My review of The Blade Artist by Irvine Welsh, in The Sunday Independent yesterday

The Blade Artist

By Irvine Welsh

(Jonathan Cape, €16.99 h/b)

You all remember Begbie, don’t you? That’s right, Frank Begbie, the hard man from Trainspotting, portrayed so memorably by Robert Carlyle in Danny Boyle’s filmisation. There’s usually one in every teenage gang: the one everyone winds up embarrassed by and wants to disown, in this case because of his thuggish, psychopathic antics, and just plain wrongness. Well, Begbie’s back, and you wouldn’t recognise him.

  Jim Francis is now a successful artist, living the good and tranquil life in southern California with beautiful, art therapist wife Melanie, and their two young daughters Grace (5) and Eve (2). The happy couple met when she was in Edinburgh for a year, working on an exchange programme between the Scottish prison service and the California correctional system. Guess who was inside? As Welsh has said, the only future he could imagine for Begbie beyond Trainspotting was either death or prison. Under Melanie’s tutelage, however, a hitherto unsuspected talent begins to flourish.

  He does portraits and busts of celebrities, adding ‘implausibly creative mutilations’. Think wide boy/wide girl Damien Hirst/Tracey Emin style Brit Art, to understand how he might find a foothold and fit in. His new profession proves lucrative too, apparently extending to private commissions: ‘ – But Nicole wants a bust of Tom, with a very specific mutilation, strictly confidential…And Aniston’s people want to know when the Angelina will be ready.’ He’s now strictly teetotal too, and has white omelette, spinach and green tea for breakfast (by all accounts echoing the lifestyle of his creator).  

  This idyll is interrupted when a phone call comes from Jim/Frank’s sister Elspeth in the old country, informing him of the death of his first born son, Sean. Jim has three children he hardly knows in Edinburgh, from previous relationships: Sean and his younger brother Michael, with June; and River, whose mother is Kate. He packs his bag to head back for the funeral, and when it emerges that Sean was murdered, you just know things are going to go downhill fast.

  Despite providing a rollickingly panoptic and page-turning view of the exile’s return to Edinburgh, with a huge cast of characters, the novel is not without its flaws. Attributing Begbie’s former rage and stupidity to undiagnosed dyslexia seems both patronising and uncharacteristically politically correct; after all, not all dyslexics develop a taste for ultra violence. There’s an ongoing riff around cell phone problems, which serves to limit communication between Jim and Melanie, but doesn’t seem credible to anyone remotely tech-savvy. Are there really no iPhone chargers to be had in the Scottish capital? And why does the relatively affluent Jim buy the cheapest Tesco mobile when his iPhone (in)conveniently pops out of his pocket and down a drain while he is out jogging? While Jim thankfully avoids the obvious cliché of going back on the bottle, he still has a barely controlled nasty streak. However, this is motivated less by revenge, and more because he just simply enjoys inflicting suffering, which make his sadistic outbursts seem gratuitous. But maybe that’s the whole point, and I am missing it. 

  Irvine Welsh remains a very good writer, both fictionally and otherwise. Indeed, as his op-eds around the Scottish Independence Referendum demonstrated, had he not made it as a novelist, he has a career manqué as the shrewdest of socio-political commentators to fall back on. He has also, notwithstanding his subject matter, become a much more straightforwardly traditional storyteller than he started out as, perhaps realising that experimental novels a lá William Burroughs wouldn’t butter any tatties these days. However, suffice it to say that he still will not prove very popular with the Edinburgh Tourist Office.

   Resurrecting characters is always fraught with pitfalls, but can also, given the passage of time in their lives, and the author’s and ours, prove rewarding. Although not perfect, Begbie’s return is a good yarn, well told.

http://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/begbies-rollicking-return-to-edinburgh-34653198.html

Charlie Chaplin's Wishbone by Aidan Mathews

Charlie Chaplin’s Wishbone

By Aidan Mathews

(Lilliput Press, €17.99 stg h/b)

Once upon a time, and a very good time it was too, Aidan Mathews was the future of Irish fiction. Along with talents such as Neil Jordan and Ronan Sheehan, these writers whose work began appearing in the mid-’70s seemed to be on a mission to drag Ireland into the modernist, and even the postmodern, world. How times have changed. These days, Aidan Mathews might be termed the forgotten man of Irish fiction.

  Mathews’ publishers on this occasion, Lilliput Press, tell us proudly on their website: ‘The verbal flair of Aidan Mathews is second to none, and the seriousness and the gravity of his contemplations a welcome counterweight to our desiccated, Anglo-American digital culture.’ The trouble is, that Anglo-American digital culture seems to have won, at least for the foreseeable future, and singular talents such as Mathews – inheritors, in Irish terms, of the experimental tradition of Sterne, Joyce, Beckett, Flann O’Brien, Aidan Higgins, and the early Banville – have been bypassed, at least for the time being. Joyce and Beckett may be cool names to drop for the tourist industry, but who actually reads their prose now, apart from a few diligent postgraduate students?

  Mathews, also a gifted poet and sometime playwright, has partly contributed to his own relative obscurity. While he may have been consistently good, valuing quality over quanity, he has hardly been prolific. His previous short story collection, Lipstick On The Host, appeared in 1992, his one and only novel, Muesli At Midnight, in 1990, and his most recent volume of poetry, According To The Small Hours, in 1998. His last full-length public sighting was a play, Communion, produced in The Peacock in 2003. Maybe he’s been busy with other things. None of which should detract from his welcome return with this splendid, if uneven, collection of short stories, most of which have appeared sporadically in various anthologies and journals in the intervening years.

  He is still working at the extremity of the form, where character and plot, even narrative itself, are secondary to free associative language, often delving into the murky depths of his protagonists’ unconsciousness. He is particularly good on children, and seeing the world through the eyes of a child. The title story has a ten-year-old boy coming of age while on holiday in Kerry. ‘Cuba’ sees another young lad absorbing the adult world’s fears of nuclear destruction during the missile crisis of October 1962. ‘Access’ is observed from the point of view of a pubescent girl who has just had her first period, meeting her separated father on a Saturday afternoon in McDonald’s.

  ‘Barber-Surgeons’ explores formal and reserved male-bonding across the class divide in 1960s Dublin, with James Bond films a common touchstone, harkening back to a time when both professions were one. ‘Waking a Jew’ flits dream-like between contemporary Dublin and childhood memories of a concentration camp, sometimes unsettlingly in mid-sentence. ‘The Seven Affidavits of Saint-Artaud’ chronicles the imprisonment of French surrealist Anton Artaud in Dublin in 1937, creating a Rashomon effect with multiple, often contradictory, points of view. ‘A Woman from Walkinstown’, told for once in a colloquial voice, has Mary musing on the decline of the name Mary, while reminiscing about the coincidence of the stillbirth of her daughter and the assassination attempt on Pope John Paul. ‘In the Form of Fiction’ hilariously has a young man and woman, chatting in a café in Palo Alto, commenting At Swim Two Birds-like on the limitations of their creator/narrator, and all done without resorting to footnotes, as David Foster Wallace would have. Meanwhile, the concluding ‘Information for the User’ alternates obtusely between psychiatrist/patient sessions (the talking cure), and pharmacological instructions for the use of Peace of Mind (the chemical cure).

  Not all those high, cold Modernist heroes, nor their more playful Postmodernist successors, lived happily ever after. But you didn’t really expect them to, did you? That doesn’t mean that they don’t have their place, still.

Slade House by David Mitchell

This book review was in the Sunday Independent a few weeks ago:

Slade House

By David Mitchell

(Sceptre, €17.99 stg h/b)

English born, Clonakilty (by way of Japan) resident David Mitchell’s new, shortish novel is an offshoot from his last one, 2014’s rather more epic tome, The Bone Clocks. It shares with its predecessor an overriding theme of Immortality and How To Achieve It, although while in the previous work this goal could be arrived at through fair means or foul, here we take a dramatic turn towards the dark side. The complex emotions of grief and hope, and how they feed off each other, also emerge as central concerns in this particular tale. All this, as well as being a contemporary variation on the venerable tradition of the scary Halloween haunted house story.

  Every nine years, over a timespan beginning in 1979 and culminating in 2015, on the last Saturday of October, a ‘guest’ finds their way, via an obscure door down a dark alley, to the titular abode. There they encounter, in various elaborate, occult-induced disguises, telepathic twins Norah and Jonah Grayer, who feed off the souls of these ‘engifted’ victims to further their own longevity.

  The first of the five sections, each told from the point of view of a different narrator, began life as a stand-alone short story published on Twitter in 2014. Entitled ‘The Right Sort’, it is recounted by 13-year-old Nathan Bishop, whose literal-mindedness signals that he has Asperger’s Syndrome (leading one to speculate that, in Mitchell’s view, Twitter’s 140 character per post format is a medium ideally suited to those with Asperger’s – and that observation is meant as no disrespect to those living with the condition, but rather as a jibe at those who live as though they might as well do so). Accompanied by his depressed, pianist mother, Rita, purportedly to a party where she meets Yehudi Menuhin, a grizzly fate awaits young Nathan.

  Next up is recently divorced policeman Gordon Edmunds, seduced by the equally recently widowed Chloe Chetwynd (a roleplaying Norah). In 1997 we are introduced to a university Paranormal Society field trip, which does not end well for insecure student Sally Timms. 2006 sees Sally’s elder journalist sister Freya lured by supposed witness Fred Pink (a roleplaying Jonah), who thoughtfully provides much of the twins’ colourful back story.

  Things reach a satisfyingly dramatic conclusion in 2015, with the appearance of this cycle’s intended target Dr. Iris Marinus-Fenby, a psychiatrist who knows more about the twins and their scurrilous activities than she lets on. Aficionados of Mitchell will recognise her name from previous novels of his, as it is his habit to have characters reappear across his entire oeuvre, in what he has described as ‘a kind of uber novel.’

  Given the scale and ambition of some of Mitchell’s previous books, from 1999’s debut Ghostwritten, to the subsequently filmed Cloud Atlas, and the more recent The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and The Bone Clocks itself, and not forgetting the more straightforward but equally compelling number9dream and Black Swan Green, Slade House may appear as a more minor addition to the endlessly unfolding Mitchell canon. But it shares his signature entertainingly inventive imagination. Postmodern narrative pyrotechnics married to traditional page-turning suspense: he’s got it cracked.

Low

Low: released on January 14^th 1977, 39 (!) years ago, two days shy of my 16th birthday. Nothing had prepared us for this, not 'Changes', not 'Ziggy Stardust', not 'Rebel Rebel', not even 'Station to Station'. (Of course, if we'd been hip enough to have discovered Can, Neu or Kraftwerk at that point, we might have had an inkling, but I wasn't.) Last track 'Subterraneans' was the lushest, scariest (at the same time) thing I'd ever heard. I thought the whole album extraordinary then, and I think it's extraordinary now. As the poster ads of the time read (sighted on first trip to London!, as well as in the NME): 'There's old wave, there's new wave, and there's David Bowie.' For once, the ad men got it bang on. Listen. Enjoy. Marvel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkyp6HCqrs4&list=PLW5_8eogYFDMWprSKGjryhPtPqmgPoPvX

David Bowie R.I.P.

So, I know I’ve posted a few things about Bowie since his death (specifically about the 39^th anniversary of the release of Low last week), but I’ve mainly been keeping my powder dry, ‘cos I knew all I’d be saying is how great he was (is), and how much I was (am) affected by his passing – which is exactly what everyone else is saying too.

But now I’ve actually thought of something original to say, or at any rate something individual to me. The thing is, I never really realised how influenced I was by him, until he died, and then I started thinking about how influenced I was by him. More than that, thinking about his music, and ultimately how much I loved it.

And I think the reason I took this love and influence for granted is that in the popular consciousness, or in my consciousness at least, Bowie lacks the gravitas associated with other singer/songwriters of comparable status, e.g. Dylan, Cohen, Townshend, Lennon, Reed, Cale, Young, Mitchell, Simon, etc. Aside from the fact that he’s slightly younger than those other luminaries, it’s all that dressing up and prancing around and pretending to be someone else, isn’t it, that predisposes us towards taking him less seriously? He was much more of a ‘mere’ ‘pop’ star than the others were (Lennon at the beginning of his career excepted). I mean, unlike them, he’d already been a Mod, and been a hippie, and also unlike them, he was on Top Of The Pops at the height of glam rock, at the same time as Slade and Sweet and Mud and Gary Glitter, and behaving in the same outlandish fashion: how could we know he was going to be any different from those early peers, and have more longevity?

It was the overt theatricality that made him seem more of a media figure and less of an artist (of course, that distinction has blurred somewhat over the years since, and partly as a result of DB’s own collapsing of the difference).  Watching his riveting 1999 interview with Jeremy Paxman on YouTube, I found it very interesting that he said the reason for all the different adopted personae was that he had never felt comfortable being on stage as himself. Furthermore, he said that by the start of the ’80s, he felt all the guises were getting in the way of his writing and performing, and so he decided to just ‘be himself’. (Of course, ‘David Bowie’ is another construct as well.) This, arguably, invites the corollary that his creativity only began to flounder when he stopped acting a part (on stage, not in films).

But the point I’m working towards trying to make is that Bowie must have realised, early in his career, be it consciously or unconsciously, that doing rock’n’roll in the traditional way would have been inauthentic for him, and so he embraced his own lack of authenticity. This is an idea and modus operandi that can be traced back at least as far as Wilde and Yeats: give a man mask and he’ll tell you the truth. We are all acting, some of us realise it and some of us don’t. But, and here’s the rub, over time the inauthentic becomes its own form of authenticity, because it’s authentic for him, and authentically him.

Maybe we also didn’t take him as seriously, and value him as much, as those others, because of his mischievousness, his playfulness, his sense of humour. Not that those others mentioned weren’t/aren’t possessed of same, but Bowie’s was always more in your face, less subtle, sometimes making you think he didn’t give a shit. How wrong we were.

Among all the post mortem commentary and obituaries, the adjective that keeps cropping up the most to describe and encapsulate him is his ‘fearlessness’. But I would add another: his generosity. Nowhere was this more apparent and exemplified than in his discoveries. Like Björk, when Bowie collaborated with someone it was almost always to bring someone from relative obscurity to wider public attention – unlike Madonna, for example, who only works with someone who is already hip or happening, thus latching on to the latest craze, the freshest talent, after the fact. Of course, it benefitted him too, but he knew where to look, and used his high media profile to further the careers of others. The list is endless: Mick Ronson, Eno, Fripp, Nile Rodgers, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Donny McCaslin. It took a great deal of prescient perspicacity to know how good the first Velvet Underground album was in 1967, to realise that Lou Reed was, to quote from the stage of the Hammersmith Odeon in 1972, ‘one of the best songwriters around’, and to produce Transformer; or to know there was something very special gong on with the Stooges’ first two albums, and to mix Raw Power, set up a management deal and recoding contract for Iggy and The Stooges, to say nothing of going on to co-write and co-produce Iggy’s The Idiot and Lust For Life, and even tour for a while in Iggy’s backing band as a keyboard player. All when Lou and Iggy were being ignored or dismissed or derided by the industry and the general public. Indeed, my favourite epitaph that I’ve read so far was that from Iggy Pop: ‘His friendship was the light of my life. I never met such a brilliant person. He was the best of what we can be.’

A gentleman. A scholar. A writer. A total performer. An incisive social commentator. But all done with the lightest of touches. He even made fear and isolation and alienation seem like they might be fun, or not as bad as you thought, or much worse than you thought – but with the hope of the possibility that you might survive them because, after all, he knew all about them, and he had.  Genius. Yes, because it takes a particular kind of genius to be serious but not take yourself too seriously, to be serious but not be taken too seriously. That’s when the fun begins. And it’s only just beginning. The hard work of taking him seriously, I mean. What fun it’s going to be. Watch that man.