The Blue Book By A. L. Kennedy

The Blue Book

By A. L. Kennedy

As regular readers of this page will be aware, I am an A. L. Kennedy fan, having already given overwhelmingly positive notices to her two preceding novels, 2004's Paradise and 2007's Day.

Writing as someone who has read all of this Scottish writer’s previous novels and short-story collections, and been an avid promoter of and enthusiastic proselytiser for them, sometimes to the point of heroine-worshipping partisanship, it gives no pleasure to opine that The Blue Book is, by a long way, the weakest fiction in an otherwise dazzling oeuvre.

The plot is simple, verging on trite: a middle-aged woman goes on a transatlantic cruise with her attentive boyfriend, meets a roguish ex-lover en voyage, and leaves her boyfriend for her ex. The woman is Elizabeth Caroline Barber, the boyfriend is plain old Derek, and the ex is Arthur Peter Lockwood. Elizabeth, formerly Beth, is temporarily fleeing the UK, in flight from her past, which mostly means the life she shared with the charismatic Arthur, when she partnered him in touring church halls as mediums, perfecting the arcane but also practical skills utilised by believable frauds in facilitating the bereft and bereaved to contact their deceased loved ones on “the other side”. When Elizabeth finally rejected what once seemed an intoxicating game as merely an unpardonable series of tawdry crimes, Arthur continued his search for the right way to do wrong, or to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. He now subsidises free closure for the traumatised and dispossessed (e.g. Agathe in Montreal, a survivor of Rwandan ethnic cleansing, while her husband and son were not) by preying on the super-rich (e.g. Peri Arpagian in New York, a widow still missing her passed-on, self-made mining industrialist and environmental polluting husband, Mels), and does very well for himself too, into the bargain. Elizabeth and Arthur still met occasionally, for weekends of sexual oblivion, but their desperate affection lacerated as much as it consoled. Thus, poor Derek, who is “perfectly adequate”, and may be planning to propose marriage, but spends most of the crossing in bed with seasickness, not helped by the fact that after Elizabeth encounters Arthur she starts substituting anodyne but ineffective medication for his seasick tablets.

So, why doesn’t it work? All the usual stylistic ticks and familiar techniques are present and correct: the italics to indicate interior monologue and/or sarcastically toned stream of consciousness; the bold type for emphasis within those excursions; the short, sometimes one-sentence, sometimes even one-word paragraphs; the rhetorical repetitions. These have proved invaluable resources before, but such devices have grown over-familiar through overuse, and should perhaps be pressed into action more sparingly. As it is, they are beginning both to look and sound like emotional incontinence, a literary running off at the mouth, or mind. Of course, it can be argued that this modus operandi provides an accurate representation in prose of Elizabeth’s thought processes and how she feels, an appropriate matching of style to content, but the close juxtapositioning of reams of lazy, loose writing with wonderfully arresting insights wrapped in poetic phrasing is highly frustrating. Kennedy fails to, ahem, strike a happy medium. There is also the fact that Elizabeth’s situation doesn’t seem to warrant such neurotic flights.

The downgrading of Derek from harmless stooge to petulant control freak is convenient but contrived, and ultimately self-serving. The sporadic direct addressing of the reader in the second person singular, as a performer would an audience, is far from innovative, featuring prominently as it did in Jay McInerney's 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City, and is a staple of postmodern fiction, for example Italo Calvino's 1979 masterpiece, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Besides which, the “you” addressed switches willy-nilly between being the reader and Elizabeth talking to herself. Then, the significance of the title is never adequately explained, but it is certainly no exhaustive meditation on an area of the psychic and colour spectrum as thorough as William Gass's beautiful essay, On Being Blue. Or maybe it’s because Hilary Mantel gave us a much more substantial and satisfying exploration of the hocus-pocus thing in 2005’s Beyond Black, perhaps because it paid more attention to social context than Kennedy chooses to do here. Finally, there is the “tragic revelation” at the end which is supposed to explain everything (and why do I feel the need to resort to that unpardonable mannerism of both writing style and speech pattern, the inverted commas or finger-flexing, when reviewing this book?), but which instead feels woefully tacked on and, as the youthful Martin Amis would have put it, “real dead babies”. In short, the whole book is a series of unlikely occurrences and outlandish situations which, as they say, “fail to convince”.

Granted, this pulling a rabbit out of a hat, narratively speaking, is meant to mimic a magic, or a confidence, trick. But there are few things more embarrassing to watch than a conjuror, or a conman, who doesn’t pull it off. I didn’t “believe” a word of it, and that is what makes this latest piece of sleight of hand, by the gifted illusionist A. L. Kennedy, her first serious misstep.

First published in The Sunday Independent.

Paradise By A.L. Kennedy

Paradise 

By A.L. Kennedy

Hannah Luckraft drinks too much. She’s been drinking too much since she was seventeen, and now she’s pushing forty, with nothing much to show for it: ‘Because I was born with the absolute certainty that I would die before leaving thirty. I arrived with ten toes and blue eyes and death firmly in mind. I passed the age when lives should be taken in hand, knowing that no such formalities would be required. For me, there would be no pension, no insurance, no prudent mortgage plan, no fretting over outrages in homes for the elderly, or the ultimate loss of my health and faculties. I was carefree. And completely wrong, of course.’ There is also no child, which in her ‘personal arithmetic’ means ‘Hannah Luckraft = Nothing’.

Hannah, whose nomenclature manages to combine both the idea of grace and religious longing in its ‘Christian’ first part with the trusting to blind fate (rather than faith) of someone all at sea in treacherous waters in its Family second half, will drink anything she can get her hands on, including the ever reliable old standby from schooldays, cough mixtures, although she’s not too keen on lager. Her favourite is: ‘Bushmill’s, County Antrim, 700 millilitres, 40 per cent. I mean, what else do you need to know? Not that, as an additional courtesy, you don’t turn it in your hands and love the rounded corners and the dapper weight and the elegant cut of the label: the black with the white and the gold, all shaped around each other to mark out an arch: a long, slim doorway to somewhere else. And God bless the rectangular bottle, for it will not roll and harm itself.’ She regularly has blackouts, waking up without a clue where she is, only to recollect later that – to take a random example – she spent a portion of the previous evening giving a vigorous blowjob to the unattractive total stranger she now finds herself chatting to across a hotel breakfast table. 

Fans of the quick-fix quackery dignified under the term ‘psychiatry’, or the more long drawn-out charlatanism which passes itself off as ‘therapy’, will search in vain for THE REASON Hannah behaves in this punishingly self-destructive way. Her childhood has been comfortable and stable, in fact a lot less traumatic than average. She is blessed with loving, supportive and – most important of all, given her inclinations – forgiving parents. Then there’s her doctor brother, Simon, whose social and material success may be a standing reproach to Hannah (who is, ridiculously, ‘something in cardboard’, that is until she gets the sack and starts working in a bar) and who, while he may have a smug shrew for a wife and a baby on the way, still cares enough to get her into a treatment clinic in Canada, and foot the bill for it. Plus there’s Robert, her recently acquired dentist boyfriend, whom she fell for because of his ‘drinker’s smile’. Yes, he’s as big a dipsomaniac as she is, if not worse, but that doesn’t stop her being crazy about him.

Doubtless any therapist worth his inflated 50-minute-hourly fee would dub this relationship ‘co-dependent’, but our Hannah isn’t about to be taken in by any of their value-laden, socially-controlling, self-serving guff, and much satire is knocked out of her time in recovery: ‘This morning, we’re sitting in a circle again – this means we’re doing something to make us better, the kind of something that we get instead of treatment. Apparently it’s a known fact that no one has ever recuperated from any unfortunate state without being slapped down into a grisly ring of pink Naugahyde armchairs and made to discuss their personal lives with a dozen emotional vampires listening.’ Shrinks aren’t any better, in Hannah’s view, their evil bunk giving them a license to behave much worse than priests and nuns ever did: ‘Tomorrow morning, I’m supposed to go off and have my skull cracked by some consultant, let him fumble around when there’s nothing left for anyone to find. I’ve been professionally groped here for over a week: whatever thrill there was in it has gone. I’ll tell him my dream and he’ll grill me about masturbation or fetishes and then try to make me feel abnormal. This doesn’t suit people like me… We need something gentle.’  

So, why does she drink? If the standard answer is ‘To forget’, and the further routine inquiry ‘To forget what?’ is always inevitably met by the comic reply, ‘I’ve forgotten’, none of this is applicable to Hannah. For she remembers, in painful, self-lacerating detail. Indeed, it would be easy to conclude that her default setting is remorse, if it were not for the cutting, paradoxical humour with which it is leavened. Why does she drink? ‘I am delicate and the world is impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped. I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would – but there isn’t. So I drink.’ Maybe it would be better to ask a geneticist why she is the way she is; or, failing that, a philosopher. For the metaphysical ironies and moral ambiguities in Kennedy’s work are beyond most of her contemporaries, and are expressed, as they could only be, in a prose style that is virtuoso in its linguistic brilliance. If this review contains excessive quotation, it is simply because this is very definitely a case where it is better to let the writing do the talking. Kennedy thrives on paradox: Paradise is, obviously, an inferno, but it is nonetheless a paradise for all that.

Allegedly a teetotaller, Kennedy has here performed a miracle of imaginative empathy. One would have to go back over seventy years, to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, to find a woman writing so well about the interiority of the drinking life. As it is, this is a lyric work which bears comparison with Malcolm Lowry’s rather more epic booze hound’s bible, Under The Volcano. It ends with a supremely well-rendered surreal train journey, which turns into a sort of pilgrimage, full of happy serendipities.

There are always only a handful of gifted and important writers in the world at any particular time, writers who really matter. Already an accomplished practitioner of the short story, with three previous highly ambitious novels behind her, Paradise provides further evidence, if any more were needed, that A.L. Kennedy is among that select company. It also, incidentally, bears ongoing witness to the thoroughgoing, media-driven farce that is the Mann Booker Prize, for which this wonderful novel did not even make the long list, much less take its rightful place among the shortlisted six.

First published in The Sunday Independent

Day By A.L. Kennedy

Day 

By A.L. Kennedy

(Jonathan Cape, £16.99 Sterling)

Alfred Day, former tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber during WW2, is the protagonist of Alison Kennedy’s fifth novel. It is now 1949, and Alfred, only 25 but feeling more like 50, is finding he’s not very good at peace. The only boy in a family of girls, with a drunken, abusive fishmonger father and a doting and doted on mother, the war (or more specifically, the R.A.F., or more exactly still, his flying crew) offered him a previously unimagined camaraderie, and an escape from his rural Staffordshire origins and having to follow his father into his smelly trade. For all the rigid class structure of Britain, reflected in the officer class/ordinary ranks divide of the armed forces, the war was a great leveller, with everyone mucking in together. But look at him now, trying not very successfully to negotiate the readjustment to civilian life, a way of being as an adult that he has never properly known.

He has been working in his friend Ivor’s bookshop in London, although they don’t seem to sell many books. Not that he’s very bothered, since the autodidact Alfred has always been fond of reading. What’s really eating him is numbness, a sense of psychological paralysis occasioned by the loses he has accumulated: his mother, ostensibly felled by a falling roof slate, although Alfred suspects, rightly or wrongly, that his father had something to do with her demise; his crew, since he was the only survivor when his plane was shot down over Hamburg in 1943 on their penultimate 29th bombing mission; and his girlfriend Joyce, a chance encounter during the Blitz, then as now unhappily married to a lieutenant she hardly knew before he was sent off to Malaya, went missing – either dead or imprisoned – who has returned with major trauma (i.e. he never leaves their house). Then Alfred also has his experiences as a German PoW to deal with, not least of which is the death of his friend from the camp, Ringer, who saved him, but whom he failed to save.

So, when the novel opens, we discover he has volunteered as an extra in a prison-camp movie being shot in Germany, trying to find the piece of him that had come adrift in the real prison. He is surrounded by actors playing the war, new and old service men, ‘good’ Germans and displaced persons, and among them are people like him, who won’t talk about what happened. Then there are the kind of people he was fighting, like the nasty piece of work that is the Nazi collaborator Vasyl, really Latvian but claiming to be Ukrainian because he thinks this will ease his passage into British residency, whose personal (im)morality, or code of survival, is summed up succinctly in his saying: ‘It’s like this – you kiss your wife, I take away her face – which one of us is more sensible? You hold on to her hand when she can’t feel and then I stop you feeling – which one of us is more sensible? You care about your daughter – I train my dog to fuck your daughter – you still care – which one of us is more sensible?’

The film set affords the opportunity for some arch but telling postmodern irony: ‘Penalty for non-compliance, one hour in the sun with hands up. They’d be filming that next: trembling British arms and British sweat, very dramatic – lots of sympathy you’d get with that – now that it wasn’t happening any more, now that it was a story.’  Kennedy even pushes it as far as having some (real) ex-prisoners trying to tunnel out of their (fake) new camp, unbeknownst to the production crew. Some of this inner circle take Alfred under their wing, offering him a new start, with false black market identity papers and the chance to be someone else, an option Alfred gives some consideration.

The novel, then, is about the crushing weight of guilt, and the redemptive power of love. If that sounds trite, it isn’t meant to. It is also, strangely enough, given its forensic delineation of the darker propensities of human nature, perhaps Kennedy’s most optimistic longer work to date. In the end, Alfred decides to accept his lot, be himself, go back to London, and take a chance on contacting Joyce.

In these homogenised, commodified times, it is increasingly rare to find a writer with both a signature style, and a sensibility (the two are intimately linked), so distinctly their own that they are instantly recognisable upon opening one of their books, and could not be anyone else’s. A.L. Kennedy is such an artist, and Day handsomely extends her already highly impressive achievement in contemporary fiction.

First published in The Sunday Independent

You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free By James Kelman

You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free 

By James Kelman

(Hamish Hamilton, £12.99)

At first sight this significant new novel by Booker Prize winner James Kelman (for 1994’s How late it was, how late) seems an unappetising affair: a 34-year-old American immigrant, Jeremiah Brown, is flying home to Scotland tomorrow to see his ailing mother after twelve years away, and has just stepped out of his motel room for a quick drink or two to relax before the journey. Although, such is his self-knowledge, he ponders the wisdom of this move, telling himself he should really stay in and have a sandwich and ogle the goggle box, his equally ample capacity for self-deception wins this particular battle, and it soon becomes inevitable that we will be spending the evening, and the next 437 pages, inside Jeremiah’s head, as he gets progressively pissed.

Jeremiah is, as he readily acknowledges, a flawed character. He drinks, he gambles, he is prone to obsessive paranoiac (or are they?) outpourings, he is estranged from ‘the ex’ – nightclub singer Yasmin – and their four-year-old daughter. He is also a failed, or rather, unpublished writer, who knows that he can ‘talk a good book’, even if he has never written, or rather, finished one. Yet, such is his charm, and his precarious position in his adopted country as an unassimilated, unintegrated alien, that he slowly wins our sympathy, and we are touched by his tough, humane decency.

Jerry has a red card which, with its connotations of left-wing allegiances and of being sent off in a football match, is both literally and metaphorically much lower down the food chain than a green or blue one. It entitles him to work, but to little else – certainly not to a credit card on his difficult-to-open bank account. He is also called upon to produce it as soon as he opens his mouth anywhere and people hear his accent, most notably by bartenders. This is something of an irony, since the greater part of his work experience is in bar-tending, or ‘the booze trade’ as he calls it. (‘She sings the blues and I sling the booze’ he tells one inquirer as to what Yasmin and he do.) That is until he decides he would like to become a solid citizen and family man, and lands a job in airport security.

But these poorly-paid, long-hours vacancies have arisen only because of the rise of ‘The Persian Bet’, a ‘Survive or Perish’ insurance deal taken out by bankrupts and other would-be suicides before flights on dodgy airlines, which pay off if the insured dies, or if they sustain any injuries but manage to survive. ‘Soon the bookies, media commentators and society leaders strove to find a non-evaluative term or phrase to describe a suicide, e.g. “a wannabe-dead”, something that wasnay too positive but at the same time wouldnay alienate the air-travelling public.’ This singular form of travel insurance soon attracts much of the flotsam and jetsam of the contemporary American underbelly, since ‘a significant proportion of those who speculated on the “persian bet” were poverty-stricken bodies on an income so far below what official government experts reckoned it took to stay alive that the term “income” was dropped. These included ‘young folks and asylum-seekers, immigrants, refugees; war vets, down-and-outs, alcoholics, addicts; unwantitorphans and homeless people; people with mental and psychological disorders; people with long histories of abuse, disabilities and deficiencies. It was like a majority of the population: the millions of daily would-be suicides, those who spend three-fifths of their waking hours dreaming of how to accomplish death in as unobtrusive, unselfish and unirresponsible a manner as possible.’ When they start raffling airline tickets in airport car parks, and generally clogging up departure lounges, extra security staff are needed to move them on.

It is patronising to applaud Kelman as merely the finest practitioner there is of Scottish vernacular writing, since in addition to that considerable achievement, what he does here is actually far more sophisticated than that as well. By skipping backwards and forwards through the narrator’s memories, and framing them within his current situation, we build up through an episodic structure a thoroughly enthralling picture of his life in exile. And if you think it looks easy, just you try doing it. While there are few concessions to the reader – the entire book runs from beginning to end without chapters or even line breaks – Kelman still manages to say more from the ground up about life in the U.S.A. today than any amount of writing-programmed, effete, New Yorker stylists ever could.  

The ‘events of 9/11’ are never explicitly referenced, but this is because Kelman understands, in a way that middle-of-the-road commentators like Martin Amis never could, that if it took such a seismic occurrence to act as a wake-up call, then things must have been pretty bad before it happened. 9/11 was not ‘the day the world changed’, as CNN would have us believe, merely the day one half of the world found out what the other half was thinking. Similarly, it is useless to fault Kelman for presenting only one half of the picture, that of the underclass, because he is more aware than most of how the supposed ‘end of history’ and the rise of global capitalism in the west over the last fifteen years have created a two tier society, with those not rich enough to buy themselves out, or those too poor through lack of education and training, or ill-health, or simple inability to fit in, required to suffer the vagaries of the corporo-bureaucratic weave, with its daily manglings of language and attempts to control reality. His half of the story is the one we usually don’t hear.

All of which may beg the question: why is Jeremiah in the country in the first place? Well, there is the example of a quixotic ancestor, whose name he shares, a pioneer who made good in the land of the free. And, as he tells us early on: ‘That is how people exile themselves, to avoid hurting their faimlies and friends. I had two faimlies; one here and one back in the UK. I now was exiting here. Where the fuck else was I gauny go?’

This novel is not perfect; but then, no novel is. Such sustained buttonholing can wear a body down, leading you to wonder does Kelman know the difference between an effective short story and a novel, while some readers may find the ending curiously inconclusive and unsatisfying. But, for all that, in terms of its scope, ambition, energy and vision, it is safe to say that James Kelman is a great writer, and everyone should read him.

First published in The Sunday Independent

I AM VERMIN by Dr. Millar

 My review of Seán Millar’s I AM VERMIN is in the current issue of The Goo magazine (June 2026).

Dr. Millar

I Am Vermin

(Gentlemen Records)

Desmond Traynor

What is the best way to review a 5 CD disc release of (save for one song) entirely new material, totalling forty-two songs all told, each disc a discrete album in itself? Maybe best to enumerate the titles of the individual albums, and explain the concept behind each. We are helped in this endeavour by Seán Millar’s semi-autobiographical essayistic liner notes, which would not be out of place in one of our more respected literary journals. Certainly, if one Goo album review is generally two hundred words, this one merits at least a thousand. Even so, this length will not be sufficient to do justice to the riches contained within.

The general title refers to Millar’s ‘tendency to identify with socially rejected things’, and permeates all five elements of the whole. Throughout all that follows, the sturdiness and variety of Millar’s singing voice, and the deftness of his musicianship, should not go unremarked.

Disc 1, Toy Bear in a Coalmine (1985-1988), has the unifying theme of what Dermot Bolger once called in the title of one of his poetry collections, ‘internal exile’. Seán writes, ‘The band that most influenced my songwriting in the years I describe here is the Velvet Underground’, and there is a raw, live feel to the recordings, all done in two takes. Many of the seven cuts, such as opener ‘Least Said Soonest Mended’ are country-inflected, some more so than others – ‘I Couldn’t Bear To Meet You’ is positively gothic. Then there is the dreamy Major 7ths progression of ‘Terrified’. Stand out is the seven minute plus ‘I Decided To Live’, with its lengthy spoken word intro, and gospel-tinged harmonies courtesy of long-time collaborator and chanteuse extraordinaire, Miriam Ingram. Lyrically, it details Millar’s early twenties suicidal ideation because of his white male guilt, but concluding that killing himself would only hurt the ones who loved him. The duel guitar interplay is reminiscent of Lou Reed’s and Robert Quine’s work on The Blue Mask, and later Reed’s and Mike Rathke’s partnership on New York.

Next up is London Eats Me (1998-1992), a title which invites reference to Hanif Kureishi’s 1991 film London Kills Me. This is where exile proper begins. Colm Tóibín has written of the venerable Irish tradition of ‘fecking off to England’, embodying the ‘idea in the Irish mind of England not so much as a conqueror and traditional enemy but as a place where people are let alone.’ Sexual experimentation was easier in a metropolis where windows weren’t squinting, and Catholic guilt mixed with claustrophobic familial social situations were not an inhibiting factor to enjoying ‘a haven of freedom and pleasure’. (I myself fecked off to Italy, and had a rare old time.) But things can turn dark. Wherever you go, there you are. ‘There’s a special kind of low self-esteem that you only get from brushes with the music industry’ Seán notes, and his rise and fall therein is delineated here. London eventually transmogrifies into ‘This Stinking Town’. Other highlights include: ‘Tony Gets It’, where the songwriter reverts to one of his favoured scenarios, adultery with other men’s wives (cf. ‘You’re Not Paranoid’ from solo debut The Bitter Lie), this time delivering a sly twist in the dénouement; ‘Twelve Years Later’, a third-person recounting of a final meeting with a former girlfriend and closest friend on whom the years have taken their toll; and the clear Scott Walker homage ‘Rumours Of You’. Most moving is the wry, arpeggiated reflection on a longstanding cross-sex friendship, ‘Sex in the Twentieth Century’: ‘We don’t make love but the love’s still there.’ Quite.

This is followed by the louche and laid back third disc, Two Centimes (1972-1997), which celebrates the European underclass that emerged during this period, of which Millar considers himself a member and defender. Many of the compositions owe a debt to the chanson tradition and to easy blues and trad jazz motifs. ‘Crazy Time’ ’s Johnny Cash cowboy vocal laments turning day into night ‘cos you know your life’s not worth two centimes’, while ‘Dirty On The Inside’ sees ‘the flowers of evil bloom’ in an afternoon hotel room. ‘The Scene’ is a spoken word apologia for the (self-chosen) lifestyle, in which the fundamental mutual misunderstanding and clash of values the protagonist experiences when confronted with aspirational working or middle class people is delineated: they think he’s failing by not getting with the programme; he thinks they are, because they already have. Closer ‘The Boot’s On The Other Foot Now’ would not sound amiss on a Stephan Grappelli record.

The conceptually complex sci fi of proggy disc #4, The Invisible Revolution, is the most challenging listen in terms of understanding the story and following the narrative. But it ends with the resounding Christmas cracker ‘December Man’, the rumbunctious bells and whistles arrangement and production courtesy of composer and keyboard wiz Daragh O’Toole.

Disc 5, Dirty Dublin, brings everything full circle, with opener ‘Run Run Run Runaway’ ruminating on ‘this town I love to hate’. It also includes the eminently singalong ‘Fucked Up Genes’ and the explanatory title track. The songs are characterised by a mature equanimity. Always Coming Home, indeed.

Whenever an artist or band release a double album, the default question is always ‘Does it justify its length?’ Such speculation, in my opinion, tends to miss the point of the extended form. In good hands, the larger canvas provides songwriters and musicians with an opportunity to stretch out and feel less constrained. The fear is that they will lose the run of themselves, and the result will be bloated and self-indulgent, with a fair proportion of filler. Millar has put out not a double, but a quintuple album(s), which magnifies these risks. But he has astutely avoided the pitfalls, mostly because he has compressed what would be ten years’ worth of work for your average singer/songwriter into one release (at least one component of which he has been working on, on and off, for ten years), and with him one can justifiably invert the old adage which extols the virtues of excess over excellence to ‘never mind the width, feel the quality’.

Just give him the Choice Music Award now. Or, failing that, at least a Lifetime Achievement Award.

https://www.thegoo.ie/albums/wkkb6k5dcff4z0eul8q5ehwzett6hg?fbclid=IwY2xjawSzdSFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEegdpCY-vGv8xA4_nYVRw1ksK3Xaj3aV_YxhFZ3l1y9KqiHgqFB_oxYo-AedE_aem_QinVZM53AOjttIlUyt3GWQ

The Little Hammer By John Kelly

The Little Hammer

By John Kelly

(Jonathan Cape, p/b, £10)

John Kelly is well-known and justly praised as a television and radio presenter, and a writer on matters musical, who has an obvious passion and near encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject. I am a fan of his nightly RTE Radio 1 programme, Mystery Train (and admired its precursor on what was then Radio Ireland), was a regular viewer of the generally excellent television popular cultural review he fronted, Later with John Kelly (sadly gone the way of all TV arts programmes at Montrose, in the national broadcaster’s incessant quest for audience figures that will keep the advertisers happy - ‘RTE: Supporting The Arts’ indeed), and enjoy his column in The Irish Times every Saturday. Not content with brightening up our lives in these capacities, he has now produced his debut novel. So, can he write it like he talks it? Is it any good?

The Little Hammer concerns an unnamed narrator, a painter from Kelly’s own Co. Fermanagh, who killed a palaeontologist with a geological hammer when he (the unnamed etc., that is) was nine years old. The motivation or significance of this incident is never fully revealed, although it transpires that this chap’s family, presided over by a grotesque Granny, is no stranger to murder in its ranks. What plot there is kicks in with the appearance of Ingrid Bergman lookalike Billie Maguire, a production assistant for Firecracker Films, run by the execrable Clive Ratcliff aka The Cockroach, who persuades our narrator to take part in an autobiographical film. Thing is, the entire film is a complete fabrication, and entails their decampment to Prague, where said narrator was a student (not). Suddenly all the stuff we’ve had to wade through about his Granny’s devotion to The Lives of The Saints and The Child of Prague becomes relevant. Billie kidnaps the original Child, substitutes it with an appropriately attired Action Man, and sends it to the Granny. Our narrator does his damnedest to rectify this situation, even writing to the Pope, and Shirley Temple. There is also a cameo by Elvis Presley.

Trouble is, the whole is less than the sum of the parts. The book could most generously be described as ‘episodic’, but quite a few chapters seem to be included for no apparent reason, and bear very little relation to what goes before or comes after them. So while it is comic in places (I particularly liked the description of charismatics as ‘the acoustic guitar wing of the Roman Catholic Church and I didn’t like the look of them’), it reads very much like a lucky dip hotchpotch, thrown together. In a recent ‘My Writing Day’ column in The Irish Times, Kelly admitted that pressure of work meant he wrote ‘...on the DART and over a sandwich’. Doubtless much substantial work has been produced under these pressing conditions, but here one gets the feeling that it is very much pieced together and slapdash. Kelly can obviously write prose, but this is hardly a novel at all, since it is bitty, and lacks coherence. He may be aiming for the surreal wit of Flann O’Brien, but O’Brien is both darker and funnier. There is too little plot or character development to keep most readers happy. Sure, it’s meant to be a funny book, not a serious book, but it is not a seriously funny book.

    At one point the narrator writes of television producer The Cockroach: 

                    ...Clive Ratcliff The Cockroach was the worst kind of

                     cockroach - a cockroach who worked in television. He 

                    was a vampire, a leech - an empty vessel that needed to 

                    be filled by the ideas of others. This way he fancied he 

                    might live for ever in the credits. He was a virus, a parasite

                    and a pest and he needed a good kick in the arse.

 and at another:

                    Mister Ratcliff, I said calmly, beginning in deliberate tones

                    but soon freewheeling, you are a fraudulent, two-faced,

                    useless, talentless, valueless, bloodsucking bastard - 

                    and if you ever contact me again you will die a cruel and

                    unusual death and you will not live to see your next miserable,

                    hateful production. I swear to you, Mister Ratcliff, I will

                    actually kill you. You are the embodiment of all that I despise -

                    all that is wrong with the opportunistic, false, unscrupulous,

                    corrupt, shabby, double-dealing, hypocritical and time-serving

                    milieu in which you prosper. I have no desire to be a part of it

                    and I certainly have no desire to go anywhere near a charlatan

                    like you!

Unfortunately, with the appearance of this book, John Kelly is running the risk of falling into the trap of becoming that which he is criticising, bringing the callow, shallow (lack of) values of television to make callow, shallow publishing, sad for someone who produces quality broadcasting in such wretched circumstances. If he were not an established media personality, I’d wager this effort would not be getting published under the Cape imprint. It is also, incidentally, not up to Cape’s usually high proof-reading and editorial standards.

The Little Hammer has a laugh here and there, but it is not a great work of art, nor was probably meant to be. Someday John Kelly may write a good book, and display as much talent and discernment as a novelist as he currently does as a broadcaster and cultural commentator, but on the evidence of his first fictional outing, which follows the personal travelogue Cool About The Ankles, he still has a considerable way to go to achieve this goal. Maybe he should take more time, or else stick to what he does best.

First published in Books Ireland

The Left and The Lucky by Willy Vlautin

 I reviewed Willy Vlautin's new novel in The Irish Times last month.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/review/2026/05/09/the-left-and-the-lucky-by-willy-vlautin-portrait-of-an-unusual-friendship-and-the-acts-that-carry-them/