Solomon’s Seal And Other Stories By Molly McCloskey / The Inland Ice And Other Stories By Éilís Ní Dhuibhne / A World Full of Places And Other Stories By Michael Carragher

Three collections of short stories reviewed, from my early days at Books Ireland. At least it led to an enduring friendship with Éilís Ní Dhuibhne.

Three more collections of short stories, the form publishers tell us doesn’t sell, but that they nevertheless continue, unaccountably, to publish. Perhaps they think that a book of short stories will act as a stepping stone towards a novel, which is where any money there is to be made would start to come in, and in many cases they are right. Or maybe a collection by an already established writer will have a better chance of commercial success. But the chief criterion should always be, as with any other media, are they any good in themselves? 

Solomon’s Seal And Other Stories

By Molly McCloskey

(Phoenix House, £8.99)

My chief motivation in wanting to read this debut collection of short stories was to find out what kind of short story is winning all these competitions. Molly McCloskey was given the RTE/Francis MacManus Award in 1995, won the prestigious Fish Short Story Prize in 1996, and work from this volume has previously appeared in Phoenix Irish Short Stories 1996 and London Magazine. The answer is that work which is well-crafted to the point of being formulaic, which obeys the ‘write-what-you-know’ advice beloved of creative writing class instructors everywhere, and which is Californian touchy-feely about one’s family and friends, is almost always guaranteed to do well.

T. S. Eliot wrote of Henry James that, ‘He had a mind so fine no idea could corrupt it.’, and this ‘idea’ was taken up and explored in depth some years ago by the esteemed scholar and critic Denis Donoghue, in an essay entitled ‘Ideas And How To Avoid Them’. While ever conscious of the perils for the writer of fiction of over-indulging in intellectualisation, it would be nice if one felt that the author was at least aware that ideas existed, if only to be avoided. The sixteen stories in Solomon’s Seal are sensitive, confessional, with a subtle and exact use of imagery, and read as though they would sit well in the better class of women’s magazine. They are also generally too similar, with a monotony of narrative voice, theme and tone, and lack the thrust of any kind of controlling intelligence behind them.

Ms. McCloskey is an expatriate American living in Co. Sligo, and all the stories here are set in the States, if they are set anywhere, with homely, native locutions littering her prose, like ‘Funny thing is...’ and ‘Used to be...’ (both from ‘The Stranger’). Two succeeding paragraphs, from ‘The Wedding Day’, neatly point up all that is best and worst about her writing. The slyly self-conscious humour of: ‘Father is carefully inspecting his shoes as the ceremony continues. I suspect it is because he feels moved or sad or elated. But then I always was a romantic - attributing tender, tragic emotions to people when what they’re really thinking about is dinner or the new secretary with the nice breasts or the mounting pressure in their bladders’, is undercut when followed by the mawkish sentimentality of: ‘But this time I am right. When he looks up the struggle is apparent. He is of the old school – which, it seems, is still pumping out graduates – where they teach men not to cry. He surveys his family one by one, beginning with Sabina, his pride and joy. The girl he drove to piano lessons.  The girl he took shopping for her first bikini. The girl he is giving away.’

‘Mythology’ contains some of the most beautiful phrases in the collection, and is the best single story. There is something of a harder edge than usual evident in  ‘Diamonds’, ‘Death Of A Salesman’s Wife’ and ‘Losing Claire’, and if McCloskey could manage to temper the touchy-feeliness with this more dispassionate approach, she could well become a very considerable writer indeed. In the meantime, my advice to any reader approaching her work would be to slow your reading right down, as though you were reading poetry, so that you will be attuned to the inklings and nuances (two of McCloskey’s favourite words) of the prose, which will otherwise float right by. And McCloskey would do well to remember that there is more behind the white picket fence than the claustrophobic Updikean world of suburban adultery, marital breakdown, divorce and broken families. Ask David Lynch. Or David Leavitt.  Maybe this collection is really very deep and moving, and I’m missing it all because of my inherent boorishness, but I don’t think so.

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. Éilís 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. Éilís 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, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is a wonderful writer, and this is a marvellous bunch of stories.

A World Full of Places And Other Stories

By Michael Carragher

(Blackstaff, £7.99)

Alarm bells should start ringing loudly as soon as one reads the long list of ‘Acknowledgements’ inside the front cover of this book, from which I will quote a short excerpt: ‘My colleagues and instructors here at the Writing Program of the University of Arkansas take a lot of credit for getting these stories right, some in particular: Gerard Donovan, Tommy Franklin, David Gavin, and David Pratt; Bill Harrison, Skip Hays, Michael Heffernan, Joanne Mescherry, Big Jim, and Brian Wilkie. Thanks, guys - and for the parties too. As the song says, it’s great to be part of something so good that’s lasting so long.’ However many ‘guys’ Carragher may thank, it won’t improve the quality of the stories in this collection.

‘Edgily positioned between the sophisticated present and the primitive, ‘thinly Christianised’ past, the stories in this powerful new collection draw their energy from the culture shock of new times, new places, shifting moralities’ the blurb on the back cover tells us. ‘Edgily’ is right, although I could find damn all evidence of that much vaunted sophistication. What we have here are thirteen stories which all, more or less, deal with an already laughably outmoded conception of machismo, the nature of violence, the meaning of honour, which results in a kind of down-market, sub-Hemingway for beginners. The only one which really crosses the present with the past is ‘Strange sounds from a far-off land’, in which an Irish lecturer at a minor American university is convinced that he hears the banshee wailing to warn of his father’s immanent death. Otherwise, most of the stories are set in the past, from World War One to the 1940s to the 1970s. Misogyny abounds, without really being examined. The best that could be said of some of the stories is that they are ‘dramatic’, particularly the title story, but it’s a drama of the ‘What’s going to happen next?’ variety, rather than an intellectual, emotional or sexual one. In general, Carragher seems to be trying to plough the ‘wild and cruel Irish past’ furrow, the kind of stuff currently being peddled by Michael Collins for the Irish-American market, which has about as much to do with Ireland today as the 1937 Constitution.

Sometimes one feels that there are simply too many people writing. Or, at least, getting published. But I suppose we should be grateful for Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and conclude that for Blackstaff, on this occasion, one out of two isn’t bad.

Headbanger by Hugo Hamilton / Curtains by Katy Hayes

“Fundamental accuracy of statement is the one morality of writing. Naming things, calling things what they really are, that is all that writers can do in an age where language has become debased and sterile.” So said novelist Joseph O’Connor, when judging the recent Fish Short Story Prize for 1996. Fundamental accuracy of statement, indeed!  Morality, indeed! Naming things, indeed! According to this criterion, James Joyce wasted the last seventeen years of his life, if not the previous seven. Samuel Beckett may as well never have put pen to paper. One thinks of those lines of Rilke, from the Ninth Duino Elegy:

                    ...Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House.

                    Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, -

                    possibly: Pillar, Tower?...but for saying, remember,

                    oh, for such saying as never the things themselves

                    hoped so intensely to be.

Before calling things what they really are, one has to be sure one knows what they really are. Before naming things, one has to be sure one knows the names. The two books under review here, like so many recently published Irish novels, are sure of their names and their things, and are furthermore unaware that any division exists between a name and its thing, a thing and its name. Unfortunately, the kind of fiction I prefer usually employs a radical scepticism about the possibility of ever being able to name things, of being able to call things what they really are, because it doesn’t know which, if any, name to choose, and it doesn’t know what things really are. Perhaps this is too theoretically stringent a stricture to use when reviewing a hard-nosed crime thriller and a racy pacy comedy, but what gives cause for concern is that both writers have produced much better work in the past.     

      

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 nicely sardonic 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 best-selling blockbusters, 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 imaginative and 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 of this dialogue driven story. But if there are straight-to-video movies, why aren’t there straight-to-screenplay novels?

Curtains

By Katy Hayes

(Phoenix House, £12.99)

The change in Katy Hayes’ work is not quite so discernible, and indeed Curtains may seem like a natural progression from 1995’s wonderfully witty and subversive collection of short stories, Forecourt, but it doesn’t quite have the bite or insight of its predecessor, and seems curiously 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 playwright and director, knows only too well, and which 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 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 sinisterly personal messages on Arlene’s answering machine. Perhaps the funniest aspect of the book is Arlene’s recurring conversations with Paddy Kavanagh’s statue along the 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 verges on journalese, and is, once again, dialogue driven. 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 reactions 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.  

Again, one feels the cinema or TV screen would be better media for this narrative, such is, like Headbanger, its fundamental accuracy of statement, and its naming of things.  Or even, given its author’s experience and its subject matter, the theatre.  

                   

The Valparaiso Voyage By Dermot Bolger

Imagine, twenty-five years ago, from 2000. I further imagine that I would applaud Dermot Bolger's sticking it to Fianna Fail lackeys even more now. 

The Valparaiso Voyage

By Dermot Bolger

(Flamingo, £9.99)

Dermot Bolger’s eighth novel concerns Brendan Brogan, Navan man and compulsive gambler, who was banished to the shed at the bottom of the garden at the age of eight to become the Hen Boy, when his widowed father, a local planning officer on the County Council and a Fianna Fail lackey, remarries a ‘bit of hot stuff’, as I believe the parlance was back in the bad old days of unreconstructed unenlightenment. His new wife, Phyllis, brought with her her son from a previous marriage (official version) or, to use more of the then current argot, her bastard (unofficial but much less doubtful), Cormac, who inadvertently usurped Brendan’s place in the house, caught as the two young boys were in the domestic crossfire between husband and wife, and the wider politics of the school playground. This brought them into contact with Pete Clancy, the bullying son of Barney Clancy, the local FF chieftain and chancer, for whom Brendan’s father Eamonn acted as faithful retainer and bagman.

Now Brendan is back, in the frenetic new Dublin (and new Navan) of Celtic Tiger toys and gadgets, extortionate house prices, conscience-salving but equally self-serving tribunal investigations, and those ‘sponging’ asylum seekers (as a real life FF TD recently had it), ten years after faking his own death in a train crash in Scotland, to escape gambling debts and provide for his wife Miriam and son Conor, out of the compensation and insurance settlements. He falls in with Ebun, a Nigerian woman whom he rescues from a racist attack, while trying to tie up loose ends that are still unravelling from Channel Island bank accounts that his father had set up for Clancy Senior in the names of his own children and grandchildren. This brings him into renewed contact with Clancy Junior, now a Junior Minister himself, and his unsavoury builder henchmen, also the sons of his father’s cronies.

This is an extremely well-plotted literary thriller, which even ends with an extended shoot out. Bolger is skilled at mixing the wider socio-political context with a more private family history, and his book is a timely corrective to all the nauseatingly smug, self-congratulatory, self-satisfied Celtic Tiger shite that has been stuffed down everyone’s throat for the past few years. However, while there are few things more pleasing, at base level, in a true Irishman’s life than seeing hick Fianna Fail hacks getting it in the neck, there is always the danger that any artistic production which features same will degenerate into A State of the Nation summary and sermon by author. Gustave Flaubert wrote that it would give Gustave Flaubert enormous personal relief to unburden himself of his political opinions in his novels, but then added, ‘But what is the importance of said gentleman?’ And Louis MacNiece listed one of his problems with returning to Ireland, in Section XVI of Autumn Journal, as ‘Your assumption that everyone cares/Who is the king of your castle.’ References to real life figures such as Charles Haughey and Brian Lenihan and my namesake, whom I have to tirelessly point out each time I am introduced to someone new, as I have had to do for the past five years, is NO RELATION, can pale after awhile, and become journalistic. Then again, as Bolger would doubtless argue, perhaps politics is too important to be left to the politicians, or even the journalists.

What is striking, though, is that it is when Bolger is concentrating on the more personal and intimate details of his central character’s life, and his tangled, fraught and emotionally ambivalent relationships with his prevaricating father, with the insecure Phyllis, with the gay Cormac, and the equally gay Conor, that the writing hits its truest and most resonant stride, and mines a deep seam of feeling. Maybe it is impossible to separate the personal from the political, and political anger and grief and public moral complexity and duplicity are just as worthy of exploration as the personal varieties, if only because one can impact on and influence the other so much. But I’d still just as soon leave the many rotten apples of The Republican Party to decompose in their own barrel, especially in comparison with focusing on the returned revenant Brendan confronting the familial legacy of his father’s weakness, the consequences of his terminally ill stepmother’s survival instinct, and the ambivalence and strength of his feelings towards the man who turns out to be his half-brother, and towards his abandoned wife and son.

First published in Books Ireland

The Silver Swan By Benjamin Black

Banville sneaks back in via the backdoor under his pseudonym, Benjamin Black. 

The Silver Swan                                                                                  

By Benjamin Black

(Picador, £16.99stg)

Why does a writer with an established reputation adopt a pseudonym? In the context of Irish literary history, the practice tends to have been eschewed by those who managed to make good their escape (Joyce, Beckett), and is more associated with those who got stuck here (Brian O’Nolan/Flann O’Brien/Myles na Gopaleen). Stephan Dedalus and Shem the Penman may have been authors (albeit largely unpublished), but they were fictional characters before they were authors, and their names never appeared on the covers of their creator’s books (except, in the case of the former, as part of a title). O’Nolan, on the other hand, forced to deal with ‘the daily spite of this unmannerly town’, found his writing personality refracted through multiple incarnations, perhaps in an attempt at psychic self-defence. Either that, or else he didn’t want his bosses in the Civil Service to know what he got up to in the evenings.

Things have changed since those bad old days, of course, and with ease of technological information exchange and relatively inexpensive and much less onerous travel arrangements – to say nothing of a less stringent local moral climate – it matters much less where we live. Besides, John Banville is hardly the most vulnerably defensive of contemporary Irish writers, nor indeed the most needy of the society of his peers, and the consequent social acceptance and approval. Yet he has now published two crime novels under the pen name of Benjamin Black: last year’s Christine Falls, and new arrival The Silver Swan. Both feature the world weary Dublin pathologist Quirke as the central sleuth, a figure it is probably hoped will join Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus or Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen in the pantheon of crime-fiction detectives, although, as can be seen, Quirke is not a policeman, but a doctor. Another key difference is that Black’s books are a species of historical novel, set in the 1950s, although Dublin is undoubtedly as significant a character for Black as Edinburgh is for Rankin and Italy is for Dibdin.

It is probably better to read the first novel first, although they can certainly be read independently, and/or in reverse order. Quirke (he is never dignified with a first name), although not an aesthete or art historian, is in many ways a typical Banville anti-hero, even if he is not written in the first person. An orphan, rescued from the Letterfrack-like Carricklea by Judge Griffin, he displaces natural son Malachy in his stepfather’s affections. He is a doctor for the dead, in contrast to Malachy who, as an obstetrician, is attendant on birth. He drinks too much, and is estranged from his unacknowledged daughter Phoebe, who has been brought up by Malachy and his wife, Sarah, who is in turn the woman he should have married and from whom he is similarly alienated. Instead, he settled for her feistier sister Delia, who died in childbirth, and for whom he is in a kind of guilt-drenched, elongated mourning. But he is at odds with his entire milieu, since the Griffin males are stalwarts of the Knights of Columbanus-like Knights of St. Patrick, while Quirke has never been much of a believer. He uncovers a Catholic conspiracy in the trafficking of orphans, but due to the moral complexity of the situation (to say nothing of closed ranks) is unable to do anything about it. He is, incidentally, not the first Quirke to appear in Banville’s/Black’s fiction, since a character with the same moniker was an intruder in Eclipse. Nor, for that matter, is Hackett the detective the first Hackett either, as there was a civil servant of that name with a walk-on part in Mefisto, and even another detective christened Hackett in Athena.

Christine Falls, then, is a more panoramic, social novel, with the Mother of Mercy Laundry a thinly disguised Magdelene Laundry, and references to the contemporaneous Animal Gang. Like a roman a clef, McGonagle’s is McDaid’s, and Barney Boyle is Brendan Behan. The Silver Swan is more idiosyncratic and personal, engaging as it does with underground sexuality and drug addiction. It could be argued that in dealing with these topics it introduces some anachronistic elements, since one wonders exactly how much of this kind of thing was going on during the decade in question. But then, Banville was in the land of the living then, and I wasn’t, so perhaps he is privy to some knowledge which I am not. Not that there is anything to stop him simply making it up. 

So what is Banville at? Let us immediately discount vile slurs emanating from some quarters – including scribblers who keep themselves well-heeled through producing lightweight poolside reads – that the sole motivation is ‘filthy lucre’. Even if it was, he is more than entitled to it, not having made a packet for much of his writing life. Rather, perhaps like writing in a second language was for Conrad, Beckett, Nabokov and Kundera, genre writing imposes certain constraints which can foster fruitful freedoms. One is forced to pay greater attention to detail, or to details to which one doesn’t usually pay attention. With literary fiction, the increased focus is on language itself. With genre fiction, it is on aspects of writing deemed essential to the given genre.

My own theory is that opting for crime fiction, and writing it under a pseudonym, frees Banville from the postmodern knowingness and self-consciousness with which he had painted himself into a corner in some of his more recent novels, and provides him with an avenue for reverting to straight-forward, plot-driven, character-delineated, traditional storytelling – and all without having to admit a kind of defeat, and give the lie to ‘experimental’ fiction.

Of course, this hypothesis is not watertight, as Paul Auster’s mid-80s New York Trilogy brilliantly incorporated themes, tropes and techniques from detective fiction into a postmodern literary work. But every artist solves his own difficulties in his own way.

Or maybe it’s all just a way of writing more quickly, as evidenced by Banville’s average five year gap between novels and his alter-ego Black’s two in consecutive years. Less searching for le mot juste results in more getting on with the story. Yet, for all that, how many crime novels can you think of which would end with such a luminous figure as, ‘…the big dark-blue cloud, which had been rising steadily without his noticing, deftly pocketed the moon’s tarnished silver coin.’? You can’t hide a good writer, or a writer who can write.

First published in Magill, December/January 2007/8

A Preparation for Death By Greg Baxter

Here's one I definitely didn't like, from 2010. I doubt Brendan Barrington, editor of the Dublin Review, and Baxter's editor at Penguin Ireland, has ever forgiven me. 

A Preparation for Death 

By Greg Baxter

(Penguin Ireland, £14.99 stg, P/B)

Greg Baxter is a failed novelist. He tells us so himself. But this is alright, in his book, since he attributes his failure to the caution, caprice and compromise of literary editors and publishers (to say nothing of their mercenary motives), who are themselves part of a culture where ‘bad writing…had become institutionalised.’ Besides, more to the point, the literary novel is dead, or undead, and autobiography, so honest and unmediated, so authentic and without artifice, is where it’s at. This is an argument which Baxter has been afforded access to the hallowed books pages of that augustly venerable paper of record, The Irish Times, to advance, via recourse to a glowing review last February of David Shield’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, no doubt paving the way for the imminent publication of the work under review here, Baxter’s own attempt at autobiography. A Preparation for Death carries a similarly glowing endorsement from David Shields on its cover. Baxter was interviewed by Eoin Butler in the ‘Weekend’ section of The Irish Times on June 26th, in a blaze of pre-publicity. So, who exactly has successfully avoided the contemporary, self-serving culture of back-scratching in the publishing world? Never mind the fact that if Baxter had had the courage of his convictions as a fiction writer, his response to rejection would have been to self-publish.

The title comes from Plato’s Phaedo, where Socrates defines philosophy as a preparation for death, although Baxter makes no reference to this source in his series of eleven autobiographical essays, four of which have already appeared in the respected journal, Dublin Review, which is edited by Brendan Barrington, who is also – again, no coincidence – Baxter’s editor at Penguin Ireland. Not that Baxter fights shy of quotation, with interpolations from Montaigne and Cioran among his favourites, along with references to Seneca and St. Augustine.

Briefly, the essays sketch Baxter’s, a Texan, transplantation to Dublin, his commuting by scooter from his soulless north Dublin housing estate to his despised job as a reporter for the Irish Medical Times, his drunken nights carousing with students after teaching in the Irish Writers’ Centre, with forays to Texas, Las Vegas, Riga, Letterfrack and Vienna thrown in. Baxter displays an alarming propensity towards kiss and tell, or shag and spill, and accounts of his many supposed conquests are provided in excruciating physical detail, e.g. ‘She has a beautifully shaped and scentless cunt. It is perfectly symmetrical and inconspicuous. It is small but gets extremely wet.’ Well, he does admit to having no facility for writing lyrically about sex. Perhaps the most interesting piece is ‘Satanism’, with its amusing section on the East Texan fundamentalism of his youth, which segues into a rereading of Milton’s Paradise Lost.  Alas, it also tangentially includes an account of a spanking session with his companion on that weekend trip to Riga, followed by some fisting (all consensual, of course!). Thankfully, this description was judiciously excluded from a travel piece Baxter wrote for the IMT about this city break in May 2008, which revealed only that Baxter is the kind of American for whom everywhere should be America, or, at least, Ireland. Curiously enough, for one who insists on fearless honesty and truth-telling in all things, there is no attempt to engage with the break up of his seven year marriage, which predated the shenanigans so vividly described, or with the impending arrival of his first-born, a product of one of these liaisons. One also wonders what the many lovely ladies who fall into his bed see in him. Is it that he’s such a bad boy? Or maybe it’s that prodigious member he intimates he is possessed of, via a third party (see p.196).

The argument against fiction goes something like: ‘Why is this guy talking in these funny voices? Why doesn’t he put down these puppets and say what he wants to say?’ But autobiography is predicated on the assumption that the writer is an interesting person, or has an interesting story to tell (not quite the same thing), or writes well. What is interesting about Greg Baxter? Although he prefaces these pieces by acknowledging that: ‘Traditional autobiography is composed after the experience has passed. I wrote this book in the very panic of the experiences that inspired it’, he still confuses and conflates autobiography with the meditative essays of those writers he admires. The sum effect is akin to being buttonholed by an inebriated, garrulous egotist in a public bar, recalling the old joke: ‘Q: How do you know if someone’s from Texas? A: Don’t worry, they’ll tell you.’

One wonders to what extent Baxter’s espousal of autobiography is a result of his failure to crack fiction. It comes across as the shy, bullied kid in school performing a literary version of a Columbine-style massacre through mercilessly destructive ‘revelations’ not only about himself, but anyone who has ever crossed him. Writers of unfavourable review had better beware. To paraphrase Lionel Shriver’s title: We Need To Talk About Greg. 

The fact is, it is still much more difficult to write even passable fiction than it is to write even great memoir. Let’s say you walk into a pub and announce to your mates: ‘An amazing thing happened to me on my way here.’ They respond, ‘Yeah, what?’ If your next move is to begin, ‘Well, first of all, I’m making this up, okay?’ you’re going to have to work really hard to keep their attention. That requires talent. A memoir merely requires a life and a memory. Moreover, how can you ever be sure that the narrator of anecdotal autobiography isn’t being economical with the truth, or embellishing it? Besides, a technical device in postmodern fiction is its shattering of the ‘suspension of disbelief’, its removal of the voyeuristic nature of the reading experience by directly addressing readers and acknowledging their active part in the novel.

‘This brilliant literary debut will appeal to fans of Geoff Dyer’ the publisher’s blurb declares. Not so, for it is impossible to imagine Baxter writing with as much insight, imagination and sheer brio on subjects as diverse as jazz, photography or D. H. Lawrence, as Dyer employs. Added to this, Dyer does novels as well, however much they may be thinly disguised autobiography. Even Dyer’s straight autobiographical essays are leavened by a self-deprecating humour that is beyond Baxter. For while Baxter may admit, ‘I repeat myself with recklessness, and since I am the subject, and I am dispensable, there is nothing I say that is essential’, one feels he is simply getting his retaliation in first, heading potential criticism off at the pass. Nor is he possessed of the historical sweep or plain curiosity about his surroundings which distinguish such contemporary masters of the form as W. G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair.

Rarely have I disliked a book I’ve had to review so much, or found such little merit in one. Montaigne and Cioran were not failed novelists. Neither were Seneca nor Augustine. They were brilliant essayists. Baxter, on this evidence, can do neither prose fiction nor prose essay. Yet, he has achieved his goal of publication. Go figure, as the Yanks say.

First published in the Sunday Independent

The Untouchable By John Banville

I complete a Banville hatrick. From The World of Hibernia, 1997.

The Untouchable 

By John Banville

(Picador, No Price Given)

In this, John Banville’s eleventh novel, Ireland’s finest living literary artist both continues and extends the spirit which has informed his last three books, the loose trilogy of The Book Of Evidence, Ghosts and Athena, in that it features a narrator who is an artistic, criminal or intellectual outsider, who is recounting and reflecting upon the dark doings and dirty deeds of his life, in a tone of detached, loftily patrician irony. However, this time he is not one of those ‘high cold heroes who renounced the world and human happiness to pursue the big game of the intellect’, as the historian in The Newton Letter, another of Banville’s previous novels, puts it, when considering Copernicus, Kepler and Newton, the subjects of Banville’s earlier ‘science’ tetralogy of Doctor Copernicus, Kepler, The Newton Letter and Mefisto.  On this occasion the central character, although a gifted scholar and art critic, has lived a double life at the heart of some of the most important events of this century. Of course, the art/life dichotomy has always been a major theme in Banville’s work, and although he has always denied it, it is commonly accepted that The Book Of Evidence was inspired by the notorious McArthur murder case. But here the supposed opposition between aesthetics and politics, the private and the public, receives its most stark examination and thorough treatment yet at Banville’s hands.

The story has its origins in the spy ring which grew out of Cambridge in the 1930s, and came into its own in the ’50s and ’60s, when everywhere the talk was of ‘reds under the bed’. Victor Maskell, the narrator (‘hero’ would be pushing it a bit too far), seems to be based on an amalgam of Anthony Blunt and Louis MacNiece, who knew each other at Marlborough public school, which Maskell also attends, although admittedly MacNiece was, in ‘real life’ as they call it, an Oxonian, and although he visited Spain with Auden, was never a committed Marxist, nor for that matter, a practising homosexual. Blunt, however, as we know, was both.

Other characters too are drawn from life, with Querell, for example, a thinly disguised Graham Greene. Indeed, Banville seems to indulge in some satiric flourishes at Greene’s expense, when he writes of Querell, ‘He was genuinely curious about people - the sure mark of the second-rate novelist.’ This is probably in revenge for Greene messing Banville around when he judged the 1989 Guinness Peat Aviation Awards, when the prize money nearly went to an unknown who was not on the shortlist.

As homosexual and as Marxist, Maskell is an Outsider, but as Keeper of the Queen’s Pictures and Director of the Art Institute - an occasional guest at Windsor Castle even - he is an Insider. The book builds into a heady brew of political and sexual intrigue, where, as Maskell says, ‘the sex and the spying had sustained a kind of equilibrium, each a cover for the other.’

But, as always with Banville, the story is almost secondary to the sheer beauty of the language in which it is told. He could write about anything and make it interesting. On every page there is an image or an insight to drool over. Try phrases like these for size: ‘anyway, persons of her age are impervious to the tics and twitches by which the old betray the pain of their predicament’; or ‘My father talked about the threat of war. He always had an acute sense of the weight and menace of the world, conceiving it as something like a gigantic spinning-top at whose pointed end the individual cowered, hands clasped in supplication to a capricious and worryingly taciturn God.’                            

I foresee Booker nominations, glittering prizes. Or maybe it is even too good for those gaudy baubles, which are, after all, only literary lotteries. Whether it is commercially successful and generally recognised or not, The Untouchable expands an already awesome achievement in contemporary fiction, in which Banville reminds us, once again, what writing can do, and what it can be.

First published in The World of Hibernia

God’s Gift By John Banville

God’s Gift

By John Banville

(Gallery Press, £13.95 h/b, £7.95 p/b)

God’s Gift is John Banville’s second adaptation of a play by the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century German playwright, Heinrich von Kliest. The first was 1994’s The Broken Jug, and now we have a version of Kliest’s Amphitryon, a myth also tackled by Moliere.

As Hugh Haughton has pointed out in his article ‘The ruinous house of identity’ in the first issue of The Dublin Review, God’s Gift ‘forms a curious theatrical complement’ to Banville’s latest novel, Eclipse. It is during performing in the third act of Kliest’s play that the actor-narrator of that book has his crack-up, and corpses on stage, after delivering the line ‘Who then, if not I, is Amphitryon?’ But, to quote Haughton once again, ‘Banville’s version of Amphitryon is not the play his fictional actor Cleave broke down in’, and the aforementioned line does not appear, since ‘Banville has played fast and loose with Kliest’s text, cutting scenes and speeches, and ...re-cast it all in Irish terms.’ So, the Greek tale of how Zeus assumed the likeness of Amphitryon, in order to have his way with Amphitryon’s wife Alcmena, and gave a banquet while so disguised, but Amphitryon comes home and claims the honour of being master of house during these proceedings, is transposed to Wexford in 1798. In the traditional story, the crisis of the theatricality of identity is resolved, as far as the servants and guests are concerned, with the line ‘he who gave the feast was to them the host.’

In Banville’s version Amphitryon becomes the Anglo-Irish General Ashburningham, fresh from victories at Vinegar Hill and Boolavogue, while Alcmena becomes Minna.  Kliest’s Sosia, servant of the General, becomes Souse, and his wife is Kitty. Jupiter and Mercury are as you were, appearing in the forms of Ashburningham and Souse.

While it is difficult to see what the 1798 setting adds to the drama of gods and mortals and impersonation and usurpation, aside from providing a local habitation, God’s Gift once again demonstrates that Banville has effective dramaturgical powers, as the recent production by Barabbas Theatre Company verified to satisfied audiences. It is a light-hearted exploration of a serious theme. But for a more profound study of how someone can inadvertently become their own ghost, check out the novel with which it was published simultaneously as an accompaniment.

First published in Books Ireland

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