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 He is also a failed, or rather, unpublished writer, who knows that he can ‘talk a good book’, even if he has never written, or rather, finished one.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/

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.

A shorter version of this interview appeared in The Goo Dublin music listings magazine in April. 

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