Eclipse by John Banville

Eclipse by John Banville was published in 2000. This is more a long-winded essay than a book review, from Books Ireland. I am reminded of that line from Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape: ‘Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. The voice! Jesus! Thank God that’s all done with anyway.’

Eclipse                                                                                  

By John Banville

(Picador, £15.99stg)

John Banville, and his work, would seem to be out of favour at the moment, especially among the young. (That is the first time I’ve written that collective noun, and not felt that it somehow included me.) Even when it is only the work that is criticised negatively, one cannot help but feel that this is mostly a consequence of the behaviour of the author, or of a dislike of the persona he chooses to project publicly, rather than simply a comment on the work itself. The smartest kid on the block isn’t going to make himself very popular with his peers if he doesn’t come out to play sometimes, i.e. hold forth - on the national airwaves in preference to in the print medium - on nationalism, revisionism, post-colonialism, feminism, or whatever other -ism is in fashion that season. But, as any genuine artist knows, none of these abstract concepts has very much to do with making works of art. They come afterwards, if at all, rather than being starting points for writing fiction or painting pictures. Not that there haven’t been excellent politically engage writers and artists. Picasso’s Guernica and Orwell’s 1984 spring to mind, as works reacting to actual historical events or commenting on specific political and social tendencies, although neither of them are directly representational. On the other hand, the work of Nadine Gordimer illustrates that even the Nobel Prize for Literature isn’t always awarded on the basis of excellence of prose style. But, for me, art comes out of art and imagination, just as much, if not more so, as it comes from life and experience; and form, style and expression are just as important, if not more so, as theme, subject matter and content. One doesn’t conceal the other, it contains it. Trouble is, deflationary Dublin wit is so all-pervasive (slagging, as it’s called in the local parlance), and everyone is so worried about being accused of being ‘pretentious’ these days, and art is increasingly being made to earn its keep by serving some social function or other, plus all Ireland is such a goldfish bowl, that it is proving increasingly difficult for artists to maintain their independence and not to get drawn into such debates. It makes for good copy, after all, and does raise the personal profile. However, Joyce and Beckett managed to concentrate on their art, rather than letting themselves get co-opted into movements, even if they did have to get out of the goldfish bowl to do it. Now, they’re the best ‘Irish’ writers that ever chanced to pop into the world on this tiny island, right? So maybe we should appreciate someone who is trying to follow their lead, while at the same time making it even more difficult for himself by remaining in that transparent glass bowl.

The backlash against Banville runs deeper than his perceived aloofness and indifference to matters local and national, though. He is at the receiving end of a type of criticism that has been levelled against another formally rigorous and fastidiously inventive word-conjurer, poet Paul Muldoon, by no less an influential personage than Harvard academic and critic Helen Vendler, specifically that: ‘There is a hole at the heart of the poem, where the feeling should be’. There is a feeling abroad that Banville is more concerned with how the words bump up against each other, at the expense of any emotion they might convey while doing so. In short, he is ‘too clever’ for his own good. To argue thus is a variation on the ‘inarticulacy as badge of sincerity’ pose, as patented by actors like James Dean, and stretching back in American letters to Hemingway, and beyond. But all poetry and prose are made primarily of words, before they are made of ideas, plot, character, emotion, or anything else. There is a necessary insincerity involved in making art, which can embrace both articulacy and inarticulacy. That’s what makes art sincere. Besides, just because some writing doesn’t wear its heart on its sleeve, doesn’t necessarily mean it doesn’t have a heart.

It would be foolish to think John Banville is not aware of these apparent shortcomings as applied to his work. In Eclipse, his latest in a long line of central characters who are alienated outsiders, Alexander Cleave - who, as his name suggests, both clings to and violently breaks away from his past, from life, from himself - tells us:

                    It is at moments such as this, fraught and uncertain, that I understand

                    myself least, seem a farrago of delusions, false desires, fantastical

                    misconceptions, all muted and made manageable by some sort of

                    natural anaesthetic, an endorphin that soothes not the nerves but the

                    emotions. Is it possible I have lived all my life in this state? Is it

                    possible to be in pain without suffering? Do people look at me and

                    detect a slight peculiarity in my bearing, as one notices the stiff jaw

                    and faintly drooping eye of a person lately risen from the dentist’s

                    chair? But no, what has been done to me is deeper than dentistry.

                    I am a heart patient. There may even be a name for my complaint.

                   ‘Mr Cleave, harrumph harrumph, I’m afraid it’s what we doctors

                    call anaesthesia cordis, and the prognosis is not good.’

(I can just hear the average waggish Dublin wiseacre, on being quoted the above passage, making a hole in his pint and inquiring of the bar: ‘Who does his think he is, Vladimir Nabokov?’ It’s all right to have a mandarin prose style if you’re not Irish, or if you’re dead, or preferably both, just as it’s okay to write in French if you go live in Paris, or are dead, or preferably both.) Do not think I am naively confusing the writer and his creation. ‘Conflate’ would be a better word, although not exactly the right one either. For, as with Beckett, and with Warhol, the authority for the supposed effacement of the author’s voice in Banville is none other than the author’s voice itself. In the interplay between author and character, autobiography and fiction, face and mask, there is room for much slight of hand and self-reflexive metaphysical topspin.

It’s all heightened a bit more this time though, because Alex is not an historian, a mathematician, a murderer, or even a spy. No, he’s an actor. Worse still, he’s an actor who has corpsed on stage, whose mask has fallen. If Banville the writer is only acting (and even that’s a highly ambiguous verb), Alex is in many ways his ideal fictional alter ego.

After his fall from grace, Alex retreats to his childhood home, abandoning his wife Lydia for the time being, and lives reclusively, brooding about his past, particularly his troubled daughter Cass. In the house he meets Quirke, a local solicitor’s clerk, and his daughter Lily, and later discovers that they have taken up residence. He is also haunted by ghostly apparitions, indeed the amorphous Ghosts is his previous novel that this one most resembles.

Some other reviewers have declared themselves stumped when it comes to saying what Eclipse is actually about. But, apart from touching on traditional Irish themes such as the burden of the past and the presence of ghosts, this novel is ultimately about the nature of consciousness itself, or more exactly, self-consciousness. I was continually reminded while reading this of one of E. M. Cioran’s aphorisms: ‘We should have been excused from lugging a body; the burden of the self was enough.’

                   When the collapse came, I was the only one who was not surprised.

                   For months I had been beset by bouts of crippling self-consciousness.

                   I would involuntarily fix on a bit of myself, a finger, a foot, and gape

                   at it in a kind of horror, paralysed, unable to understand how it made

                   its movements, what force was guiding it. In the street I would catch

                   sight of my reflection in a shop window, skulking along with head

                   down and shoulders up and my elbows pressed into my sides, like a

                   felon bearing a body away, and I would falter, and almost fall,

                   breathless as if from a blow, overwhelmed by the inescapable

                   predicament of being what I was. It was this at last that took me by

                   the throat on stage that night and throttled the words as I was

                   speaking them, this hideous awareness, this insupportable excess

                   of self.

Although Alex writes elsewhere of taking ‘my place in the lower ranks of the high consistory of which she was an adept of long standing’, the above passage is enough to make you wonder who was madder, him or his daughter Cass. The final act of this tragedy (and this is a five-part book that echoes the classical five acts of drama), presses this question home even further. He has been a neglectful father, so wrapped up in himself that he has not noticed that Cass may well have been a notable scholar: ‘...I should have paid more attention to what I always winced at when I heard her refer to it as her work. I could never believe it was anything more than an elaborate pastime, like thousand-piece jigsaw puzzles, or Chinese patience, something dull but demanding that would soothe her frantic mind.’

Ironies abound, not least of which is the fact that the line Alex fluffed, ‘Who if not I, then, is Amphitryon?’, from Moliere’s Amphitryon, concerns loss of identity. The story goes that Zeus assumed the likeness of Amphitryon, in order to visit his wife Alcmena, and gave a banquet; but Amphitryon came home and claimed the honour of being master of the house. However, as far as the servants and guests were concerned, ‘The real Amphitryon is the Amphitryon who provides the feast’. Also check out Alex’s and Lydia’s subtly rendered almost diametrically opposed versions of Alex’s life, on p.141.

There are some echoes of Banville’s previous books, for example the aforementioned phantoms put one in mind of Ghosts, while Alex’s confession that he is a secret stalker is reminiscent of the passage in The Book of Evidence where Freddie starts following people in the street, plus a circus comes to town here, just like it did in Birchwood.

If I have any criticisms of Eclipse they are that there are perhaps too many similarities to Beckett’s prose style and, as a corollary, to his worldview: ‘If the lodgers led unreal lives, so too did we, the permanent inhabitants, so called.’(p. 49) and ‘How intricate they are, human relations, so called.’ (p 140), both echo ‘...my so-called virile member...’ and ‘...the alleged joys of so-called self-abuse.’ from Molloy.  Then there’s the long paragraphs, of course, and the sparse dialogue. It is also worth hinting that perhaps it might be time for a change of style and perspective for Banville. Since the end of his ‘science’ tetralogy, we have had a series of five novels (the first three of which form a loose trilogy themselves), all first-person narratives by broadly similar characters in fairly similar circumstances. He may be trying to get more purity and intensity, but maybe another big panoramic novel like Doctor Copernicus or Kepler would not go amiss, or alternatively a novel narrated by a less disenchanted central character.

In short, for unashamed Banville fans like me, who have read all his previous books, this is more of the same, and they will be very pleased with getting their fix. On the other hand, it is not going to answer any of those callow criticisms (some of them emanating from, of all places, the local campuses) about his aestheticism and elitism, of the order of ‘Banville never went to university, and we’ve all been suffering ever since.’, or ‘It’s all only words, he doesn’t really mean it.’, or ‘He’s more concerned with structure than character’, or (the kiss of death) ‘He’s a writer’s writer’. But from the perspective of someone who is just beginning to call themselves a writer, it seems to me that in terms of both quantity and quality, the competition is still only biting on his dust.

First published in Books Ireland

Kingdom Come By J. G. Ballard

Kingdom Come

By J. G. Ballard

(4th Estate, £17.99 stg, H/B)

James Graham Ballard is by now, thankfully, an institution, simply by sticking around long enough, and not giving up. At 76, Kingdom Come is his twenty-seventh work of original fiction (short story collections as well as novels). He has even, like many artists whose imaginative world is so singularly their own that its signature is instantly recognisable, and could not be mistaken for anyone else’s, had the honour of having his surname adjectivised, "Ballardian" being defined in the Collins English Dictionary as ‘resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in JG Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.’   

Appearing in the early ’60s, Ballard’s first fictions The Drowned World and The Drought focussed on the fallout from ecological disasters, like global warming and melting ice caps, at a time when such terms were not commonplaces of public discourse. This gave way in the ’70s, with Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise, to explorations of the downside of technological advances. Since the mid-’90s, with Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes and Millennium People, his concerns have shifted to the perils of consumerism and the persistence of violence, driven by the twin ideas that consumerism creates an appetite which can only be satisfied by fascism, and that humans are a primate species with an unbelievable need for violence. These themes are restated in his new novel. Is it possible that Ballard is starting to repeat, rather than extend, himself? Perhaps, but maybe that is because he thinks we are not listening to his jeremiads on the myth of progress. After all, he has always been prophetically ahead of the game, and it took rather a long time for his previous prognostications to be taken up by the general populace.

Of course, this mighty oeuvre has been subsumed under the catch-all genre term ‘science fiction’, despite the fact that it has little to do with travels in space or time, or alien invasions. Like Philip K. Dick and William Gibson, Ballard’s writing was never about imagining unrecognisable worlds hundreds of light years from now, but simply extrapolating from contemporary events, and setting it fifteen minutes in the future.  This is why its dystopian visions have such forceful predicative relevance.

Which brings us to Kingdom Come. Richard Pearson, recently divorced, is a well-to-do but currently unemployed ad-man, who has come out from his comfortable Chelsea apartment to Brooklands, a motorway town on the western rim of the M25, ‘a terrain of inter-urban sprawl, a zone of dual carriageways and petrol stations where there were no cinemas, churches or civic centres, and the endless billboards advertising a glossy consumerism sustained the only cultural life.’ His father has been fatally wounded at the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall in the centre of this apparently peaceful town, when a deranged mental patient opened fire on a crowd of shoppers, and Pearson is here to wrap up the old man’s affairs. When the main suspect is released without charge, thanks to the dubious testimony of self-styled pillars of the community - the doctor who treated his father on his deathbed, the local headmaster, the patient’s psychiatrist - Pearson suspects that there is more to his father's death than meets the eye, a more sinister element lurking behind the pristine facades of the labyrinthine mall.

  Determined to unravel the mystery, Pearson soon realises that the Metro-Centre, with its round-the-clock cable TV channel and its sponsored sports clubs, lies at the very heart of his father's death. Consumerism rules the lives of everyone in the motorway towns, assuaging their emptiness and boredom. Metro-Centre shoppers transmogrify into vigilantes, uniforming themselves in St George’s Cross t-shirts.  Nightly sports events provide excuses for post-match rioting, as these well-organised hooligans terrorise the streets, set on purging the area of its Eastern European and Asian immigrant communities. ‘Snobby middle-class people’, long-time residents who disdain the intrusion of the Metro-Centre on their previously tranquil lives in leafy Surrey, are also a target.

  Convinced that a new kind of democracy is afoot, ‘where we vote at the cash counter, not the ballot box’, and that ‘Consumerism is the greatest device anyone has invented for controlling people’, Pearson joins the movement as a propagandist, using his professional skills to write TV ads featuring the chat show anchorman who has emerged as the people’s messiah, all the while believing that under this cover he can get nearer to the real story of what lay behind his father’s killing. When the cable host, who was the original intended target, is seriously wounded in an assassination attempt, the consumer fascists make hostages of fellow-shoppers and take refuge inside the Metro-Centre, as police lay siege outside. The whole thing ends in a suitably apocalyptic conflagration.

  If you think all this sounds paranoiacly far-fetched, or even just like something that might conceivably happen over there in materialistic England but never here in cute little compassionate Ireland, just take a trip out to that monstrosity in Dundrum, where willing slaves serve the devotees of the new religion. We are stuck in the middle of an Anglo-American phenomenon, where it doesn’t matter how many Iraqi babies we kill, as long as we defend our way of life and our right to have whatever we want, while our so-called ‘maverick’ columnists and social commentators compose television documentary odes to the glories of choice and the joys of consumerism. As for those who argue that, ‘Well, sure isn’t it better than the emigration in the ’50s and the unemployment in the ’80s?’, they never seem to consider that when the pendulum swings, it always goes just as far in the other direction. As Philip Larkin, another Englishman who was highly unimpressed with what passes for progress, wrote in ‘Homage to a Government’: Our children will not know it’s a different country/All we can hope to leave them now is money.

First published in The Sunday Independent 

A User’s Guide to the Millennium By J. G. Ballard

A User’s Guide to the Millennium

By J. G. Ballard

(Harper Collins, £18.00 stg, H/B)

This is a collection of essays and reviews by the author of such science fiction (for want of a better label) classics as The Drowned World, The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash and Hello America. Many of the themes familiar to readers of Ballard’s novels, like California, Shanghai, television, technology, surrealism, cars, motorways and the atom bomb, are present.

Like Wilde, like Burroughs, Ballard has a great facility for paradox, inversion and subversion. He points a camera at a subject from a new and oblique angle, focuses, and invites us to look through the lens. Try this for size: ‘…needless to say, I think there should be more sex and violence on television, not less. Both are powerful catalysts of social change, at a time when change is desperately needed.’, or: ‘London needs to become as decadent as Weimar Berlin. Instead, it is merely a decadent Bournemouth.’ Unlike so many Sunday supplement columnists, you get the impression that his dissenting voice is not put on to be deliberately controversial or provocative or sensational, but that he actually believes what he writes.

He can spot a great phrase, and come up with a great phrase, sometimes in the same sentence. Colonel Kilgore’s “I love the smell of napalm in the morning”, from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, is ‘worthy of some Armalite-toting Robert Lowell’; Andy Warhol is ‘the Walt Disney of the amphetamine age’; while Henry Miller is ‘a working-class Proust’ (echoing Kenneth Tynan’s description of Joe Orton as ‘a welfare state Oscar Wilde’).

The insights come flowing thick and fast. Writing in 1969, Ballard calls Max Ernst, Salvador Dali and William Burroughs ‘a trinity of the only living men of genius’.  Only Burroughs survives. Now into his 80s, he is a marvellous advertisement for the salutary effects of a debauched lifestyle. Ballard praises Freud’s influence on Dali, although these days Freud seems less of a liberator and more a determinist. He points out how feminism has evolved into a new Puritanism and Deconstruction into a new orthodoxy, thus taking on the characteristics of the value systems they originally set out to destroy. He mentions the influence of Joyce’s last work, Finnegans Wake, on Burroughs’ first great work, Naked Lunch, something I’ve always thought has been insufficiently explored. His special ire is reserved for ‘career novelists’, who dominate today’s fiction, ‘with the results one expects whenever careerists dominate an occupation.’

In an age when novels are going the way of poetry, and becoming an increasingly minority interest, being superseded by cinema, television, video and advertising, here is a writer who still really matters. There is enough meat there for the most ravenous of appetites. It is the sort of book that gives book reviewing a good name, and makes it a pleasure.

First published in the Irish Independent

The Information by Martin Amis

Callow review of The Information by Martin Amis, although I can see that I had made my mind up early about Amis. Again, from the late '90s, in The Big Issues, of all places. 

The Information

By Martin Amis

(Flamingo)

Martin Amis’ most recent novel has finally made it into paperback, and what a wicked entertainment it is. The plot concerns the jealousy of obscure, failed novelist Richard Tull, of his former Oxford roommate and successful popular fiction writer Gwyn Barry, and Richard’s plans to wreak vengeance for being ignored, despite being the smarter of the two.  (‘What was Richard?’, asks the narrator at one point. ‘He was a revenger, in what was probably intended to be a comedy’ is the reply.)  

Richard started off as the more promising, effortlessly acquiring a First, publishing a couple of well-received if unintelligible novels, and making a name for himself as a shit hot young book reviewer. Now pushing the big Four-O, he is reduced to reviewing increasingly lengthy biographies of increasingly minor writers. Gwyn, in contrast, struggled to scrape a bad second, and his first publications were crib notes on Chaucer for secondary school students. But although he is the same age as Richard, he shows no signs of a mid-life crisis. Rather, he is now one of the most popular novelists in the Western hemisphere (and probably the Eastern one too), with translations, publicity tours, film rights and remunerative awards. He also has an aristocratic and attractive wife with whom he manages to carry off a public image of the perfect marriage (he even took part in a television documentary called The Seven Vital Virtues, 4: Uxoriousness), while bedding a bevy of eligible babes on the side.

Of course, money and envy are nothing new as Amis’ themes, but literary jealousy isn’t just a fight to the death, it’s a fight to the afterlife, for how one is going to be regarded by posterity. Amis also seems to be making a point about the decline of the novel, or literature in general. If Gwyn’s new age utopian claptrap is what most people regard as deep and meaningful, then what price ‘the good stuff’?         

There are two discernible voices in Amis’ work: predominately, there is the incisively vicious one, which is usually set in London (London Fields); but there are also hints of an absurdly compassionate one, which is usually set all over the world (Time’s Arrow). I prefer the latter. He is, for the most part, obsessed with schadenfreude, and seems to take pleasure in the miseries and misfortunes of others, and only occasionally makes an effort to empathise with others’ pain. Amis is Dickensian in his presentation of the interaction (or lack of it) between middle class and working-class characters. The middle class ones get to have interesting interior lives. The working-class ones are just dumb.  

    Yet, for all that, there are passages here most novelists would kill or die to have written. Amis knows too much: one of the many excuses Richard offers his wife for his impotence is ‘book reviewing...stuff like deadlines and sub-editorial deletions and late payment.’ Only a book reviewer reviewing a book about a book reviewer could truly savour such quips. 

    Amis has been called, among lots of other things, the supreme English prose stylist of his generation. I demur. That accolade should go to Julian Barnes. (I’m not just saying this because of Amis’ long, competitive friendship with Barnes, which was terminated when Barnes’ wife, the agent Pat Kavanagh, was dropped by Amis for the sake of a bigger advance.) However, he does command an incredible technical virtuosity, which he places in the service of vileness. He writes like a dream, but is probably a thoroughly nasty and unpleasant little man.

First published in The Big Issues

Too Much Too Soon By Joe Ambrose

Another Ambrose, another slice from the rich and varied tapestry of Irish life and letters, another relic from the late ’90s. Truly, all human life has been covered in my arts journalism. My review of Too Much, Too Soon by Joe Ambrose, which appeared in Books Ireland.

Too Much Too Soon

By Joe Ambrose

(Pulp Books, £9.99)

Joe Ambrose’s second book is a disillusioned middle-aged trawl through youthful misadventure and folly, featuring a returned emigrant hero struggling, baffled, to comprehend a rapidly changed Ireland that has simply passed him by, since it has become pretty much like everywhere else. ‘The nicer people I used to know have either accommodated themselves to the new consensus – gotten with the programme – or they’ve been brutally sidelined. Dublin has joined the international community of cities where intellectual life is a scary fringe activity and only money matters.’ So opines Liam Crowe, Ambrose’s fictional yet autobiographical alter ego (if such an entity is possible).  So much of Ambrose’s own background as the biographer of old IRA man Dan Breen and erstwhile contributor to In Dublin magazine (here changed to Anna Livia) has been incorporated into that of the central character, with the trusty fallback formulation ‘thinly disguised’ never more applicable.

While he flatsits in the new Dublin, rewriting the Breen biography Against Tyrant’s Might (this time retitled On The Run), Crowe recounts his formative years, most especially his close friendship with rebellious school buddy Rory Murray, who early got involved with subversive paramilitary activity, while Liam was busy hanging out with the People’s Voice Trotskyites at UCD. Much of the book consists of Irish History According To Joe Ambrose, and Sean MacBride even puts in an appearance as an interviewee. Alas, much of it is also not terribly well written, way too general in its pronouncements (even if they reinforce prejudices this reader would broadly share with the author), and depends on the audience being told what to think, or what the writer who is directly identified with the central character thinks, as opposed to being shown through scenes, where ideas and problems might be dramatised and ventilated through character interaction and incident. Of course, it could be argued that the latter methodology can be just as polemical, if a little less direct, as the former one, especially if the characters are just there to represent different types who would hold the standard views of their particular type on a broad range of issues and topics. Still, monologues have to be more imaginative than this, and take on the macabre singularity of some of the rants of that stalwart of outlaw literature, William Burroughs, with whom Ambrose has himself worked, to avoid coming off as mere reportage, and descending to the journalistic.

Rory comes to a bad end, taking up with the wrong sort of woman who is not-quite-his-class-dear, and then goes quietly psychotic when she leaves him to return to her former husband. He plans to murder her, but the attempt goes badly wrong, and he falls into the hands of the law. He dies by his own hand while on bail, after psychiatric breakdown. As Liam has it, ‘Like many a good revolutionary before him, Rory’s attention drifted when sex became available on a regular basis.’

On the positive side, the redeeming feature of this tome is that, like Pat McCabe to cite another example, Ambrose has an intimate knowledge and deep appreciation of popular and counter culture from the 60s to the 90s, that is more than just an occasional but ill-understood designer reference. It’s nice to read a book by an Irish author who actually knows who The MC5 and Richard Hell and The New York Dolls actually are, and who doubtless owns some of their vinyl too. Indeed, the title of The Dolls’ first album provides Ambrose with his title here. Rory, like a couple of founder members of that mid-70s band of transvestite Rolling Stones parodists, died of getting Too Much Too Soon. If only he’d gotten more into music than violent nationalist politics, and Ambrose had done likewise in this book, he might have increased his chances of survival, and we would have had a more entertaining read. The politics of dancing has always been a more pleasurable avenue to pursue than the politics of killing people.

First published in Books Ireland

Hollywood Lies By David Ambrose

Another from the 1996/97 period, back when the late Bruce Arnold, then Literary Editor, used to give me books to review for the Irish Independent on Saturday, with a word length limit of 200 words. This one is hardly worth reproducing, given the slightness of the subject matter - but we must be strictly alphabetical. 

Hollywood Lies

By David Ambrose

(Macmillan, £15.99)

Hollywood Lies is a collection of seven short stories by screenwriter and novelist David Ambrose, who began his career working for Orson Welles. Welles provides the epigraph: ‘Everything you’ve ever heard about Hollywood is true - including the lies.’ The stories are unified by all being set in or around Tinseltown. There is a Tales Of The Unexpected quality to them, and each one ends with a Machiavellian twist.

    ‘Living Legend’ has people paying to play a pivotal part in a virtual reality experience of Marilyn Monroe; the title story features a washed up producer who starts to get lots of breaks when associates think he has an incurable terminal disease, but whose good luck plummets when it is discovered that his hospital records have been mixed up and he is in fact well; ‘Remember Me’ has a journalist being buttonholed by an Elvis impersonator who believes he is, and might just be, the real thing; in ‘Scribbler’ a screenwriter is, rather romantically, terrorised by a character he has created, a force that refuses to die either on screen or off; ‘The Fame That Dare Not Speak Its Name’ is interesting psychologically in looking at how a loving relationship may develop between two hard-core porn flick stars; ‘The Ghost Of Me Sings’ may or may not be a satire at Michael Jackson’s expense; and in ‘Hollywood Royalty’ a failed actress avenges herself on one of the town’s dynastic families, in what is also the greatest performance of her life.

    These stories are clever and entertaining, but sometimes stretch credulity with their endless twists and turns, and make it difficult for one to maintain one’s willing suspension of disbelief. But as the hero of the title story says, ‘You can’t fake phoney’.     

First published in the Irish Independent

Before The Dawn by Gerry Adams

My rather archaic website is due to bite the dust sometime this year, so I have decided to post all my book, music, film and theatre reviews, plus occasional essays and features, on this blog, as a kind of repository of my arts journalism over the years (which is what the website’s main function really was, up until now). I will endeavour to post one a day, which should keep me going for a while. To make things easier for myself, they will appear in alphabetical order, within each grouping (books, films, etc.). Enjoy the lucky dip.

To start, curiously enough, my take on Gerry Adam’s autobiography Before The Dawn, from 1997. Commissioned by the San Francisco Chronicle, I do not know if they ever used it. An updated version of the book was published in 2018, I notice. 

Before The Dawn (An Autobiography)

By Gerry Adams

(William Morrow; 325 pages; $25 Hardcover; Published February 10th, 1997)

When contemplating or confronted with what is politely but euphemistically referred to as ‘The Troubles’ in the North, most soft Southerners, myself included, are inclined to throw up our hands wearily and declare, ‘A plague on both your houses’. Although the border is only fifty miles from Dublin, for many in the South the North may as well be a thousand miles away, so different are people’s experiences and living conditions. One of the most interesting things to emerge from and be reinforced by this autobiography by Gerry Adams, President of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA, is how Northern Ireland has evolved into virtually a country apart, isolated from, and suspicious of, both the Republic of Ireland and Britain. Unionists want to maintain the link with Britain, chiefly for economic reasons, while it is an open secret that if the British could get rid of the North tomorrow morning, they would. This relationship is further compounded at present because John Major’s Conservative Party is dependent on a small Unionist vote to keep it in power in the Westminster parliament in London. Republicans claim to aspire to a United Ireland, yet regard the South as a partitionist state and, as Adams writes, ‘The absentionist refusal to recognise the right of the British parliament to rule in the northeastern six counties and the refusal also to recognize the legitimacy of the Leinster House parliament in Dublin were cornerstones of republican belief.’ So while both Loyalists and Nationalists claim to be sponsored by states outside their own jurisdiction, (Britain and Ireland respectively), the relationship they have with those states is uneasy at the best of times, and fraught with ambivalence and mistrust.

So to the book in question, and what light it sheds on these considerations. It begins with an account of Adams’ formative years, the influence on him of his family’s strongly Republican background and the poverty of his childhood, and is written in a homely, anecdotal style, with lots of dialogue, so that it sometimes reads like fiction rather than autobiography. The tweeness of his account of his first confession is such that one would scarcely think it came from the pen of the leader of an organisation which tacitly condones violent means to achieve its objectives. However, as we progress through his treatment of the Civil Rights movement, Bloody Sunday, and his time in Long Kesh internment camp, the writing gets a little more meaty, and it is impossible not to be moved and to sympathise when he recounts the stories of the British army wrecking his family home, and of the hunger strikes and negotiations with British government representatives of 1980-81.

The book does beg several important questions though, like why did he join Sinn Fein instead of the IRA in the first place, and how closely entwined are these organisations? Although the epilogue provides a brief summary of events to date, the narrative effectively ends in 1981, which is disappointing for those of us interested in current developments. Adams’ ostracism by Bill Clinton and John Hume, among others, since the Canary Wharf bombing and the breakdown of the peace process in February 1996, is not addressed. There’ll be no more visas courtesy of Clinton and tea on the White House lawn in the foreseeable future, and Hume wrote recently in an article in The Irish Times, ‘To make an electoral pact with Sinn Fein without an IRA ceasefire would be the equivalent of asking our voters to support the killing of innocent human beings by the IRA.’ For this has always been one of the most unsavoury aspects of the Republican movement in the North: its classic guerrilla war tactic of having a ‘political wing’ (Sinn Fein) and a ‘military wing’ (the IRA), a good cop and a bad cop, and one of the reasons Sinn Fein is not taken seriously in democratic politics, and the IRA is condemned in civilised society. (Funny to reflect on that much used and abused term, ‘Republican’: in France in 1789 it meant someone who favoured democracy over monarchy; in America it means a right wing conservative; in Ireland it means someone who plants bombs and shoots people.) Of course, the Unionists are no better, with their political parties and their paramilitary organisations.              

Denis Donaghue, the literary critic and professor, has written that the North is not a ‘problem’, but a ‘situation’. It will eventually solve itself over time, if only by simple demographics. In the meantime, how many more people will be killed? Whatever your views, Before The Dawn is heartfelt and impassioned, and ends with a plea for peace. But it is difficult not to think of the words of Stephen Dedalus to Leopold Bloom in James Joyce’s Ulysses: ‘We can’t change the country. Let us change the subject.’

Commissioned for the San Francisco Chronicle