Jim O’Rourke Interview

                                       Jim O’Rourke Interview - April 2026

‘Maverick’ is a word that seems to have been coined specifically to describe Jim O’Rourke. To enumerate his various band affiliations, collaborations and solo projects, which span several genres over the last 40+ years, would leave little room in this article for selected portions of the actual interview. Shorthand will have to suffice: he is best known among ‘indie’ music listeners for his late ’90s/early ’00s production and membership of Sonic Youth, his production work on Wilco’s two most experimental albums Yankee Hotel Foxtrot and A Ghost Is Born, mixing Joanna Newsom’s magna opera Ys and Have One On Me, and his run of singer/songwritery albums taking their titles from the titles of Nic Roeg films (more of which anon). O’Rourke has lived in Japan for the last fifteen years, and frequently collaborates musically with his domestic partner Eiko Ishibashi. The two met when Ishibashi played flute on an album of Burt Bacharach covers which O'Rourke was producing. Their most recent record together is last year’s Paraedolia. They play the National Concert Hall on Saturday and Sunday, April 25th and 26th, the second date augmented by hardanger d’amore fiddle player and former member of The Gloaming, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh. 

DT: Tell me about how living in Japan influences your work. Why did you relocate there in the first place?

JO’R: I just felt very at home here, from the first time I came. Plus, it’s easy to disappear, especially since I moved out of Tokyo into the countryside.

DT: It kind of removes you from the American or Western indie scene. For someone who wants to be alone, you get an awful lot done.

JO’R: It’s because I like to work every day. And I get more done by myself. I personally never really had anything to do with, what you say, the Western indie scene, otherwise that I worked in it. I worked as an engineer and producer in that world for quite a few years. But, I mean, that isn’t really my background, I don’t come from that. I didn’t grow up playing in bands.

DT: But you were in Sonic Youth, you were in Wilco, as well as producing them, who were two of the biggest bands of the time.

JO’R: It so happened that I did work with people like that. The Sonic Youth thing was almost an accident that I ended up playing with them, because the first record that I worked with them as an engineer and producer was at a period where Kim really didn’t want to play bass, and she hadn’t played bass on the previous record, and they felt that maybe they should put some bass on the record. And since I was staying at the studio, they just said, ‘Well, if you have any ideas for bass parts, put them down after we go home.’ So I ended up playing bass on the whole record and so they were like, ‘Oh, you know, now you have to go out on tour with us. We need you to play the bass parts.’ And at the time, it was like, ‘Oh, this would be great.’ I enjoyed working with them, enjoyed being with them, so it seemed like a great idea. ‘Sure. Why not? That’ll be fun.’ And Wilco. I mean, Jeff (Tweedy) and I had our own project (Loose Fur) with Glenn (Kotche), which was also before he was in Wilco, because he played drums with me.  Jeff just liked a record I had made around that time called Bad Timing. He heard something that he thought was, at that point, what was missing from Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I wasn’t really involved, the record was pretty much recorded when I started working with them. It’s from the next record, Jeff just felt I should be involved from the beginning. 

DT: But those records are noticeably different from the rest of their work, mostly because of your presence.

JO’R: But also because of where Jeff was at the time. And also, I think the version of the band that did A Ghost Is Born – and this isn’t meant as a slight to other members before and afterwards – but that was my favourite incarnation of that band. I thought that the members were really super talented, but also there was a modesty in their playing, and they were all like multi-instrumentalists. So it was a really good combination. So I think that had a lot to do with it. It was really a new band, even though it was still the same people from before, but they were kind of going at it from a new perspective. So I think that’s why those records sound different from before and afterwards, because of people that weren’t there and the people that were there.

DT: That’s very modest of you. You don’t want to take all the credit.

JO’R: If I did a record of theirs now, it would sound different because, you know, my way of working and taste would have changed from then. But at that point, there were a lot of bands where I was coming from another direction, because my background is in playing in orchestras and being a composer and playing jazz. A lot of the musicians at that time were interested in me working with them. They were people who were coming from their music towards this other music. There was starting to be an overlap of interest in that music. So I was someone who could help them with that. But I’ve been asked by other people, even kind of recently, and I would say, I really don’t think I can help you with anything, because that’s not what I’m good at. You want to make this kind of record, and that’s not what I do. So I think I was a good person to be a good watch out on the bridge, as they crossed over.

DT: How do you feel about that whole period now, looking back?

JO’R: It really took over my life for a while. Also it was sort of the end of an era. It wasn’t too much later that being able to make records that way and work that way became kind of impossible. And I didn’t want to go into the professional world. I was starting to get asked to do records, but I didn’t really care about their music. I didn’t like being in that situation, because I only wanted to work with people who I thought I could do something for them. I found something in it that was interesting to me, and more and more I knew my place in that role was like, it’s time had come to an end. So I don’t feel bad about not continuing with it. I think I did what I could do, and then I got out before it got awkward.

DT: How does your collaboration with Eiko Ishibashi work? Because she’s more of a traditional songwriter than you are now, as well as being an improvising musician.

JO’R: She’s fairly similar to me. Actually, her background was playing drums in a punk band when she was young, but also she was a classically trained pianist, and did get a lot of film soundtrack things, and played in a lot of improvised music settings, with all sorts of people. So the singer songwriter things – I think for her it is very similar to what it was for me. I think she and I approach things the same way: we have you could say a question or a quandary that we want to work through, and sometimes that involves songwriting and making records like that. But I know she doesn’t think of it as her main thing, it’s just part of the wheel of things that she does.

DT: Is there any difference between working with her and working with other people, because you’re in a relationship?

JO’R: We’re not married, but we’ve been together for 15 years. So, of course, there’s that. There’s a lot of shorthand. I don’t really have to explain myself very much, and she doesn’t have to explain herself very much. When we do the shows together, for her, it’s 100% improvised, and it’s like 90% improvised for me, but because I sort of restrict what materials I get to use it makes like a set list so I can somewhat recreate things from show to show, but they’re never going to be the same version. I can change the order live but Eiko doesn’t know what order I’m going to play things in or what I’m going to do. So for her, it’s 100% improvised. I just restricted a little bit to create that formal structure that everything hangs on.

DT: Where did you come across Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh?

JO’R: I played in Dublin three and a half years ago, and the promoter of that was involved with the World Expo in Osaka last year, and for the Irish Pavilion he was bringing over Caoimhín. I knew he was in The Gloaming, that’s where I knew him from. Caoimhín was interested in meeting me because he was starting to think about using computers with his own performances. So he came out to my studio for a few days, and we worked together and made stuff, and I showed him how I worked and then we did a performance at the Expo and also at the Irish Consulate, based on all the work we had done beforehand. And it was great. 

DT: Your parents were Irish, and you spent time here during your childhood. Do you still have family here? 

JO’R: Both of my parents were orphans, so no. But my parents never lost their accents. They never really integrated in Chicago. All their friends were Irish. There was very little American culture in my house.

DT: Do you feel an affinity when you’re here? 

JO’R: I do. I mean, Dublin feels different to me than what I remember as a kid. Even the people are a little bit different, you know? But the melancholy never goes away. That special kind of guilt. I may have been born in Chicago, but there’s a lot of Irish DNA in me, just from how I look at the world, how I either accept it or don’t accept it. I had a kind of strict Irish Catholic upbringing. I was an altar boy, so there’s that.

DT: So was I! Which we’ve both vehemently rejected. You’ve famously said, ‘I’m not a musician’. Instead, you ‘do stuff’. What is it you do? Would you be able to describe it or do it without referencing music? 

JO’R: Well, I mean, again, this probably has a lot to do with the Irish thing: I’m a bit embarrassed of having spent this much time in my life playing instruments and stuff, because they’re just for me things that I have to use to make the things I want to make. I don’t have any particular love for instruments. I’m not really interested in playing them. If I could make things without having to use them, I would. I find this is just me, because I know the bulk of people who make music don’t think this way. But I get no joy out of playing an instrument. I feel maybe embarrassment more than anything else, because the work is what’s important, not me. If I could get myself out of the equation completely, that would be the best. It’s just this attitude that the work is what’s important, that was instilled in me by my parents.

DT: You can probably do a lot now without instruments.

JO’R: Oh yeah, I don’t use them very much at all anymore. I sold most of them a few years ago. I mostly just do everything in this room now, with my few remaining things.

DT: Would Brian Eno be a good reference point, as a non-musician and producer?

JO’R: Not really. I have all respect for Brian. But I think our background and approach are quite different. I had a question like that before, and I did think of someone, but he was probably a film director.

DT: That’s what I was trying to get at with the original question, which is that maybe it’s a conceptual thing. Maybe it’s not specifically to do with music, and you were very into film and books as a kid. So it’s kind of an aesthetic that’s general for the arts. Like your fascination with Nic Roeg: is that because of the way he edits his films? Is it something to do with non-linear time?

JO’R: Big influence. Because I saw his stuff when I was in high school. And the question of how you deal with non-linear time is very easy in many of the arts, like in writing and in film. But in music, it’s really, really difficult to deal with non-linear time and to evoke non-linear time outside of just things being a reference. I can now refer to something that happened before, but you can’t do the things that you can do in film or in writing, but especially Roeg’s, especially that early period of his, and especially Performance. When I first saw those, they were really shocking to me. I had never seen any director do that. It taught me a lot about context, because for me, context is really important. How you can change the meaning of even just a single image by that change of context. Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a more contemporary director who is also very, very good at that. So I think in a way I’m probably actually just like a critic more than anything, and that instead of writing criticism, I make sounds. You know, it’s like when Godard said that the best way to make a critique of a film is to make another film. And I really took to that when I was young. That really made sense to me.

Walking On Dry Land By Denis Kehoe

Walking On Dry Land                                                                                  

By Denis Kehoe

(Serpent’s Tail, £10.99stg original paperback)

Denis Kehoe scored a palpable hit with Nights Beneath the Nation, his debut novel of three years ago, which oscillated between twin, interconnected narratives set respectively in 1950s and contemporary Dublin. This, his sophomore effort, employs a similar structural device, alternating between Angolan capital Luanda (mostly) in 2006-7, and Lisbon and Luanda from 1965 to 1977.

The near present-day portion concerns Ana de Castro, a 32-year-old woman raised in Lisbon by her father Jose and stepmother Helena, who has been living in Dublin since late adolescence. Aware from an early age that Helena was not her birth mother, she sets out on a pilgrimage to Luanda, via Lisbon, during the Christmas/New Year holiday season, to locate the woman her father had an affair with over thirty years previously. Armed only with a faded photograph of two women, a name, Solange, and a vague notion that this woman had been and possibly still is a nightclub singer, she stays with her elder half-brother Tiago and his family, while pursuing these clues through several contacts. Eventually, after an internet search and an e mail response from Solagne, mother and long-lost daughter meet up.

The portion set in the past details Jose and Helena’s courtship and marriage in Lisbon, and their subsequent emigration from Salazar’s Portugal to then-Portuguese colony Angola. The ambivalence of both parties in the early stages of their relationship is subtly rendered: they weren’t exactly crazy about each other, but evidently got along well enough to think they could make a go of it. Of course, most of the atmospheric scenes from thirty or forty year ago can only be imaginative reconstruction or even pure conjecture on Ana’s part: Helena has died of breast cancer, and Jose, now elderly and retired in Lisbon, never gets to make a personal appearance. The accumulation of unanswered questions which persist past the terminal point of the narrative (for example, why would Helena consent to raise a child who was not her own, much less one who is the progeny of her philandering husband?) linger teasingly in the air, lending it a sense of unreality. True, real life doesn’t provide neat closure, but there are some obvious conversations Ana could have to help her on her quest and elucidate her understanding of her origins, which are never allowed to take place, maybe because they would tamper with the novel’s carefully manufactured mystery.  

Perhaps inevitably, Ana’s discovery of the mother who had no hand in bringing her up, while it answers some questions, proves to be underwhelming. It dissolves in some banal and quotidian observations on romantic relationships between the two women, where they discuss the loss of self which accompanies the compromise necessary for all committed couplings.

Ana is a PhD student in Film Studies in Dublin, and teaches film in UCD and NCAD, and this professional background sanctions much use of film references. Indeed, the novel is drenched in them. It gives nothing away to say that the last two sentences of the book are: ‘The image turns to a freeze-frame. Frame after frame after frame, as the strip of celluloid film slips out of the projector.’ However, Ana’s constant casting of herself and her parents as screen idols can grow a little forced, and further contributes to that overriding impression of unreality.  

The tropes of Postcolonial Studies are also well ventilated here, with Jose, who works as a publishing editor, thinking: ‘It’s Africa, Angola, Luanda they’re putting into the Portuguese…these young writers, moulding, manipulating the mother tongue to their own devices. Colonising, civilizing, the shiver of a thrill of a Luandino sentence, Kimbundu words, phrases skittering across history and time, taking their place on the pages of a book in another language. Sometimes he remembers, and sometimes he forgets, those writers who have been sent off to the prison camp of Tarrafal in Cape Verde, because of their political affiliations.’; and Solange later opining: ‘ “…all whites believe they are superior in a way, whether it’s in France or Portugal or the States. They still have that attitude, you know, even after all this time, even after everything that’s happened…But the truth is they just can’t imagine that other people see the world differently, that Africans don’t see it the way they do. That our reality, our way of being in this world, is different.” ’

But while there are many evocative descriptions of Luanda, and while there is much to admire here, overall the novel feels over-researched, or does not hide its research well enough. Thus, it lacks the stamp of experiential authenticity which informed Kehoe’s first novel. Hopefully he can recapture that more visceral spirit in the future, of which his undoubted talent is more than capable.

First published in The Sunday Independent.

Nights Beneath The Nation By Denis Kehoe

Nights Beneath The Nation

By Denis Kehoe

(Serpent’s Tail, £9.99stg p/b)

The debut novel from Dubliner Denis Kehoe is narrated by Daniel Ryan, born in 1930 and raised in rural Ireland, who has returned to Dublin to revisit scenes from his young manhood, after an absence of nearly forty years spent developing a successful hairdressing business in New York. His narrative alternates cleverly between 1950/51 and 1997/98, since Daniel has rented a house overlooking the sea at Seapoint in order to write a memoir of a pivotal year in his development, when as a clerk in the Civil Service he tasted his first forbidden fruits of bohemian freedom in the big city. The Dublin of those days may frequently be characterised retrospectively as a stifling provincial backwater, but as Daniel tells it there was still shenanigans to be got up to, even if it was swept under the carpet. Having encountered the enigmatic theatre director Maeve O’Donnell in Bewley’s, she takes Daniel under her wing and helps him locate his nascent sexual identity: at one of her wild parties he kisses a boy, and finds he likes it.

The book is particularly good at capturing the manic energetic adrenalin rush of newly liberated youth, especially when contrasted with its portrait of small town life, where middle aged men ‘became the fathers they had once defined themselves against.’ This heady atmosphere is fuelled in no small measure by the life-changing thrill of first love, for Daniel has met dashing UCD student Anthony, and they fall for each other in a big way. Meanwhile, back in the near present, the older Daniel has become embroiled in a wary friendship with the shadowy Gerard, a twenty-something he met in The George, who also happens to be researching and writing a book about an actor and Spanish Civil War veteran (Republican side) who ran with the same crowd as Daniel did in those days. How much does Gerard already know about Daniel, if anything, and how much does he want to find out?

 The book is very well plotted, with the dual time perspective doing the trick, and even becomes something of a page turner, when a murder mystery element is added to the mix. Daniel and Anthony are happily rehearsing their parts for Maeve’s version of Lorca’s Blood Wedding, of which telling use is made as a mythical underlay, and Anthony is swatting for his finals, when the repressive rigidities of the real world intrude, and things take a turn towards the dark side. Anthony’s right-thinkingly uptight parents discover his affair, and threaten him with the asylum, where they had already had him committed for six months for a previous relationship, unless he gives up Daniel. They’ve even thoughtfully arranged a sham marriage for him, to the daughter of friends of theirs knocked up by a long vanished tourist, doubtless otherwise destined for a Magdalene laundry, and her child for an ‘orphanage’. The nexus of church/state control, bolstered by collusively villainous shrinks intent on pathologising and ‘curing’ homosexuality, is subtly rendered, with reference even being made to Dr. Noel Browne’s abortive Mother and Child scheme. Small wonder the next generation of gays took to the streets. Love in a dark time, indeed.

But Daniel is a queen of the old school, and, like Victor Maskell in John Banville’s The Untouchable, feels only derision for those noisily marching for the right to do it in the street. Even so, if there is a criticism to be made of this fine first outing, it is that sometimes Daniel sounds younger than his 67 years. Also, given the time and place, he seems relatively guilt-free about his then frowned upon and illegal orientation. But, there again, he is an individual, as well as being representative; and few of us were around at the time to know exactly what it was actually like, and even those among us who were might well have been inhabiting vastly different milieux.

What Kehoe has done brilliantly is to examine the ramifications of a gay life, bases on the life experience of an older gay man, and evoked the cruel hypocrisies of a time which condemned homosexuals to a lifetime of public toilet or bathhouse assignations because gay pair-bonding was vigorously discouraged, by family and society. He has also told a good story, and will hopefully tell many more.    

First published in The Sunday Independent

Antarctica By Claire Keegan

Antarctica

By Claire Keegan

(Faber and Faber, £9.99)

This auspicious debut collection of short stories comes highly recommended, since some of the pieces here have already garnered garlands like the Martin Healy Prize, the Francis MacManus Award and the William Trevor Prize, and been published and broadcast extensively. It is not difficult to see why, as Keegan does several things very well.  

Her own background consists of an upbringing in rural Co Wicklow, a degree in English and Political Science from Loyola University in New Orleans, and a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of Wales in Cardiff. All this experience is drawn upon, not only in terms of location - seven of the stories are set in Ireland, six in America, and two across the water - but also in appropriate and exact use of relevant idiom.

Several of the stories - ‘Where the Water’s Deepest’, ‘The Ginger Rogers Sermon’, ‘Storms’, ‘The Singing Cashier’, ‘Burns’, ‘Men and Women’, ‘A Scent of Winter’ and ‘The Burning Palms’ - deal with childhood or early adolescence, whether first or third person narratives, and delineate a child’s or adolescent’s increasing perception of an often senselessly cruel and hostile adult world he or she is struggling to understand. Keegan specialises in the recounting of bizarre experiences and extreme situations in an understated, deadpan manner, but this domestication of perspective never becomes either too genteelly sanitised or too gratuitously shocking, since all effects are achieved by steady yet subtle implication.

The title story concerns a happily married woman’s just-for-the-sake-of-it, just-to-see-what-it’s-like infidelity, a playful but self-indulgent caprice for which she gets rather more than she bargained. ‘Storms’ charts the effects of a mother’s descent into madness on her daughter. ‘The Singing Cashier’ deftly incorporates the Fred West story into a piece about a young woman who trades sex for food: ‘I drank Fred West’s milk while my sister was fucking the postman’ is one of the few more up front, in-your-face declarations in the book. ‘Burns’ deals with a man and his children and his second wife (the kids’ stepmom) in their attempt to exorcise the ghost of his first wife, the natural but abusive mother of the children. In ‘A Scent of Winter’ a Southern man has taken the law into his own hands with his now anorexic wife’s black rapist, and seeks legal advice about how best to avoid detection. In ‘You Can’t Be Too Careful’ a murderer frames the narrator. ‘Passport Soup’ is a short but searing tale, reminiscent in theme of Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel The Child in Time, and in terseness of tone - if not plainness of language - to the more successful stories of Raymond Carver, in which a wife mentally tortures her husband for losing their daughter. Although it may be an over-obvious reference point, it is still high praise to mention that there is more than a touch of the Flannery O’Connoresque Southern Gothic about the stories set in the States.

Nascent feminism in rural Ireland is another recurring thread, and in ‘Storms’, ‘Quare Name for a Boy’, ‘Men and Women’ and ‘Sisters’ we meet women and girls living in isolation in the Irish countryside, giving over their lives to caring for mostly ungrateful men. However, rather than becoming bleakly resigned to their situation, sooner or later Keegan’s characters make a gesture of defiance, and take some form of affirmative action. She also writes with almost equal fluency in both male and female voices and from those points of view, and it is no accident that ‘Men and Women’ is arguably the most perfectly realised story in the collection, although I would be very surprised if the familial sexual politics it contains were that of contemporary Ireland.

This book is a grower, and its pleasures and virtues sneak up on you slowly. Like good poetry, one’s appreciation increases with repeated readings. Despite, or more probably because of, the detachment, coolness and iciness, there’s fire down below. Finally, this woman is great at leave-it-hanging endings.

Keegan has just completed an M Phil in Creative Writing at Trinity College, and is currently embarked on a novel. Not only does this volume give just cause to revise upward one’s opinion of such courses, but its wonderfully accurate descriptive passages and scene-setting, and its attention to the nuances of language, place and character, auger very well for what is yet to come.

First published in Books Ireland 

Marilyn and Me By Ji-min Lee

Marilyn and Me

By Ji-min Lee

(4th Estate)

The Korean War (1950-1953) is commonly referred to in the Anglophone world as ‘The Forgotten War’, which apart from the more obvious question ‘Why?’, also prompts the query ‘By whom?’ 

The ‘Why?’ has several credible explanations, foremost among which is that, sandwiched between the euphoric rectitude of the ‘Just War’ victory over the forces of evil in World War II, and the nadir of the moral bankruptcy and humiliation of ‘The War That Wasn’t Won’ of Vietnam, the Korean conflict has been consigned to a footnote in American history. This is to underestimate grossly its importance: not only as the first major conflagration and carve-up along Cold War lines, which still resonates today in the Trump administration’s agitation over North Korea’s nuclear capability; but also because of the sheer devastation it caused the war-torn country. Between three and four million people lost their lives, as many as 70% of whom were civilians. Destruction was particularly acute in the North, which was subjected to over two years of sustained American bombing, including the first use of napalm. Roughly 25% of Korea’s prewar population was killed. Damage was also widespread in the South, where Seoul changed hands four times. 

As for the ‘By whom?’, it would appear the answer is ‘Everyone, except the North Koreans.’ Largely elided from American historical discourse, and too painful to be passed on to younger generations of South Koreans by those who survived, in the popular consciousness the most significant fact about the Korean War is that for four days in 1954, Marilyn Monroe entertained American troops stationed there.

All of which preamble is only important for our purposes here because this war and its aftermath is the world inhabited by the heroine and first-person narrator of this novel, Alice J. Kim – real name Kim Ae-sun. The novel opens in Seoul in February 1954, just over six months after the armistice, but with military tensions still high, American troops present in force, and the country itself completely devastated. Alice, now in her late twenties, who was an artist and something of an intellectual before life-altering events overtook her during the war, is working as a typist on the U.S. base, where she is the only Korean woman making a living off the American military without being a prostitute – although everyone assumes that she is. ‘Only whores or spies take on an easy to pronounce foreign name.’

When Marilyn Monroe takes time out from her Japanese honeymoon with Joe DiMaggio to tour Korea, Alice is selected as her translator, because of her trilingual skills. With her prematurely grey hair which she dyes with beer, her fraying lace gloves that hide (self-inflicted) burn marks on her hands, and the memories she fears will engulf her, Alice is – in contemporary parlance – suffering from PTSD, and so initially subdued in the presence of the famous Hollywood starlet. ‘War had killed the love and hope and warmth within me, but it had also spared me. I covered my face with my hands, sobbing out the last bit of love to shore up the life remaining inside.’ But as these two women form an unlikely, temporary friendship, the story of Alice’s traumatic experiences in the conflict emerges, and when she becomes embroiled in a sting operation involving the entrapment of a Communist spy she is forced to confront the past she has been trying so hard to repress. 

The narrative alternates between 1954 and the years 1947-50, and much of Alice’s current suffering is related to her pre-war, personal love life. Her two ex-lovers, who reappear in her post-war present, are married writer Yo Min-Hwan, and Joseph Pines, an American spy posing as a missionary. They form a naïve ménage a trois, which ends abruptly when she betrays one with the other. But she is also haunted by her failure to protect two little girls in her charge during the strife, Yo’s daughter Song-ha, and Chong-nim, an orphan ‘who grabbed my hand trustingly as we escaped Hungnam amid ten thousand screaming refugees.’

Alice is a suicide survivor who is planning another attempt, but who comes to realise before it is too late that she is not necessarily responsible for the survivor guilt which is crippling her. Obviously written with an eye to possible filmisation (Lee is a successful screenwriter in her native country), hardly a word is wasted in this beautifully written short novel, especially during the early scene-setting sections. However, the cathartic effects, delineated in the denouement, of Alice’s time with Marilyn, are at best tenuous and at worst contrived. It is telling that the only way to get a Western audience interested in a neglected international episode in which the West was involved, is to drag in one of its most legendary cultural icons, kicking and screaming, rather than focusing solely on the validity of an indigenous woman’s experiences. But maybe that was a calculated compromise, deemed judicious. The work is, nevertheless, a necessary and timely act of reclamation and remembrance for the so-called Forgotten War.

Published in The Irish Times, 01/08/2019 

W. B. Yeats – Man And Poet By A Norman Jeffares

W. B. Yeats – Man And Poet

By A Norman Jeffares

(Gill and Macmillian)

This reissued critical biography was first published in 1949, and remains one of the key texts about Yeats. Jeffares mixes biography and criticism, showing the interrelationship between the life and the work, and how one who said that we must choose either perfection of one or the other, achieved a high degree of accomplishment in both. 

Yeats was lucky in having an indulgent father and a supportive family. He was no genius at school, and as anyone who has read his prose will know, he remained a bit woolly headed all his life. ‘You would like to be a philosopher when you are really a poet,’ his father told him. We learn of the meetings with, and influence of, George Russell, John O’Leary, Katharine Tynan and, of course, Maud Gonne. In later life, when he told her, ‘I am not happy without you.’, she replied, ‘Oh yes, you are, because you make beautiful poetry out of what you call your unhappiness and you are happy in that. Marriage would be such a dull affair. Poets should never marry. The world should thank me for not marrying you.’ We see how he endured poverty until well on in life, but stuck to his guns. He also stood by John Synge, when the mob was baying for his blood, and we get the details of the founding of The Abbey in 1904.  

Jeffares is good on the different stages in Yeats’ development as a poet. He is right when he writes: ‘The verses in The Wind Among The Reeds have great beauty, but lack the honesty, even the bitter and brutal honesty, of much of his late work. That is why the newcomer to Yeats’ poetry finds that the unreality of the earlier symbolism is less striking than the expression of the full man in the later work.’ Jeffares is quite specific about the nature of the change: ‘He had cut away the props which supported his early work: he no longer relied on the elaborate mythology which he had created for himself out of the romantic poets, the Celtic legends, folklore and a smattering of symbolism. His verse had changed and he had begun to write the poetry which was to make him leader of a new generation of poets, unique in the history of English literature as a poet who was able to change his style so completely, to write with increasing energy as he grew older.’

My own view on Yeats is that he took a long time to grow up and get good, (he hadn’t done anything like his best work when he won the Nobel Prize), and that on a personal level he was probably the kind of person who was a royal pain in the ass to know (I mean, you can hardly imagine going for a pint with him in The Flowing Tide when the was director of The Abbey). Even his wife George said, ‘He simply did not understand people.’ But he did remain in Ireland at a time when anyone with an ounce of creative talent was getting out as fast as they could, and any artist working in Ireland today owes something of the freedom they now enjoy to Yeats. In that measure, he is heroic.

This is a handsome edition, which will compliment Denis Donoghue’s Modern Masters study, and will provide a service until, and probably after, Roy Foster’s biography appears.         

             

Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go                                                                                  

By Kazuo Ishiguro

(Faber & Faber)

Reviewing this book presents the commentator with the perennial problem, more usually encountered by film critics, of how to elucidate the material without giving away the all important twist upon which it all hangs, the revelation of which retrospectively casts the whole story in an entirely different light. Alas, due to the excellent publicity job done by the publishers, the world and his wife knows by now that the new novel by former Booker Prize winner Ishiguro (for 1989’s The Remains of the Day) is ‘about clones’, a fact only verified for the unforewarned reader when he reaches p127 of the text. Some reviewers have even been foolhardy enough to describe the work as Ishiguro’s first foray into science fiction. This is doubly unfortunate, since to focus exclusively on the biotechnological element of this genre-defying and -defining story represents a seriously reductive reading of what is, like most of the best science fiction, a subtly allegorical tale. For this is not so much a novel about clones, as one about that far more extreme state of existence, which we cringe with embarrassment in calling ‘the human condition’. This is the reason, rather than the fact that most of you will already have heard anyway by now, that this writer has little compunction about the potential party-pooping involved in giving the game away. Besides, Ishiguro is a determinedly undramatic writer, his fictions usually proceeding by subtle shifts in tone rather than grand gestures. By the time our suspicions are confirmed, it is no more than we have guessed.

Kathy, Ruth and Tommy were pupils at Hailsham, an idyllic private school somewhere in the English countryside. The children were sheltered entirely from the outside world and brought up to believe that they were special. While it strikes us as strange that they have only initial letters for surnames, and that no mention is made of their families, they are not aware of anything out of the ordinary in their circumstances, as how could they know any different?

At Hailsham they were educated by guardians: the Principal Miss Emily, the gentle Miss Geraldine, and the sporty Miss Lucy, the latter of whom grows uneasy with the way her charges are being treated, given what’s in store for them, and unceremoniously spills the beans. They are also visited by Madame, who takes their more accomplished art and poetry away with her, for her gallery. But they are vaguely yet unmistakeably aware that those responsible for their welfare are palpably repulsed by them. With the otherworldly atmosphere a splendidly idiosyncratic but worryingly euphemistic vocabulary emerges, and we learn that these young people will in early adulthood become ‘carers’ in recovery centres, and then ‘donors’ themselves, and even go searching for their ‘possibles’, before they eventually ‘complete’.  

Now thirty-one, Kathy looks back on the past and narrates the haunting story of how she and her two best friends slowly come to deal with the truth about their seemingly happy childhoods, the place where it happened, and what the future holds for them. Kathy and Tommy are flabbergasted to learn later, when they finally confront their former guardians, that there could possibly have been a serious debate in the wider world about whether or not they had souls. But they, it transpires, were the lucky ones, having received an enlightened education. The majority of their kind, bred only for the use their internal organs would be put to, was not deemed worthy of such special care, and their upbringing was rather more rough and rudimentary. Yet, if their end is to be exactly the same as the others, it begs the question, which they rightly ask, “Why Hailsham at all?” The place was a sham, but they have to hail it.     

When I claimed above that it did not matter if this review revealed the plot, invoking our old friend the ‘human condition’ as my excuse, it was precisely because Ishiguro is asking a more universal question here about the nature of mortality, for all of us: if we are all going to die, sooner or later, what’s the point of any human striving and achievement? “Why anything at all?” We distract ourselves with religion, thinking holy people inhabit another plain, and will be saved; or with art, imagining artists live more fully than other people and that art is redemptive; or with the search for love, hoping that finding someone else to share it all with will confer meaning on our lives and make us happy. Yet our fate remains unchanged: we are still going to die. However special we are, or imagine ourselves to be, no one is spared. Paradoxically, the clones have it both better and worse than the rest of us: they at least die giving life, but they help prolong the lives of uncaring and ungrateful humans. It is perhaps significant here that while most humans can reproduce, these clones cannot have children.

This book is so much more than a meditation on the ethical problems thrown up by genetic research. If the characters seem emotionally stilted, just try imaging what it would be like to grow up in an institution, without parents, or even the knowledge that people have parents, and with no expectations of having a family to raise or a career to develop. By the same token, Kathy and Ruth and Tommy are no more or less repressed than Stevens, the butler in The Remains of the Day. What is ultimately seen as important is the act of remembrance, for as Kathy writes towards the end, ‘I was talking to one of my donors a few days ago who was complaining about how memories, even your precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t see them ever fading. I lost Ruth, then I lost Tommy, but I won’t lose my memories of them.’ What history is to a nation, memory is to the individual. Which is why the amnesiac pianist hero of Ishiguro’s wonderful previous novel, The Unconsoled, is condemned to living in a nightmare world where something always prevents him getting things done, and he can never finish anything.

In cool, pellucid prose, while deftly withholding and gradually revealing salient information, Ishiguro has fashioned yet another indelibly strange but oddly moving work of art, which is, in the end, a love story, as flat yet hypnotic as the Norfolk landscape it references.   

First published in The Sunday Independent