Dr. Sean Millar at The Odessa Club

Great intimate gig by Dr. Sean Millar and band at The Odessa Club last night. Wonderful to hear so many of the old songs mixed with the new ones from C48, in a room like that.

A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing by Eimear McBride

A Girl Is A Half-formed Thing

By Eimear McBride

(Galley Beggar Press, £11.00 stg)

This debut novel by Liverpool born, west of Ireland raised, Norwich resident McBride, has been garlanded with glowing reviews in the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement. These notices tended to emphasise the book’s originality and experimentalism. However, what inventiveness or exploration there is resides in an obtuse use of language and idiosyncratic punctuation, which disdains the preposition, enjoys scrambled syntax, and fairly eschews the common comma (although I did spot a total of two in the course of the 203 pages). Beneath this enigmatic playfulness, the subject matter and narrative trajectory remain tediously conventional.

   The story, told in the first person singular and addressed to the second person singular, concerns an unnamed female narrator and her unnamed older brother (every character in this novel is unnamed). There are a couple of years between them, and the tale begins when she is two and he is four, ending when our girl is 20. There is a strong bond between them, oscillating from embarrassment to affection. He was born with a brain tumour which was removed, but is considered a ‘thicko’ at school. The reoccurrence of his illness, this time inoperable and so terminal, is the spur for the novel’s dramatic finale.

  It’s perhaps not surprising they are close: their father abandons the household when they are infants, and their tyrannically religious mother beats them, and tries to set them against each other. The brother also ‘plays’ the mother, in having her wait on him hand and foot. While our heroine is away at college (although it is deemed too trivial actually to tell us what she is studying), he stacks shelves in a local supermarket by day, and becomes a lazy, antisocial, nerdy computer gamer by night.

  In typical bildungsroman fashion, the story arc chronologically follows the narrator through school and its social jostling, adolescent rebellion and loss of virginity, that departure from messed up home to college and undergraduate shenanigans, a rejection of her mother’s fierce brand of evangelical religion, the temporary relief of sexual promiscuity (‘Saying yes the best of powers’ – presumably when boys expect you to say ‘no’), all culminating in a return to the family homestead for her brother’s last days and death. Along the way she is seduced by a visiting uncle from England when aged 13 and has an intermittent affair with him, and seeks out increasingly violent sexual encounters with strangers. She likes being beaten up.

  There is long and complex history of Irish writers making good in England by presenting versions of the Irish experience which merely cater to and reinforce English perceptions and prejudices of Irish stereotypes. When Joyce saw what happened to Wilde in London, it made him only more determined to flee Ireland to continental Europe, and strengthened his refusal to ‘play court jester to the English.’ In our own day, there is still no shortage of Irish writers queuing up to tell the Brits what they want to hear, in publications such as the London Review of Books, conscious no doubt of the worldwide publicity and distribution attendant on a lucrative London publishing deal. In falling over themselves to demonstrate how ‘over’ the postcolonial chip on the shoulder they are, they serve only to show how much it still weighs them down.

  One wonders where Eimear McBride situates herself in this scenario. Although, like everything else, the setting and timeline are frustratingly vague, passing references to Walkmen and Dexy’s Midnight Runners’ song ‘Come On Eileen’ signal we are in the ’80s, that not so fondly remembered time of referenda civil wars. True, the death last year of Savita Halappanavar in a Galway hospital, because ‘this is a Catholic country’, proved Catholicism can still kill; while the subsequent debate around the Protection of Life During Pregnancy Bill, with rosary sayers scattering holy water on unbelievers outside Dail Eireann, reminded us that these people never learn and the crazies haven’t gone away. But, as even church goers themselves would admit, Catholicism, extreme or otherwise, has become an increasingly peripheral part of contemporary Irish life. So why is a youngish writer like McBride writing about the past? It’s not exactly like Catholic totalitarianism isn’t a well covered topic in Irish literature. Could it be that she thinks this kind of account of Ireland still sits well with certain readers across the water?

  Lots of fundamentalist religion; lots of rough sex: unlike most ‘experimental’ fiction, it should sell well.

Also available here, with reference to Savita Halappanavar excised:

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books-arts/experimental-language-masks-what-is-quite-a-conventional-novel-29637412.html

No Age at The Grand Social

Caught No Age at The Grand Social tonight. Fun, while it lasted. Kind of...

Waiting For Godot at The Gaiety Theatre

Just saw the worst production of Waiting for Godot I've ever seen,

by the St. Lazare Players in The Gaiety Theatre last night. Even

all-female student productions at UCD Dramsoc back in the '80s

were better, while Barry McGovern at The Gate remains 

definitive. Conor Lovett should stick to one-man shows of the

prose. He can't interact with other actors, and lacks presence 

and projection. Poor Gogo, stuck with that Didi. It's supposed to be 

FUNNY, as well as sad, boys...

Fakir

Is he a Fakir?

Nah, he's the real thing!

Doctor Millar - C48

Doctor Millar

C48

Mass Market Recordings

Desmond Traynor

5/5

It has long been an open secret, at least among ‘us critics’, that the good Doctor, Sean Millar, is Ireland’s greatest living singer/songwriter. That this critical acclaim has never been matched by commercial success is immaterial (in the philosophical sense, at least, if not the financial one), as such mainstream acceptance has eluded lots of the finest: Bill Fay, Sixto Rodriguez, The Go-Betweens. Get my drift? In my perfect world, Dr. Millar would be as big as The Corrs were.

   Since 1995’s solo debut, The Bitter Lie, every Sean Millar album has been an event, but if possible, C86 ups his game. While its title slyly refers back to the NME’s now legendary giveaway cassette tape of indie luminaries, the salad days of men and women who are now of a certain age, the album can also be defined by a new maturity in the work.

  Opener ‘Wake Up Outside London’ could be The Bitter Lie’s ‘Alcohol Problem’ anti-hero poet manqué revisited, twenty years later.  All his friends have ‘settled down’ with wives, kids, houses, but he’s still going to distant parties, without even the fare home. ‘You button up your coat because your shirt is stained with wine’. What elevates this above just another sob story of a refusal (or inability) to grow up is the pathos of someone whose problems are so ill-defined yet all-pervasive that they are not ever going to be solved by talking to someone. ‘You’re on the run from heartbreak/You’re on the run from shame/People want to understand/But you just can’t explain’.

  It makes sense that this road not taken, might-have-been life (Dr. Millar’s double, his shadow self) is followed by the life that is being lived now. ‘My Kids’ is as transparently eloquent as its title suggests, a paean to the writer’s offspring, ‘…like gold to me/In you I see my prosperity/Oh my little apple tree’.

  Indeed Love, in its many varieties, guises and incarnations, is the prevailing theme of the record. From the straight-up contented blue-eyed soul of a gorgeous duet with Miriam Ingram, ‘I’ve Never Loved Somebody’; to the hard-won victory of ‘Dancing With Dogs’, lent a vague trad vibe by Steve Wickham’s fiddle figures; to the unrequited desperation of ‘You Fill My Heart With Greed’, replete with prime Dylanesque drawl; to the visceral void of frankly self-explanatory hidden track ‘Sick With Desire’: it’s all in there.

  The Cohenesque phrasing, intonation and chops of ‘Your Eyes Like Sorrow’, and the odd perspective shift of ‘Don’t Take It Out On The Boy’ are among Millar’s grittiest, most unvarnished compositions yet, where lyrical dexterity is equal to the complex emotions involved.

  In contrast to many riding under the singer/songwriter banner, and perhaps because of the very excellence of his songwriting gifts, both the Doctor’s singing and his guitar-playing prowess often go overlooked. The voice is by turns rich and deep, and light and airy, when it needs to be, in accordance with the material. His finger-picking is up there with the best of them, as are his blues bends in his soloing, as illustrated on ‘I’ve Never Loved Somebody’ and ‘You Fill My Heart With Greed’. He is ably abetted here by Joe Chester on occasional guitar, who does his best Richard Hawley out of Chris Isaak out of Hank Marvin out of Link Wray eerie Bigsby vibrato on ‘The Devil’s Dirty Rhyme’, a slice of Nick Cave/Gun Club country gothic (when is Camille O’Sullivan going to start covering his songs?), but he is more than capable of doing his own version of spooky, as the twangy solo on ‘Something About The Way He Walks’ demonstrates. Also indispensible to this palette are Steve Wickham’s contributions, most especially on the above-mentioned ‘Dancing With Dogs’, ‘Your Eyes Like Sorrow’ and ‘The Devil’s Dirty Secret’, but also the closer ‘The Morning Shift’.

  This parting shot is yet another gem, in voice and mood the wondrous hybrid child of Lee Hazelwood’s ‘Some Velvet Morning’ and Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down’ (in its Johnny Cash version).

Also available at: http://www.state.ie/album-reviews/doctor-millar-c48

Graham Parker at Whelan's

I went to Graham Parker's solo show at Whelan's on Saturday night. Not bad, but his songs really need the full Rumour treatment for maximum effect.