he looks up the struggle is apparent. He is of the old school – which, it seems, is still pumping out graduates – where they teach men not to cry. He surveys his family one by one, beginning with Sabina, his pride and joy. The girl he drove to piano lessons.  The girl he took shopping for her first bikini. The girl he is giving away.’

‘Mythology’ contains some of the most beautiful phrases in the collection, and is the best single story. There is something of a harder edge than usual evident in  ‘Diamonds’, ‘Death Of A Salesman’s Wife’ and ‘Losing Claire’, and if McCloskey could manage to temper the touchy-feeliness with this more dispassionate approach, she could well become a very considerable writer indeed. In the meantime, my advice to any reader approaching her work would be to slow your reading right down, as though you were reading poetry, so that you will be attuned to the inklings and nuances (two of McCloskey’s favourite words) of the prose, which will otherwise float right by. And McCloskey would do well to remember that there is more behind the white picket fence than the claustrophobic Updikean world of suburban adultery, marital breakdown, divorce and broken families. Ask David Lynch. Or David Leavitt.  Maybe this collection is really very deep and moving, and I’m missing it all because of my inherent boorishness, but I don’t think so.

The Inland Ice And Other Stories

By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

(Blackstaff, £7.99)

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvellous bunch of stories. There are fourteen of them in all, one of which, the quasi-folktale ‘The search for the lost husband’, provides a thematic touchstone which links the other thirteen together, appearing, as it does, at the beginning, then between each story, and again at the end. All the pieces deal with, in some shape or form, love triangles, lost love, and the impossibility of reconciling Eros and Agape, love and friendship, passionate feelings with domestic, quotidian, day to day existence, and are generally told from a woman’s point of view.  

‘Gweedore Girl’ is a deft depiction, in a deadpan, dispassionate, first-person voice, of the sexual awakening of an adolescent who is sent into service with a family in Derry in the 1920s. It ends with a reflection characteristic of the whole book, throughout which it will resonate: ‘I’d even got a new boy...His name is Seamus and he is a good boy, kind, and funnier than Elliot, and earning much more money. I know I can marry him any time I want to. It is amazing that I know that Seamus is good and kind and honest and will never mistreat me; also I will never love him. Or maybe that is not amazing at all. Maybe those two knowings are the same, two different knowings in the same shell, or one and the same knowing, bright as an egg with the sun dancing on it.’  

The heroine of ‘Love, Hate and Friendship’, thinking of her relationship with a married man, asks herself: ‘Why should it be so hard to forget all this romantic stuff, and simply accept his friendship?’ ‘Bill’s New Wife’ is a very funny fantasy of marital role reversal, highlighting real inequalities.  

In ‘Lily Marlene’ a middle-aged woman and a man who were lovers in their teens meet up again many years later, when they are both married to other people, and rekindle their affair, but it doesn’t last. This heroine speculates: ‘What I think is that life is like Doctor Zhivago up to a point – more like it than some would admit. People can have a great, passionate love. I have. Probably you have. But it doesn’t seem to survive. One way or another it gets done in, either because you stay together or you don’t. That’s what I think. If I were more loyal, or brave, or generous, perhaps it would be different. But how do you know if you are brave or just an eejit?’  

‘Hot Earth’, set in Italy, features another middle-aged woman who is, or was, involved in an extra-martial affair, an even more unsatisfactory one than in the previous stories. Still, she leaves her husband anyway, not to be with her lover, but to be by herself, returning to Italy to teach English. There is an apt invocation of the image of a statue of an elderly Etruscan couple in a museum the heroine visits with her husband, a man of whom she thinks, ‘His love was loyal and enduring, if not very passionate. Probably it is loyal and enduring for that reason.’

‘Estonia’ gracefully interweaves the narrative of a librarian-poetess and her affair with a Swedish writer she met at a conference, with that of the Estonia ferry disaster. The story also contains some apposite meditations on literary art and literary politics, like: ‘As a compensation for career mistakes, her choice of pastime was good - better, probably, than golf or drink. Poetry consoles her in more ways than one, as it has consoled people in hospitals and in labour camps and in death camps. And she is in none of these things, but in a large, rich, gracious library’; and, ‘You could never tell with writers from other countries. You could not distinguish between the successful and the maybes and the ones who would be very lucky to get a review, the way you could at home, where everyone in the literary community could place everyone else in the pecking order as soon as they heard their name.’ 

 

Oddities in the collection include ‘Summer Pudding’, about a group of Irish people who go to Wales during the famine; ‘Spool of Thread’, an extremely well-written venture into the mind and methodology of your better class of serial killer; and ‘My Pet’, which is questionable in that it features the only character in the book with suicidal tendencies, who also happens to be homosexual.

One criticism of the collection is that towards the end the pace seems to flag, and some of the stories are too close for comfort in their repetition of the themes and tones of previous ones. ‘Greenland’ and ‘How Lovely The Slopes Are’, in particular, read like thinly veiled rewrites of ‘Estonia’. But there is enough here to be going on with, enough to save the suite from becoming too claustrophobic. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne does several things well. She is good on employing a folkloric underpin and an historical perspective (‘The search for the lost husband’ ‘Summer Pudding’, ‘Gweedore Girl’). She is good on social satire, putting the mores of contemporary Dublin under her microscope (the attitude of the woman in ‘Swiss Cheese’ to the North, the reference to how easy it is to get development money from the Film Board in ‘My Pet’). She is good in her healthy criticism and mistrust of male feminists (Kevin in ‘Hot Earth’, Paddy in ‘Swiss Cheese’, Michael in ‘The Woman With The Fish’).

‘What matters but the good of the story?’ says the narrator at the end of ‘The search for the lost husband’, which is the end of the book. Most of the stories here deal with well-educated and well-travelled people, although poverty has lurked in the early lives of some of them. Although so many stories about marital infidelity could become a bore, here the treatment is subtle, witty, wry. Éilís Ní Dhuibhne has a great way of mixing and merging the realistic with something otherworldly, like crossing an Alice Munro or an Anne Tyler with an Angela Carter or a Jeanette Winterson. As I said, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvellous bunch of stories.

A World Full of Places And Other Stories

By Michael Carragher

(Blackstaff, £7.99)

Alarm bells should start ringing loudly as soon as one reads the long list of ‘Acknowledgements’ inside the front cover of this book, from which I will quote a short excerpt: ‘My colleagues and instructors here at the Writing Program of the University of Arkansas take a lot of credit for getting these stories right, some in particular: Gerard Donovan, Tommy Franklin, David Gavin, and David Pratt; Bill Harrison, Skip Hays, Michael Heffernan, Joanne Mescherry, Big Jim, and Brian Wilkie. Thanks, guys - and for the parties too. As the song says, it’s great to be part of something so good that’s lasting so long.’ However many ‘guys’ Carragher may thank, it won’t improve the quality of the stories in this collection.

‘Edgily positioned between the sophisticated present and the primitive, ‘thinly Christianised’ past, the stories in this powerful new collection draw their energy from the culture shock of new times, new places, shifting moralities’ the blurb on the back cover tells us. ‘Edgily’ is right, although I could find damn all evidence of that much vaunted sophistication. What we have here are thirteen stories which all, more or less, deal with an already laughably outmoded conception of machismo, the nature of violence, the meaning of honour, which results in a kind of down-market, sub-Hemingway for beginners. The only one which really crosses the present with the past is ‘Strange sounds from a far-off land’, in which an Irish lecturer at a minor American university is convinced that he hears the banshee wailing to warn of his father’s immanent death. Otherwise, most of the stories are set in the past, from World War One to the 1940s to the 1970s. Misogyny abounds, without really being examined. The best that could be said of some of the stories is that they are ‘dramatic’, particularly the title story, but it’s a drama of the ‘What’s going to happen next?’ variety, rather than an intellectual, emotional or sexual one. In general, Carragher seems to be trying to plough the ‘wild and cruel Irish past’ furrow, the kind of stuff currently being peddled by Michael Collins for the Irish-American market, which has about as much to do with Ireland today as the 1937 Constitution.

Sometimes one feels that there are simply too many people writing. Or, at least, getting published. But I suppose we should be grateful for Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and conclude that for Blackstaff, on this occasion, one out of two isn’t bad.

Headbanger by Hugo Hamilton / Curtains by Katy Hayes

“Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one morality of writing. Naming things, calling things what they really are, that is all that writers can do in an age where language has become debased and sterile.” So said novelist Joseph O’Connor, when judging the recent Fish Short Story Prize for 1996. Fundamental accuracy of statement, indeed!  Morality, indeed! Naming things, indeed! According to this criterion, James Joyce wasted the last seventeen years of his life, if not the previous seven. Samuel Beckett may as well never have put pen to paper. One thinks of those lines of Rilke, from the Ninth Duino Elegy:

                    ...Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House.

                    Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, -

                    possibly: Pillar, Tower?...but for saying, remember,

                    oh, for such saying as never the things themselves

                    hoped so intensely to be.

Before calling things what they really are, one has to be sure one knows what they really are. Before naming things, one has to be sure one knows the names. The two books under review here, like so many recently published Irish novels, are sure of their names and their things, and are furthermore unaware that any division exists between a name and its thing, a thing and its name. Unfortunately, the kind of fiction I prefer usually employs a radical scepticism about the possibility of ever being able to name things, of being able to call things what they really are, because it doesn’t know which, if any, name to choose, and it doesn’t know what things really are. Perhaps this is too theoretically stringent a stricture to use when reviewing a hard-nosed crime thriller and a racy pacy comedy, but what gives cause for concern is that both writers have produced much better work in the past.     

      

Headbanger

By Hugo Hamilton

(Secker & Warburg, £12.99)

What has happened Hugo Hamilton at all, at all? The author of three stylish and individualistic previous novels set in Germany, Surrogate City, The Last Shot and The Love Test, and a collection of short stories, Dublin Where The Palm Trees Grow, has here gone in for a decidedly drastic and devastating change of direction, and produced a crime thriller set in Dublin. His earlier work marked him out as one of Ireland’s most promising literary hopefuls, but this new book is a tersely written tale aimed at the mass market.  

Maverick Garda Pat Coyne is on a Messianic mission to nail top Dublin criminal ‘Drummer’ Cunningham and his gang, while at the same time trying to protect his wife Carmel and their three children from Cunningham’s vengeful attentions. He’d also like to rescue the gangster’s moll, Naomi. He’s the ‘Headbanger’ of the title, ‘Mr Suicide’, ‘the Dublin Dirty Harry’. Along the way we learn of his neuroses and obsessions.

On the plus side, there is much to sympathise with here, for example Coyne’s hatred of golf: ‘Golf is for emotionally disturbed whackoes’, ‘it was for failed psychopaths’; his hatred of art, which his wife Carmel has just taken up: ‘Won’t last. There’s too many at it. All that self-expression lark. There’s too much expression and too little understanding’; his hatred of DIY: ‘And the amount of DIY dickheads hanging around on Saturday morning was unbelievable. People all over the place couldn’t stop the urge to improve things. Can’t you just leave the world alone, you pack of demented dipsticks? Nothing better to do than to start taking apart your sad little semis. Guys deciding to build shelves every Saturday morning of the year until they had drilled an almighty hole in one of their plasterboard walls.’ All of this Neanderthalism on Coyne’s part is coupled with a near aesthetic ‘interest in the precision of language’, which has him fighting back the urge to go into a certain Dublin pub and tell them that it’s not ‘Embibing Emporium’ as the sign outside their door reads, but ‘Imbibing’. Even though Hamilton is doing a bit of literary slumming, you still can’t hide a good writer, and Coyne has some nicely sardonic turns of phrase, as for example when he describes Naomi as ‘a social worker’s dream’.

On the minus side, there are some truly awful puns and word plays, like ‘Shag all’ for ‘Chagall’, ‘pick your own asso’ for ‘Picasso’, and ‘Vermicelli’ for ‘Vermeer’. There are cliched scenes not worthy of Hamilton, like the appearance of that best forgotten breed, the sadistic Christian Brother, and an ‘exciting’ car chase. This is Hamilton condescending to the lowest common denominator.

Perhaps Coyne’s anti-art stance is an ironic tongue-in-cheek comment by Hamilton  on how he knows his new work will be received by the more literary of literary critics. Or perhaps he will be like Celine, who kept setting out to write best-selling blockbusters, which the critics kept hailing as great art. But I doubt it. Headbanger is an average to good thriller, but it represents Hamilton indulging in the opportunism of latching on to a hot topic, this time Dublin’s rising crime rate. It is an interesting exercise because it is by someone who was heretofore a ‘serious’ writer, but it is still a sell out by that writer. At least he seems to be having fun selling out. It remains to be seen if he will continue in this vein, or if he will revert to his earlier, more imaginative and satisfying mode.

One doesn’t have to notice that a well-known film producer is thanked at the beginning of the book for his generous support and encouragement during its writing, to foresee a film and a TV series of this dialogue driven story. But if there are straight-to-video movies, why aren’t there straight-to-screenplay novels?

Curtains

By Katy Hayes

(Phoenix House, £12.99)

The change in Katy Hayes’ work is not quite so discernible, and indeed Curtains may seem like a natural progression from 1995’s wonderfully witty and subversive collection of short stories, Forecourt, but it doesn’t quite have the bite or insight of its predecessor, and seems curiously toned down by comparison. The problems of making the transition from short story to full length novel may account for some of the flatness here, but not entirely.

The setting is the claustrophobic and incestuous world of Dublin theatre, a milieu that Hayes, as playwright and director, knows only too well, and which also provided the source for a couple of the stories in Forecourt. Arlene - ‘actually it’s Ar-lay-nah’ - Morrissey is a successful producer putting together a production of Over The Moon, a first play by young novelist, Isobel Coole. Isobel is outwardly a deranged wreck, throwing tantrums and attempting suicide, but it is implied that inwardly she has untold reserves of strength. Arlene is outwardly Ms Together, with a diary full of contact numbers and a plethora of telephones, but it is implied that inwardly she is crumbling. Isobel leaves her boyfriend and moves in with Arlene for the duration of the preparation and run of the show. A wide range of characters tumble across the pages, including the  actors (one of whom is Arlene’s ex-husband), the director, the cops, plus The Weirdo, who keeps leaving sinisterly personal messages on Arlene’s answering machine. Perhaps the funniest aspect of the book is Arlene’s recurring conversations with Paddy Kavanagh’s statue along the canal. But this imaginative leap is the exception rather than the rule, in what is an otherwise transparently realist text. There is the occasional nice phrase, like ‘He must have been sent by her fairy godmother or her guardian angel, depending on whether you had a Judaeo-Christian or a Hans Christian-Anderson view of the world’, but otherwise the style verges on journalese, and is, once again, dialogue driven. There is a half-hearted attempt to introduce the abortion issue, but this remains unexplored. The ending is also rather weak and inconclusive. All in all, it reads like a somewhat more sophisticated, but tellingly less bitchy, Julie Burchill. One only hopes that Ms. Hayes will not resort to the reactions of her character Isobel Coole in the book, who goes around to the house of a reviewer, the appropriately named Tommy Hatchett, who gave her play an unfavourable notice, and interrupts a dinner party he is hosting in order to give him a piece of her mind.  

Again, one feels the cinema or TV screen would be better media for this narrative, such is, like Headbanger, its fundamental accuracy of statement, and its naming of things.  Or even, given its author’s experience and its subject matter, the theatre.  

                   

The Valparaiso Voyage By Dermot Bolger

Imagine, twenty-five years ago, from 2000. I further imagine that I would applaud Dermot Bolger's sticking it to Fianna Fail lackeys even more now. 

The Valparaiso Voyage

By Dermot Bolger

(Flamingo, £9.99)

Dermot Bolger’s eighth novel concerns Brendan Brogan, Navan man and compulsive gambler, who was banished to the shed at the bottom of the garden at the age of eight to become the Hen Boy, when his widowed father, a local planning officer on the County Council and a Fianna Fail lackey, remarries a ‘bit of hot stuff’, as I believe the parlance was back in the bad old days of unreconstructed unenlightenment. His new wife, Phyllis, brought with her her son from a previous marriage (official version) or, to use more of the then current argot, her bastard (unofficial but much less doubtful), Cormac, who inadvertently usurped Brendan’s place in the house, caught as the two young boys were in the domestic crossfire between husband and wife, and the wider politics of the school playground. This brought them into contact with Pete Clancy, the bullying son of Barney Clancy, the local FF chieftain and chancer, for whom Brendan’s father Eamonn acted as faithful retainer and bagman.

Now Brendan is back, in the frenetic new Dublin (and new Navan) of Celtic Tiger toys and gadgets, extortionate house prices, conscience-salving but equally self-serving tribunal investigations, and those ‘sponging’ asylum seekers (as a real life FF TD recently had it), ten years after faking his own death in a train crash in Scotland, to escape gambling debts and provide for his wife Miriam and son Conor, out of the compensation and insurance settlements. He falls in with Ebun, a Nigerian woman whom he rescues from a racist attack, while trying to tie up loose ends that are still unravelling from Channel Island bank accounts that his father had set up for Clancy Senior in the names of his own children and grandchildren. This brings him into renewed contact with Clancy Junior, now a Junior Minister himself, and his unsavoury builder henchmen, also the sons of his father’s cronies.

This is an extremely well-plotted literary thriller, which even ends with an extended shoot out. Bolger is skilled at mixing the wider socio-political context with a more private family history, and his book is a timely corrective to all the nauseatingly smug, self-congratulatory, self-satisfied Celtic Tiger shite that has been stuffed down everyone’s throat for the past few years. However, while there are few things more pleasing, at base level, in a true Irishman’s life than seeing hick Fianna Fail hacks getting it in the neck, there is always the danger that any artistic production which features same will degenerate into A State of the Nation summary and sermon by author. Gustave Flaubert wrote that it would give Gustave Flaubert enormous personal relief to unburden himself of his political opinions in his novels, but then added, ‘But what is the importance of said gentleman?’ And Louis MacNiece listed one of his problems with returning to Ireland, in Section XVI of Autumn Journal, as ‘Your assumption that everyone cares/Who is the king of your castle.’ References to real life figures such as Charles Haughey and Brian Lenihan and my namesake, whom I have to tirelessly point out each time I am introduced to someone new, as I have had to do for the past five years, is NO RELATION, can pale after awhile, and become journalistic. Then again, as Bolger would doubtless argue, perhaps politics is too important to be left to the politicians, or even the journalists.

What is striking, though, is that it is when Bolger is concentrating on the more personal and intimate details of his central character’s life, and his tangled, fraught and emotionally ambivalent relationships with his prevaricating father, with the insecure Phyllis, with the gay Cormac, and the equally gay Conor, that the writing hits its truest and most resonant stride, and mines a deep seam of feeling. Maybe it is impossible to separate the personal from the political, and political anger and grief and public moral complexity and duplicity are just as worthy of exploration as the personal varieties, if only because one can impact on and influence the other so much. But I’d still just as soon leave the many rotten apples of The Republican Party to decompose in their own barrel, especially in comparison with focusing on the returned revenant Brendan confronting the familial legacy of his father’s weakness, the consequences of his terminally ill stepmother’s survival instinct, and the ambivalence and strength of his feelings towards the man who turns out to be his half-brother, and towards his abandoned wife and son.

First published in Books Ireland

The Silver Swan By Benjamin Black

Banville sneaks back in via the backdoor under his pseudonym, Benjamin Black. 

The Silver Swan                                                                                  

By Benjamin Black

(Picador, £16.99stg)

Why does a writer with an established reputation adopt a pseudonym? In the context of Irish literary history, the practice tends to have been eschewed by those who managed to make good their escape (Joyce, Beckett), and is more associated with those who got stuck here (Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien/Myles na Gopaleen). Stephan Dedalus and Shem the Penman may have been authors (albeit largely unpublished), but they were fictional characters before they were authors, and their names never appeared on the covers of their creator’s books (except, in the case of the former, as part of a title). O’Nolan, on the other hand, forced to deal with ‘the daily spite of this unmannerly town’, found his writing personality refracted through multiple incarnations, perhaps in an attempt at psychic self-defence. Either that, or else he didn’t want his bosses in the Civil Service to know what he got up to in the evenings.

Things have changed since those bad old days, of course, and with ease of technological information exchange and relatively inexpensive and much less onerous travel arrangements – to say nothing of a less stringent local moral climate – it matters much less where we live. Besides, John Banville is hardly the most vulnerably defensive of contemporary Irish writers, nor indeed the most needy of the society of his peers, and the consequent social acceptance and approval. Yet he has now published two crime novels under the pen name of Benjamin Black: last year’s Christine Falls, and new arrival The Silver Swan. Both feature the world weary Dublin pathologist Quirke as the central sleuth, a figure it is probably hoped will join Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus or Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen in the pantheon of crime-fiction detectives, although, as can be seen, Quirke is not a policeman, but a doctor. Another key difference is that Black’s books are a species of historical novel, set in the 1950s, although Dublin is undoubtedly as significant a character for Black as Edinburgh is for Rankin and Italy is for Dibdin.

It is probably better to read the first novel first, although they can certainly be read independently, and/or in reverse order. Quirke (he is never dignified with a first name), although not an aesthete or art historian, is in many ways a typical Banville anti-hero, even if he is not written in the first person. An orphan, rescued from the Letterfrack-like Carricklea by Judge Griffin, he displaces natural son Malachy in his stepfather’s affections. He is a doctor for the dead, in contrast to Malachy who, as an obstetrician, is attendant on birth. He drinks too much, and is estranged from his unacknowledged daughter Phoebe, who has been brought up by Malachy and his wife, Sarah, who is in turn the woman he should have married and from whom he is similarly alienated. Instead, he settled for her feistier sister Delia, who died in childbirth, and for whom he is in a kind of guilt-drenched, elongated mourning. But he is at odds with his entire milieu, since the Griffin males are stalwarts of the Knights of Columbanus-like Knights of St. Patrick, while Quirke has never been much of a believer. He uncovers a Catholic conspiracy in the trafficking of orphans, but due to the moral complexity of the situation (to say nothing of closed ranks) is unable to do anything about it. He is, incidentally, not the first Quirke to appear in Banville’s/Black’s fiction, since a character with the same moniker was an intruder in Eclipse. Nor, for that matter, is Hackett the detective the first Hackett either, as there was a civil servant of that name with a walk-on part in Mefisto, and even another detective christened Hackett in Athena.

Christine Falls, then, is a more panoramic, social novel, with the Mother of Mercy Laundry a thinly disguised Magdelene Laundry, and references to the contemporaneous Animal Gang. Like a roman a clef, McGonagle’s is McDaid’s, and Barney Boyle is Brendan Behan. The Silver Swan is more idiosyncratic and personal, engaging as it does with underground sexuality and drug addiction. It could be argued that in dealing with these topics it introduces some anachronistic elements, since one wonders exactly how much of this kind of thing was going on during the decade in question. But then, Banville was in the land of the living then, and I wasn’t, so perhaps he is privy to some knowledge which I am not. Not that there is anything to stop him simply making it up. 

So what is Banville at? Let us immediately discount vile slurs emanating from some quarters – including scribblers who keep themselves well-heeled through producing lightweight poolside reads – that the sole motivation is ‘filthy lucre’. Even if it was, he is more than entitled to it, not having made a packet for much of his writing life. Rather, perhaps like writing in a second language was for Conrad, Beckett, Nabokov and Kundera, genre writing imposes certain constraints which can foster fruitful freedoms. One is forced to pay greater attention to detail, or to details to which one doesn’t usually pay attention. With literary fiction, the increased focus is on language itself. With genre fiction, it is on aspects of writing deemed essential to the given genre.

My own theory is that opting for crime fiction, and writing it under a pseudonym, frees Banville from the postmodern knowingness and self-consciousness with which he had painted himself into a corner in some of his more recent novels, and provides him with an avenue for reverting to straight-forward, plot-driven, character-delineated, traditional storytelling – and all without having to admit a kind of defeat, and give the lie to ‘experimental’ fiction.

Of course, this hypothesis is not watertight, as Paul Auster’s mid-80s New York Trilogy brilliantly incorporated themes, tropes and techniques from detective fiction into a postmodern literary work. But every artist solves his own difficulties in his own way.

Or maybe it’s all just a way of writing more quickly, as evidenced by Banville’s average five year gap between novels and his alter-ego Black’s two in consecutive years. Less searching for le mot juste results in more getting on with the story. Yet, for all that, how many crime novels can you think of which would end with such a luminous figure as, ‘…the big dark-blue cloud, which had been rising steadily without his noticing, deftly pocketed the moon’s tarnished silver coin.’? You can’t hide a good writer, or a writer who can write.

First published in Magill, December/January 2007/8

A Preparation for Death By Greg Baxter

Here's one I definitely didn't like, from 2010. I doubt Brendan Barrington, editor of the Dublin Review, and Baxter's editor at Penguin Ireland, has ever forgiven me. 

A Preparation for Death 

By Greg Baxter

(Penguin Ireland, £14.99 stg, P/B)

Greg Baxter is a failed novelist. He tells us so himself. But this is alright, in his book, since he attributes his failure to the caution, caprice and compromise of literary editors and publishers (to say nothing of their mercenary motives), who are themselves part of a culture where ‘bad writing…had become institutionalised.’ Besides, more to the point, the literary novel is dead, or undead, and autobiography, so honest and unmediated, so authentic and without artifice, is where it’s at. This is an argument which Baxter has been afforded access to the hallowed books pages of that augustly venerable paper of record, The Irish Times, to advance, via recourse to a glowing review last February of David Shield’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, no doubt paving the way for the imminent publication of the work under review here, Baxter’s own attempt at autobiography. A Preparation for Death carries a similarly glowing endorsement from David Shields on its cover. Baxter was interviewed by Eoin Butler in the ‘Weekend’ section of The Irish Times on June 26th, in a blaze of pre-publicity. So, who exactly has successfully avoided the contemporary, self-serving culture of back-scratching in the publishing world? Never mind the fact that if Baxter had had the courage of his convictions as a fiction writer, his response to rejection would have been to self-publish.

The title comes from Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates defines philosophy as a preparation for death, although Baxter makes no reference to this source in his series of eleven autobiographical essays, four of which have already appeared in the respected journal, Dublin Review, which is edited by Brendan Barrington, who is also – again, no coincidence – Baxter’s editor at Penguin Ireland. Not that Baxter fights shy of quotation, with interpolations from Montaigne and Cioran among his favourites, along with references to Seneca and St. Augustine.

Briefly, the essays sketch Baxter’s, a Texan, transplantation to Dublin, his commuting by scooter from his soulless north Dublin housing estate to his despised job as a reporter for the Irish Medical Times, his drunken nights carousing with students after teaching in the Irish Writers’ Centre, with forays to Texas, Las Vegas, Riga, Letterfrack and Vienna thrown in. Baxter displays an alarming propensity towards kiss and tell, or shag and spill, and accounts of his many supposed conquests are provided in excruciating physical detail, e.g. ‘She has a beautifully shaped and scentless cunt. It is perfectly symmetrical and inconspicuous. It is small but gets extremely wet.’ Well, he does admit to having no facility for writing lyrically about sex. Perhaps the most interesting piece is ‘Satanism’, with its amusing section on the East Texan fundamentalism of his youth, which segues into a rereading of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Alas, it also tangentially includes an account of a spanking session with his companion on that weekend trip to Riga, followed by some fisting (all consensual, of course!). Thankfully, this description was judiciously excluded from a travel piece Baxter wrote for the IMT about this city break in May 2008, which revealed only that Baxter is the kind of American for whom everywhere should be America, or, at least, Ireland. Curiously enough, for one who insists on fearless honesty and truth-telling in all things, there is no attempt to engage with the break up of his seven year marriage, which predated the shenanigans so vividly described, or with the impending arrival of his first-born, a product of one of these liaisons. One also wonders what the many lovely ladies who fall into his bed see in him. Is it that he’s such a bad boy? Or maybe it’s that prodigious member he intimates he is possessed of, via a third party (see p.196).

The argument against fiction goes something like: ‘Why is this guy talking in these funny voices? Why doesn’t he put down these puppets and say what he wants to say?’ But autobiography is predicated on the assumption that the writer is an interesting person, or has an interesting story to tell (not quite the same thing), or writes well. What is interesting about Greg Baxter? Although he prefaces these pieces by acknowledging that: ‘Traditional autobiography is composed after the experience has passed. I wrote this book in the very panic of the experiences that inspired it’, he still confuses and conflates autobiography with the meditative essays of those writers he admires. The sum effect is akin to being buttonholed by an inebriated, garrulous egotist in a public bar, recalling the old joke: ‘Q: How do you know if someone’s from Texas? A: Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.’

One wonders to what extent Baxter’s espousal of autobiography is a result of his failure to crack fiction. It comes across as the shy, bullied kid in school performing a literary version of a Columbine-style massacre through mercilessly destructive ‘revelations’ not only about himself, but anyone who has ever crossed him. Writers of unfavourable review had better beware. To paraphrase Lionel Shriver’s title: We Need To Talk About Greg. 

The fact is, it is still much more difficult to write even passable fiction than it is to write even great memoir. Let’s say you walk into a pub and announce to your mates: ‘An amazing thing happened to me on my way here.’ They respond, ‘Yeah, what?’ If your next move is to begin, ‘Well, first of all, I’m making this up, okay?’ you’re going to have to work really hard to keep their attention. That requires talent. A memoir merely requires a life and a memory. Moreover, how can you ever be sure that the narrator of anecdotal autobiography isn’t being economical with the truth, or embellishing it? Besides, a technical device in postmodern fiction is its shattering of the ‘suspension of disbelief’, its removal of the voyeuristic nature of the reading experience by directly addressing readers and acknowledging their active part in the novel.

‘This brilliant literary debut will appeal to fans of Geoff Dyer’ the publisher’s blurb declares. Not so, for it is impossible to imagine Baxter writing with as much insight, imagination and sheer brio on subjects as diverse as jazz, photography or D. H. Lawrence, as Dyer employs. Added to this, Dyer does novels as well, however much they may be thinly disguised autobiography. Even Dyer’s straight autobiographical essays are leavened by a self-deprecating humour that is beyond Baxter. For while Baxter may admit, ‘I repeat myself with recklessness, and since I am the subject, and I am dispensable, there is nothing I say that is essential’, one feels he is simply getting his retaliation in first, heading potential criticism off at the pass. Nor is he possessed of the historical sweep or plain curiosity about his surroundings which distinguish such contemporary masters of the form as W. G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair.

Rarely have I disliked a book I’ve had to review so much, or found such little merit in one. Montaigne and Cioran were not failed novelists. Neither were Seneca nor Augustine. They were brilliant essayists. Baxter, on this evidence, can do neither prose fiction nor prose essay. Yet, he has achieved his goal of publication. Go figure, as the Yanks say.

First published in the Sunday Independent

The Untouchable By John Banville

I complete a Banville hatrick. From The World of Hibernia, 1997.

The Untouchable 

By John Banville

(Picador, No Price Given)

In this, John Banville’s eleventh novel, Ireland’s finest living literary artist both continues and extends the spirit which has informed his last three books, the loose trilogy of The Book Of Evidence, Ghosts and Athena, in that it features a narrator who is an artistic, criminal or intellectual outsider, who is recounting and reflecting upon the dark doings and dirty deeds of his life, in a tone of detached, loftily patrician irony. However, this time he is not one of those ‘high cold heroes who renounced the world and human happiness to pursue the big game of the intellect’, as the historian in The Newton Letter, another of Banville’s previous novels, puts it, when considering Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, the subjects of Banville’s earlier ‘science’ tetralogy of Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter and Mefisto.  On this occasion the central character, although a gifted scholar and art critic, has lived a double life at the heart of some of the most important events of this century. Of course, the art/life dichotomy has always been a major theme in Banville’s work, and although he has always denied it, it is commonly accepted that The Book Of Evidence was inspired by the notorious McArthur murder case. But here the supposed opposition between aesthetics and politics, the private and the public, receives its most stark examination and thorough treatment yet at Banville’s hands.

The story has its origins in the spy ring which grew out of Cambridge in the 1930s, and came into its own in the ’50s and ’60s, when everywhere the talk was of ‘reds under the bed’. Victor Maskell, the narrator (‘hero’ would be pushing it a bit too far), seems to be based on an amalgam of Anthony Blunt and Louis MacNiece, who knew each other at Marlborough public school, which Maskell also attends, although admittedly MacNiece was, in ‘real life’ as they call it, an Oxonian, and although he visited Spain with Auden, was never a committed Marxist, nor for that matter, a practising homosexual. Blunt, however, as we know, was both.

Other characters too are drawn from life, with Querell, for example, a thinly disguised Graham Greene. Indeed, Banville seems to indulge in some satiric flourishes at Greene’s expense, when he writes of Querell, ‘He was genuinely curious about people - the sure mark of the second-rate novelist.’ This is probably in revenge for Greene messing Banville around when he judged the 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Awards, when the prize money nearly went to an unknown who was not on the shortlist.

As homosexual and as Marxist, Maskell is an Outsider, but as Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures and Director of the Art Institute - an occasional guest at Windsor Castle even - he is an Insider. The book builds into a heady brew of political and sexual intrigue, where, as Maskell says, ‘the sex and the spying had sustained a kind of equilibrium, each a cover for the other.’

But, as always with Banville, the story is almost secondary to the sheer beauty of the language in which it is told. He could write about anything and make it interesting. On every page there is an image or an insight to drool over. Try phrases like these for size: ‘anyway, persons of her age are impervious to the tics and twitches by which the old betray the pain of their predicament’; or ‘My father talked about the threat of war. He always had an acute sense of the weight and menace of the world, conceiving it as something like a gigantic spinning-top at whose pointed end the individual cowered, hands clasped in supplication to a capricious and worryingly taciturn God.’                            

I foresee Booker nominations, glittering prizes. Or maybe it is even too good for those gaudy baubles, which are, after all, only literary lotteries. Whether it is commercially successful and generally recognised or not, The Untouchable expands an already awesome achievement in contemporary fiction, in which Banville reminds us, once again, what writing can do, and what it can be.

First published in The World of Hibernia