The Mulberry Empire By Philip Hensher

The Mulberry Empire

By Philip Hensher

(£17.99stg, H/B)

The new doorstop novel (537 pages!) by Philip Hensher, who is a columnist for the London Independent and chief book reviewer for The Spectator, covers a decade, concerns the First Afghan War, and ranges from London to Calcutta, St Petersburg to Kabul. In the spring of 1839, the forces of the British Empire entered Afghanistan in splendour, deposing Amir Dost Mohammed Khan, Pearl of the Age, and installing their puppet Shah Shujah-ul-mulk. Three years later, in 1842, all that was left of that great army was a single British horseman, spared only so that he could tell the tale of the peremptory Afghan revenge.

The chief characters of this tome are Alexander Burnes, a Scottish adventurer at loose in Asia; Bella Garraway, the London high society debutant with whom he has a brief affair; and the Amir himself. Given the current international situation, one would have thought that it would prove instructive to discover more about the history of this region, before it became a hapless, unsuspecting venue for a ‘war on terrorism’. But, as Hensher tells us in the ‘Errors and Obligations’ at the end of the book, ‘…this is a pack of lies, though outlines of my imaginary war occasionally coincide with those of a real one…’

So, if it makes no claims to historical accuracy, does it work as fiction? Alas, no. Hensher is not a natural writer, and provides yet another example of a prevailing trend, that of perfectly good journalists who think they can cut it as novelists. The rambling story, the thin characterisation and the turgid prose do nothing to justify the book’s length, and it has none of the intellectual rigour or metaphysical playfulness that make Antonia Byatt, who Hensher tells us was the book’s ‘onlie begetter’, and ‘told me bluntly from the beginning that I must write a long novel’, so entertaining and worth reading.

For, if there is a ‘fairly awful Irish historical novel’ (rain, miserable upbringing, alcohol abuse, rain, authoritarian priests, did I mention the rain?), there is also a ‘fairly awful English historical’ equivalent (pomp and circumstance, dashing hero, stiff upper lip, pomp and circumstance, wise and virtuous heroine, let’s not forget the pomp and circumstance). And, while there are hints of a healthy English revisionist attitude to the legacy of empire going on here, it still remains for the former imperial power to produce a writer who will address the empire which has been busy writing back, via inventive storytellers like Salman Rushdie, and respond to the colonised’s missives with a matching vigour and élan. 

First published in the Irish Independent, in 2002 when the book reviews section of the Weekender Supplement was edited by John Spain.

Nowhere Man By Aleksandar Hemon

Nowhere Man

By Aleksandar Hemon

(Picador, £15.99stg p/b)

This second novel from Hemon, a follow-up to 2000’s The Question of Bruno, which was one of the most celebrated debuts of recent years, concentrates on a secondary character from that book, moving him centre stage.

When we last encountered Jozef Pronek, he had left Sarajevo to visit Chicago in 1992, arriving just in time to watch war break out at home on TV. Unable to return, Pronek began to make his way in a foreign land. His adventures proved bemusing, confusing, heartbreaking and, every so often, hilarious.

With Nowhere Man, we get this accidental refugee’s back story, interspersed with snapshots of how his life now, as an unwilling nomad, is progressing. From his boyhood in Sarajevo and the grand projects of his adolescence – fighting to change the face of rock and roll, struggling to lose this troublesome virginity – to his meeting with George Bush père in Kiev, his enrolment in a Chicago language school, and his life as a minimum-wage-slave fundraising door-to-door for Greenpeace, Pronek’s experiences are both touchingly familiar and bracingly extraordinary.

Like his hero, Hemon was born in Sarajevo and arrived in Chicago in 1992, an autobiographical identification which may prove too close for comfort for some readers. He began writing and getting published in English in 1995.  

Rather like being a Northern Irish poet in the 1970s, hailing from the traumatised conflagration of the Balkans in the 1990s can have done Hemon’s ascendant star little harm. As Harry Lime had it in The Third Man: ‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love; they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce?  The cuckoo clock.’

But much of the work of the man whose song lends this book its title, John Lennon, was autobiographical, as indeed is that of most lyric poets. Whether the recounting of incidents based wholly or partly on personal experience works as well in fiction is for the reader to decide. However, there can be little doubt that Hamon would have been a writer, albeit perhaps slightly less feted, no matter where he came from.

Desmond Traynor is a Hennessey Literary Award winner, whose essays and short stories have been widely published.

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996 By Seamus Heaney

Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996

By Seamus Heaney

(Faber and Faber)

Even before he won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature, for what the Swedish Academy of Letters called his ‘works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth’, Seamus Heaney was already the most famous Irish poet of his generation, known both at home and abroad even to people who might not usually read, or necessarily know very much about, poetry. This popularity has been a mixed blessing for him, especially as it was gained on foot of the pastoralism of his early work, which drew on and explored his rural background, leading many to suppose that he has not moved on since then, and to accusations of having evaded the realities of late twentieth century life. This criticism has surfaced once again in the critical reception of Opened Ground, which contains work from all of Heaney’s collections up to now, from Death of a Naturalist in 1966 to The Spirit Level in 1996, a greater number of poems than would usually appear in a Selected, but fewer than would make up a Collected, belonging somewhere in between the two categories. The usual strictures were expressed most stridently in a review written by the English-based, Australian poet Peter Porter for The Daily Telegraph, in which he extended the argument about failure to engage with the vices and virtues of the modern world to encompass all Irish poets, with the notable exceptions of  Paul Muldoon and Ciaran Carson, saying that Ireland alone among English-speaking countries has been granted this enviable immunity.

But a trawl through Opened Ground, and perhaps most of all a reading of ‘Crediting Poetry’, his Nobel acceptance lecture which is also included here, reveals the tension that has always existed in Heaney’s mind and art between social responsibility and creative freedom. He has always been a brilliant essayist (in fact, very often I prefer reading his critical writings over his poetry, although that probably says more about some gross temperamental deficiency in me, rather than casting aspersions on his creative writing, even if the best criticism is always highly creative anyway). In ‘Crediting Poetry’ he traces his journey from the nature lyrics he started with, to how he was forced to become a poet of public as well as private life in response to Northern Ireland’s descent into violence after 1968, ‘a quarter century of life waste and spirit waste’ as he puts it. Indeed, it is odd that Heaney is often accused, generally by sectarian extremists seeking to enlist him for their cause, of having shirked the Northern situation, especially when one considers the darkness of works such as North and Station Island. Then, another change of direction came a few years ago, when he stopped acting like ‘some monk bowed over his prie-dieu, some dutiful contemplative pivoting his understanding in an attempt to bear his portion of the weight of the world’, and began ‘not in obedience to the dolorous circumstances of my native place but in spite of them’ to straighten up and ‘make space in my reckoning and imagining for the marvellous as well as for the murderous’, which is reflected in the volumes Seeing Things and The Spirit Level.

It has been a remarkable trajectory, from being the child who first encountered the word ‘Stockholm’ on the face of the radio dial in the kitchen of the traditional thatched farmstead on his family’s farm, to the man standing on the platform in Stockholm as guest of the Nobel Foundation, an outcome ‘not just beyond expectation’ for his younger self, but ‘simply beyond conception’. In the intervening years, he has learned how to ‘adjudicate among promptings variously ethical, aesthetical, moral, political, metrical, sceptical, cultural, topical, typical, post-colonial and, taken all together, simply impossible’. But what artist has ever lived in ideal times? They don’t award you the Nobel Prize for Literature for nothing.

As well as having suffered because of his popularity, Heaney has also been a victim of his own niceness and generosity of spirit. There is nothing in the rule-book to say that writers have to be nice people, but neither does being a writer grant a license to not be a nice person, as many writers seem to think and many audiences to expect. He signed his earliest poems ‘Incertus’, the uncertain one who crept before he walked, and then identified with the mythical figure Antaeus, who lost his strength if he was lifted off the ground. In a subsequent poem he had Hercules defeat Antaeus. As this book ably demonstrates, the ground has been opened, in a quietly earth-shattering way, and despite his elevation, Heaney shows no signs of falling, of losing his power.

First published in The World of Hibernia

Sudden Times By Dermot Healy

Sudden Times

By Dermot Healy

(Harvill, £10.99)

If, as was suggested sometime ago by the esteemed film critic of the Irish Sunday Times, Gerry McCarthy, in his Film Ireland review of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, with reference to Kafka and Pynchon, Hitchcock and Cronenberg, that paranoia was the defining condition of the twentieth century, then Dermot Healy is up there with the best of them, and is taking this most terrifying but potentially fruitful of mental states into the new century as well. For if Pat McCabe’s The Butcher Boy is more usefully read as being about the disjunction between what is going on in a boy’s head and what is going on around him, rather than about what it was like to grow up in Monaghan in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s, and if Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man is better appreciated as being about them knowing more than us, and being out to get us too, by trying to rule us through fear, rather than interpreted as a literary comment on the Northern Situation, then Sudden Times is about a person seeking refuge in what society denominates as madness –  a la R. D. Laing and Thomas Szasz – because their experience is too traumatic to face, rather than about the condition of Irish emigrants working on London building sites.

Ollie Ewing has returned to his native Sligo from London and is ‘lying low’, living at the top of a rundown house with some art students at the Regional Technical College. By day, he works as a trolley-boy and shelf-stacker in a local supermarket, by night, he tries to dodge his recurrent nightmares. These centre almost exclusively, and hardly surprisingly, on the scarifying events which took place when he was a navvy in London, living in a mobile home on a vacant lot with his best friend from the old country, Marty.

                      The intimacy you once had with someone is hard to forget at

                    the beginning. It returns stronger than ever before.

                        I would say I was not right in the head.

                        That’s right.

                        High all the time on sorrow, and low because of what you

                    think is being said about you.

                    ...

                        It all came back. The worst thing is I turned religious. That

                    can happen the best of us. I walked to the window in the hostel

                    and looked out at the monastery that had not been inhabited in

                    over two centuries. In my head I heard beautiful psalms. This

                    need of mine for God is a travesty. The traveller wanted to speak

                    of Aristotle and I wanted to speak of St Paul. You’ll get that. You

                    push too much onto someone.

 

Marty wound up murdered through his involvement as a foot-soldier with a sinister protection racket run by the devious and ruthless Silver John and Scots Bob, who are ostensibly site foremen. Ollie found Marty dead in the back of his lorry, after the later had gone off on a ‘business’ trip to Manchester. At least, he believes it was Marty, since the fact that the body was doused with acid made identification difficult. Then Ollie’s brother, Redmond, died of severe burns after a fight with Scots Bob. The whole thing climaxes in a courtroom cross-examination, which demonstrates the prejudices and power structures inscribed in legal rhetoric and practices, and has left Ollie even more disturbed.

The fact that we get the second half of the story first, back in Sligo, before moving back in time to events in London for the second half of the book, invites immediate re-reading, as did Healy’s previous novel, A Goat’s Song. It’s a clever narrative strategy, as it withholds explanatory information until its revelation will have most impact, and makes earlier sections clearer second time around.

With his central acting role in Nicola Bruce’s extraordinary film of Irish emigrant life in London, I Could Read The Sky, and his recent direction of Samuel Beckett’s play Footfalls, to say nothing of his founding and long-time editing of Force 10 magazine, there would seem to be no end to Healy’s talents and energy. Let’s hope he keeps up this level of creativity, for Sudden Times is a worthy addition to an already impressive body of work.

First published in Books Ireland

The Honeymoon By Justin Haythe

The Honeymoon

By Justin Haythe

(Picador, £15.99stg)

This debut novel by thirty-year-old Haythe concerns the Oedipal struggle between American boy Gordon, and his formidable divorcee mother Maureen, who has dragged him around the capital cities of Europe while he was growing up, as she pursued research for her never published guide to the art treasures of various museums and churches. Her ex-husband Theo, Gordon’s father, footed the bill for these peregrinations, while himself going through new wives with alarming frequency.

These are displaced Henry James characters, trying to live in a world already long vanished. As Gordon says of Maureen, early on: ‘Her great regret was that she had missed by fifty years the time when Europe was still open to Americans – when only the smart and the sensitive came across – and when, by merely opening your mouth, you did not immediately put people off.’

Cut adrift in London, where he is studying photography at a second-rate art college, Gordon takes up with Annie, shop girl and voracious reader, and starts to get a glimpse of a more quotidian, less rarefied world. As a culmination to their first date, they make love in the bushes on Hampstead Heath. Within a year, they are getting married.

Over the course of a year in London, Gordon and Annie try to construct an idea of married life for themselves, until their long-delayed honeymoon of the title takes them to Venice. This was the wedding gift of Maureen and her new beau Gerhardt, but kept having to be postponed. Trouble is, the offer was to accompany her and Gerhardt, rather than to go on their own. Honeymooning with one’s mother: now there’s a recipe for disaster. And so it proves. But was the absurd yet shocking act of violence perpetrated by Maureen against Annie done out of deliberate malice and madness, or just an involuntary symptom of the as yet undiagnosed brain tumour which would eventually kill her? It hardly matters, as Gordon and Annie’s relationship is blighted from then on. 

This is a subtle and well-written novel, with touches of sinister Banvillean atmospherics, not least in the exerts from Maureen’s guide which open some chapters, reminiscent as they are of the descriptions of paintings which grace Banville’s fine novel, Athena. It also captures perfectly the affectlessness which an over-aestheticised milieu can spawn, and the angst attendant upon having an overbearing mother.

First published in the Irish Independent

Curtains By Katy Hayes

Curtains

By Katy Hayes

(Phoenix House, £12.99)

This is Katy Hayes’ first novel, but she has already had a book of her fiction published, if only in Ireland, 1995’s wonderfully witty and subversive collection of short stories, Forecourt. In many ways Curtains may seem like a natural progression from its predecessor, but it doesn’t quite have the bite or insight of many of the stories in Forecourt, and seems curiously tame and toned down by comparison. The problems of making the transition from short story to full-length novel may account for some of the flatness here, but not entirely.

The setting is the claustrophobic and incestuous world of Dublin theatre, a milieu that Hayes, as a playwright and director, knows only too well, and which has also provided the source for a couple of the stories in Forecourt. Arlene - ‘actually it’s Ar-lay-nah’ - Morrissey is a successful producer putting together a production of Over The Moon, a first play by a young novelist, Isobel Coole. Isobel is outwardly a deranged wreck, throwing tantrums and attempting suicide, but it is implied that inwardly she has untold reserves of strength. Arlene is outwardly Ms. Together, with a diary full of contact numbers and a plethora of telephones, but it is implied that inwardly she is crumbling. Isobel leaves her boyfriend and moves in with Arlene for the duration of the preparation and run of the show.  

A wide range of characters tumble across the pages, including the actors (one of whom is Arlene’s ex-husband), the director, the cops, plus The Weirdo, who keeps leaving sinister personal messages on Arlene’s answering machine. Perhaps the funniest aspect of the book is Arlene’s recurring conversations with Paddy Kavanagh’s statue on the banks of the Royal Canal. But this imaginative leap is the exception rather than the rule, in what is an otherwise transparently realist text. There is the occasional nice phrase, like ‘He must have been sent by her fairy godmother or her guardian angel, depending on whether you had a Judaeo-Christian or a Hans Christian-Anderson view of the world’, but otherwise the style is for the most part dialogue driven and at times verges on journalese. There is a half-hearted attempt to introduce the abortion issue, but this remains unexplored. The ending is also rather weak and inconclusive. All in all, it reads like a somewhat more sophisticated, but tellingly less bitchy, Julie Burchill.  

One only hopes that Ms. Hayes will not resort to the reaction of her character Isobel Coole in the book, who goes around to the house of a reviewer, the appropriately named Tommy Hatchett, who gave her play an unfavourable notice, and interrupts a dinner party he is hosting in order to give him a piece of her mind.  

With its easy to read, potential mass-market appeal, one feels the cinema or TV screen would probably be better media for this narrative. Or even, given its author’s experience and its subject matter, the theatre.   

First published in Books Ireland

Resurrection Man/Marc Evans/1998

Resurrection Man/Marc Evans/1998

Arriving amid a welter of unfavourable reviews, and running for only one week, twice daily at UCI Tallaght, it would seem Resurrection Man, directed by Welshman Marc Evans, and scripted by Eoin McNamee from his own brilliant 1994 novel, never stood a chance of gaining any kind of audience acceptance in this country. (Whither the IFC, whither The Screen?) Which is a great pity, since it is perhaps the first screen representation of relatively recent events in Northern Irish history that has been made expressly for grown-ups. This is because, paradoxically, it is not really about violence in the North at all, but recognises that that violence has very little to do with the political and socio-economic context in which it takes place, but is more an immutable trait in individual human psychology, which would seek to find circumstances anywhere, any place, any time, that would help to sponsor and legitimise it. Thus a specific instance of aberrant and deviant behaviour is universalised, showing the arbitrariness of this particular set of origins.

    It has long been accepted that paramilitary groupings on either side of the so-called sectarian divide in Northern Ireland are little more than fronts for organised crime, who profiteer from extortion and protection rackets. But if the ideology and mythology of fighting for a cause can be used to cloak Mafia-style activity, it can also provide useful camouflage for various forms of psychopathology. In a recent piece in The Irish Times on filmic treatments of Northern Ireland, Fintan O’Toole criticised the character of the female IRA terrorist in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, as being little more than a dominatrix figure from male fantasy. But this was to miss an essential point of Jordan’s film, which is central to Resurrection Man too. For, if there is a politics of sexuality, there is also a sexuality of politics. If the desire to right wrong can be seen as analogous to sex in a loving relationship, then killing for the sake of killing can be seen as analogous to sadism. Killing to right wrong has long since had very little to do with the Northern situation, except where it can be exploited by vested interests. And just as these vested interests manipulate misplaced idealism, they can make equally good use of aspiring psychopaths. Of course, the distinctions get blurred, and it’s rarely as simple as that. How many freedom fighters know they’re psychos, and vice versa? And if the terrorist is the transgressor in the political arena, how transgressive are squaddies, who kill with the backing of a democratically elected government, but are really just Pit Bull terrier keeping, lager swilling, low rent de Sades? And if the sadomasochist is the transgressor in the sexual arena, how transgressive are many married couples, whose bedrooms are little more than minefields of dominance and submission? And how many of these sponsored supposed transgressives know they’re psychos, and vice versa?  

    Back to Resurrection Man. Stuart Townsend is excellent as Victor Kelly, capturing the fine balance of edginess and smarminess exactly right. The product of a household classically Freudian in its recipe for an extreme outcome, Victor is the only child of a doting, indulgent Protestant mother, and a weak, marginalised Catholic father. Brenda Fricker is outstanding as the adamant, vehement mother, a study in control and controlling. Victor soon finds McClure (Sean McGinley), who with his fondness for imperialistic anthems and Nazi memorabilia, helps to channel Victor’s anti-social tendencies. Heather (Geraldine O’Rawe) is Victor’s sometime girlfriend, and Ryan (James Nesbitt) a drunken wife-beating journalist who writes up the unfolding story of the knife murders for his newspaper, his interest as voyeuristic, a RUC officer points out, as that of his audience. Granted, Victor and his mother are the only two fully fleshed out characters, but this is a morality play, so cardboard cut-out ciphers will suffice to surround them, especially since that is how they view these people anyhow.

    The perennial cliched gripe remains, that the film is not as good as the book, the repetition of the various victims’ plea “Kill me, kill me” in particular loosing some of its hypnotic force when transposed from page to screen. But, as McNamee said in a television interview about adapting his novel for the screen, “The money’s good”. He also commented, in a seminar held recently in Cork, that the difference between writing a novel and a screenplay is that with the latter, at the end of the day you’ve finished a page. The deficiencies resultant on the shift from one medium to the other are ameliorated somewhat by the dark, fluid, grubby, rainswept look captured by Pierre Aim, the lighting cameraman who shot La Haine. The movie is violent, but given the subject matter, necessarily so, and is not gratuitous or exploitative. It is far from being the splatter fest some commentators have suggested, and is certainly no more violent than your average vacuous cops and robbers Hollywood flick.

    McNamee has also said that: “We have a moral responsibility to confront our history in this society. That’s what the film does and I think it does it responsibly.” But it also confronts the nature of violence in general. That Resurrection Man has touched a raw nerve in those from a loyalist background in the North can be gauged from playwright Gary Mitchell’s farcical claim in a recent Irish Times article that: ‘...they (the Shankhill Butchers) had reasons for doing what they did. For example, they understood that guns as murder weapons are extremely traceable; butchers’ knives, hack-saws, chisels and scissors are not.’ Strange, then, that one clean cut to the throat was not sufficient to dispatch a random victim, until a thousand small cuts were first administered all over the rest of the body. Strange, too, that prolonged blood loss by multiple minor incisions did not become the most popular method of murder for all factions in the six counties. Mitchell also wrote: ‘...when this small, thin man (Victor) suffocated a very large and heavy B J Hogg, any hope of realism left the auditorium. It is clear that the makers do not understand violence any more than they understand the Protestant community from which it was generated.’ But what Mitchell misses is that Hacksaw (Hogg) wanted to die, and that violence generated for an ostensible political aim but really as an end in itself always turns back on itself, punishing its own. Complicity is everything. By problematising these issues in an intelligent fashion, Resurrection Man makes most recent ‘Northern Movies’ seem simplistic to the point of childishness, still caught up as they are in trying to explain the conflict in straightforward political terms. As for where the buck stops, who are these ‘vested interests’, that’s another day’s work, involving arguments about the circularity of power and its exercise, but a good place to start looking would be the eternal heart of darkness, embodied in Mephistopheles, and delineated by Conrad, among others, including McNamee.

First published in Film Ireland