The Line of Beauty By Alan Hollinghurst

The Line of Beauty                                                                                  

By Alan Hollinghurst

Picking up from where his popular debut The Swimming Pool Library left off, Alan Hollinghurst’s new novel covers the four years from 1983 to 1987, beginning with the ’83 Tory landslide election victory, which copper fastened the hold of the political and economic philosophy which has come to be known as Thatcherism over the British people.

Meet 20-year-old Nick Guest, son of a provincial antiques dealer, who has just ‘come down’ from Oxford with a first in English, where he also ‘came out’ as a homosexual. Embarking on a dissertation at UCL on Henry James and style, he takes up residence in an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Fedden family, having been friendly with – and fancied – the son of the house, Toby, while at college, although this passion had remained in the realms of fantasy, due to Toby’s exclusive straightness. The ostensible reason for Nick’s first moving in was to ‘keep an eye on’ Catherine, Toby’s sister, while the rest of the family were on holiday in France, as she is prone to mood swings and unpredictable behaviour, and is later diagnosed as manic-depressive. She is also the single most interesting character in the book since, more than any of the others, she provides a kind of moral centre, by standing at a critical angle to the assumptions and ambitions of her parents.

These progenitors are Gerald, a fiercely competitive and shamelessly self-publicising newly-elected Tory MP and successful businessman, with a telling line in those hideous white-collared shirts with a differently-coloured body, so beloved of plutocrats and other high-achieving male professionals the world over; and Rachel, his wealthy, aristocratic wife, characterised by her own neat line in quiet irony.

And so we swan with Nick from one interminable party to another, even sojourning, through him, at the Feddens’ French chateau for a month-long summer break. Two vividly contrasting love affairs, with a young black local council clerk, and the son of a Lebanese supermarket millionaire, dramatise the dangers and rewards of the aesthetic Nick’s own private pursuit of beauty, which is as compelling for him as the acquisition of power and money is for the Feddens and their friends.

It all starts to become strongly redolent of an updated Brideshead Revisited although, tellingly, the old money as represented by Rachel’s brother Lord Kessler have nothing but disdain for the parvenus sponsored by the Thatcher boom years, however wealthy they may become. ‘The Lady’, as she is known to her admirers in her party, even gets a walk-on part, at a party in the Feddens’ house, where Nick actually dances with her (although he secretly voted Green at the election which gave Thatcher her third term). Given that the now thankfully moribund Celtic Tiger was, to a large extent, identikit Thatcherism, a dissection of this nouveau riche milieu may prove of some interest to Irish readers. On the other hand, if observing the doings of vacuous wannabe aristos does not float your boat, it can get mighty tedious.

For my part, I found myself tiring of spending 616 pages of my time in the company of a collection of people who, for the most part, would be greatly improved by, and benefit immeasurably from, being slapped around the head, face and neck with a wet fish. (Indeed, there is a school of thought which says that they should be first up against the wall, come the revolution, but let it pass.) The majority of them, whether of the older or younger generation, are crushing bores, the kind of people you wouldn’t want to be marooned at a weekend house party with – our hero only intermittently excepted. But, then again, they’d probably think I wasn’t a lot of fun as their house guest, either. The choice is yours.   

For the last third of the novel, things grow steadily darker. With the onset of AIDS, many of those around Nick start dropping like flies, until in the end he intuitively concludes that he himself is infected, and learns that most difficult lesson of all for would-be aesthetes: to see beauty in simple things. The moral decay anatomised by Henry James in The Spoils of Poynton, for example, of which Nick has written a screenplay, consists in loving things more than people – although that is hardly an attitude exclusive to aesthetes. Gerald is forced to resign in disgrace after being exposed in insider trading (not that that stops him taking up an £80,000 p.a. directorship the following week), and found out having an affair with his secretary (but, hey, that’s what Tory M.P.s do, isn’t it?). Nick and his buddies also get increasingly snowed under in an avalanche of cocaine – the phrase of the title working on several levels.

What is noteworthy here, as evidenced also by Colm Toibin’s recently published novel The Master, is the extent to which Henry James is retrospectively becoming something of a gay icon, although he never wrote directly about the topic himself. This reticence is undoubtedly understandable since, as Toibin has observed elsewhere, in relation to James’ attitude to the Wilde controversy, we can imagine James’ reaction to the prospect of hard labour.  

A problem arises, however, if you ponder how applicable the methods of The Master are to contemporary situations. With his playful, yet exact, yet subtle discriminations, Hollinghurst is a much finer prose stylist than Toibin, but the greatest gay writers and artists – among them Jean Genet, William Burroughs, Francis Bacon, Andy Warhol and Edmund White – were all doing something new with the language and the form, in an attempt to reflect the times, rather than rehashing tried and trusted techniques. Or else, like more traditionally humanistic practioneers such as David Leavitt or Michael Cunningham, they touch emotional depths the surface of which remains only scratched here.

While, as Josef Brodsky wrote in his essay on Constantine Cavafy, ‘homosexuality is a form of sensual maximalism which absorbs and consumes both the rational and the emotional faculties of a person so completely that T.S. Eliot’s old friend, “felt thought” is likely to be the result’, he also qualifies this by stating, ‘What matter in art are not one’s sexual affiliations, of course, but what is made of them.’ Just as feminists tend to bring feminism into everything, and Irish writers tend to bring ‘Irishness’ into everything, so too can gay writers seem to write of nothing but gay life. So who is being ghettoised by whom? With Hollinghurst, one thinks of an observation in Julian Barnes’ novel Flaubert’s Parrot, about how Auden, Spender and Isherwood preached ‘socialism as a sideshoot of homosexual law reform.’ To be kinder, it could be argued that they framed their socio-political views in terms of their psychosexual identities. While The Line of Beauty is a worthwhile sociological record, rich in its awareness of manifold ironies, it ultimately remains strictly for the gay set – and the more well-heeled of that confraternity to boot.

First published in The Sunday Independent

The Mulberry Empire By Philip Hensher

The Mulberry Empire

By Philip Hensher

(£17.99stg, H/B)

The new doorstop novel (537 pages!) by Philip Hensher, who is a columnist for the London Independent and chief book reviewer for The Spectator, covers a decade, concerns the First Afghan War, and ranges from London to Calcutta, St Petersburg to Kabul. In the spring of 1839, the forces of the British Empire entered Afghanistan in splendour, deposing Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, Pearl of the Age, and installing their puppet Shah Shujah-ul-mulk. Three years later, in 1842, all that was left of that great army was a single British horseman, spared only so that he could tell the tale of the peremptory Afghan revenge.

The chief characters of this tome are Alexander Burnes, a Scottish adventurer at loose in Asia; Bella Garraway, the London high society debutant with whom he has a brief affair; and the Amir himself. Given the current international situation, one would have thought that it would prove instructive to discover more about the history of this region, before it became a hapless, unsuspecting venue for a ‘war on terrorism’. But, as Hensher tells us in the ‘Errors and Obligations’ at the end of the book, ‘…this is a pack of lies, though outlines of my imaginary war occasionally coincide with those of a real one…’

So, if it makes no claims to historical accuracy, does it work as fiction? Alas, no. Hensher is not a natural writer, and provides yet another example of a prevailing trend, that of perfectly good journalists who think they can cut it as novelists. The rambling story, the thin characterisation and the turgid prose do nothing to justify the book’s length, and it has none of the intellectual rigour or metaphysical playfulness that make Antonia Byatt, who Hensher tells us was the book’s ‘onlie begetter’, and ‘told me bluntly from the beginning that I must write a long novel’, so entertaining and worth reading.

For, if there is a ‘fairly awful Irish historical novel’ (rain, miserable upbringing, alcohol abuse, rain, authoritarian priests, did I mention the rain?), there is also a ‘fairly awful English historical’ equivalent (pomp and circumstance, dashing hero, stiff upper lip, pomp and circumstance, wise and virtuous heroine, let’s not forget the pomp and circumstance). And, while there are hints of a healthy English revisionist attitude to the legacy of empire going on here, it still remains for the former imperial power to produce a writer who will address the empire which has been busy writing back, via inventive storytellers like Salman Rushdie, and respond to the colonised’s missives with a matching vigour and élan. 

First published in the Irish Independent, in 2002 when the book reviews section of the Weekender Supplement was edited by John Spain.

Nowhere Man By Aleksandar Hemon

Nowhere Man

By Aleksandar Hemon

(Picador, £15.99stg p/b)

This second novel from Hemon, a follow-up to 2000’s The Question of Bruno, which was one of the most celebrated debuts of recent years, concentrates on a secondary character from that book, moving him centre stage.

When we last encountered Jozef Pronek, he had left Sarajevo to visit Chicago in 1992, arriving just in time to watch war break out at home on TV. Unable to return, Pronek began to make his way in a foreign land. His adventures proved bemusing, confusing, heartbreaking and, every so often, hilarious.

With Nowhere Man, we get this accidental refugee’s back story, interspersed with snapshots of how his life now, as an unwilling nomad, is progressing. From his boyhood in Sarajevo and the grand projects of his adolescence – fighting to change the face of rock and roll, struggling to lose this troublesome virginity – to his meeting with George Bush père in Kiev, his enrolment in a Chicago language school, and his life as a minimum-wage-slave fundraising door-to-door for Greenpeace, Pronek’s experiences are both touchingly familiar and bracingly extraordinary.

Like his hero, Hemon was born in Sarajevo and arrived in Chicago in 1992, an autobiographical identification which may prove too close for comfort for some readers. He began writing and getting published in English in 1995.  

Rather like being a Northern Irish poet in the 1970s, hailing from the traumatised conflagration of the Balkans in the 1990s can have done Hemon’s ascendant star little harm. As Harry Lime had it in The Third Man: ‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce?  The cuckoo clock.’

But much of the work of the man whose song lends this book its title, John Lennon, was autobiographical, as indeed is that of most lyric poets. Whether the recounting of incidents based wholly or partly on personal experience works as well in fiction is for the reader to decide. However, there can be little doubt that Hamon would have been a writer, albeit perhaps slightly less feted, no matter where he came from.

Desmond Traynor is a Hennessey Literary Award winner, whose essays and short stories have been widely published.

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 By Seamus Heaney

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996

By Seamus Heaney

(Faber and Faber)

Even before he won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, for what the Swedish Academy of Letters called his ‘works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth’, Seamus Heaney was already the most famous Irish poet of his generation, known both at home and abroad even to people who might not usually read, or necessarily know very much about, poetry. This popularity has been a mixed blessing for him, especially as it was gained on foot of the pastoralism of his early work, which drew on and explored his rural background, leading many to suppose that he has not moved on since then, and to accusations of having evaded the realities of late twentieth century life. This criticism has surfaced once again in the critical reception of Opened Ground, which contains work from all of Heaney’s collections up to now, from Death of a Naturalist in 1966 to The Spirit Level in 1996, a greater number of poems than would usually appear in a Selected, but fewer than would make up a Collected, belonging somewhere in between the two categories. The usual strictures were expressed most stridently in a review written by the English-based, Australian poet Peter Porter for The Daily Telegraph, in which he extended the argument about failure to engage with the vices and virtues of the modern world to encompass all Irish poets, with the notable exceptions of  Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson, saying that Ireland alone among English-speaking countries has been granted this enviable immunity.

But a trawl through Opened Ground, and perhaps most of all a reading of ‘Crediting Poetry’, his Nobel acceptance lecture which is also included here, reveals the tension that has always existed in Heaney’s mind and art between social responsibility and creative freedom. He has always been a brilliant essayist (in fact, very often I prefer reading his critical writings over his poetry, although that probably says more about some gross temperamental deficiency in me, rather than casting aspersions on his creative writing, even if the best criticism is always highly creative anyway). In ‘Crediting Poetry’ he traces his journey from the nature lyrics he started with, to how he was forced to become a poet of public as well as private life in response to Northern Ireland’s descent into violence after 1968, ‘a quarter century of life waste and spirit waste’ as he puts it. Indeed, it is odd that Heaney is often accused, generally by sectarian extremists seeking to enlist him for their cause, of having shirked the Northern situation, especially when one considers the darkness of works such as North and Station Island. Then, another change of direction came a few years ago, when he stopped acting like ‘some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world’, and began ‘not in obedience to the dolorous circumstances of my native place but in spite of them’ to straighten up and ‘make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous’, which is reflected in the volumes Seeing Things and The Spirit Level.

It has been a remarkable trajectory, from being the child who first encountered the word ‘Stockholm’ on the face of the radio dial in the kitchen of the traditional thatched farmstead on his family’s farm, to the man standing on the platform in Stockholm as guest of the Nobel Foundation, an outcome ‘not just beyond expectation’ for his younger self, but ‘simply beyond conception’. In the intervening years, he has learned how to ‘adjudicate among promptings variously ethical, aesthetical, moral, political, metrical, sceptical, cultural, topical, typical, post-colonial and, taken all together, simply impossible’. But what artist has ever lived in ideal times? They don’t award you the Nobel Prize for Literature for nothing.

As well as having suffered because of his popularity, Heaney has also been a victim of his own niceness and generosity of spirit. There is nothing in the rule-book to say that writers have to be nice people, but neither does being a writer grant a license to not be a nice person, as many writers seem to think and many audiences to expect. He signed his earliest poems ‘Incertus’, the uncertain one who crept before he walked, and then identified with the mythical figure Antaeus, who lost his strength if he was lifted off the ground. In a subsequent poem he had Hercules defeat Antaeus. As this book ably demonstrates, the ground has been opened, in a quietly earth-shattering way, and despite his elevation, Heaney shows no signs of falling, of losing his power.

First published in The World of Hibernia

Sudden Times By Dermot Healy

Sudden Times

By Dermot Healy

(Harvill, £10.99)

If, as was suggested sometime ago by the esteemed film critic of the Irish Sunday Times, Gerry McCarthy, in his Film Ireland review of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, with reference to Kafka and Pynchon, Hitchcock and Cronenberg, that paranoia was the defining condition of the twentieth century, then Dermot Healy is up there with the best of them, and is taking this most terrifying but potentially fruitful of mental states into the new century as well. For if Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy is more usefully read as being about the disjunction between what is going on in a boy’s head and what is going on around him, rather than about what it was like to grow up in Monaghan in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, and if Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man is better appreciated as being about them knowing more than us, and being out to get us too, by trying to rule us through fear, rather than interpreted as a literary comment on the Northern Situation, then Sudden Times is about a person seeking refuge in what society denominates as madness –  a la R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz – because their experience is too traumatic to face, rather than about the condition of Irish emigrants working on London building sites.

Ollie Ewing has returned to his native Sligo from London and is ‘lying low’, living at the top of a rundown house with some art students at the Regional Technical College. By day, he works as a trolley-boy and shelf-stacker in a local supermarket, by night, he tries to dodge his recurrent nightmares. These centre almost exclusively, and hardly surprisingly, on the scarifying events which took place when he was a navvy in London, living in a mobile home on a vacant lot with his best friend from the old country, Marty.

                      The intimacy you once had with someone is hard to forget at

                    the beginning. It returns stronger than ever before.

                        I would say I was not right in the head.

                        That’s right.

                        High all the time on sorrow, and low because of what you

                    think is being said about you.

                    ...

                        It all came back. The worst thing is I turned religious. That

                    can happen the best of us. I walked to the window in the hostel

                    and looked out at the monastery that had not been inhabited in

                    over two centuries. In my head I heard beautiful psalms. This

                    need of mine for God is a travesty. The traveller wanted to speak

                    of Aristotle and I wanted to speak of St Paul. You’ll get that. You

                    push too much onto someone.

 

Marty wound up murdered through his involvement as a foot-soldier with a sinister protection racket run by the devious and ruthless Silver John and Scots Bob, who are ostensibly site foremen. Ollie found Marty dead in the back of his lorry, after the later had gone off on a ‘business’ trip to Manchester. At least, he believes it was Marty, since the fact that the body was doused with acid made identification difficult. Then Ollie’s brother, Redmond, died of severe burns after a fight with Scots Bob. The whole thing climaxes in a courtroom cross-examination, which demonstrates the prejudices and power structures inscribed in legal rhetoric and practices, and has left Ollie even more disturbed.

The fact that we get the second half of the story first, back in Sligo, before moving back in time to events in London for the second half of the book, invites immediate re-reading, as did Healy’s previous novel, A Goat’s Song. It’s a clever narrative strategy, as it withholds explanatory information until its revelation will have most impact, and makes earlier sections clearer second time around.

With his central acting role in Nicola Bruce’s extraordinary film of Irish emigrant life in London, I Could Read The Sky, and his recent direction of Samuel Beckett’s play Footfalls, to say nothing of his founding and long-time editing of Force 10 magazine, there would seem to be no end to Healy’s talents and energy. Let’s hope he keeps up this level of creativity, for Sudden Times is a worthy addition to an already impressive body of work.

First published in Books Ireland

The Honeymoon By Justin Haythe

The Honeymoon

By Justin Haythe

(Picador, £15.99stg)

This debut novel by thirty-year-old Haythe concerns the Oedipal struggle between American boy Gordon, and his formidable divorcee mother Maureen, who has dragged him around the capital cities of Europe while he was growing up, as she pursued research for her never published guide to the art treasures of various museums and churches. Her ex-husband Theo, Gordon’s father, footed the bill for these peregrinations, while himself going through new wives with alarming frequency.

These are displaced Henry James characters, trying to live in a world already long vanished. As Gordon says of Maureen, early on: ‘Her great regret was that she had missed by fifty years the time when Europe was still open to Americans – when only the smart and the sensitive came across – and when, by merely opening your mouth, you did not immediately put people off.’

Cut adrift in London, where he is studying photography at a second-rate art college, Gordon takes up with Annie, shop girl and voracious reader, and starts to get a glimpse of a more quotidian, less rarefied world. As a culmination to their first date, they make love in the bushes on Hampstead Heath. Within a year, they are getting married.

Over the course of a year in London, Gordon and Annie try to construct an idea of married life for themselves, until their long-delayed honeymoon of the title takes them to Venice. This was the wedding gift of Maureen and her new beau Gerhardt, but kept having to be postponed. Trouble is, the offer was to accompany her and Gerhardt, rather than to go on their own. Honeymooning with one’s mother: now there’s a recipe for disaster. And so it proves. But was the absurd yet shocking act of violence perpetrated by Maureen against Annie done out of deliberate malice and madness, or just an involuntary symptom of the as yet undiagnosed brain tumour which would eventually kill her? It hardly matters, as Gordon and Annie’s relationship is blighted from then on. 

This is a subtle and well-written novel, with touches of sinister Banvillean atmospherics, not least in the exerts from Maureen’s guide which open some chapters, reminiscent as they are of the descriptions of paintings which grace Banville’s fine novel, Athena. It also captures perfectly the affectlessness which an over-aestheticised milieu can spawn, and the angst attendant upon having an overbearing mother.

First published in the Irish Independent

Curtains By Katy Hayes

Curtains

By Katy Hayes

(Phoenix House, £12.99)

This is Katy Hayes’ first novel, but she has already had a book of her fiction published, if only in Ireland, 1995’s wonderfully witty and subversive collection of short stories, Forecourt. In many ways Curtains may seem like a natural progression from its predecessor, but it doesn’t quite have the bite or insight of many of the stories in Forecourt, and seems curiously tame and toned down by comparison. The problems of making the transition from short story to full-length novel may account for some of the flatness here, but not entirely.

The setting is the claustrophobic and incestuous world of Dublin theatre, a milieu that Hayes, as a playwright and director, knows only too well, and which has also provided the source for a couple of the stories in Forecourt. Arlene - ‘actually it’s Ar-lay-nah’ - Morrissey is a successful producer putting together a production of Over The Moon, a first play by a young novelist, Isobel Coole. Isobel is outwardly a deranged wreck, throwing tantrums and attempting suicide, but it is implied that inwardly she has untold reserves of strength. Arlene is outwardly Ms. Together, with a diary full of contact numbers and a plethora of telephones, but it is implied that inwardly she is crumbling. Isobel leaves her boyfriend and moves in with Arlene for the duration of the preparation and run of the show.  

A wide range of characters tumble across the pages, including the actors (one of whom is Arlene’s ex-husband), the director, the cops, plus The Weirdo, who keeps leaving sinister personal messages on Arlene’s answering machine. Perhaps the funniest aspect of the book is Arlene’s recurring conversations with Paddy Kavanagh’s statue on the banks of the Royal Canal. But this imaginative leap is the exception rather than the rule, in what is an otherwise transparently realist text. There is the occasional nice phrase, like ‘He must have been sent by her fairy godmother or her guardian angel, depending on whether you had a Judaeo-Christian or a Hans Christian-Anderson view of the world’, but otherwise the style is for the most part dialogue driven and at times verges on journalese. There is a half-hearted attempt to introduce the abortion issue, but this remains unexplored. The ending is also rather weak and inconclusive. All in all, it reads like a somewhat more sophisticated, but tellingly less bitchy, Julie Burchill.  

One only hopes that Ms. Hayes will not resort to the reaction of her character Isobel Coole in the book, who goes around to the house of a reviewer, the appropriately named Tommy Hatchett, who gave her play an unfavourable notice, and interrupts a dinner party he is hosting in order to give him a piece of her mind.  

With its easy to read, potential mass-market appeal, one feels the cinema or TV screen would probably be better media for this narrative. Or even, given its author’s experience and its subject matter, the theatre.   

First published in Books Ireland

Resurrection Man/Marc Evans/1998

Resurrection Man/Marc Evans/1998

Arriving amid a welter of unfavourable reviews, and running for only one week, twice daily at UCI Tallaght, it would seem Resurrection Man, directed by Welshman Marc Evans, and scripted by Eoin McNamee from his own brilliant 1994 novel, never stood a chance of gaining any kind of audience acceptance in this country. (Whither the IFC, whither The Screen?) Which is a great pity, since it is perhaps the first screen representation of relatively recent events in Northern Irish history that has been made expressly for grown-ups. This is because, paradoxically, it is not really about violence in the North at all, but recognises that that violence has very little to do with the political and socio-economic context in which it takes place, but is more an immutable trait in individual human psychology, which would seek to find circumstances anywhere, any place, any time, that would help to sponsor and legitimise it. Thus a specific instance of aberrant and deviant behaviour is universalised, showing the arbitrariness of this particular set of origins.

    It has long been accepted that paramilitary groupings on either side of the so-called sectarian divide in Northern Ireland are little more than fronts for organised crime, who profiteer from extortion and protection rackets. But if the ideology and mythology of fighting for a cause can be used to cloak Mafia-style activity, it can also provide useful camouflage for various forms of psychopathology. In a recent piece in The Irish Times on filmic treatments of Northern Ireland, Fintan O’Toole criticised the character of the female IRA terrorist in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, as being little more than a dominatrix figure from male fantasy. But this was to miss an essential point of Jordan’s film, which is central to Resurrection Man too. For, if there is a politics of sexuality, there is also a sexuality of politics. If the desire to right wrong can be seen as analogous to sex in a loving relationship, then killing for the sake of killing can be seen as analogous to sadism. Killing to right wrong has long since had very little to do with the Northern situation, except where it can be exploited by vested interests. And just as these vested interests manipulate misplaced idealism, they can make equally good use of aspiring psychopaths. Of course, the distinctions get blurred, and it’s rarely as simple as that. How many freedom fighters know they’re psychos, and vice versa? And if the terrorist is the transgressor in the political arena, how transgressive are squaddies, who kill with the backing of a democratically elected government, but are really just Pit Bull terrier keeping, lager swilling, low rent de Sades? And if the sadomasochist is the transgressor in the sexual arena, how transgressive are many married couples, whose bedrooms are little more than minefields of dominance and submission? And how many of these sponsored supposed transgressives know they’re psychos, and vice versa?  

    Back to Resurrection Man. Stuart Townsend is excellent as Victor Kelly, capturing the fine balance of edginess and smarminess exactly right. The product of a household classically Freudian in its recipe for an extreme outcome, Victor is the only child of a doting, indulgent Protestant mother, and a weak, marginalised Catholic father. Brenda Fricker is outstanding as the adamant, vehement mother, a study in control and controlling. Victor soon finds McClure (Sean McGinley), who with his fondness for imperialistic anthems and Nazi memorabilia, helps to channel Victor’s anti-social tendencies. Heather (Geraldine O’Rawe) is Victor’s sometime girlfriend, and Ryan (James Nesbitt) a drunken wife-beating journalist who writes up the unfolding story of the knife murders for his newspaper, his interest as voyeuristic, a RUC officer points out, as that of his audience. Granted, Victor and his mother are the only two fully fleshed out characters, but this is a morality play, so cardboard cut-out ciphers will suffice to surround them, especially since that is how they view these people anyhow.

    The perennial cliched gripe remains, that the film is not as good as the book, the repetition of the various victims’ plea “Kill me, kill me” in particular loosing some of its hypnotic force when transposed from page to screen. But, as McNamee said in a television interview about adapting his novel for the screen, “The money’s good”. He also commented, in a seminar held recently in Cork, that the difference between writing a novel and a screenplay is that with the latter, at the end of the day you’ve finished a page. The deficiencies resultant on the shift from one medium to the other are ameliorated somewhat by the dark, fluid, grubby, rainswept look captured by Pierre Aim, the lighting cameraman who shot La Haine. The movie is violent, but given the subject matter, necessarily so, and is not gratuitous or exploitative. It is far from being the splatter fest some commentators have suggested, and is certainly no more violent than your average vacuous cops and robbers Hollywood flick.

    McNamee has also said that: “We have a moral responsibility to confront our history in this society. That’s what the film does and I think it does it responsibly.” But it also confronts the nature of violence in general. That Resurrection Man has touched a raw nerve in those from a loyalist background in the North can be gauged from playwright Gary Mitchell’s farcical claim in a recent Irish Times article that: ‘...they (the Shankhill Butchers) had reasons for doing what they did. For example, they understood that guns as murder weapons are extremely traceable; butchers’ knives, hack-saws, chisels and scissors are not.’ Strange, then, that one clean cut to the throat was not sufficient to dispatch a random victim, until a thousand small cuts were first administered all over the rest of the body. Strange, too, that prolonged blood loss by multiple minor incisions did not become the most popular method of murder for all factions in the six counties. Mitchell also wrote: ‘...when this small, thin man (Victor) suffocated a very large and heavy B J Hogg, any hope of realism left the auditorium. It is clear that the makers do not understand violence any more than they understand the Protestant community from which it was generated.’ But what Mitchell misses is that Hacksaw (Hogg) wanted to die, and that violence generated for an ostensible political aim but really as an end in itself always turns back on itself, punishing its own. Complicity is everything. By problematising these issues in an intelligent fashion, Resurrection Man makes most recent ‘Northern Movies’ seem simplistic to the point of childishness, still caught up as they are in trying to explain the conflict in straightforward political terms. As for where the buck stops, who are these ‘vested interests’, that’s another day’s work, involving arguments about the circularity of power and its exercise, but a good place to start looking would be the eternal heart of darkness, embodied in Mephistopheles, and delineated by Conrad, among others, including McNamee.

First published in Film Ireland

The Blue Tango By Eoin McNamee

The Blue Tango

By Eoin McNamee

(Faber & Faber, £10.99)

For his second full-length novel, after the harrowing achievement of Resurrection Man in 1994 (and not forgetting his two earlier novellas, Love in History and The Last of Deeds), Eoin McNamee ventures even further into the realm of faction. As documented by Shirley Kelly in her interview with McNamee in the last issue, The Blue Tango revisits a notoriously murky murder, and its subsequent investigation and the conviction that followed, which took place in and around Belfast nearly fifty years ago.

    In the early hours of November 13th, 1952, 19-year-old Patricia Curran, daughter of Judge Lancelot Curran, Northern Ireland’s Attorney-General and later Lord Chief Justice, was found dead in the grounds of her home, The Glen, outside Whiteabbey, on the outskirts of Belfast. The body was discovered by her father and her brother Desmond, a solicitor and Moral Rearmament activist. She had been stabbed 37 times.  Her mother Doris waited in the house.

    The ensuing investigation was led by RUC Inspector Albert McConnell, but Chief Inspector Richard Pim, in his efforts to protect the family, made things difficult for McConnell from the start, denying him permission to interview any of the surviving Currans, or to search the house. Pim pointed McConnell in the direction of a maniac, and one was sure to be found, hopefully among one of the Polish Free Army units that were stationed nearby. Come January, with no firm leads established, Pim drafted in Chief Inspector John Capstick of Scotland Yard and his assistant Detective Sergeant Denis Hawkins. McNamee renders the briefing exchange between Pim and the adulterous Essex policeman thus:    

              ‘I rather thought that a foreigner might be involved.  Stabbing is

          rather a foreign modus operandi, is it not, Chief Superintendent?’

              ‘It’s a useful thought, sir. Plenty of stabbings in London during the

          war. Spaniards, Arabs and the like. Stab you soon as look at you,

          some of them.’

              ‘What about Poles?’

              ‘The temperament is there, sir, no shadow of a doubt about it.’

        

A Scottish RAF serviceman, Iain Hay Gordon, was eventually charged with the crime. A shy, nervous outsider, and acquaintance of Desmond’s who had been to dinner in The Glen, he was a vulnerable target to pin it on. He signed a confession on the understanding that Capstick would withhold from his schoolteacher mother the suspicion that her son was homosexual. The confession itself was extracted by the novel technique of Capstick putting each alleged event to Gordon as a hypothesis, and when the suspect answered ‘Yes’, writing it down as fact.

    Gordon pleaded guilty but insane, spent seven years in a mental hospital where he received no treatment because the Superintendent thought he was perfectly healthy, and was then released and given a job for life in Glasgow, with the proviso that he change his name and never talk about the case. When he took voluntary redundancy in 1993, he began a campaign to clear his name. Last year, the verdict against him was quashed.

    All the above personages appear as characters in McNamee’s narrative, along with various other figures like journalist Harry Fergusson and Catholic bookmaker Hughes, from whom Lancelot Curran borrowed money to pay gambling debts.

    As with Resurrection Man, some will complain that the characters are cardboard cut-outs, but as with that novel, depths are revealed through surfaces. Others will cavil at the indeterminate mix of fact and invention, particularly as Desmond is still alive and working as a Catholic priest in South Africa, but there are literary precedents, in Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. It is a historical novel, as distance is needed for recollection and reconciliation.

    Again, as with his previous book, the prose style is reminiscent of the lapidary Puritan discourse of a morality play, a kind of latter-day Northern Catholic John Bunyan, which is ideally suited to the Manichean societal structures up there. Also striking is McNamee’s sensitivity to language register and its betrayal of social standing, as when some of the statements in the police records by soldiers read more like the product of a well-educated, middle-class professional hand. Like all true artists, McNamee takes nothing for granted at face value, and the nuances of the social pecking order are perfectly rendered. ‘Authority’ is one of the most frequently recurring words in the text.

    The atmosphere builds with the mounting weight of suppressed evidence against the family itself. Why were Patricia’s hat and bag found neatly stacked some distance from her remains? Why, after a wet night, were they perfectly dry? Why, if the hat was pinned and difficult to take off, did she remove it? Why did Lancelot Curran phone around her friends to find out where she was three-quarters of an hour after the body had been found? Why did Pim suppress records of these conversations? When the house was sold four years later, and a huge bloodstain discovered in an upstairs bedroom after a carpet was lifted, why did the police do nothing when they were called? There is also Gordon’s part in his own accusation and prosecution, through looking for an alibi before he was even under suspicion, and getting a fellow serviceman to lie for him. Patricia herself haunts the narrative in a ghostly fashion, a 1950’s version of Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, another instance of the good girl/bad girl archetype. Some say she was promiscuous, married men and the like, and got no more than she deserved, while this is balanced by Hughes’ recounting of her voluntary charity work in the area, recipients of which included his own widowed mother.

    This reads like an x-rayed tabloid, a record of gossip, innuendo and scapegoating. It is a reminder of the bad old days when sex was dirty, and married and missionary was the only game in town, and you could be blackmailed and destroyed for doing anything else, and all was ‘family values’, and men spoke about ‘the ride’. Maybe some men can’t enjoy sex unless it is ‘dirty’: that’s why they invented sexual morality. But, as we’ve discovered, morality need not apply solely to sexuality, and this tale of ex-public schoolboy men-in-suits rallying around to cover-up for and protect one of their own is something that still goes on, and perhaps always will.         

    At the time of writing The Blue Tango is on the Booker long list. A book of this poetic intensity and precision would be a worthy contender on the short list, and it secures McNamee’s position among the most talented younger novelists on this island.

First published in Books Ireland

A White Merc With Fins By James Hawes

A White Merc With Fins

By James Hawes

(Jonathan Cape, £12.99)

James Hawes’ debut novel, A White Merc With Fins, is a hilarious account of the planning and execution of a bank robbery, set in contemporary London. The unnamed hero, pushing 30 and living in a shed in Big Sis’s back garden, is terrified of becoming A Bald Man in a Bedsit (with those horrible orange curtains bedsits always have), and so concocts The Plan to rob Michael Winner’s Private Bank of one million pounds. The other members of The Gang are Suzy the Black Widow, Brady and Chicho, and along the way we met an assortment of other deviant and eccentric characters.

Hawes is great on England’s rigid class structure. You can be underclass (UC), working class (WC), lower middle class (LMC), middle class (MC) or upper class (UC).  (Is the fact that the underclass and the upper class have the same initials a suggestion that they have more in common with each other than anyone caught in between?) The protagonist is LMC with a college education, desperate to escape to MC Heaven. He tells us: ‘There are really only three super-tribes in London: the ones who will never be able to get mortgages, the ones who live and die by the mortgage rate, and the ones who do not need mortgages. Those are the ranks of slavery and freedom, the rest is all just questions of degree.’ The book presents a vivid picture of what a hole London really is.

There’s more than a hint of the smart-arsedness of the early Martin Amis (before he got good), but Hawes is less vicious, aiming more for the belly-laugh. The novel contains the most reasonable attitudes to heroin and to the IRA I have come across in fiction. It also has a couple of really good dirty, happy sex scenes.

It’s not exactly ‘deep’, but it is a laugh a page, and well worth a read. 

First published in The Big Issues

One Day As A Tiger By Anne Haverty

One Day As A Tiger

By Anne Haverty 

(Chatto & Windus, No Price Given)

Anne Haverty’s debut novel concerns a man living in the shadow of his more kindly and well-adjusted brother, his romantic attachment to that brother’s wife, and the feelings, which he shares with this woman, for a mutant sheep, a mutual interest which helps to bring them together and cement their relationship.

Clever young historian Martin Hawkins throws over his promising career at Trinity College and returns to the family sheep farm in Tipperary to brood instead on his own past, most notably the deaths of his parents and his failed romances. At odds with his conscientious brother Pierce, and with the country folk who are more worldly-wise than he is, and perceive him as a shiftless soul with his head in the clouds who has deserted his own calling, he is also furtively in love with Pierce’s restive wife, Etti, and harbours strange convictions about the genetically engineered lamb he calls Missy.

Missy is one of a flock that has been ‘improved’ with human genes. Pitiful, infinitely touching, surely unsheep-like, maybe even half-human, Missy figures significantly in Martin’s imagination. When Etti too comes to regard Missy with the same tenderness and empathy, she and Martin embark on a reckless and terrible adventure, which involves a doomed attempt to deliver Missy to Brigitte Bardot’s animal sanctuary in Provence, where they think she will be properly looked after. But will the adulterated animal that is Missy find a place in the affections of the former sex-kitten, given her jaundiced view of humanity?

If this all sounds ridiculously far-fetched, it is, but such is Haverty’s skill that she manages to make the strangest and most surreal of situations seem almost normal and quotidian. (A few years ago this modus operandi was termed ‘magic realism’, and was much favoured by Eastern European and South American writers.) Despite the apparently whimsical storyline, all the big themes are present here: love, hate, betrayal; death, bereavement, grief. The nature/culture opposition that is united in Missy is a metamorphosis as worthy of Ovid as it is of Kafka, with a dash of science fiction (or, indeed, science fact) thrown in for good measure. Haverty is also to be congratulated on pulling off the difficult imaginative feat of writing this first-person narrative in the voice of a male character, making it believable, and exploring the motivations towards misogyny without being judgmental or prescriptive. The evocation of rural life, both Irish and French, is brilliant, with moments of great beauty and passages of deep despair, and there is a subtle humour that cuts through the tragic pull of the story, placing it in the best Irish tragicomic tradition. The only other young Irish writer I can think of capable of such inventive accomplishments is Mike McCormick, whose first collection of short stories, Getting It In The Head, published last year, should be on everybody’s reading list.   

                  

In a world of fakes, Anne Haverty is the real thing: a writer who can write, with a faultless style that matches a thought-provoking story. Her next move will be watched, by me at least, with the keenest attention.

First published in The World of Hibernia

The Dancers Dancing By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

The Dancers Dancing

By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

(Blackstaff, £7.99)

The new novel from Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, which follows 1997’s excellent collection of short stories, The Inland Ice, concerns a group of girls from Dublin and Derry who go to the Donegal Gaeltacht in the summer of 1972. Their parents have sent them there, ostensibly to learn Irish, but also to ‘knock the corners off them’, and because it will give them an educational advantage over children whose parents have not bothered to send them. Also, presumably, it gives the parents a rest during the long school holidays.

Ní Dhuibhne once again displays her great gift for observing social nuances, and commenting obliquely but sardonically on the power structures which underwrite them. She also has a wonderful empathy for the manifold confusions and insecurities of early adolescence. Most of these perceptions are filtered through the mind of the central character, Orla, whose working class origins in a middle class milieu have sensitised her to the contradictions and injustices imposed through difference and division, such as those between adults and children, boys and girls, urban and rural, North and South, Irish and English. It is only in the final chapter, which looks back from the present day, that Orla writes in the first person, but it is still her point of view which informs most of the narrative.

Orla, thirteen and two months, is overweight, and in awe of her friend Aisling, twelve and a half, who has more presentable parents, whose clothes are better, who has more savior-faire. The other students in the house they are staying in are Jacqueline and Pauline, two Derry girls. This is a world of petty jealousies, casual hypocrisies and fumbling romances. The girls’ time is divided between Irish classes, ceilis and midnight feasts. The playful chapter titles include ‘What does your father do?’ and ‘The girls discuss the North of Ireland question’. The former contains the passage: ‘...somehow occupation is the defining feature as far as fathers are concerned. Nobody asks, ‘Is your father nice?’ (yes), What age is he? (don’t know), What colour are his eyes? (blue), Can he sing? (yes, and play the mouth organ), Can he tell jokes? (not really). Occasionally someone will ask, ‘Where does he come from?’ meaning what county in Ireland. The one question everyone asks is, What does your father do? What your father does is what defines your father, as far as other people are concerned. More significant, it is what defines you, if you happen to be a child. So it seems to Orla. Her father is a bricklayer. That is what he is. But Orla says, ‘He is a building contractor.’ ’ The latter subtly demonstrates how, for the young southern Irish, even in 1972, the north, with its problems, is an almost incomprehensible other country. But, most of all, this is a world where, in contrast to our more child-centred times, ‘Orla has no right to be a child. Nobody has or ever had; this is the thinking. Children are there to carry out adults’ orders, first and foremost. Their feelings, and adults do not believe they have any, simply don’t matter.’

The local detail is enviable in its exactitude: for the southern girls, Northern Ireland means Mars bars and Marathons; showbands and singers like Big Tom and The Mainliners and Roly Daniels appear at country dances.     

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s background in writing for children is evident, and given its subject matter and style, this book is equally accessible and of interest to adults and adolescents. The cover reprints a quotation of profuse approbation from this very magazine, culled from a review of Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s previous volume, although the critic’s name (for it is I) has unaccountably gone missing. However, here’s another recommendation that can be extracted as a blurb: when is the world going to discover Éilís Ní Dhuibhne?

First published in Books Ireland

The Inland Ice And Other Stories By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

The Inland Ice And Other Stories

By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

(Blackstaff, £7.99)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published in The World of Hibernia

John Banville: Exploring Fictions By Derek Hand

John Banville: Exploring Fictions

(Contemporary Irish Writers and Filmmakers Series)

By Derek Hand

(The Liffey Press, €16.50)

This is one of the first volumes in what promises to be an ongoing series, with Eugene O'Brien of Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, as general editor. As well as the John Banville opus, studies of Seamus Heaney, Brian Friel, Jim Sheridan, William Trevor and Conor McPherson have already appeared. Further books on Roddy Doyle, Neil Jordan, Jennifer Johnston, Brian Moore, Maeve Binchy, John McGahern and Colm Toibin are in the pipeline.

Derek Hand's doctoral thesis dealt with the image of the Big House in Yeats, Bowen and Banville, and here he sets himself the task of reclaiming Banville for Irish Studies by demonstrating the writer's relevance to Irish themes and concerns, mostly historical and sociological. The two texts he concentrates on as most readily fitting this agenda are Birchwood and The Newton Letter, presumably because they are first and foremost set in Ireland, rather than Greece or medieval Mitteleuropa, and so the given environment would be rather hard to avoid. The task of reclamation is deemed necessary by Hand partly because, 'John Banville himself has repeatedly downplayed the importance of his being Irish to engaging with his work: “I stay in this country but I’m not going to be an Irish writer. I’m not going to do the Irish thing.” ’, partly because, ‘Perhaps Banville has been influenced by one of his foremost critics, Rudiger Imhof, who believes that, ‘the Ireland of his (JB’s) art is merely a convenient backdrop to the more serious and interesting postmodern concerns being dealt with in the foreground.’, and partly because, with reference to Gerry Smyth's The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction as an example, of ‘how difficult it is to categorise Banville's writing with reference to Irish writing/literature in general’.   

What is odd about this introduction is that, rather than setting out to celebrate a great writer, or encouraging more people to read him because of the beauty and profundity of his work, it is already on the defensive, to the extent that it is almost apologising on the writer’s behalf, not only for the much vaunted (and greatly exaggerated) difficulty of said oeuvre, but also for his not being ‘Irish’ enough.

Hand takes Imhof to task for stating that, ‘Irish fiction in the twentieth century has been quite conventional in subject matter and technique, despite Joyce and Beckett and in spite of what has been going on elsewhere in the world.’, by countering that ‘…it is more accurate to say that most writing fails to take up where James Joyce and Samuel Beckett left off. The majority of writing today is “conventional” and traditional, presenting itself in the mould of “cosy realism”. It is as if the vistas opened up by Joyce and Beckett are too terrible to contemplate and writers - everywhere - retreat in the face of such formalistic and thematic experimentation. It is unfair, consequently, to single out Irish writing as having failed to learn the lessons of Joyce and Beckett, when almost everyone else has too.’ What we are encountering here is a specific example of the general vice of over-specialisation, of which the Irish Studies phenomenon is a particularly virulent strain. Hand’s riposte conveniently ignores much of the greatest writing of the second half of the last century, and the beginning of this one, most glaringly that of Americans like Faulkner, Burroughs, Pynchon, Gaddis, Barthelme, Barth, Coover, Gass, De Lillo, Acker, Wallace or Franzen; but also that of French nouveau roman writers like Camus, Sartre, Genet, Celine, Robbe-Grillet, Butor, Sarraute, Duras, Simon or Pinget, whose work rejected the plots, characters, linear chronologies and omniscient narrators of the nineteenth-century tradition, which had expressed that century’s belief in a knowable, representable world of which man was the centre and purpose, and that of the Oulipo writers such as Queneau and Perec who followed them and who, while they did not discover the idea that formal constraints stimulate rather than obstruct creative writing, took it to far greater lengths than before, thus simultaneously reaffirming the capacity of language to create texts from within its own operations and thereby shape our perceptions of reality, and freeing the writer from the obligation to create politically or philosophically committed literature; to say nothing of that of contemporary Scottish writers like Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Janice Galloway, A. L. Kennedy, Ali Smith, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Gordon Legge and Laura Hird, whose work contains much political anger, stylistic experiment and formal trickery; and that of mavericks, who it is even more senseless to classify by nationality, as diverse as Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Elias Cannetti, Malcolm Lowry, Vladimir Nabokov, Gertrude Stein, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Anthony Burgess, B. S. Johnson, Angela Carter, Jeanette Winterson or Jenni Diski; or the magic realists of Eastern Europe and South America, such as Kundera or Marquez; or discursive, meditative works like those of Claudio Magris, Roberto Callaso or W. G. Sebald. By the standards of many of the aforementioned, the majority of Banville’s work looks decidedly tame and even conventional in comparison. As I argued in my own Irish Literary Supplement review of Imhof's book, John Banville: A Critical Introduction, way back in 1990, ‘In a review of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, written in 1973 for Hibernia magazine, Banville complained about this “broth of a boy” who had written “a fat, bad book”, thus missing entirely the point that Pynchon’s book is concerned with the same chance/necessity conundrum which informs his own work, except that Pynchon accepts chaos, takes it as given, while Banville still struggles valiantly to impose order.’ While I would now acknowledge that Banville is the better stylist, I still submit that Pynchon knows more about the science, and has a firmer grip on the pulse of the zeitgeist. More importantly, nowhere does Hand’s introduction address the issue of Banville’s perceived lack of acceptance in the country of his birth, and explore what underlying reasons may be adduced for it, nor justify why, in the face of such relative indifference on the part of both author and audience, it is then necessary to emphasis his nationality as central to understanding his work. The obvious irony that the first full-length study of Banville to appear was written by a German rather than an Irish person is never highlighted. Also, while Hand may be urging us, a la D. H. Lawrence, to ‘trust the tale, not the teller’, it seems ludicrous to suggest that Banville has been influenced by one of his foremost critics in his own pronouncements on the unimportance of his being Irish to engaging with his work.

Admittedly, following Richard Kearney’s terminology, Hand points to ‘John Banville’s position of being caught between a modern and a postmodern perspective - both he and his characters wavering between desiring order and meaning while simultaneously recognising its absence, both looking forward and backward at the same time’, thus acknowledging that he is a transitional figure who feels the loss of ‘unifying, grand visions, which had the potential to order and give meaning to the world and man’s place in the world’ much more so than more playfully free-falling, fully-fledged postmodern writers and metafictionists. This dilemma is further located between ‘the artistic sure-footedness of high modernism epitomised by Joyce’ and Beckett’s ‘questioning the actual possibility of creating or saying anything.’ But to argue then that this ‘radical “in-betweenness” - his being neither a Joycean modernist nor a Beckettian postmodernist but an amalgamation of both; his desiring a word or words that can grasp the real, yet simultaneously despairing that such a language is possible; his many characters’ relentless search for a true authentic self that always end with the pessimistic conclusion that aching hollowness is perhaps all there is - is best understood within an Irish context’ is far-fetched and ill-founded, amounting to saying nothing more than, ‘Being Irish is central to understanding Banville’s work because to be Irish is to be at an angle to the mainstream and he is at an angle to the mainstream, and to be human is to be at an angle to the mainstream, so to be Irish is to be human, and John Banville is Irish, so he is therefore human.’

‘We’re modern because we’re Irish, and Ireland is like everywhere else’ is undoubtedly a viable argument, but it seems slight of hand (sorry) then to claim that modernity or postmodernity are thrown into sharp relief in the Irish situation, since that would make us ‘not like everywhere else’ all over again. It is also an odd way of claiming Banville for Irish Studies, since as a syllogism it would read: ‘Banville writes about modern universal concerns/Ireland is part of the modern universe/Therefore he is an Irish writer.’ One does not need the mind of Aristotle, schooled in non-contradiction and excluded middles, to spot the flaw in that line of reasoning. It also fails to explain why the Irish Studies crew still have such a problem with accepting Banville’s work, or why the majority of work produced in Ireland is still formally conservative or in the mode of cosy realism.

Of course, from the opposite perspective, while everywhere is like everywhere else, it is also true that nowhere is like anywhere else. Hand wisely recognises, with reference to the character of Victor Maskell in The Untouchable, ‘how complicated and protean a thing is Irish identity. Despite the insistent use of labels such as Protestant and Catholic, Anglo-Irish and Gaelic-Irish, there terms - as in the case of Victor Maskell - conceal as well as reveal.’  But what makes the advocates of Irish Studies think that Irish complexity is any more fascinating than Nigerian, or Cuban, or Japanese complexity, to throw out some random examples? Ireland is an environment, nothing more, nothing less. We may love every flea in our birth mattress as much as the Nigerians, Cubans or Japanese love theirs, but that’s only because it’s our mattress. They think their flea-ridden mattresses are the most loveable in the world too. Even the use of terms like ‘we’, ‘our’ and ‘us’ with reference to national identity is unsustainable, since they imply the existence of a level playing field and a strong sense of community, with no internal social inequalities and divisions and power relations. But Hand is smart enough to know this, since he remarks on how Maskell’s easy acceptance into upper class life ‘highlights how fluid and non-essential racial identity actually is.’ This recognition does tend to undermine the argument put forward in the rest of his book, though.

Hand also falls for the romantic distinction between head and heart, mentioning with reference to Nightspawn and in his conclusion that ‘A common criticism consequently levelled at John Banville’s work is that, perhaps because of this perceived lack of interest in storytelling, it is far too intellectual and cleverly playful for its own good…In other words, real emotion is replaced by a cold, calculating desire to engage only with abstract intellectual concerns.’ While he makes an eloquent plea for the real feeling in Banville’s articulation of the postmodern dilemma, he might have taken issue with the currently popular employment of the word ‘clever’ as a term of critical abuse, which employment usually amounts to nothing more than indicating that the writer under review is possessed of a fully functioning, fairly useful mind, or that the critic does not understand the book. For, while intellect can be a bar to understanding, it is interesting to follow the trajectory of how an independent mind works things out, or fails to do so. Cleverness and wisdom are not mutually exclusive. Besides, it is not as though Irish writing (or, given pervasive global dumbing down, writing anywhere), is exactly coming down with cleverness (or, to use a slightly less pejoratively loaded term, intelligence) at the present time.

Hand’s contention that The Newton Letter ‘…is, or as near as it is possible to be, quite perfect and perhaps his best piece of writing’ is one with which I would concur. However, a critic no less than a writer is revealed by his blind spots, and Hand is hard on Athena, the only one of Banville's mature novels he does not deal with in detail, opining that ‘…it is one book too many, stretching whatever interest a reader might have in Freddie as a character almost to breaking point.’ This does not recognise the fact that ‘Freddie as a character’ is perhaps not what we are supposed to be most interested in. And Beckett, one of Banville's greatest artistic mentors, knew more than enough about stretching things almost to breaking point, the quality of excruciation being one of the chief characteristics of his work. In truth, Athena continues The Book of Evidence’s and Ghosts’ thorough investigation of the authenticity, or lack thereof, of the self. Following Bataille, it explores the notion of the extinction of selfhood in extreme erotic experience (another first in ‘Irish’ writing!), a path in many ways as onerous as that of the mystic.

While not as comprehensive (up to The Book of Evidence) as Joseph McMinn’s John Banville: A Critical Introduction, and not as justifiably polemical and illuminating as Imhof’s book, Hand’s volume is worth a read for Banville enthusiasts. But general readers (at whom it is also obviously aimed, given the otioseness of phrases like, ‘James Joyce, in his great novel Ulysses’), should be wary of the amount of special pleading it contains.

Perhaps the solution to the solipsism of ‘Irish Studies’ (and ‘Hispanic Studies’ and ‘Women’s Studies’ and all the other ‘Studies’) is a championing of good old-fashioned Comparative Literature, where material is organised thematically, rather than nationally, so crossing all geographical borders. Of course, most academicians want art to be about society, not about words, images, styles etc, that is, about its own materiality. For my part, I doubt that John Banville devotes many of his waking hours to ruminating on Irish identity and what it means to be Irish. He may think that violence in Northern Ireland is a bad thing, but then so do most of us. Indeed, when asked in the recent Reading The Future interview with Mike Murphy, ‘So people saying that you are an Irish writer doesn’t mean anything to you really, does it?’, he replied, ‘No, no, I don't think it does to anybody. Certain Irish writers beat the Irish drum, but that’s a way of doing things.’ However, the Irish Studies industry, as currently constructed, needs new blood and fresh perspectives, and it does give us all something to talk about and write about and argue about, if and when we cannot stand to stop and listen to the underlying, ever-present silence.

First published in Ropes 11, NUI Galway

Headbanger By Hugo Hamilton

I reviewed Headbanger by Hugo Hamilton, it seems, in 1997 or thereabouts.

Headbanger

By Hugo Hamilton

(Secker & Warburg, £12.99)

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published in Books Ireland 

The Confessions of Max Tivoli By Andrew Sean Greer

The Confessions of Max Tivoli

By Andrew Sean Greer

Given the beauty of the prose of this novel, which almost cries out to be called well-wrought and delicately nuanced, and effortlessly accomplishes the difficult feat of being both finely tuned yet other-worldly, precise yet ethereal (the style is evidently catching), it is difficult to know where to begin summarising the narrative in a truncated review. That would very nearly spoil things, it seems. For the secret to the success of this novel lies almost entirely in the dandified, disenchanted voice of its  most unusual narrator, which harks back to the long, meditative, essayistic style inaugurated by Proust and brought to fruition by Nabokov. This is no small achievement for a contemporary author, since it would be so easy to get it wrong and look stupid, and requires balancing precariously on a tight rope between profundity and parody. And yet, to place the emphasis thus is to denigrate the sad enchantment of the very singular story. 

So, what’s it all about, then? ‘We are each the love of someone’s life’ declares Max Tivoli in the opening sentence, and so it proves. Unfortunately, that love is rarely reciprocated. When Max is born in San Francisco in September 1871, he has the external physical appearance of an old, dying man. Yet, as he ages, his body grows younger. If he looks seventy when he’s born, and lives his allotted threescore and ten, then he will die in 1941. His grandmother has the numerals of this year engraved on a gold pendent that he will wear around his neck, as a sort of memento mori, just to remind him. This peculiar condition also means that the only time his body and mind will be in total chronological concord is when he is in and around thirty-five.

Max’s appearance being constantly at variance with his inner life leads to all sorts of complications, as you can imagine, not least among which is the contretemps caused by his falling for fourteen-year-old neighbour girl Alice when she is fourteen and he a healthy, wholesome, budding boy of seventeen, but looking like a dirty old man of fifty-three. As he writes this memoir, he is forced to endure the indignity of reciting his times tables in primary school, even though he is pushing sixty. ‘Be what they think you are’ is his mother’s advice about how to get through his life, and mostly he heeds her, exceptions occurring in the case of the aforementioned Alice – whom, in a middle-aged guise, he goes on to marry, and later still, in a further deception, becomes her adopted son – and with his lifelong friend, Hughie. Max loved Alice, but Alice really loved Hughie who, in turn, having his own secret, really loved Max. ‘We are each the love of someone’s life’, indeed.            

With its atmospheric evocation of turn of the century San Francisco, and an extended road trip reminiscent of Humbert Humbert aimlessly dragging Dolores Haze through the American heartland, these confessions have more than enough to keep your interest from flagging. But its greatest achievement is that far from feeling outré, the irony is that Max’s predicament merely represents our own in extremis: wanting to be older when we are young, and wanting to be younger when we are old.

First published in the Irish Independent

The Importance of Music to Girls By Lavinia Greenlaw

The Importance of Music to Girls

By Lavinia Greenlaw

(Faber & Faber, £16.99stg hardback)

This memoir (it declares itself as such on the garishly Day-Glo, suggestively punky, bright orange cover, so that’s what it must be), despite its ostensible does-exactly-what-it-says-on-the-tin title, could be had up under the Trade Descriptions Act.

  First and foremost, one comes away still wondering about how important music is to girls, leading one to speculate that the title is intended as an exploratory interrogative rather than a declaratory statement. But then, where’s the question mark?

  Secondly, as with most memoirs, the book is not really about music per se, as about its role in Lavinia Greenlaw’s personal development, and her evolving appreciation of it. Even then, music is not the main focus, so much as the friends and fashions that surround it, so that she could just as well have titled her book The Importance of Short Plaid Skirts to Girls, or The Importance of Haircuts to Girls, because it is the girl and not the music that makes the most noise.

  Which leads, last but not least, to my third gripe: the book is really about the importance (or lack of it) of music (or whatever) to this particular girl, rather than girls in general. While she does make reference to her thirteen-year-old gang of girlfriends, we don’t get the impression that music means any more to them than it does to the pubescent Ms. Greenlaw. She even trumpets this singularity herself, since after her brief infatuation with Donny Osmond bites the dust and she sees The Sex Pistols on telly, she decides, ‘After three years of trying to fit in, I liked the idea of being different.’ Furthermore, the implication that music is experienced quite differently by girls than by boys is never satisfactorily delineated. The male protagonist of Joe Jackson’s pop ditty ‘It’s Different For Girls’ was being ironic, after all.

  All in all, one can only surmise that Greenlaw, a poet of some standing, sold the publisher the title and a one-page proposal, and then had to find a way of delivering it.

  Granted, this is a perennial problem with books which purport to be about the author and something-else-as-well, be it fly fishing, stamp collecting, or traveling around Ireland with a fridge. With arts related material, they are pitched halfway between memoir and criticism, so where does the balance lie? What we usually get is an autobiographical spurge intended to demonstrate how the writer arrived at the uniquely insightful and sublime sensibility which is now dispensing their invariably half-baked opinions.

  The trouble with the This-is-how-this-song-made-me-feel-the-first-time-I-heard-it school, popular with non-professional music writers and, sadly, quite a lot of professional ones too, is that it eschews the rigors of close compositional reading, listening and interpretation, or analysis of the broader socio-cultural context and impact, leading literate non-partisan bystanders to conclude that all rock journalism is rubbish. However, it is possible to write intelligently about popular culture in general and rock music in particular, as practitioners as diverse as Greil Marcus and Ian MacDonald have shown.

  In many ways, Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, a useful point of comparison even if it is a novel, is the polar opposite of Greenlaw’s highly subjective treatment, since it was much better on the music than it was in its rather banal study of contemporary males’ aversion to commitment (the unstated, and so unexamined, assumption here being that commitment, preferably to a woman, and even better still to a family and household, is an undiluted ‘good thing’, and really just what most blokes need to sort themselves out). Of course, it could be argued that this is merely a further example of the different ways music is apprehended by males and females, but somehow I don’t buy this strict gender division. Ultimately, in the guise of trying to strike a chord with millions of readers, primarily of the same sex as themselves, both of these writers are really just talking about themselves.

  The above strictures aside, the personal approach would be fine if Greenlaw were only somehow more passionate in her musings on music. Instead, potentially pivotal moments and shared experiences, which thousands of readers who would probably buy the book on the strength of its title alone could surely relate to, e.g. listening to John Peel’s radio show alone in your bedroom, seeing Ian Curtis perform with Joy Division, are all subsumed into and made subservient to Greenlaw’s frankly not very interesting and certainly not at all unusual Essex girl adolescence. It is safe to assume that, despite the portentousness of that misleading title, young Lavinia was much more at home on the balcony than in the mosh pit.

  So, is it nerdy to like/be obsessive about (delete according to subjective stance) music (or, by extension, anything)? Are women less obsessive than men, because they ‘grow out’ of things, i.e. grow up, sooner? I remain unconvinced. Music is simply far too important – to this boy at least, and to some girls I know too – to be written about in this solipistically dilettantish way, which, given the incendiary nature of much of the material, remains remarkably pedestrian and unengaging.

First published in The Sunday Independent