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 He is also a failed, or rather, unpublished writer, who knows that he can ‘talk a good book’, even if he has never written, or rather, finished one.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

Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich By David Irving

Goebbels: Mastermind of the Third Reich

By David Irving

(Focal Point Publications, £25)

Height only 5ft 4ins, an emaciated figure with a head too large for his body, and a clubfoot for which he was taunted as both boy and man, the cards seemed stacked against Joseph Goebbels from the start. Or so David Irving would have us believe, in his attempt to explain the psychology of a mass murderer, and justify genocide. Unlike some American white supremacists, Irving does not dispute the historical veracity of the Holocaust, but he does place its origins in the socio-economic context of Weimar Germany, with its crippling unemployment and rampant inflation.  

While I would readily accept that World War Two was essentially a continuation of World War One, it seems to me that the Treaty of Versailles and the War Reparations Commission had more to do with Germany’s problems than the Jewish people. Besides, neither anti-Semitism nor belief in the invincibility of the German people were new ideas in Germany; but they did assume greater importance as the country faced, or rather failed to face, its post-war problems. There was anti-Semitic feeling in 1918, partly because of the large number of Jews among Rosa Luxemburg’s Spartacists and the Independent Socialists. So racialist theory was founded on people’s political inclinations. And the effects of the Wall Street crash and the trail of bankruptcies and unemployment that it left behind in the United States were felt severely by all countries engaged in international trade, not only Germany.  

Irving explores none of this. The chief selling point of the book is Irving’s exclusive access to the previously undiscovered Goebbels’ diaries, found in Moscow in 1992. Quotation from the diaries takes place inside inverted commas, and commentary outside them, but the distinction begins to blur, since although Irving at one point refers to the ‘heathen criminality’ of the death camps, nowhere does he condemn, but rather seems to condone, his subject’s anti-Semitism, homophobia and misogyny. Irving also flits back and forth with gay abandon between the past and present tense, when talking about the past, which is a very sensationalised way to write history.

Like many of the leaders of our own 1916 Rising, Goebbels began with artistic ambitions, writing poetry, plays and novels, and only later became a political animal. He studied Latin, philology and history, and gained a PhD. He blamed Jewish control of publishing houses for his lack of literary success. Despite his distinctly non-Aryan physique (there is surely a study to be written on the negative image of disability in history: Goebbels identified with Richard III), he became an even more enthusiastic Jew-baiter than his Fuhrer. Irving shows how if one accepts the crazy logic of putting eugenic theory into action, the Final Solution seems almost rational:

                       Physically liquidating them now seemed an increasingly viable

                       solution. If it was possible to liquidate the insane, if Goring’s

                       air force was killing the relatively innocent English by the              

                       thousand, why should the ‘guilt-laden’ Jews be spared?  

                       Goebbels had discussed the euthanasia project (‘the covert

                       liquidation of the mentally ill,’ he called it) with Bouhler on

                       January 30, 1941. Bouhler had informed him that they had

                       quietly disposed of 80,000 so far, with 60,000 more still to

                       go. ‘Hard work, but necessary too,’ applauded Goebbels.

A virgin until 33, he rapidly made up for lost time, with a succession of actresses and secretaries. This inevitably led to marital conflict, although his wife Magda was also culpable as regards infidelity. A newspaper editor and journalist who hated journalists, had he lived today he would have made a brilliant creative director in an advertising agency, such was his understanding of how to sway public opinion. (Indeed, Irving too may well have missed his true vocation, and is an ad-man manqué, since there can be few more difficult briefs than trying to retrospectively make Nazism seem acceptable.) As Minister for Propaganda, he set up the Chamber of Culture, and had complete control over the press, literature, theatre, music, the graphic arts, film and radio. His censorship was meticulous and ruthless. Signs appeared in dance-halls reading ‘Jazz Dancing Forbidden’. He organised an exhibition of ‘Junk Art’, including the work of Otto Dix, Emile Nolde and Oskar Kokoschka, to demonstrate to the public the ‘artistic bolshevism’ of this work. His loyalty to Hitler was unswerving, and when the end came in May 1945, he took his wife and six children with him to the Nazi Valhalla with equanimity, the day after his leader killed himself.

Irving presents the evidence, but fails to synthesise it into a larger whole. The book ends with Goebbels’ suicide, and no attempt is made to appraise his career. Irving is good at the everyday details, like when he describes the internal feuding among the leaders of the Third Reich, but he misses the overall picture.  

Anyone who has read the work of Paul Celan or Primo Levi will know the other side of the story, the struggle of the victims to cope with the burden of grief and memory. A favourite phrase of Levi’s was, ‘the nature of the offence’. Discussing that phrase in Time’s Arrow, Martin Amis wrote:

                      The offence was unique, not in its cruelty, nor in its cowardice, 

                      but in its style - in its combination of the atavistic and the 

                      modern. It was, at once, reptilian and ‘logistical’. And

                      although the offence was not definingly German, its style was.

Of course, the worm turns inexorably, and the abused become the abusers, the oppressed become the oppressors, and today we need writers like Edward Said to remind us of the humanity of Palestinians. But the fact remains that the Holocaust was so horrific that any considered, measured or reasoned response seems offensive. Goebbels was an evil man, who was a linchpin of a regime which presided over the nadir of this best and worst of centuries.       

First published in the Irish Independent

 

Submission By Michel Houellebecq

Submission

By Michel Houellebecq

(Heinemann, £18.99 stg)

Published in French on January 7th this year, the day of the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris, and now appearing in English translation, you couldn’t say controversialist Michel Houellebecq latest novel, his seventh, is not prescient. He has form when it comes to Muslim immigration in France, and jihadism, of course. He was taken to court in 2002 for incitement to racial hatred, after calling Islam ‘the stupidest religion’, and his 1999 novel Platform culminates in the conflagration of a fundamentalist terrorist atrocity on a beach resort in Thailand.

Submission’s central character is a recognisable Houellebecq type. François, 44, a lecturer at the Sorbonne, is reclusive, friendless, existing on a diet of frozen dinners in his two room apartment, and trying to avoid mithering by postgraduate students he doesn’t consider up to snuff. He usually initiates an annual affair with a female student, which ends in the summer when he receives a message beginning ‘I’ve met someone.’ The current incumbent is 22-year-old Myriam, beautiful, sexy and Jewish, who clearly cares for him, but he can’t respond. He was the author, in his 20s, of a brilliant dissertation on decadent 19th century novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans, author of the infamous Au Rebours. 

Set slightly in the future, Submission partakes of a trait of most of the best science fiction, that of a ‘What if…?’ projection on the present. It is also in the tradition of the dystopian narrative, á la Orwell’s 1984, although the timeline here is rather more truncated and immediate, for this is a dystopia we mostly already inhabit.

It is 2022, and the apolitical François is settling in to watch the Presidential election results on TV, entertainment he considers second only to the soccer World Cup. After the preliminary voting, two candidates emerge: Marine Le Pen, leader of the far-right Front National, and the head of France’s new Islamic party, Mohammed Ben Abbes. The Socialists coalesce with the Muslim Brotherhood to defeat Le Pen, and Ben Abbes becomes president. Because the Brotherhood cares more about education than the economy, as the chief instiller of appropriate moral values in the next generation, all they ask is that state secondary schools and universities adopt an Islamic curriculum. François is duly informed that he cannot return to his university work unless he converts to Islam, and is retired on a generous pension.

These events precipitate a crisis of (non) faith, which sees François taking off for the Benedictine abbey in southern France where Huysmans spent his last years after abandoning his dissolute life in Paris and converting to mystical Catholicism in middle age, and thence to the medieval Christian pilgrimage site Rocamadour. Myriam leaves for Israel with her parents, but François concludes, “There is no Israel for me.”

This is no coup d’etat, so little seems to change at first, but over the following months François starts to notice small things, beginning with how women dress. He sees fewer skirts and dresses, more baggy pants and shirts that hide the body’s contours. Non-Muslim women have adopted the style to escape the sexual marketplace that Houellebecq has delineated so well elsewhere. Youth crime declines, as does unemployment when women, grateful for the social engineering of new family subsidies, begin to leave the workforce to care for their children.

François thinks he sees a new social model developing before his eyes, which he imagines has the polygamous family at its center. Men have different wives for sex, childbearing, and affection; the wives pass through all these stages as they age, but never have to worry about being abandoned. They are always surrounded by their children, who have lots of siblings and feel loved by their parents, who never divorce. François is impressed, but while his admiration may initially stem from a colonial fantasy of the erotic harem, it flourishes as acknowledgement of a secure social order, based on the family.

The big question here is, how much does Houellebecq himself endorse this view? Curiously, he may not simply be pulling our leg here. When François accedes to the gentle proslytising of suave university president, Robert Rediger, and returns to his now exorbitantly paid teaching post, it seems not solely out of self-interest, if at all. Similarly, when he also edits a complete works of Huysmans, where he concludes that his hero was not really a decadent after all, he genuinely seems to believe this. But if François rolls over, does that mean Michel H has?

When asked about ‘the stupidest religion’ remark last January, Houellebecq declared that he had now changed his mind, through reading the Qu’ran. “Perhaps I hadn’t read it with enough care,” he said. “Now I think that a reasonably honest interpretation of the Qu’ran does not end up with jihadism. It would require a very dishonest interpretation to arrive at jihadism.” He also added that Submission is “not Islamophobic. Even an inattentive reading would not see it as that.”

So, while some in France have complained that the novel fans right-wing fears of the Muslim population, that is to miss Houellebecq’s deeply subversive point: Islamists and anti-immigration demagogues really ought to be on the same side, because they share a suspicion of pluralist liberalism and a desire to return to ‘traditional’ or pre-feminist values, where a woman submits to her husband, just as ‘Islam’ means that a Muslim submits to God. Rediger even permits himself a sly allusion to Pauline Réage’s BDSM classic The Story of O in this regard.

 Which is all fine and well, unless you’re the kind of man who’d like to be with a woman who has a brain, or are the kind of woman for whom domesticity does not provide total fulfilment. 

 The other aspect of this timely novel to be remarked upon is how much Houellebecq has improved as a writer qua writing since his early scattergun sprawls. When he started off, he had a lot to say, but was not always all that careful about how he said it. However, aphoristic sentences such as ‘For man, love is nothing more than gratitude for the gift of pleasure’, and ‘Living together would have spelled the end of all sexual desire between us, and we were still too young to survive that as a couple’ partake of a Wildean exactitude. How much of this greater attention to language is the result of working with more skilled editors and translators we may never know, but it is one more reason to read this novel, from a writer who has never been afraid to grapple with the big questions.

Breakdown by Cathy Sweeney

So I read Breakdown (2024) by Cathy Sweeney. Well written, easy to read. My main takeaway is: 

Why do women think they have a monopoly on middle-class, middle-aged discontent and angst under the vacuousness of late capitalism, mindless consumerism and domestic tedium? I’ve some news for you: lotsa men feel the same way. Lots of people are unfulfilled, both men and women. Why is it always men’s fault? * Ah yes, the patriarchy. As if men didn’t suffer under that too. It’s hardly the boring husband’s fault that she’s a failed artist. Also: why do people like this nameless character have children in the first place? Did they think that they wouldn’t grow to dislike them so much, over time? 

I would say that there is a very strange mother/daughter dynamic going on between Cathy Sweeney and Lucy Sweeney Byrne (who, incidentally, I would consider to be a far superior writer), particularly in the wake of this novel’s publication. Both share a disaffected worldview. Maybe I just find the disillusionment of younger women more interesting than that of the older cohort. 

* This strawman argument against these strawmen is, of course, a commonly observable phenomenon among contemporary Irish women whom I’ve read, e.g. Eimear McBride, Niamh Campbell, Nicole Flattery. While it may be therapeutic to get things off your chest, I’m not sure how much it helps the discourse. 

The Map and the Territory By Michel Houellebecq

The Map and the Territory 

By Michel Houellebecq

(Vintage, £7.99 stg, P/B)

The latest novel from the author of controversial and prize-winning works Atomised and Platform is his most normal and conventional outing thus far. But this is Houellebecq, so it is still relatively challenging. 

Essentially it is the life-story of successful French artist Jed Martin, an only child and a solitary adult, whose social and sexual interactions are few and far between. He meets his retired architect father once a year for Christmas dinner (his mother committed suicide when he was a boy). For a time he has an affair with beautiful Russian émigré, Olga. Otherwise his main distraction is the fluctuating state of the boiler in his bachelor pad/artist’s studio. He seems to stumble through life, having the great good fortune that his talent is recognised, and handsomely remunerated, without much obvious self-promotion. Indeed, his Kiplingesque indifference to ‘those two imposters’, and the feeling that his acclaim is as much the result of blind chance as it is of ability and application, is one of his more attractive features.

He begins his artistic career photographing tools and household objects, but gains attention for his series of photographic recastings of Michelin maps. It is through these works that he meets Olga, who is Public Relations director of Michelin France. After they become lovers, they enjoy weekends away in provincial France, at ‘Charm & Relax’ hotels and Michelin starred restaurants. One could argue that in his caustic observations on the socio-economic demographics of the domestic leisure industry, Houellebecq here does for tourism in France what Platform did for holidays in Thailand. Jed’s mature work, carried out long after Olga has returned to promotion in Moscow, starts out as the Series of Simple Professions, and culminates in canvases with titles like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology and Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons Dividing Up the Art Market. He photographs things; he paints people.

The Michelin fixation has a clear antecedent in Roland Barthes’ essay ‘The Blue Guide’ from Mythologies; but it is another, more well-known Barthes work which really informs The Map and the Territory: ‘The Death of the Author’. Jed requests that none other than Michel Houellebecq, the notorious novelist, write the catalogue essay for a retrospective of his work. After meeting the author, he decides to do a portrait of Michel Houellebecq, Writer. So, Houellebecq becomes a character in his own novel, with all the opportunities for satire, self-parody and doubleness that entails. When the author gets bumped off in gruesome fashion, the book takes an unexpected left turn into a police procedural. It also brings the nod to Barthes full circle, and sets up a challenge from the creative to the critical, the literary to the theoretical. Barthes argued for the effacement of authorial biography and intention. Houellebecq’s voice, entangled as it is with his anti-celebrity, and the flatly opinionated tone of his writings, is so powerful that it speaks from beyond the grave.

Some will say that this is Houellebecq’s least ambitious novel, even if it is the first one to win the prestigious Prix Goncourt in France. Atomised, after all, was dedicated ‘to mankind’. But, aside from taking a few pot-shots at his detractors among France’s media figures, for the most part Houellebecq avoids the navel-gazing pitfalls inherent in the ‘novelist-as-character-in-his-own-novel’ ploy. Rather like the artist Jed Martin, the writer Michel Houellebecq has achieved both critical and commercial recognition, a combination which can arouse a good deal of professional jealousy and financial envy. The novel does contain some shrewd send-ups of art criticism and the art market. The character Houellebecq, in his exhibition catalogue, opines that all of Jed Martin’s work could be subtitled A Brief History of Capitalism. Perhaps the same is true of Houellebecq’s oeuvre. At any rate, he can still employ his trenchant talent for amusingly sweeping generalisation to devastating effect, as with, ‘They had several happy weeks. It was not, it couldn’t be, the exacerbated, feverish happiness of young people, and it was no longer a question for them in the course of a weekend to get plastered or totally shit-faced; it was already – but they were still young enough to laugh about it – the preparation for that epicurean, peaceful, refined but unsnobbish happiness that Western society offered the representatives of its middle-to-upper classes in middle age.’ One certainly wonders how far his tongue was planted in his cheek when he has Jed’s father offer this opinion of his work: ‘He’s a good author, it seems to me. He’s pleasant to read, and he has quite an accurate view of society.’

First published in The Sunday Independent.

The Possibility of an Island By Michel Houellebecq

The Possibility of an Island

By Michel Houellebecq

(Hamish Hamilton, £12.99stg/€19.04)

In many ways, this new novel by the bad boy (or hot property, depending on your point of view) of contemporary French letters, could be described as a sequel to his breakthrough, second novel, 1999’s Atomised. Less generously, it could equally be dismissed as ‘more of the same’.

All the previous and expected particular elements are in place: the jaundiced disdain for the rampant yet alarmingly unselfconscious self-indulgence of hippie-liberal hangover values (or, rather, lack of them); the acerbic appraisal of the selfishly hedonistic West, fixated as it is on the glorification of youth, the accumulation of wealth and the instant gratification of pleasure – in short what is generally rather euphemistically described as ‘progress’, the dark corollary of which is its incapacity to accommodate its own old, sick or poor – much less those of what is usually somewhat optimistically referred to as the ‘developing’ world; an equal contempt for the power-hungry absurdities of traditional, atavistic, family-values orientated religion, be it Jewish, Christian or Muslim; and a quasi-science fictional fascination with the possibilities opened up by biochemistry and genetics for curing man, the sick animal, of his desires, violence and neuroses, sometime in the distant future.

Daniel is a successful forty-something French comedian, who has built his reputation on envelope-pushing, near-the-knuckle shock tactics, in his stand-up routines and films. Having amassed a fortune but, in the process, grown blasé about what he does, he goes to live in a depopulated part of southern Spain, in semi-retirement.

There have been two significant women in his life. The first is his contemporary Isabelle, a magazine editor whom he marries and takes to Spain, and with whom all goes well until her aging body initially puts her off herself, and then puts him off her. They divorce, and she goes to live in Biarritz, with the morphine-shooting old biddies.  The second is younger model Esther, the twenty-two-year old Spanish student of philosophy and piano, who supplements her income with acting and, well yes, modelling. But their intensely erotic affair, described in copious detail, is doomed, since, ‘For Esther, as for all the young girls of her generation, sexuality was just a pleasant pastime, driven by seduction and eroticism, which implied no particular sentimental commitment.’ Through her Daniel realises that he too, at forty-seven, is careworn and past it. Isabelle wanted love but not sex; Esther wanted sex but not love: therein lies his conundrum.

While in mainland Spain, and subsequently in Lanzarote, Daniel becomes involved with The Elohimites, a cult espousing free love and eternal life through DNA cloning. When the cult leader, The Prophet, is murdered by a jealously disgruntled acolyte, and Daniel’s artist friend Vincent takes over the reins, Daniel donates his own DNA sample for posterity. Thus, in a kind of Biblical pastiche, the narrative is shared between him, Daniel1, and Daniel24 and Daniel25, his distant descendants, who have been culled from his DNA, with all the annoyingly rancorous human traits ironed out of the mix. When one incarnation dies, he is replaced by the next number in line. So, we are transported to 2000 years in the future, where Daniel25, like the rest of these ‘neohumans’, passes his days in neutral tranquillity, adding his commentary to his ancestor’s personal history, striving to understand what could have made him so unhappy, while the remnants of the old human race roam in primitive packs outside his secure compound.   

In his ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound asked a pertinent question: ‘Can you be interested in the work of a man who is blind to 80 percent of the spectrum? To 30 per cent of the spectrum? Here the answer is, curiously enough, yes IF…if his perceptions are hypernormal in any part of the spectrum he can be of very great use as a writer – though perhaps not of very great ‘weight’. This is where the so-called crack-brained genius comes in. The concept of genius as akin to madness has been carefully fostered by the inferiority complex of the public.’ Houellebecq’s range may be limited, but his gaze is intense, the jettisoning of a balanced and well-rounded worldview being the price for the unflinching and penetrating stare which produces insight. However, he is far from being a prophet, or even the prescient social and cultural forecaster he has been hailed as. For he is merely describing things as they already are, as he sees them (and his objective reality is certainly as verifiable and valid as those who cheerfully persist in ‘looking on the bright side’), but as most people are still too blithely unaware or too wilfully unwilling to see for themselves.

While never a very elegant stylist (at least in translation), his true metier is that venerable, almost forgotten genre, ‘the novel of ideas’. As for the repetition and lack of progression in his oeuvre, that is something which can only trouble his longtime admirers rather than those new to his work. But even the old fans may well find themselves making allowances. For, while he may only have a couple of things to say, hardly anyone else is saying them, and he says them very well. Whether or not he needs to keep on restating them is another matter, and the choice to continue listening is ultimately yours. His choice is whether or not he needs to change his tune, or at least to conduct some variations on it. But for the time being, he has decided to leave well enough alone.

First published in The Sunday Independent