Tenderwire By Claire Kilroy

Tenderwire

By Claire Kilroy

(Faber & Faber, £10.99, Jacketed Paperback Original)

This sophomore effort from Claire Kilroy is in the same genre as her much-lauded debut, All Summer, that of the literary thriller. It is a less-travelled by-road of contemporary writerly production she seems to be making her own.

The plot – and this is nothing if not a well-plotted story – concerns a young Irish concert violinist living and working in New York, Eva Tyne, with a background perhaps not unlike that of the author: hill of Howth born and bred, privileged, well-connected. Eva collapses after her solo debut and is rushed to hospital, with what subsequently transpires to have been a miscarriage. Still dazed after the incident, she goes off the rails and on a bit of a tear. Leaving her steady boyfriend, Czech photographer Krystof, she takes up with a mysterious young man she meets in a hotel bar, Peruvian investment banker Daniel. In the course of a bar-hopping night with best friend Valentina, she encounters Russian émigré Alexander – well, she thinks he’s Russian, although his provenance turns out to be as dubious as the Stradivarius violin he offers to sell her at the knock-down price of $650,000, roughly half its market value.  

After playing the violin in a drunkenly bedraggled state in the middle of the night in Alexander’s less than salubrious Brooklyn apartment, and deciding that while it may not actually be a Strad, it is certainly a very beautiful instrument, Eva becomes obsessed with raising the cash to acquire it, an undertaking she must fulfil in one week. Using a variety of sources of finance – her inheritance from her father, who disappeared in suspicious circumstances seven years ago when she was sixteen, and has just recently been declared legally deceased; revenue from the sale of her current violin; an investment loan from Daniel; – she succeeds in getting her hands on the marvellous machine, which she christens the Magdalena, she is sure will be the making of her. But, needless to say, her troubles have only just begun… 

This novel is very good on conveying the sense of money as an almost abstract, quasi-metaphysical concept which nonetheless has remorselessly real and practical implications on peoples’ lives, and the horizons within which they are allowed to live them, the expectations they are allowed, or allow themselves, to have. Eva wants to buy a violin for much more than most people spend on their home. But she hardly thinks twice about doing so, partially perhaps because of the background from which she comes. Her father, after all, was pictured on a yacht with the Taoiseach before he vanished, and ‘could’ve had an offshore account in a false name’ since ‘Everyone else did on the hill.’

Kilroy is also very good on doing minor characters. Estelle, the old woman who lives across from Eva and Krystof’s erstwhile apartment; Patrice, who manages the launderette downstairs from Daniel’s; even big, burly Alexander himself, are all brought vividly to life in a series of telling ticks. Eva’s dependence on an inhaler, being asthmatic, is also a nice detail, well used, and her references to ambient trance grooves as ‘…hollow…empty and cynical…the opposite of music’ certainly served to get me on her side.

However, as so often occurs with painstakingly plotted thrillers, the psychological depth of the central characters remains embarrassingly thin. Daniel, Krystof, Valentina, all remain ciphers on the periphery of Eva’s self-obsession and near-paranoiac jealousy, with little in the way of motivations of their own. Eva herself is, of course, wilful and manipulative, but has only a sole moment of self-conscious insight, strikingly enough in relation to her father’s shady business dealings: ‘If he was anywhere near as crooked as his only child, it would have been no bother to him. Lying, cheating, dissembling, just to get what you want. I didn’t lick it off the stones.’ True, her father’s abrupt leave-taking, and her latterly revealed miscarriage, are offered as reasons for her fugue state, but somehow neither managed to convince this reader. There again, maybe that’s because I’m a mere man. But, given her outrageously selfish behaviour, and despite her undoubted talent, while we might kind of like her, would we want to get to know her? It is doubtful if many men would want to put up with her as a girlfriend, and more doubtful still that ‘she’s worth it’.

Finally, while this is a tautly constructed thriller, there are still a few red herrings thrown around and loose ends left hanging. The supposedly significant looks given Eva by an aged Hungarian Maestro in Cologne, and his subsequent death, never amount to anything in the context of the Magdalena, and we also never find out what actually happened to her father. But life can be similarly free of ‘closure’ too, sometimes.    

So, this is a pacy, compelling, well-written concoction. Kilroy knows the moves and can pull the strings to keep an audience on tenterhooks. It will certainly keep you turning the pages deep into the night, just to find out how the story resolves itself. But, rather like a one night stand, while the adrenaline rush is exciting while it is happening, you might just feel a little bit cheated on the morning after, depending on what expectations, if any, were raised (or you thought were raised) while it was going on.

First published in The Sunday 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

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/

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 

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.

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.