John Boyne's "The Heart's Invisible Furies": Book Review

I liked John Boyne's depiction of two priests in the Ireland changing over the past fifty years, "The History of Loneliness." A few years later, Boyne returns to his native island, with a much longer and ambitious portrayal of another man who over the past seven decades has witnessed, and been a part of, the massive social changes there. The boy raised as Cyril Avery tells his coming-of-age saga from his mother's conception of him in 1945 up to 2015. The narrator's voice also tells part of his birth mother's predicament. The two lives intertwine and separate, in a vividly told tone.

"The Heart's Invisible Furies" in its blurbs sounds cliched: redemptive power of the human spirit, you laugh and cry, beloved author. However, I am pleased to report that beyond the boilerplate, the praise is merited. Boyne's an author aiming at the popular audience which was disdained by Cyril's "adoptive mother" (read yourself to find out why this phrase is so stressed) as a novelist herself. But he integrates period detail, character studies, and social commentary adroitly. It's clear that beneath the accessible story-line and snappy pace, that Boyne's ear and eye craft a careful fiction.

A fiction not too far from fact, certainly, in the clerically dominated Ireland that looms over this as his previous theme in his earlier novel. Boyne does not offer facile stereotypes, but he delights via some of his restive Irish men and women to challenge the dead grip over the generations. While the opening scene led me to wonder if he'd lay it on too thick, as the plot develops, and as it twists and turns, nuance enriches the telling.

Sexuality, and those seen as aberrant in this period, gains too Boyne's careful depiction in the protagonist. I will not divulge any developments. Suffice hear to say that Boyne presents a thoughtful, entertaining, and believable voice through which to tell the stories of son and mother.

And many more. One favorite scene a third of the way in features Brendan Behan in a great cameo. The conversation, or what the Irish call the "craic" snaps, crackles and pops in this as in many chapters. Boyne does indeed make one smile and wince, and with grand figures such as his "adoptive parents," the louche Charles and the aloof Maude to set off our picaresque hero into modern Ireland, you see how his formative years go.

Finally, the prose does not call much attention to itself, as the talent Boyne has is put into the narrative in modest but well-earned application. Yet a few phrases do linger. I could "devour a small Protestant" says one friend to another after a long journey by bus from the far-off hamlets of West Cork. In their destination of Dublin, the Liffey runs "determined" to slough off its brown waste as it hastens seaward. Praise is given as convincingly by one to another akin to a Parisian lauding a meal in "Central London." This is recommended, as both engaging and provocative.

While the contexts of "unwed mothers" and their offspring have, like the clerical abuse coverage, gained much by journalists and filmmakers of late, depictions in popular fiction not of the crime genre, aimed at a wider readership, but not sensationally, gain depth by Boyne's careful efforts. (ARC review; Amazon US 6-11-17)

Revisiting Rollerskate Skinny

When Paul McCartney's younger brother broke into show business later in the 60s, he did so as "Mike McGear." After Kevin Shields' band My Bloody Valentine broke into the British charts two decades on, little brother Jimi stuck with his surname. But in the intimate Dublin rock scene, the association with MBV dogged him and his mates, who in 1992 formed Rollerskate Skinny, They languished less lauded than Mike McGear's The Scaffold, who at least had their one-off novelty hit.

Named after Holden Caulfield's praise of a girl who was "rollerskate skinny" in The Catcher in the Rye, the quartet brought an ambition rivaling the Beatles to their two albums. All Music Guide's Tim DiGravina compared their pair of full-length albums to a combination of Beatles melodies, MBV feedback and experimental song structures akin to The La's, Killing Joke, Flaming Lips, Mercury Rev and Echo and the Bunnymen, Rollerskate Skinny captured the neo-psychedelic, post-punk and indie guitar moods of their contemporaries. But the four men rejected easy choruses and catchy repetition.

Instead, Shoulder Voices, co-produced by Guy Fixsen (who engineered MBV on Loveless) featured odd pop filtered through chiming miasma and clattering dynamics. Alternating delicate tunes with aggressive roars, Rollerskate Skinny refused to play along with their peers, who often toned down their idiosyncrasy to get aired on stations beyond the college radio, critically admired, fringes of that era's alt-rock. While spot-the-influences tempts critics, this band sneaks around any fence-me-in.

A few albums rush out of the starting gate and then settle down halfway down the track, ambling into the finish line fifty-odd minutes later, hardly recognizable as whatever or whomever had started them off. This pattern distinguishes both recordings. Beggars Banquet distributed this band's 1993 debut. 

Its first five songs rattle along with threats and chants. Jimi Shields integrates the traditional Irish bodhrán drum into "Lúnasa," which mixes in the ominous percussive beat under a tribal melody. Recalling an earlier, inventive and overlooked Dublin ensemble, The Virgin Prunes (there the relation is to U2 rather than MBV in civic genealogy), that song conveys an intelligent nod to the island's folk roots, enriching the noise rather than smoothing it out. "Bring on Stigmata" finds Shields' vocals echoing and wailing as keyboards churn, credited to Shields and Ken Griffin. Meanwhile, Ger Griffin (no relation) supports with unpredictable guitar. Stevie Murray's bass thunders under "Bow Hitch-Hiker," the last combative contribution among the eleven songs. For, after the first side's sonic attack, the second side settles into pleasantry, akin more to later Mercury Rev or Flaming Lips. As with those bands, this music provides decent pop-rock, but it's no match for those outfits' once-amplified, addled first few albums. Luckily, Dave Fridmann, producer and tamer of both those American bands, was not on hand to dampen down whatever Rollerskate Skinny had turned up to 11, at least for a while.

Apparently, the constant references in coverage of the band to brother Kevin led Jimi to quit before 1996. That year's follow-up Horsedrawn Wishes found the band reduced by one, relying on session drummers. A leaner Rollerskate Skinny thickens the layers of instrumentation, creating even denser and more challenging harmonics. The band's confidence shows. With co-producer Aidan Foley, they reached a clever apex in exploiting well whatever Warner Brothers had shelled out for studio costs. 

Perversely or intentionally, the band also delivers album two on the same template as the first. Until the end of the seventh entry, the three musicians, now all playing what the liner notes reveal as the guitars and keyboards (which Jimi had mastered on Shoulder Voices), shine. "Speed to My Side" is the tune AMG reviewed as marrying Beatles shimmer to MBV shudder. It saunters like opera, rising and falling. These skewed songs float and dip, cresting and dipping over waves of volume as texture. Rollerskate Skinny stack up the voices and pile on the momentum, if for half the tracks each outing.

"Man Under Glass" has the members vowing their hate of the sun, or maybe the Son. This bobs over a mad flurry of mechanical tinkering, over rhythms capable of crushing the wary or inspiring the saintly. The music swerves and spins. The bands listed above may offer rough similarities, but the determination to resist the usual rock styles makes them again akin more to humbler if sassier misfits such as The Virgin Prunes. In a city where U2 reigned, it must have been a daunting challenge to go against the flow and to insist, as Rollerskate Skinny does twice for a stretch each album, on audacity.

Why each album glides after soaring may not need any answer more profound than rest after exertion. Their energy dissipates gradually, as sides two bring a listener back to firm ground. But the best moments remain in the unsettling, giddy, surprising and woozy rides that precede the landings. 

The members went on after the band's demise following their second album to the usual side projects. Dave Fridmann inevitably weighed in as co-producer of Jimi Shields' Lotus Crown. Their Chokin' on the Jokes (1997) resembles Fridmann's main bands, but it also tilts upon a shoegazing foundation on which Jimi builds up engaging and offbeat songs. It also suggests that Ken Griffin may have been Rollerskate Skinny's mastermind, rather than Shields. For Dead City Sunbeams, the project of Griffin's alter ego Kid Silver, managed on JetSet to rouse critical applause just before the millennium.

Ken then created a collaboration with Aspera, Philadelphia neo-psych veterans, as Favourite Sons. They released a few Iggy meets The Strokes or Echo-plus-The Church records, after all moving to Brooklyn. Finally, The Radio (2004) generated Ger Griffin's dream-pop back in Rollerskate Skinny's hometown. It's a shame that streaming services do not enable audiences over two decades later to enjoy all of Rollerskate Skinny. For now, Lotus Crown and Shoulder Voices survive as bits and bytes.
(Spectrum Culture in re-edited form as part of its Revisit/ Rediscover music feature series 6-6-17)

Benjamin Black's "Even the Dead": Book Review

This seventh entry in the Quirke series set in mid-1950s Dublin satisfies. It circles back to elements of the first installment, Christine Falls, but it does not feel stale. You could begin here, but as only asides to the increasingly complex inner life and love affairs and family traumas the protagonist endures emerge, it's better to read Benjamin Black's evocations of the dreary city and the coroner's office in order. Again, we find David Sinclair at the latter, while Inspector Hackett accompanies Quirke on what he reasons is his desultory quest for justice, given his intense "absence of a past" felt.

This emerges at the climax. As before, whether as Black or John Banville, this writer prefers a slow pace. In these mysteries, much work is done by others, and although the three coincidences tallied by characters do defy probability, Dublin's a small place where many of its people cross paths, for dark purposes. Quirke, battered in a previous account (reminiscent of the aging Jack Taylor in Ken Bruen's equally fine Galway noir contributions to this genre), suffers a brain lesion and feels increasingly fuzzy-headed. His confidant Mal also faces weakness, and in a typically eloquent passage common to this writer's works, he makes a poignant analogy. Facing onset of mortality, Mal opens up to Quirke.

"It's like discovering that all along you've been walking on a tightrope, and suddenly the end of the rope is in sight. You want to get off, but you can't, and you can't stop or retrace your steps, you just have to go on, until you can't go any further. Simple as that." (142) The stoicism they share continues.

But as always, there lurks beneath the power and corruption of Church and State glimpses of comfort. "And still the day refused to end. At ten-thirty the sky was an inverted bowl of blue raised radiance, except in the west, where the sunset looked like a firefight at sea, a motionless Trafalgar. He stood at the open window of the flat, craning to see, up past the tall houses opposite, a single pale star suspended above the rooftops, a dagger of shimmering light. It was a long time since he had felt so calm, so untroubled. Serene: the word came to him unbidden. He felt serene." (68) Quirke has solace.

There's also bits of gallows humor, given the trade. "Amazing the number of people who drive into trees or stone walls by accident in the middle of the night, or fall into the Liffey with their pockets full of stones." (17) So Sinclair opines. He leavens the growing sorrow of his senior, Quirke the pathologist. He battles drink, the memories of abandonment and betrayal and guilt, and the drudgery of his tasks. He seeks romance, and even if "love" is but the term people use, he reasons, when they run out of other words to express their predicament or their yearnings, it may comfort him--for now. (Amazon US 12/2/16)

Paul Murray's "The Mark and the Void": Book Review

An Irish novelist, Paul, has an offer for Claude Martingale, a French research analyst working for a Dublin investment bank. Why not feature in his next book, depicting, a century after Ulysses, a citizen's everyday life? After all, Paul reasons, the "humanity in the machine" exists in such offices and towers, and "we're all being narrated" within not the printed page, but on screens by our media.

So begins Paul Murray's The Mark and the Void. His third novel continues the quirks of An Evening of Long Goodbyes (2003) and the experiments of Skippy Dies (2010). The entrance of an author into his creation is not new. Fans of the film Adaptation, or the satire At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien, will recognize tropes as the inventor finds himself outwitted by those who resist his machinations. To keep such a tale convincing, a writer must convince us of his control over his satire.

Whether this works or not for The Mark and the Void challenges the reader. Paul through Claude and his colleagues at the Bank of Torabundo tries to capture the "narrow minds and broad hearts" of today's Dubliners, often immigrants to a city they make over and live within as if any other. Stripped of much of the local color that enlivened Joyce's epic, Murray's city has had its Monto "Nighttown" red-light quarter overshadowed and obliterated by the high rise mercantile powers and corporate multinationals. This context, after the collapse of the Celtic Tiger boom and during the austerity cuts imposed upon Greece and Ireland, darkens the sheen of those symbols of capitalism and speculation.

Complicit in these schemes, Torabundo's employees transform. They realize that business' true purpose aims "to replace the shifting, medieval labyrinths of love with the broad, sanitized avenues of materialism," rational reordering of the "lightless, involuted city of the self." Leopold's Bloom finds his concerns outmoded. Paul's Claude hears his calculating author argue for a shift to the web. There, the novel will be replaced "to preserve the illusion," where one can fall in love, and stay in a story forever. Paul tries to entice Claude into investing not in his next novel, but in a novel invention. Myhotswaitress.com attempts to provide a lonely searcher with a way to follow the waitress of his choice, by surveillance and by catering to his dalliances, discreetly and at a safe, tempting, distance.

A spin off of Cyrano de Bergerac's courting through another voice enters this narration. But Paul Murray appears as restless as his own stand-in, Paul. The Mark and the Void tries to take on the ethics of the gift economy, the plight of Dublin's poor as "zombies" haunting the banks who did them in, and how prostitution has morphed between Joyce's time and ours into servicing the rich and the greedy. Next to the Famine memorial by the river Liffey, paid for by wealthy sponsors, this novel reminds us that the banks still loom high. There, "the night sky is reflected and intensified in the louring windows of the corporate towers, as though they were mining darkness for the air, storing it within them." This passage demonstrates the force of Murray's prose, as it dissects Dublin's dire vista.

Havoc ensues late on. But the depiction of the River Liffey about to overspill those concrete banks, under the stolid gaze of the banks above, fails to convince, and Murray keeps piling on the intricacies of banking that lack a punch on the page. Claude and Paul want the Irish to succeed, but will they?

Near the end, a German colleague opines that given the clerical domination of Ireland for so long, the natives "already believe they are born in debt, a terrible sin, which they can never pay in full. A people like this is more comfortable wrapped in chains." The value of Murray's novel lies in the unsparing gaze he casts, through his alter ego Paul and through his narrator Claude, into the frail shell surrounding the glitz and the shimmer of Dublin. While it rambles and spins about in a manner not unfamiliar to readers of such self-referential and many-layered narratives, The Mark and the Void reminds audiences of the human costs beneath the rise to fortune of a few manipulators of our money. (1-7-16 to the New York Journal of Books)

Free Speech Can Be Scary

 



It's difficult for those of us saturated in social and print and online media to keep up with anti-free speech demands. British laws, as conservative critic Charles C.W. Cooke tells the New York Times, apply capriciously: "A Briton was arrested for telling a police officer his horse was gay. A singer in a seaside bar was arrested for singing 'Kung Fu Fighting' in the presence of a couple of Chinese people." Although I have since writing this been informed that Cooke fails (at least in the edited version of an admittedly short space) to clarify that the “hate speech” legislation since the “horse” episode has been amended eight years ago, and that said offender was not prosecuted, this explanation shows the lengths to which such legal interference and incompetence have extended.

I cite the end of Judith Shulevitz' article, worth reading in full, for its applicability to the situation Maryam Namazie has chronicled the past week on her blog, and which The Pensive Quill excerpted. Namazie planned to speak at Trinity College Dublin. But, security asked for a moderator, to shield her talk from any threat of "antagonising" its "Muslim students." TCD seems to have clumsily tried to tip a "balance" away from "one-sided" views, but winds up censoring one who knows Islamist tactics well. "It is crucial that I be able to speak against Islamist fascism and honour our dissenters deemed apostates, blasphemers, heretics…whether ex-Muslims, Muslims or non-Muslims," she insists. 

Shulevitz, after documenting the increasing levels of administration on college campuses to protect supposedly vulnerable young adults from harsh opinions or dissenting ideas, raises the overlooked "possibility that insulating students could also make them, well, insular. A few weeks ago, Zineb El Rhazoui, a journalist at Charlie Hebdo, spoke at the University of Chicago, protected by the security guards she has traveled with since supporters of the Islamic State issued death threats against her. During the question-and-answer period, a Muslim student stood up to object to the newspaper’s apparent disrespect for Muslims and to express her dislike of the phrase 'I am Charlie.'”

Judith Shulevitz goes on to narrate the situation, and I quote her at length. “Ms. El Rhazoui replied, somewhat irritably, 'Being Charlie Hebdo means to die because of a drawing,' and not everyone has the guts to do that (although she didn’t use the word guts). She lives under constant threat, Ms. El Rhazoui said. The student answered that she felt threatened, too.

A few days later, a guest editorialist in the student newspaper took Ms. El Rhazoui to task. She had failed to ensure 'that others felt safe enough to express dissenting opinions.' Ms. El Rhazoui’s 'relative position of power,'  the writer continued, had granted her a 'free pass to make condescending attacks on a member of the university.' In a letter to the editor, the president and the vice president of the University of Chicago French Club, which had sponsored the talk, shot back, saying, 'El Rhazoui is an immigrant, a woman, Arab, a human-rights activist who has known exile, and a journalist living in very real fear of death. She was invited to speak precisely because her right to do so is, quite literally, under threat.'

You’d be hard-pressed to avoid the conclusion that the student and her defender had burrowed so deep inside their cocoons, were so overcome by their own fragility, that they couldn’t see that it was Ms. El Rhazoui who was in need of a safer space." So concludes Shulevitz, in wise words to ponder.

Megan Murphy, a Vancouver feminist, has since added her view on the dubious protection afforded "safe spaces" in the Globe and Mail. She tells how she has been added to a list of "dissidents" on the Black Box, "an online incarnation of safe space." She joins a list of prominent freethinkers who have lately found themselves the targets of opprobrium for daring to speak out and not to give in to cant.

She reminds us of the cost that capitulation carries. "Pathologizing disagreement is an intellectually dishonest way to cope with challenging arguments. It certainly doesn’t support critical thinking."

She continues: "It also creates a culture wherein people are afraid to express dissenting opinions or question the party line. This is ironic, because many of those under threat of being silenced are people who are speaking out against abuse, harassment and violence. While some may hold 'controversial' opinions about how best to do it, they are just that – controversial. Throughout history, our heroes and radicals have held controversial opinions. How often do tepid opinions and fearfulness change the world for the better?"

Those at The Pensive Quill and as we see above, certain journalists and activists in the media, continue to fight for the right to freely express opinions and to promote facts that challenge pieties.
The reaction to Shulevitz' article in the following week of the New York Times, as these letters prove, was mixed. Professors and students tended to insist on safe spaces, at least from the correspondents selected, more than I would have predicted, but this appears to illustrate how deeply the principles of right-thinking by purportedly left-leaning individuals have permeated many in higher education.

(P.S. My blog piece has been updated for TPQ. I cannot find the original source of this image credit)

Harry Browne's "The Frontman: Bono (In the Name of Power)": Book Review

When Bono sells charity, should we buy his good intentions? As with Barack Obama, his savvy equals his threat. He imitates an activist, but he supports the powers that be. Tellingly, Obama's 2008 campaign played U2's "City of Blinding Lights" for the candidate's entrance. Bono peddles ideas for helping the poor to those such as the President, his donors, his cronies, and fans of both men. Logically, Bono gains plaudits from not only his audience, but politicians, philanthropists, and the wealthy. Without denying the practical good achieved by some of his projects, Harry Browne, a Dublin-based "activist and journalist", criticizes Bono's cozy neo-liberal, market-funded loyalties. Justice cannot be increased, Browne argues, without confronting this pampered elite.  Browne denies that aid, debt relief, or even altered trade agreements will fundamentally alter global poverty for billions of its recipients. Bono makes peace with power.

Taking his subject "very" seriously but with a touch of Irish self-deprecation and "light relief" as Bono would himself his own self, Browne cautions us against any expectations of a hatchet job. Sure, many assure us that Bono means well. Browne, however, as one better placed than most of Paul Hewson's admirers, knows the reaction by fellow Dubliners to Ballymun's earnest lad turned icon. Irish begrudgery cuts down those judged to have climbed high.

Bono advanced by Browne's estimation to "true greatness" by his own sly but genuine merits, but does this success grant him a free pass to peddle the schemes of technocrats, bankers, and arms dealers? Browne says no. Rather than rehash U2's musical impact or Bono's lyrics (unless relevant), Browne analyzes Bono's political success. He shifts Bono from a "bleeding-heart" left-liberal to a "conservative, Western-centric, and pro-capitalist" allegiance; this polemic joins a Counterblasts series against "apologists for Empire and Capital" Thomas Friedman, Michael Ignatieff, Bernard-Henri Lèvy, and Christopher Hitchens. The Frontman aims at Bono as a celebrity target.

Browne dispatches neatly the mythic origins assumed by gullible audiences of any street-smart cred, given U2's relatively posh origins despite their geographical residence as teens growing up on the purportedly working class northside of Dublin.  They sought success early. Browne touches upon a key force: the evangelical Christian beliefs of The Edge, Larry Mullen Jr., and Bono Vox. Their ambitions matched with a sly, ruthless manager, Paul McGuinness, who "was and is a traditional Irish Catholic, which is to say a man without a shred of obvious, let alone ostentatious, Christianity". 

U2's emotional justification, to use music as "self-expression" to reveal revelation, countered a comparative lack of early skill, in Browne's estimation. Schooled in stagecraft, passionate, charming and well-connected within the Dublin music scene and soon abroad, "Bono talked a great gig".

But as in "Sunday Bloody Sunday" Bono's lyrics distanced themselves from ideological precision; they evoke charged Irish republican and nationalist themes without targeting responsibility for the cycle of violence perpetuated by more than one faction. The band's nimble manipulation of Irish identity led to American acclaim but this led U2 into being "appropriated" by Irish "politicians and pundits as a reason for the nation to be cheerful and encouraged" during yet another jobs downturn. Their stance elevated U2's "not-being-in-Ireland" attitude during the 1980s, as their self-righteous singer served as international spokesman for his homeland--if in an apolitical, unthreatening form. 

Ireland's generous incentives allowing the creative classes tax breaks on their published works fortuitously afforded U2 the opportunity to invest their quarter-century of profits in an opaque series of holding entities and start-ups, few of which flourished on paper. By 2006, the Irish government enacted a limit of 250,000 euro on untaxed earnings; U2 sent its money off to the Netherlands. Bono tried to argue that the band never broke any laws, but in trying to revamp the band's "tax avoidance" as "an act of patriotism" Browne blames Bono for his characteristic evasion. Promoting the "priorities of global capital" while attempting to represent himself as an "outspoken advocate of conventional wisdom," Bono from "Do They Know It's Christmas?" to Band Aid to Self Aid to Live Aid draws himself increasingly into the status quo even as he tries to stand out as a celebrity humanitarian. 

"His capacity to speak the language of global justice while advancing policies that do little to advance it might be regarded as the central political fact of Bono's subsequent career." Browne in part two explains how African debt relief, albeit an admirable cause, when backed by global banks does not generate domestic infrastructures within poor nations, but eases entry for foreign investment by multinationals. While $15 billion earmarked for anti-retroviral drugs to fight AIDS creates tangible change, as Browne credits via Bono's successful pleas to George W. Bush, this program emboldened the Christian Right to dictate its own moral guidelines for which African supplicants received priority care. Such reliance by Africans on First World aid perpetuates the Third World's dependence on charity as epitomized by the patronizing programs such as (RED) and ONE endorsed by Bono. 

(RED) shares with U2 a consistent lack of transparency in tracing precisely where its funds go. (Browne pegs Bono's personal wealth at half a billion dollars.) "Charitainment" fuels First World consumption, often of high-end baubles, fashion, and gadgets by First World consumers. Nike, Amex, Converse, Apple sign on, under contracts that betray the restricted amounts dispensed. A small share may go to worthy causes, but what Browne labels as "pitching pennies" to the poor faraway adds up to comparatively little. The past six years show, as far as can be ascertained, $200 million raised by (RED). U2's latest two-year tour added $736 million to their Dutch accounts. 

Meanwhile, 2010 advertised Bono with his wife, Ali, clutching $1000 limited-edition Louis Vuitton bags as they looked, in an artfully altered setting, as if they had just landed in an African grassland. Their prop plane's wheel was sprayed with mud. The air glows gold, shot by Annie Leibowitz. 2012 found Bono backing the NGO Invisible Children, responsible for the Kony video tied to a right-wing Christian spokesman whom Bono defended. His tangled ties to the continent keep digging deeper.  

Part three shifts from Africa to the rest of the world, as in its enclaves Davos and Pebble Beach, or wherever the G8 summits or World Bank's tycoons convene. By now, Browne cleverly borrows another messiah's prediction: "Wherever two or three are gathered, there too shall you find Bono, telling them how good they are." Tony Blair or Gordon Brown, Bill Clinton or George W., Obama or Oprah huddle with him, along with lesser-known but greatly influential figures such as Kennedy scion Bobby Shriver, who speeds Bono's access to neocon hawk Paul Wolfowitz and shock doctrine economist Jeffrey Sachs. Mark Zuckerberg, Bill and Melinda Gates, and George Soros also bend their ear to what Bono suggests. What he advises appears to bolster more injustice rather than justice.

Browne never claims that Bono's endeavors do not pay off by creating some good. Bono for all his jibes at his own image relishes the chance to use his prominence as U2's frontman to improve the lives of others. But his critic insists, as fairly as he can, that Bono does so not with much of his own money, but by encouraging the powerful to distribute their own funds. True, these may alleviate suffering, and minimize hunger. These funds from the elite nations and the affluent, however, go far less often if at all to assisting those who would shout out hard questions about wealth inequality, lack of education, or capitalist fidelity to the economic disparities which most of humanity labors under. 

Bono's appeal carried him far in the past thirty-odd years. Browne observes that "while mere photo-ops with Bush had earned Bono the anger of many US (and Irish) liberals, his lavish praise for Obama put him firmly in their company". Still, this journalist concedes that while his musical career may still hold surprises, his activism may find a less gullible hearing from those who connect Bono more closely with "Washington's powerful elite" over the past two decades, no matter which party.  

This critique nears its conclusion, in what is a slightly wearying (Browne rarely questions the tropes of radical rhetoric but then, would Verso have published this otherwise?) but often astute analysis, by reminding us of how a rock star's hubris may await Bono's next career move. It's a supposedly "post-recession" recovery, we are told by those with whom Bono partied and politicked. The best albums of U2 appeared quite a while back. Mephisto McFly buzzed away. Bono buys stock in Facebook. 

"A decade ago, one might arguably have suggested that he stood outside the system, bringing some moral authority to bear on questions of global poverty and disease and what to do about them. Today, as a high-profile multimillionaire investor, as part of a band of notorious tax-avoiders who assured us that financial innovation was the route to success, as the man who dressed a bunch of multinational corporations in the favoured shade of (RED), as the Blairite who applauded when the world's war-mongers pretended to lavish some relief on a few poor countries while saddling them with more neoliberal conditions -- today, he is hard to see as anything other than one of Them, the elite 1 per cent of 1 per cent." Nobody expects Mick Jagger to give away his millions, I suppose. But the Rolling Stones never aspired to position themselves as arbiters of a global conscience. Browne cannot discern how much Bono himself donates to charitable causes. (That estimate may be lower than that of some others equally graced with enormous funds tucked away, Browne avers.) This impenetrable labyrinth of financial fronts for the frontman and his bandmates in U2, abetting the charities Bono urges upon his clientele and the luxuries for us as consumers, may lead readers to wonder what U2 is up to. U2 naming its own financial holding entity Not Us Ltd. appears up to more than name games.

This book's cover photo, of Bono shaking hands with George W., will never gain the iconic kitsch status of Elvis meets Nixon. But the collusion between celebrity and conniver grows more blurred. Neither an American president nor an Irish pop star appears willing anymore to play the court fool. Browne's sharply drawn depiction of superstar humanitarianism and rock star philanthropy, personified in Paul David Hewson's rise to a status never attained by a previous member of a band, certainly diminished the King's pretensions to world domination by comparison. Elvis may have sought to rule the stage, but Bono and his friends in high places seek to rule us, by gradual stages. Taking care of business, indeed. (PopMatters 7-31-13. In shorter and altered form to Amazon US 7-12-13)

Benjamin Black's "Holy Orders": Book Review

With the sixth installment in John Banville's busman's holiday writing as Benjamin Black, pathologist Quirke with a side pursuit as amateur detective risks resembling a brooding houseguest intent on staying. Banville's erudite, Continental-style novels of ideas, with characters trapped within history by their own haunted compromises, continue to differ thematically from his mysteries set in 1950s Dublin. However, as Black's "Quirke novels" have met with a wider following than his mannered, dour ones, loyal readers such as myself may sense Quirke merging with Banville's louche protagonists. Black's prose which initially appeared to distinguish "genre" from Banville's "literary" fiction has evolved by now more similarities than contrasts. What still may set this protagonist apart from his creator's other characters may be his troubled, resilient self. It sustains Quirke through more tales than those given Banville's anguished men--although some of those revive or reappear in Banville's novels, which continue apace.

Still, the Quirke franchise needed a jolt. The setup in Christine Falls introduced Quirke, and the delayed reaction by Phoebe as they meet again, long after Quirke's decision to pass off his daughter to his sister and her husband to raise as their own. The Silver Swan, of the five my favorite, met with muted enthusiasm among some, but I enjoyed its tawdry evocation of deluded Dubliners craving esoteric wisdom. Secrecy represses Irish society, often amidst those seeking status or having obtained it trying to keep it, and the whiff of corruption remains pungent, more than the chemicals within Quirke's morgue--where as Black's novels progress the doctor appears to spend less and less time.

Phoebe's doctor friend April Latimer vanishes in the poignant Elegy for April (see my PopMatters review). Midstream in this series, cub reporter Jimmy Minor assumes a supporting role, along with Phoebe's boyfriend and Quirke's colleague David Sinclair. The predicament of those marginalized within Catholic culture, the few Jewish citizens such as Sinclair, and in Elegy the plight of international students, receive probing attention as Black scrutinizes the cutting or cruel mores of the economically troubled and very suspicious nation which at this period raised him as Banville.

Dislocation follows in A Death in Summer (see my PopMatters review), and it opens splendidly. But I found its elegant saunter languid compared with the previous two city tales. Black starts off strong, lets the energy simmer, parades a series of suspects for Police Inspector Hackett and his part-partner  to seek out, and then solves the puzzle in the final fifteen pages adroitly. Even if Death succeeded in its arch tone as it pursued skulduggery among the gentry, I prefer the down and dirty Dublin settings. The darker alleys force Black to peer at the grime where he must confront a dismal postwar malaise.

Vengeance (see my PopMatters review) again begins with brio, as Black finds a suitably vixenish foil to unnerve Quirke. In advanced middle age, he's resigned to the arms of an aging actress, Isabel, after his wife's death. Battling the bottle, worse for wear, he's determined to continue his tiring avocation.

Jimmy Minor, April and Phoebe's friend, had worked as a junior reporter for a Dublin paper. His boyish corpse, fished out of the River Liffey, opens this latest novel. With the suggestive title of Holy Orders, the connivance of a compliant, cowed government with the lordly Church in this oppressive era of postwar Irish history looms; it's very difficult to shake the sensation that this novel is not happening over a half-century later, amidst continued revelations of clerical abuse and conspiracy.

In a dramatic, harrowing scene, overcome at a priests' gloomy residence by his childhood memories at a feral Catholic orphanage, Quirke's heart seems to burst. As if a bird fluttering from inside his ribcage, the bewildered sufferer peers out at thieving magpies and hovering blackbirds. Black conjures doom compactly. It resounds through the calmly told chapters of this confident novel.

Quirke's vertigo and hallucinations pierce this novel to prickle to the reader's response to mystery. "He went out to the living room. A parallelogram of insipid sunlight lay on the floor under a window like the parts of a broken kite. He stood and looked about himself, feeling dazed. The morning's watercolor tints lent a novel sheen to familiar surfaces. Everything was as it always was, yet somehow he could recognize nothing. It was as if all that was formerly here had been swept away in the night and replaced with a shiny new version of itself, identical in every aspect, yet one-dimensional and hollow, like props in a fantastically detailed stage setting." (160)

Phoebe notices her father's altered state, accentuating his habitual tendency to peer out at the world as if through the eyes of the disappointed child he was in the orphanage. While the novel relies on an indirect omniscient narrative via Quirke, Black sidles into her perspective. Through her unease with Jimmy's twin sister, Sally, Phoebe's own self fractures. "She felt as if one whole side of her life was shearing off and toppling into the sea."

Hints of Joyce's Ulysses linger: cocoa, cinnamon, and pineapple entice Dubliners from their slump. Beckett's inquiring light which troubled some of his own trapped characters enters, too, more ominously, onto Quirke's mental stage to illuminate his enigmatic inner vision. By now, readers of a sixth book need no sixth sense to be told why. Quirke simply soldiers on, with handmade Italian shoes trudging the mud of a down-and-out campsite, tracking down if not legal justice than moral recompense, despite his ennui.

Deceit, suspicion, jealousy, doubt: Banville and Black join, through Quirke and Phoebe, the ageless concerns of storytellers. Holy Orders freshens them. May my lack of plot details encourage you to encounter their treatment for yourself, for their evocation proves this to be the most powerful Quirke novel yet. Black's return from gentry pursuits to Quirke's inward search, and his concern for what Quirke's former lover tells him he has, not her husband's "heart" but the rarer quality of a "soul", endures to enrich this sixth tale of this haunted Dubliner's lonely hunt for answers--or partial clues. 
(Amazon US in briefer form 8-20-13; as above to PopMatters 8-15-13)

"The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1929-1940": Book Review

The editors began this project around 1985. Changes in ownership of Beckett’s works, negotiations over publication of his correspondence, and the winnowing down of 15,000 letters to 2,500 to be reprinted in four volumes, along with another 5,000 from which excerpts would be used for annotations, demonstrate the care with which this endeavor has been compiled. Beckett may be the last major writer to have his correspondence extant in an entirely non-electronic form. The range of his letters, two-thirds written in English, 30% in French, and 5% in German, attests to the cosmopolitan range and erudite ambition of his determination to imagine himself, early on, into a literary life.

Fehsenfeld and Overbeck explain how they sought a middle way between the minimalist editorial approach of Richard Ellmann for James Joyce’s letters, and the maximalist approach taken by John Kelly for W.B. Yeats’s letters. Restricted to reproducing those letters that drew directly upon Beckett’s writings, the editors nevertheless seek a liberal interpretation of this control. They explain how their first examples display Beckett’s desire to connect to correspondents. He delivers less information, and more solidarity, or intimacy, as he tries to forge a literary career – and to keep his distance from one.

As Beckett’s confidence grows, and as Murphy finally gets published after nearly two years of rejections, his language takes flight. Their content and style soar like kites, above his cities. His words may relax, energize, or recoil. No wonder “rectal spasms,” as the editors note, characterize the physicality of later 1930s letters, with analogies between the act of writing and primal, raw functions within the body.

He begins with coiled frustration. “I am looking forward to pulling the balls off the critical & poetical Proustian cock” (36). His monograph on Proust he regards more as duty than pleasure. He struggles to separate himself from his fellow and elder Irishman in Paris. “Sedendo et Quiescendo” to Beckett “stinks of Joyce in spite of most earnest endeavours to endow it with my own odours” (81). He then promises an editor at Chatto & Windus a scatological comparison to the precise shape of his bowel movements.

Thomas McGreevy received many of the letters included here. They speak of Beckett’s indolence: “even if I succeeded in placing something and getting some money I don’t think I would bother my arse to move.” (158) He would rather lose the world for stout “than for Lib., Egal., and Frat., and quarts de Vittel.,” (159) he tells McGreevy in May 1933. Yet Beckett wonders why Man of Aran lacked any poteen, and soon he spends more time in London, looking toward Paris rather than Dublin for his future.

A year later, he tells Morris Sinclair of his fears, that “no relationship between suffering and feeling is to be found,” and any joy comparing his own fortune to those with less “begins to look deceptive” (204). He observes himself as if “through a keyhole,” and feels at a distance well away from his own self. “Strange, yes, and altogether unsuitable for letter writing” (205).

He finds the attitude that will infuse his mature work. In Autumn 1934, he informs McGreevy that the dehumanization and mechanical nature of the artist extends to the portraits he studies so intently: “as the individual feels himself more & more hermetic & alone & his neighbor a coagulum as alien as a protoplast or God, incapable of loving or hating anyone but himself or of being loved or hated by anyone but himself” (223).

Still, humor lurks. A spider has two “penes.” The “Kook of Bells” gets a nod. T.S. Eliot spelled backwards stands for toilet. Beckett contrasts the art, plays and concerts he views with English literature. It remains mired in “old morality typifications and simplifications. I suppose the cult of the horse has something to do with it”(250).  He tires of vices and virtues. This mood may, in Spring 1935, account for his difficulties with Murphy. After analysis with Bion, Beckett rages to McGreevy. “If the heart still bubbles it is because the puddle has not been drained, and the fact of its bubbling more fiercely than ever is perhaps open to receive consolation from the waste that splutters most, when the bath is nearly empty” (259).

Yet, he watches the old men as kite flyers at Kensington’s Round Pond that autumn, and he observes them in his letter with the same detail that will enrich his novel. He tells McGreevy of a friend’s comment: “‘You haven’t a good word to say except about the failures’. I thought that was quite the nicest thing anyone had said to me for a long time” (275).

Tedium shrouds 1936. Working for his brother back in Dublin tempts him briefly. “I am thinking of asking Frank does he want stamps licked in Clare Street. Though I fear my present saliva would burn a hole in the envelope” (320). He informs McGreevy: “I do not feel like spending the rest of my life writing books that no one will read. It is not as though I wanted to write them”(362).  Frank asks him after Murphy is turned down again:

‘Why can’t you write the way the people want’, when I replied that I could only write the one way, i.e. as best I could (not the right answer, not at all the right answer), he said it was a good thing for him he did not feel obliged to implement such a spirit in 6 Clare St. Even mother begins to look askance at me. My departure is long overdue. But complicated by owing them £10 apiece (366).

Beckett cannot please possible publishers. “Do they not understand that if the book is slightly obscure, it is because it is a compression, and that to compress it further can only result in making it slightly obscure?” (380). He vows that his next work will be “on rice paper with a spool, with a perforated line every six inches and on sale in Boots” (383).

He roams Germany, refining his fluency, in early 1937. His letter to Axel Kaun in German represents a breakthrough. “It is getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English. And more and more my language appears like a veil which one has to tear apart for me to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it” (518). While this exchange is well-known, within the contexts of travel and growing unease as the Continent’s fate entangles with his own uncertain future, this letter gains resonance. In 1936 he had noted how at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, “all the lavatory men say Heil Hitler. The best pictures are in the cellar” (384). He shifts from London to Paris to Dublin, unsettled.

Recovering from the 1938 attack upon him by a Parisian assailant, Beckett contemplates an offer from Jack Kahane’s Obelisk Press to translate Sade’s Les 120 Journées de Sodome. He hesitates, not wanting to do the predictably censorable work anonymously, but reluctant “to be spiked as a writer” (604). He as always needs the money, but the project fades away. His later letters document the rejections given to Murphy, and Beckett’s reluctance to stay in Ireland. “All the old people & the old places, they make me feel like an amphibian detained forcibly on dry land, very very dry land” (637).

Even in 1933 he felt an “unhandy Andy” around his family. Frank suffers his own malaise, “with the feeling all the time in the not so remote background that he is strangling his life. But who does not” (369). In 1938, Beckett learns from his brother that their mother is ailing. “I feel sorry for her often to the point of tears. That part is not analysed away, I suppose,” he tells McGreevy. From Paris, he “returned to the land of my unsuccessful abortion,” but only to “keep my mother company” before he goes back for good “to the people where the little operation is safe, legal & popular. ‘Curetage’” (647).

For Beckett’s own intimacies, this compendium remains discreet. Lucia Joyce and Peggy Guggenheim garner proper mention. Beckett stays reticent regarding his relationship with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil. He introduces her to McGreevy in 1939 as “a French girl also whom I am fond of, dispassionately, who is very good to me. The hand will not be overplayed. As we both know that it will come to an end there is no knowing how long it may last” (657).

By June 1940, Beckett wonders about their fate, “provided we are staying on in Paris.” He tells Marthe Arnaud how “Suzanne seems to want to get away. I don’t. Where would we go, and with what?” (683). He concludes, c/o the painter Bram Van Velde, with a characteristically resigned, yet defiant set of images and thoughts. As those around him await the Nazi occupation, Beckett cites Murphy, and mixes his own predicament with that looming over the recipients of his final letter.

Under the blue glass Bram’s painting gives off a dark flame. Yesterday evening I could see in it Neary at the Chinese restaurant, ‘huddled in the tod of his troubles like an owl in ivy’. Today it will be something different. You think you are choosing something, and it is always yourself that you choose; a self that you did not know, if you are lucky. Unless you are a dealer (683-684).

Presciently, an advance notice about More Pricks Than Kicks in The Observer opined: “Mr. Beckett is allusive, and a future editor may have to provide notes” (210). Notes expand here. Each letter earns footnotes; profiles of recipients total fifty-seven. Works cited, an index, and George Craig’s French and Viola Westbrook’s German translation prefaces supplement the letters. Contributors credited by the editors fill thirteen pages.

This is the first of four projected volumes. The diligence of those who have assembled this compendium attests to its thoroughness. Spot-checking, I could find only one small slip, an indexed reference that lacked a referent. The immense labor of Beckett, building up his own talent, is matched by the scholars who present his early correspondence, or at least a third of what remains, to an attentive audience. 

[P.S. As above, in html/pdf in Estudios Irlandeses 6 (2010): 183-185. Edited down and then expanded again for a different crowd at  Amazon US 2-17-13.  As is my Amazon review the same day of "Volume Two: 1941-1956"]