The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely By Benedict Kiely

The Collected Stories of Benedict Kiely

By Benedict Kiely

(Methuen, £19.99)

As one of only five artists and writers currently honoured with election as a Saoi of Aosdana, Benedict Kiely’s reputation as one of Ireland’s grand old men of letters is nothing if not secure. However, as Colum McCann points out in his eloquent and laudatory introduction to this volume, ‘...a perverse monism sometimes remains, insisting that Kiely can be read if you’re white, Irish and over fifty. The truth is, of course, that Kiely should be read in Brixton, Mississippi, Neilstown, Johannesburg and points in between.’

As Kiely is now 81, it is timely that Metheun should gather together his four collections of short stories, and reissue them in one book. Thus we have here the entire contents of A Journey to the Seven Streams (1963), and A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly (1973), A Cow in the House (1978), and A Letter to Peachtree (1987), plus the 1977 novella Proxopera for good measure. 

While some of Kiely’s early stories do have a traditional structure, and follow realist patterns established by O’Connor, O’Flaherty and O’Faolain, for the most part his style is discursive and digressive, and could even be termed expressionist, in that he subordinates realism to inner vision. Sometimes the seemingly arbitrary intertwining of incidents, tales, snippets of conversation and fragments of memory can irritate, but more often than not the stories repay repeated readings, as the layers of narration are stripped back and revealed as the ebb and flow of a writer who likes travelling hopefully as much as he likes arriving. For Kiely is a master of technique, and therefore has full licence to play with conventional notions of beginning, middle and end. We trust Picasso’s Cubism because we know he can draw like Ingres, and what is fascinating about Kiely is the fluid mix of tradition with experimentation.

Like his younger advocate McCann, Kiely also transposes the national with the international, either through featuring the Irish abroad, or else people from unlikely corners of the globe washed up on these shores. So ‘A Ball of Malt and Madame Butterfly’ concerns a Japanese prostitute in Dublin, while ‘The White Wild Bronco’ could be described as Ireland’s first Wild West short story. Though written in the third person, ‘Through the Fields in Gloves’ has all the verbal tics of the central character, an old man who spray-paints young girls, while his wife sits at home, too fat to rise from her chair.

But it is the inclusion of Proxopera here that is the clincher. Weirdly prescient of the horrible events of August 15, 1998 in Kiely’s hometown of Omagh, it oscillates effortlessly between the first and third person in recounting the story of a retired schoolteacher forced by terrorists to run a proxy bomb into his local town. Far from hitching a ride on the coattails of yesterday’s headlines, this great anti-war fable should have been read, and should still be read, as a terrible warning. A flawless piece of writing, it is one more reason to celebrate this book.

First published in the Irish Independent

Pacazo By Roy Kesey

Pacazo 

By Roy Kesey

(Jonathan Cape, £12.99 stg, H/B)

A pacazo is ‘an uncommonly large iguana, native to the environs of Piura, NW Peru’. John Segovia is an uncommonly large, 35-year-old Californian historian living in Piura, NW Peru. It is 1997, and he went there four years ago for his doctoral research on Peruvian history, and the horrors of the conquistadors – there is a vague family myth that he might be descended from a settler with whom he shares a name – but has not yet completed. Something of an eternal postgrad slacker, he instead teaches English language at the town’s university, his position there more tenuous than tenured, his visa status problematic. Given his bulk, and apparent ugliness, he identifies with the titular reptile. However, as the word can also define ‘a petty, bitter, local god who hates fat pale pillaging strangers’, he is also repelled by it – not least because in his first year on campus one defecated on his head from the branch of a tree he was walking under on his way to work, and it took weeks before he smelled good enough again for his students to approach him. So, self-loathing is much in the air.

He has bigger problems, however, and greater reasons to hate himself. Ten months previously, his young wife, Pilar, has been raped, beaten and left for dead in the desert, dying of heatstroke later after wandering in the wrong direction. Segovia blames himself. So do his in-laws. And so he is left to care for their infant daughter, Mariangel, who was only four weeks old when the murder took place.   

The local police, venal and corrupt, have given up on the case, and so Segovia searches obsessively for clues and for his suspected perpetrator, a taxi driver. In his time off, he scours the desert where Pilar’s body was found, accumulating dubious ‘evidence’. Otherwise, he visits prostitute ‘Jenny’ occasionally, and gets into trouble continually picking on the wrong people in the street, dark young men he mistakes for the culprit.

When the floods of El Nino arrive, destroying his horde, it seems like a sign that it is time to move on. He begins socialising with his university colleagues again, even finding a new love in Karina. Then, when another woman who resembles his deceased wife is found raped and murdered in similar circumstances, and then two more, he goes into full maniacal mode again, even to the point of indulging in an episode of bodysnatching. The dénouement is disturbing, but not altogether surprising.

Written in the present tense, foremost among Kesey’s stylistic ticks are unsignposted time shifts between Segovia’s current surroundings and scenes from Peruvian history, usually occurring mid-sentence. This imbues the prose with a dream-like quality, but also casts Segovia as an unreliable narrator. So lost is he in his interior thoughts and reflections, he doesn’t always see clearly what is going on around him. In general, the writing is beautifully cadenced, recalling the arresting simplicity of William Carlos Williams. The novel is also good on depicting academic disillusionment (but under the weight of such personal tragedy, what field of professional endeavour would not appear somewhat vacuous?), and the quotidian hassles of expatriate life.

 Pacazo is Kesey’s first full-length novel, after a novella, Nothing In The World, a short story collection, All Over, and a travel guide to the Chinese city of Nanjing. At over 500 pages, it is longer than it needs to be, suggesting that maybe shorter forms suit him better. The repeated scenes of checking taxi license plates, and missing intercity buses, tend to tire fourth time around. Also, having set the story up with a noirish element, it does seem like cheating the reader to suspend the ‘investigation’ plot for most of the book. But, then again, given the quality of the writing, it would be a brave editor who would decide what to leave out. 

Besides, Pacazo isn’t really a whodunit at all. It is a study of overpowering grief, remorse and anger, and incidentally the bemusements of first-time fatherhood. On those terms, it deserves to be read, even if it does wear out its welcome.

First published in The Sunday Independent

The Blue Book By A. L. Kennedy

The Blue Book

By A. L. Kennedy

As regular readers of this page will be aware, I am an A. L. Kennedy fan, having already given overwhelmingly positive notices to her two preceding novels, 2004's Paradise and 2007's Day.

Writing as someone who has read all of this Scottish writer’s previous novels and short-story collections, and been an avid promoter of and enthusiastic proselytiser for them, sometimes to the point of heroine-worshipping partisanship, it gives no pleasure to opine that The Blue Book is, by a long way, the weakest fiction in an otherwise dazzling oeuvre.

The plot is simple, verging on trite: a middle-aged woman goes on a transatlantic cruise with her attentive boyfriend, meets a roguish ex-lover en voyage, and leaves her boyfriend for her ex. The woman is Elizabeth Caroline Barber, the boyfriend is plain old Derek, and the ex is Arthur Peter Lockwood. Elizabeth, formerly Beth, is temporarily fleeing the UK, in flight from her past, which mostly means the life she shared with the charismatic Arthur, when she partnered him in touring church halls as mediums, perfecting the arcane but also practical skills utilised by believable frauds in facilitating the bereft and bereaved to contact their deceased loved ones on “the other side”. When Elizabeth finally rejected what once seemed an intoxicating game as merely an unpardonable series of tawdry crimes, Arthur continued his search for the right way to do wrong, or to do the wrong thing for the right reasons. He now subsidises free closure for the traumatised and dispossessed (e.g. Agathe in Montreal, a survivor of Rwandan ethnic cleansing, while her husband and son were not) by preying on the super-rich (e.g. Peri Arpagian in New York, a widow still missing her passed-on, self-made mining industrialist and environmental polluting husband, Mels), and does very well for himself too, into the bargain. Elizabeth and Arthur still met occasionally, for weekends of sexual oblivion, but their desperate affection lacerated as much as it consoled. Thus, poor Derek, who is “perfectly adequate”, and may be planning to propose marriage, but spends most of the crossing in bed with seasickness, not helped by the fact that after Elizabeth encounters Arthur she starts substituting anodyne but ineffective medication for his seasick tablets.

So, why doesn’t it work? All the usual stylistic ticks and familiar techniques are present and correct: the italics to indicate interior monologue and/or sarcastically toned stream of consciousness; the bold type for emphasis within those excursions; the short, sometimes one-sentence, sometimes even one-word paragraphs; the rhetorical repetitions. These have proved invaluable resources before, but such devices have grown over-familiar through overuse, and should perhaps be pressed into action more sparingly. As it is, they are beginning both to look and sound like emotional incontinence, a literary running off at the mouth, or mind. Of course, it can be argued that this modus operandi provides an accurate representation in prose of Elizabeth’s thought processes and how she feels, an appropriate matching of style to content, but the close juxtapositioning of reams of lazy, loose writing with wonderfully arresting insights wrapped in poetic phrasing is highly frustrating. Kennedy fails to, ahem, strike a happy medium. There is also the fact that Elizabeth’s situation doesn’t seem to warrant such neurotic flights.

The downgrading of Derek from harmless stooge to petulant control freak is convenient but contrived, and ultimately self-serving. The sporadic direct addressing of the reader in the second person singular, as a performer would an audience, is far from innovative, featuring prominently as it did in Jay McInerney's 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City, and is a staple of postmodern fiction, for example Italo Calvino's 1979 masterpiece, If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller. Besides which, the “you” addressed switches willy-nilly between being the reader and Elizabeth talking to herself. Then, the significance of the title is never adequately explained, but it is certainly no exhaustive meditation on an area of the psychic and colour spectrum as thorough as William Gass's beautiful essay, On Being Blue. Or maybe it’s because Hilary Mantel gave us a much more substantial and satisfying exploration of the hocus-pocus thing in 2005’s Beyond Black, perhaps because it paid more attention to social context than Kennedy chooses to do here. Finally, there is the “tragic revelation” at the end which is supposed to explain everything (and why do I feel the need to resort to that unpardonable mannerism of both writing style and speech pattern, the inverted commas or finger-flexing, when reviewing this book?), but which instead feels woefully tacked on and, as the youthful Martin Amis would have put it, “real dead babies”. In short, the whole book is a series of unlikely occurrences and outlandish situations which, as they say, “fail to convince”.

Granted, this pulling a rabbit out of a hat, narratively speaking, is meant to mimic a magic, or a confidence, trick. But there are few things more embarrassing to watch than a conjuror, or a conman, who doesn’t pull it off. I didn’t “believe” a word of it, and that is what makes this latest piece of sleight of hand, by the gifted illusionist A. L. Kennedy, her first serious misstep.

First published in The Sunday Independent.

Paradise By A.L. Kennedy

Paradise 

By A.L. Kennedy

Hannah Luckraft drinks too much. She’s been drinking too much since she was seventeen, and now she’s pushing forty, with nothing much to show for it: ‘Because I was born with the absolute certainty that I would die before leaving thirty. I arrived with ten toes and blue eyes and death firmly in mind. I passed the age when lives should be taken in hand, knowing that no such formalities would be required. For me, there would be no pension, no insurance, no prudent mortgage plan, no fretting over outrages in homes for the elderly, or the ultimate loss of my health and faculties. I was carefree. And completely wrong, of course.’ There is also no child, which in her ‘personal arithmetic’ means ‘Hannah Luckraft = Nothing’.

Hannah, whose nomenclature manages to combine both the idea of grace and religious longing in its ‘Christian’ first part with the trusting to blind fate (rather than faith) of someone all at sea in treacherous waters in its Family second half, will drink anything she can get her hands on, including the ever reliable old standby from schooldays, cough mixtures, although she’s not too keen on lager. Her favourite is: ‘Bushmill’s, County Antrim, 700 millilitres, 40 per cent. I mean, what else do you need to know? Not that, as an additional courtesy, you don’t turn it in your hands and love the rounded corners and the dapper weight and the elegant cut of the label: the black with the white and the gold, all shaped around each other to mark out an arch: a long, slim doorway to somewhere else. And God bless the rectangular bottle, for it will not roll and harm itself.’ She regularly has blackouts, waking up without a clue where she is, only to recollect later that – to take a random example – she spent a portion of the previous evening giving a vigorous blowjob to the unattractive total stranger she now finds herself chatting to across a hotel breakfast table. 

Fans of the quick-fix quackery dignified under the term ‘psychiatry’, or the more long drawn-out charlatanism which passes itself off as ‘therapy’, will search in vain for THE REASON Hannah behaves in this punishingly self-destructive way. Her childhood has been comfortable and stable, in fact a lot less traumatic than average. She is blessed with loving, supportive and – most important of all, given her inclinations – forgiving parents. Then there’s her doctor brother, Simon, whose social and material success may be a standing reproach to Hannah (who is, ridiculously, ‘something in cardboard’, that is until she gets the sack and starts working in a bar) and who, while he may have a smug shrew for a wife and a baby on the way, still cares enough to get her into a treatment clinic in Canada, and foot the bill for it. Plus there’s Robert, her recently acquired dentist boyfriend, whom she fell for because of his ‘drinker’s smile’. Yes, he’s as big a dipsomaniac as she is, if not worse, but that doesn’t stop her being crazy about him.

Doubtless any therapist worth his inflated 50-minute-hourly fee would dub this relationship ‘co-dependent’, but our Hannah isn’t about to be taken in by any of their value-laden, socially-controlling, self-serving guff, and much satire is knocked out of her time in recovery: ‘This morning, we’re sitting in a circle again – this means we’re doing something to make us better, the kind of something that we get instead of treatment. Apparently it’s a known fact that no one has ever recuperated from any unfortunate state without being slapped down into a grisly ring of pink Naugahyde armchairs and made to discuss their personal lives with a dozen emotional vampires listening.’ Shrinks aren’t any better, in Hannah’s view, their evil bunk giving them a license to behave much worse than priests and nuns ever did: ‘Tomorrow morning, I’m supposed to go off and have my skull cracked by some consultant, let him fumble around when there’s nothing left for anyone to find. I’ve been professionally groped here for over a week: whatever thrill there was in it has gone. I’ll tell him my dream and he’ll grill me about masturbation or fetishes and then try to make me feel abnormal. This doesn’t suit people like me… We need something gentle.’  

So, why does she drink? If the standard answer is ‘To forget’, and the further routine inquiry ‘To forget what?’ is always inevitably met by the comic reply, ‘I’ve forgotten’, none of this is applicable to Hannah. For she remembers, in painful, self-lacerating detail. Indeed, it would be easy to conclude that her default setting is remorse, if it were not for the cutting, paradoxical humour with which it is leavened. Why does she drink? ‘I am delicate and the world is impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped. I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would – but there isn’t. So I drink.’ Maybe it would be better to ask a geneticist why she is the way she is; or, failing that, a philosopher. For the metaphysical ironies and moral ambiguities in Kennedy’s work are beyond most of her contemporaries, and are expressed, as they could only be, in a prose style that is virtuoso in its linguistic brilliance. If this review contains excessive quotation, it is simply because this is very definitely a case where it is better to let the writing do the talking. Kennedy thrives on paradox: Paradise is, obviously, an inferno, but it is nonetheless a paradise for all that.

Allegedly a teetotaller, Kennedy has here performed a miracle of imaginative empathy. One would have to go back over seventy years, to Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood, to find a woman writing so well about the interiority of the drinking life. As it is, this is a lyric work which bears comparison with Malcolm Lowry’s rather more epic booze hound’s bible, Under The Volcano. It ends with a supremely well-rendered surreal train journey, which turns into a sort of pilgrimage, full of happy serendipities.

There are always only a handful of gifted and important writers in the world at any particular time, writers who really matter. Already an accomplished practitioner of the short story, with three previous highly ambitious novels behind her, Paradise provides further evidence, if any more were needed, that A.L. Kennedy is among that select company. It also, incidentally, bears ongoing witness to the thoroughgoing, media-driven farce that is the Mann Booker Prize, for which this wonderful novel did not even make the long list, much less take its rightful place among the shortlisted six.

First published in The Sunday Independent

Day By A.L. Kennedy

Day 

By A.L. Kennedy

(Jonathan Cape, £16.99 Sterling)

Alfred Day, former tail-gunner in a Lancaster bomber during WW2, is the protagonist of Alison Kennedy’s fifth novel. It is now 1949, and Alfred, only 25 but feeling more like 50, is finding he’s not very good at peace. The only boy in a family of girls, with a drunken, abusive fishmonger father and a doting and doted on mother, the war (or more specifically, the R.A.F., or more exactly still, his flying crew) offered him a previously unimagined camaraderie, and an escape from his rural Staffordshire origins and having to follow his father into his smelly trade. For all the rigid class structure of Britain, reflected in the officer class/ordinary ranks divide of the armed forces, the war was a great leveller, with everyone mucking in together. But look at him now, trying not very successfully to negotiate the readjustment to civilian life, a way of being as an adult that he has never properly known.

He has been working in his friend Ivor’s bookshop in London, although they don’t seem to sell many books. Not that he’s very bothered, since the autodidact Alfred has always been fond of reading. What’s really eating him is numbness, a sense of psychological paralysis occasioned by the loses he has accumulated: his mother, ostensibly felled by a falling roof slate, although Alfred suspects, rightly or wrongly, that his father had something to do with her demise; his crew, since he was the only survivor when his plane was shot down over Hamburg in 1943 on their penultimate 29th bombing mission; and his girlfriend Joyce, a chance encounter during the Blitz, then as now unhappily married to a lieutenant she hardly knew before he was sent off to Malaya, went missing – either dead or imprisoned – who has returned with major trauma (i.e. he never leaves their house). Then Alfred also has his experiences as a German PoW to deal with, not least of which is the death of his friend from the camp, Ringer, who saved him, but whom he failed to save.

So, when the novel opens, we discover he has volunteered as an extra in a prison-camp movie being shot in Germany, trying to find the piece of him that had come adrift in the real prison. He is surrounded by actors playing the war, new and old service men, ‘good’ Germans and displaced persons, and among them are people like him, who won’t talk about what happened. Then there are the kind of people he was fighting, like the nasty piece of work that is the Nazi collaborator Vasyl, really Latvian but claiming to be Ukrainian because he thinks this will ease his passage into British residency, whose personal (im)morality, or code of survival, is summed up succinctly in his saying: ‘It’s like this – you kiss your wife, I take away her face – which one of us is more sensible? You hold on to her hand when she can’t feel and then I stop you feeling – which one of us is more sensible? You care about your daughter – I train my dog to fuck your daughter – you still care – which one of us is more sensible?’

The film set affords the opportunity for some arch but telling postmodern irony: ‘Penalty for non-compliance, one hour in the sun with hands up. They’d be filming that next: trembling British arms and British sweat, very dramatic – lots of sympathy you’d get with that – now that it wasn’t happening any more, now that it was a story.’  Kennedy even pushes it as far as having some (real) ex-prisoners trying to tunnel out of their (fake) new camp, unbeknownst to the production crew. Some of this inner circle take Alfred under their wing, offering him a new start, with false black market identity papers and the chance to be someone else, an option Alfred gives some consideration.

The novel, then, is about the crushing weight of guilt, and the redemptive power of love. If that sounds trite, it isn’t meant to. It is also, strangely enough, given its forensic delineation of the darker propensities of human nature, perhaps Kennedy’s most optimistic longer work to date. In the end, Alfred decides to accept his lot, be himself, go back to London, and take a chance on contacting Joyce.

In these homogenised, commodified times, it is increasingly rare to find a writer with both a signature style, and a sensibility (the two are intimately linked), so distinctly their own that they are instantly recognisable upon opening one of their books, and could not be anyone else’s. A.L. Kennedy is such an artist, and Day handsomely extends her already highly impressive achievement in contemporary fiction.

First published in The Sunday Independent

You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free By James Kelman

You Have to be Careful in the Land of the Free 

By James Kelman

(Hamish Hamilton, £12.99)

At first sight this significant new novel by Booker Prize winner James Kelman (for 1994’s How late it was, how late) seems an unappetising affair: a 34-year-old American immigrant, Jeremiah Brown, is flying home to Scotland tomorrow to see his ailing mother after twelve years away, and has just stepped out of his motel room for a quick drink or two to relax before the journey. Although, such is his self-knowledge, he ponders the wisdom of this move, telling himself he should really stay in and have a sandwich and ogle the goggle box, his equally ample capacity for self-deception wins this particular battle, and it soon becomes inevitable that we will be spending the evening, and the next 437 pages, inside Jeremiah’s head, as he gets progressively pissed.

Jeremiah is, as he readily acknowledges, a flawed character. He drinks, he gambles, he is prone to obsessive paranoiac (or are they?) outpourings, he is estranged from ‘the ex’ – nightclub singer Yasmin – and their four-year-old daughter. He is also a failed, or rather, unpublished writer, who knows that he can ‘talk a good book’, even if he has never written, or rather, finished one. Yet, such is his charm, and his precarious position in his adopted country as an unassimilated, unintegrated alien, that he slowly wins our sympathy, and we are touched by his tough, humane decency.

Jerry has a red card which, with its connotations of left-wing allegiances and of being sent off in a football match, is both literally and metaphorically much lower down the food chain than a green or blue one. It entitles him to work, but to little else – certainly not to a credit card on his difficult-to-open bank account. He is also called upon to produce it as soon as he opens his mouth anywhere and people hear his accent, most notably by bartenders. This is something of an irony, since the greater part of his work experience is in bar-tending, or ‘the booze trade’ as he calls it. (‘She sings the blues and I sling the booze’ he tells one inquirer as to what Yasmin and he do.) That is until he decides he would like to become a solid citizen and family man, and lands a job in airport security.

But these poorly-paid, long-hours vacancies have arisen only because of the rise of ‘The Persian Bet’, a ‘Survive or Perish’ insurance deal taken out by bankrupts and other would-be suicides before flights on dodgy airlines, which pay off if the insured dies, or if they sustain any injuries but manage to survive. ‘Soon the bookies, media commentators and society leaders strove to find a non-evaluative term or phrase to describe a suicide, e.g. “a wannabe-dead”, something that wasnay too positive but at the same time wouldnay alienate the air-travelling public.’ This singular form of travel insurance soon attracts much of the flotsam and jetsam of the contemporary American underbelly, since ‘a significant proportion of those who speculated on the “persian bet” were poverty-stricken bodies on an income so far below what official government experts reckoned it took to stay alive that the term “income” was dropped. These included ‘young folks and asylum-seekers, immigrants, refugees; war vets, down-and-outs, alcoholics, addicts; unwantitorphans and homeless people; people with mental and psychological disorders; people with long histories of abuse, disabilities and deficiencies. It was like a majority of the population: the millions of daily would-be suicides, those who spend three-fifths of their waking hours dreaming of how to accomplish death in as unobtrusive, unselfish and unirresponsible a manner as possible.’ When they start raffling airline tickets in airport car parks, and generally clogging up departure lounges, extra security staff are needed to move them on.

It is patronising to applaud Kelman as merely the finest practitioner there is of Scottish vernacular writing, since in addition to that considerable achievement, what he does here is actually far more sophisticated than that as well. By skipping backwards and forwards through the narrator’s memories, and framing them within his current situation, we build up through an episodic structure a thoroughly enthralling picture of his life in exile. And if you think it looks easy, just you try doing it. While there are few concessions to the reader – the entire book runs from beginning to end without chapters or even line breaks – Kelman still manages to say more from the ground up about life in the U.S.A. today than any amount of writing-programmed, effete, New Yorker stylists ever could.  

The ‘events of 9/11’ are never explicitly referenced, but this is because Kelman understands, in a way that middle-of-the-road commentators like Martin Amis never could, that if it took such a seismic occurrence to act as a wake-up call, then things must have been pretty bad before it happened. 9/11 was not ‘the day the world changed’, as CNN would have us believe, merely the day one half of the world found out what the other half was thinking. Similarly, it is useless to fault Kelman for presenting only one half of the picture, that of the underclass, because he is more aware than most of how the supposed ‘end of history’ and the rise of global capitalism in the west over the last fifteen years have created a two tier society, with those not rich enough to buy themselves out, or those too poor through lack of education and training, or ill-health, or simple inability to fit in, required to suffer the vagaries of the corporo-bureaucratic weave, with its daily manglings of language and attempts to control reality. His half of the story is the one we usually don’t hear.

All of which may beg the question: why is Jeremiah in the country in the first place? Well, there is the example of a quixotic ancestor, whose name he shares, a pioneer who made good in the land of the free. And, as he tells us early on: ‘That is how people exile themselves, to avoid hurting their faimlies and friends. I had two faimlies; one here and one back in the UK. I now was exiting here. Where the fuck else was I gauny go?’

This novel is not perfect; but then, no novel is. Such sustained buttonholing can wear a body down, leading you to wonder does Kelman know the difference between an effective short story and a novel, while some readers may find the ending curiously inconclusive and unsatisfying. But, for all that, in terms of its scope, ambition, energy and vision, it is safe to say that James Kelman is a great writer, and everyone should read him.

First published in The Sunday Independent

I AM VERMIN by Dr. Millar

 My review of Seán Millar’s I AM VERMIN is in the current issue of The Goo magazine (June 2026).

Dr. Millar

I Am Vermin

(Gentlemen Records)

Desmond Traynor

What is the best way to review a 5 CD disc release of (save for one song) entirely new material, totalling forty-two songs all told, each disc a discrete album in itself? Maybe best to enumerate the titles of the individual albums, and explain the concept behind each. We are helped in this endeavour by Seán Millar’s semi-autobiographical essayistic liner notes, which would not be out of place in one of our more respected literary journals. Certainly, if one Goo album review is generally two hundred words, this one merits at least a thousand. Even so, this length will not be sufficient to do justice to the riches contained within.

The general title refers to Millar’s ‘tendency to identify with socially rejected things’, and permeates all five elements of the whole. Throughout all that follows, the sturdiness and variety of Millar’s singing voice, and the deftness of his musicianship, should not go unremarked.

Disc 1, Toy Bear in a Coalmine (1985-1988), has the unifying theme of what Dermot Bolger once called in the title of one of his poetry collections, ‘internal exile’. Seán writes, ‘The band that most influenced my songwriting in the years I describe here is the Velvet Underground’, and there is a raw, live feel to the recordings, all done in two takes. Many of the seven cuts, such as opener ‘Least Said Soonest Mended’ are country-inflected, some more so than others – ‘I Couldn’t Bear To Meet You’ is positively gothic. Then there is the dreamy Major 7ths progression of ‘Terrified’. Stand out is the seven minute plus ‘I Decided To Live’, with its lengthy spoken word intro, and gospel-tinged harmonies courtesy of long-time collaborator and chanteuse extraordinaire, Miriam Ingram. Lyrically, it details Millar’s early twenties suicidal ideation because of his white male guilt, but concluding that killing himself would only hurt the ones who loved him. The duel guitar interplay is reminiscent of Lou Reed’s and Robert Quine’s work on The Blue Mask, and later Reed’s and Mike Rathke’s partnership on New York.

Next up is London Eats Me (1998-1992), a title which invites reference to Hanif Kureishi’s 1991 film London Kills Me. This is where exile proper begins. Colm Tóibín has written of the venerable Irish tradition of ‘fecking off to England’, embodying the ‘idea in the Irish mind of England not so much as a conqueror and traditional enemy but as a place where people are let alone.’ Sexual experimentation was easier in a metropolis where windows weren’t squinting, and Catholic guilt mixed with claustrophobic familial social situations were not an inhibiting factor to enjoying ‘a haven of freedom and pleasure’. (I myself fecked off to Italy, and had a rare old time.) But things can turn dark. Wherever you go, there you are. ‘There’s a special kind of low self-esteem that you only get from brushes with the music industry’ Seán notes, and his rise and fall therein is delineated here. London eventually transmogrifies into ‘This Stinking Town’. Other highlights include: ‘Tony Gets It’, where the songwriter reverts to one of his favoured scenarios, adultery with other men’s wives (cf. ‘You’re Not Paranoid’ from solo debut The Bitter Lie), this time delivering a sly twist in the dénouement; ‘Twelve Years Later’, a third-person recounting of a final meeting with a former girlfriend and closest friend on whom the years have taken their toll; and the clear Scott Walker homage ‘Rumours Of You’. Most moving is the wry, arpeggiated reflection on a longstanding cross-sex friendship, ‘Sex in the Twentieth Century’: ‘We don’t make love but the love’s still there.’ Quite.

This is followed by the louche and laid back third disc, Two Centimes (1972-1997), which celebrates the European underclass that emerged during this period, of which Millar considers himself a member and defender. Many of the compositions owe a debt to the chanson tradition and to easy blues and trad jazz motifs. ‘Crazy Time’ ’s Johnny Cash cowboy vocal laments turning day into night ‘cos you know your life’s not worth two centimes’, while ‘Dirty On The Inside’ sees ‘the flowers of evil bloom’ in an afternoon hotel room. ‘The Scene’ is a spoken word apologia for the (self-chosen) lifestyle, in which the fundamental mutual misunderstanding and clash of values the protagonist experiences when confronted with aspirational working or middle class people is delineated: they think he’s failing by not getting with the programme; he thinks they are, because they already have. Closer ‘The Boot’s On The Other Foot Now’ would not sound amiss on a Stephan Grappelli record.

The conceptually complex sci fi of proggy disc #4, The Invisible Revolution, is the most challenging listen in terms of understanding the story and following the narrative. But it ends with the resounding Christmas cracker ‘December Man’, the rumbunctious bells and whistles arrangement and production courtesy of composer and keyboard wiz Daragh O’Toole.

Disc 5, Dirty Dublin, brings everything full circle, with opener ‘Run Run Run Runaway’ ruminating on ‘this town I love to hate’. It also includes the eminently singalong ‘Fucked Up Genes’ and the explanatory title track. The songs are characterised by a mature equanimity. Always Coming Home, indeed.

Whenever an artist or band release a double album, the default question is always ‘Does it justify its length?’ Such speculation, in my opinion, tends to miss the point of the extended form. In good hands, the larger canvas provides songwriters and musicians with an opportunity to stretch out and feel less constrained. The fear is that they will lose the run of themselves, and the result will be bloated and self-indulgent, with a fair proportion of filler. Millar has put out not a double, but a quintuple album(s), which magnifies these risks. But he has astutely avoided the pitfalls, mostly because he has compressed what would be ten years’ worth of work for your average singer/songwriter into one release (at least one component of which he has been working on, on and off, for ten years), and with him one can justifiably invert the old adage which extols the virtues of excess over excellence to ‘never mind the width, feel the quality’.

Just give him the Choice Music Award now. Or, failing that, at least a Lifetime Achievement Award.

https://www.thegoo.ie/albums/wkkb6k5dcff4z0eul8q5ehwzett6hg?fbclid=IwY2xjawSzdSFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEegdpCY-vGv8xA4_nYVRw1ksK3Xaj3aV_YxhFZ3l1y9KqiHgqFB_oxYo-AedE_aem_QinVZM53AOjttIlUyt3GWQ

The Little Hammer By John Kelly

The Little Hammer

By John Kelly

(Jonathan Cape, p/b, £10)

John Kelly is well-known and justly praised as a television and radio presenter, and a writer on matters musical, who has an obvious passion and near encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject. I am a fan of his nightly RTE Radio 1 programme, Mystery Train (and admired its precursor on what was then Radio Ireland), was a regular viewer of the generally excellent television popular cultural review he fronted, Later with John Kelly (sadly gone the way of all TV arts programmes at Montrose, in the national broadcaster’s incessant quest for audience figures that will keep the advertisers happy - ‘RTE: Supporting The Arts’ indeed), and enjoy his column in The Irish Times every Saturday. Not content with brightening up our lives in these capacities, he has now produced his debut novel. So, can he write it like he talks it? Is it any good?

The Little Hammer concerns an unnamed narrator, a painter from Kelly’s own Co. Fermanagh, who killed a palaeontologist with a geological hammer when he (the unnamed etc., that is) was nine years old. The motivation or significance of this incident is never fully revealed, although it transpires that this chap’s family, presided over by a grotesque Granny, is no stranger to murder in its ranks. What plot there is kicks in with the appearance of Ingrid Bergman lookalike Billie Maguire, a production assistant for Firecracker Films, run by the execrable Clive Ratcliff aka The Cockroach, who persuades our narrator to take part in an autobiographical film. Thing is, the entire film is a complete fabrication, and entails their decampment to Prague, where said narrator was a student (not). Suddenly all the stuff we’ve had to wade through about his Granny’s devotion to The Lives of The Saints and The Child of Prague becomes relevant. Billie kidnaps the original Child, substitutes it with an appropriately attired Action Man, and sends it to the Granny. Our narrator does his damnedest to rectify this situation, even writing to the Pope, and Shirley Temple. There is also a cameo by Elvis Presley.

Trouble is, the whole is less than the sum of the parts. The book could most generously be described as ‘episodic’, but quite a few chapters seem to be included for no apparent reason, and bear very little relation to what goes before or comes after them. So while it is comic in places (I particularly liked the description of charismatics as ‘the acoustic guitar wing of the Roman Catholic Church and I didn’t like the look of them’), it reads very much like a lucky dip hotchpotch, thrown together. In a recent ‘My Writing Day’ column in The Irish Times, Kelly admitted that pressure of work meant he wrote ‘...on the DART and over a sandwich’. Doubtless much substantial work has been produced under these pressing conditions, but here one gets the feeling that it is very much pieced together and slapdash. Kelly can obviously write prose, but this is hardly a novel at all, since it is bitty, and lacks coherence. He may be aiming for the surreal wit of Flann O’Brien, but O’Brien is both darker and funnier. There is too little plot or character development to keep most readers happy. Sure, it’s meant to be a funny book, not a serious book, but it is not a seriously funny book.

    At one point the narrator writes of television producer The Cockroach: 

                    ...Clive Ratcliff The Cockroach was the worst kind of

                     cockroach - a cockroach who worked in television. He 

                    was a vampire, a leech - an empty vessel that needed to 

                    be filled by the ideas of others. This way he fancied he 

                    might live for ever in the credits. He was a virus, a parasite

                    and a pest and he needed a good kick in the arse.

 and at another:

                    Mister Ratcliff, I said calmly, beginning in deliberate tones

                    but soon freewheeling, you are a fraudulent, two-faced,

                    useless, talentless, valueless, bloodsucking bastard - 

                    and if you ever contact me again you will die a cruel and

                    unusual death and you will not live to see your next miserable,

                    hateful production. I swear to you, Mister Ratcliff, I will

                    actually kill you. You are the embodiment of all that I despise -

                    all that is wrong with the opportunistic, false, unscrupulous,

                    corrupt, shabby, double-dealing, hypocritical and time-serving

                    milieu in which you prosper. I have no desire to be a part of it

                    and I certainly have no desire to go anywhere near a charlatan

                    like you!

Unfortunately, with the appearance of this book, John Kelly is running the risk of falling into the trap of becoming that which he is criticising, bringing the callow, shallow (lack of) values of television to make callow, shallow publishing, sad for someone who produces quality broadcasting in such wretched circumstances. If he were not an established media personality, I’d wager this effort would not be getting published under the Cape imprint. It is also, incidentally, not up to Cape’s usually high proof-reading and editorial standards.

The Little Hammer has a laugh here and there, but it is not a great work of art, nor was probably meant to be. Someday John Kelly may write a good book, and display as much talent and discernment as a novelist as he currently does as a broadcaster and cultural commentator, but on the evidence of his first fictional outing, which follows the personal travelogue Cool About The Ankles, he still has a considerable way to go to achieve this goal. Maybe he should take more time, or else stick to what he does best.

First published in Books Ireland

The Left and The Lucky by Willy Vlautin

 I reviewed Willy Vlautin's new novel in The Irish Times last month.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/review/2026/05/09/the-left-and-the-lucky-by-willy-vlautin-portrait-of-an-unusual-friendship-and-the-acts-that-carry-them/

Jim O’Rourke Interview

                                       Jim O’Rourke Interview - April 2026

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

DT: Where did you come across Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Walking On Dry Land By Denis Kehoe

Walking On Dry Land                                                                                  

By Denis Kehoe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published in The Sunday Independent.

Nights Beneath The Nation By Denis Kehoe

Nights Beneath The Nation

By Denis Kehoe

(Serpent’s Tail, £9.99stg p/b)

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

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

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

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

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

First published in The Sunday Independent

Antarctica By Claire Keegan

Antarctica

By Claire Keegan

(Faber and Faber, £9.99)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published in Books Ireland 

Marilyn and Me By Ji-min Lee

Marilyn and Me

By Ji-min Lee

(4th Estate)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Published in The Irish Times, 01/08/2019 

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

W. B. Yeats – Man And Poet

By A Norman Jeffares

(Gill and Macmillian)

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

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

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

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

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

             

Never Let Me Go By Kazuo Ishiguro

Never Let Me Go                                                                                  

By Kazuo Ishiguro

(Faber & Faber)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First published in The Sunday Independent