Phil Harrison "The First Day": Book Review

Samuel Orr preaches on East Belfast's streets. There "he spoke only the scripture, no commentary, no opinion, no interpretation. No pleading." On the south side of the city, another resident elaborates on her chosen texts. She pursues another Samuel, surnamed Beckett. Anna Stuart "lectured her groups of avid nihilists while looking" from her classroom high up among the red-brick facades of Queens University, "at people scurrying far below, like insects." Phil Harrison sets up his protagonists as he begins The Third Day. His examination of faith and the tensions it creates and confronts engage the reader who enters into this novel. An award-winning filmmaker, he turns to fiction for his print debut.

As a Belfast native, Harrison scrutinizes "a city without roots." Rather than drawing sustenance from the earth, this place rejects security. "Flags, history, tradition, they all take light from the world and bury it." Where this perspective emanates from is not clear. Beginning in 2012, the setting for this story sours its residents. Those raised by the "1986 generation of nay-sayers" of "No Surrender" grow up "just as militant, though with less to lose. A decade of unimaginative leadership, of reconciliation attempts built around 'telling your story', served for the most part merely to trap people in the failed myths they'd grown up with rather than encouraging them to abandon them for bigger, messier ones."

This judgment resonates. Its speaker will be revealed as another victim of this entrapment as it passes down from the sins of the fathers. The stories told by this voice fill in much, but not all. Limits to complete understanding persist, in the city and in Orr's family. For quite a while, readers may remain unaware of who narrates, nearly omniscient, during much of the first half. Harrison slows this pace.

An authorial decision which may startle some embeds itself in the early prose. For the King James Version in all its poetry and power flows through Samuel Orr by habit and by vocation. His stream of consciousness fills with biblical cadences, verbatim from the Good Book. Orr, as a congregant regards him, "seemed to have an ability to make it all about him, to turn the scriptures into biography." Furthermore, the listener to Orr's sermon observes, that obdurate lay minister "yet did not actually do anything; he merely refused to change, to be anything other than his flawed, blunt self."

Like many an Ulsterman, Orr resists sentiment. Harrison keeps him at a distance. Orr's his most potent presence, and when he recedes, his creator plays it safer. Anna's predicament moves Orr, first to passion but soon to estrangement. Their son, also christened Sam (the triple nod to this prophetical nomenclature makes one wonder how necessary is this choice by the writer), must deal with his brother by Orr's wife, twelve-year-old Philip. (The author gives this foil his own first name.) That older boy is saddled with a burden. His father's actions in engendering a sibling only half a brother rankle Philip. He, the narrator defines, "became continuation, the past blurred into the present." Here, the predicament of many in the Irish North hardens the young as it has the old for centuries. "It was like the story they told children: if you pull a face and the wind changes direction it stays that way forever." Philip's determination to thwart both his father and the lad he has produced creates the story line which takes three-quarters of these pages to work itself out. This presumes a reader's patience.

For Harrison resolves to move Philip into a key scene which will effect the narrator and this account.
As with the naming Harrison chooses to grant central characters in The First Day, so with this pivot. It smacks of too-neat a scheme. Perhaps in film this could be carried off adroitly. In fiction, it calls attention more to the author than his antagonist. However, the narrator does reveal necessary sentences (in more ways than one) necessary for the scheme to be at all credible. "Philip had an extraordinary skill of carefully unpicking a person's weakness, of paying attention as much to what they didn't say as to what they did." He teases out the repressed and unravels what others labor to hide. "And he had that rare absence of compassion, a preparedness to use whatever he could get his hands on for his own ends." Certainly this foreshadowing follows through on that narrator's portent.

The crux lies in the ability of Philip to convincingly carry off what Harrison wants him to see through. Orr opines that his older son's "genius" evinces itself by Philip never stepping out of his role. He's "like a method actor who finishes work on a film and forgets to return to his normal life."

The novel's later half shifts the chronology thirty-five years later. Surprisingly, The First Day does not attempt to create a future New York City much altered from today. Gentrification turns into its own parody; artisans consume themselves. This may have already happened, one may aver, by 2012.

As a museum guard, the narrator inhabits a potentially rich setting for an inventive storyteller. Phil Harrison, once more, does not attempt to expand this as much as readers might expect. Instead, the narrator has to "find my own corners, my periphery." He rationalizes this as a better option to the dour conditions which have dampened his upbringing. "Darkness as character--the unknown not as absence but as a space to grow into." These marginal haunts, inevitably, echo those of Sam Beckett.

The First Day succeeds when it plunges Orr and Anna into their own Irish-based predicaments. When the narrative resumes across the ocean, it diffuses. Family secrets, betrayals, punishment and redemption add up to familiar tropes. The promise of the opening chapters, full of the addled and stubborn Orr's KJV compulsions to channel the prophets, and Anna's desperate confusion as she faces the joys and sorrows of motherhood, fades. The narrator trots adroitly at its start. When the story turns to New York, too much has been left unsaid and hidden for its revelations to excite its readers. What could have accelerated into a dynamic climax idles and glides into too rapid a resolution.
(NYJB 10/24/17)

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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)

Sebastian Barry's "Days Without End": Book Review

Sebastian Barry, in six previous novels (as well as his play The Stewart of Christendom) takes inspiration from his family members, past and present. More than one Barry narrative features the McNulty clan from the Irish port of Sligo. Days Without End sidles back before The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty and A Long, Long Way. Barry credits not only the rumor of a great-great uncle "in the Indian Wars" but he dedicates this latest installment to his son Toby, who has come out as gay.

Whereas those two earlier McNulty fictions began as a Great War shattered peace, this densely allusive, self-aware new narrative begins with the Famine, sending in 1847 thirteen-year-old Tommy McNulty off to Canada on a "fever ship," and then to Missouri. In Daggsville, a town as unpromising as its moniker suggests, he meets his lover, John Cole. Fifty-odd years later, Thomas tells us of their pairing: "We were two wood-shavings of humanity in a rough world." They dress in a "comely fashion" as dance partners to entice lovelorn miners, desperate to be fooled by feminine wiles. During Tommy's teens, this stratagem succeeds. With maturity, illusion withers. The partners join the Army. Heading west, they meet what they expect.

"To tell a story I have to trust it but I can issue a warning like a ticket master issuing a ticket for a western-bound train that will be obliged to go through wilderness, Indians, outlaws, and storms." Thomas's adventures turn bleak in Northern California. Summoned against the Yuroks, soldiers massacre women and children and their "braves." Troops are fooled by darkness, driven by frenzy.

The victors bury corpses. Enlisted men fill in the pits with dirt "like we were putting pastry tops on two enormous pies." Arresting phrases and novel images sharpen this blunt coming-of-age story. Barry balances beauty with horror.  Bloody duties order Thomas and John back and forth across the expanding 1850s frontier. "We wanted the enemy stilled and destroyed, so that we could live ourselves." Thomas recites the details of how these men (un-)settled themselves, unflinchingly. "A man's memory might have only a hundred days in it; he has lived thousands." Death watches it all.

Such a conflict wearies them. Their sergeant ages. Thomas reflects: "Like we got ten faces in our lives and we wear them one by one." For a while, these two young men return to their theatrical niche. In Grand Rapids they court gypsum miners. "We have our store of days and we spend them like forgetful drunkards." For a while, this satisfies the couple. "Out on stage we hear the first skits going over the footlights like crates of delicious apples. Thomas gets to wear a dress and don female frippery, and does so away from the limelight. But a greater campaign empties Michigan mines of men. John and Thomas join their old sergeant, who recruits both into a Massachusetts Irish regiment.

Marched into Northern Virginia, Union ranks await battle: "Fear like a bear in the cave of banter." After this slaughter, Thomas notices that land wrest back its dominion. "The whippoorwill will call forever over these snowy meadows. But the tents are temporary." That weather worsens along with the plight of the regiment hacking its way into Tennessee. The Deep South holds a fate for the "Feds" which many novelists have evoked. Sebastian Barry, as these excerpts attest, strives to capture the Joycean tone of his storyteller, infused with Barry's small slips of verse within his very stylized prose.

A longtime fellow fighter muses of the typical Irishman in these ranks: "the trouble with him is he thinks when he is bid to do a thing." Independence may be idealized by patriots, but not among the military. "That ain't a good trait in a soldier." Barry channels through Thomas a liberal sympathy for those he must shoot, whether Native Americans or "yellowlegs" with strange accents in butternut rags. The latter foe shrinks as thin as wraiths. Rebels weaken on "fingers" of cornbread, filthy water.

The latter part of this chronicle continues in the pattern of the Western first half. As with another saga which took up the adventures of the Irish during this era, the film Gangs of New York, the scope of Barry's project strains to encompass both the tumult of the decades before the Civil War as well as the conflagrations in the days of Lincoln, Grant, and Lee. While Barry avoids repetition, such elaboration of suffering weighs down Days Without End to resemble its eternal title. Thomas repeats the moral of all this mess. "Everything bad gets shot at in America, says John Cole, and everything good too."

The soldiers respect justice despite slaughter. Their "cold brutal war" on the plains and in the hollows reveals how an armed man keeps "a queer spot in his wretched heart for his enemy, that's just a fact." Thomas as he retraces his itinerary into "o'erwhelming country" to rescue Winona, a Sioux girl he had adopted fifteen years earlier (it's a winding subplot), reflects on parallels between the persecuted in his homeland and the Irishman's fate as another empire's cannon fodder and shock troops. "Now we make them this American paradise. Guess it were strange so many Irish boys doing this work." In Indian Territory Thomas peers at displaced natives. "Every face before us looks like it were slapped."

Through many plot complications, Thomas tries to sustain his hard-won family, with one old black veteran, Winona, and himself, part of "a white couple." He tries to settle down. "I hitch up my skirts good as any country girl and I work beside the men. Yet, no retreat from guns and violence lasts long in a violent depiction of more than one American lust. "Flowers draw bees and gold draws thieves."

As Days Without End rambles on, its body count rises. Old haunts spark new hatreds. Reconstruction and the clearance of natives from the supposedly tamed frontier wear down resistance against this relentless Union. "We blunder through and call it wisdom but it ain't." Facing his latest in a series of forced emigrations, Thomas reasons: "The ones that don't try to rob me will feed me. That's how it is in America." Dramatizing an omnipresent imperial force, this picaresque yarn speaks for its perpetrators and victims, ordinary men, women, and children. Even if Thomas's yarn relies more than once as a Western tall tale may, on sudden coincidence and daring rescues in the nick of time: "He just appeared like an angel, I says." So does Thomas, but readers of his account may forgive him for these interventions. After all, Thomas won his place on stage and behind a skirt, fooling in turn many.
(PopMatters 3-27-17)

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)

Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels": Audiobook Review

"Not the children's book you think"

Where does Gulliver's Travels: A Signature Performance by David Hyde Pierce rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Near top tier. Excellent choice of narrator. David Hyde Pierce is perfectly cast and poised.

What did you like best about this story?

The upending of the first part is familiar: big meets small. Then small meets big. But the latter parts, where the mind is inflated into the arbiter of all, and then the body prolonged beyond endurance, speak better to Swift's legacy, for these issues remain relevant today.

Which scene was your favorite?

The last section with the inversion of horses as dominating humans is coruscating. It's cutting satire and it stings deeply. All the same, Jonathan Swift's compassion mixed with his disgust for human cruelty and animal dignity resonates, in ways we may me recognize more than three hundred years ago for his audience, at least those tuned into sentient creatures.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

I did snicker. While the Laputan third part was less interesting than I recall from high school (imagine this book being assigned in most places now, given its NSFW content and offending sensibilities couched in a courtly high style few perhaps can now appreciate), it held up despite this slow spot, for the novel from then on reaches its horrifying climaxes.

Any additional comments?

As above lauded, the pairing of Pierce and Swift is praised. The actor brings out the wit and the pain in the pages, and he renders the difficult registers of some of the high-flown rhetoric of which Swift's a master into entertaining adventure and instructive warnings of human follies. The messages of this often diminished (!) tale remain lively and surprisingly applicable, in life-extension and in animal rights as well as servitude and inequality, today. (Audible 11/7/16)

Bram Stoker's "Dracula": Audiobook Review

Overall

Performance

Story

"More English reporting than Transylvanian action"

If you could sum up Dracula [Audible Edition] in three words, what would they be?

Menacing. Meandering. Maddening.

How would you have changed the story to make it more enjoyable?

Shift all action onto Dracula's home turf. So much of this narrative is off-stage from the Count, in the second location of England. Characters debate how to fight the force, but from a distance. They talk and talk about Dracula, but take a long time to form a big showdown.

What about the narrators’s performance did you like?

The "all-star cast" fulfills its mission. The voice for Van Helsing is effective, and the report of the Russian sea captain and that of Mina's trance-like message both add depth and doom.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

It's faster than the novel.

Any additional comments?

Revisiting this after thirty years, the layered narratives are inventive ways to tell a tall tale. But their cumulative power dissipates as the antagonist is tucked away as it were for a great part of the plot. This diminishes rather than increases his terror. Stoker's inventive staging of the novel in many reports and letters remains admirable, but the force of it all is lessened. (Audible US 12/6/16)

Mark Williams' "Ireland's Immortals": Book Review

How the Christian Irish regarded their island's pagan divinities, in medieval and modern times, comprises the two halves of Ireland's Immortals: A History of the Gods of Irish Myth. Mark Williams, an Oxford medievalist, unravels the tangled threads in texts that challenge even the skilled interpreter. Old Irish remains formidable for scholars, and the fact that the evidence exists only in copies centuries after its first renditions onto parchment, deep within already Catholic times, complicates any explicator's task. Dr. Williams remains steady throughout this study. His accessible style remains academic but blessedly free of jargon or cant. His glossaries summarize key concepts and his footnotes address arcane debates.

His history of the gods of Irish myth examines key writings left by the monks and scribes, from the period after conversion. Williams estimates that within a half-century after the Patrician period, Ireland would have been effectively under Christian control. Although pre-Christian practices may have endured, they diminished rapidly, despite the imaginations of later bards eager to insist on secret continuity with centuries nearly up to our own. Williams separates the archaic from the innovative elements inserted into these stories and chronicles preserved within monasteries. Although these tales and accounts were tamed, a "ferocious weirdness" persists in surreal or juxtaposed scenes, distinguishing imagery from the dour scenarios in Anglo-Saxon sagas such as {Beowulf}, for instance.

These Irish pre-Christian versions resemble (as in the Book of Invasions, a chronological origin myth of successive waves of those landing on the nation's shores) the configurations of Romanesque architecture.  Williams compares the sagas to these simple, repeating structures which are decorated with teeming surface details. The medieval corpus, furthermore, rises as a massive edifice, if resting on slender foundations. Pseudo-scholarship at its most ingenious labored to match biblical lore with Celtic supposition. This tension, concentrating around the meaning of the "god-people" the Túath Dé sustains itself within the literature Williams examines. As a blend of inherited narratives with concocted alterations shaped into a Christian mindset, these tales' impact faded by the end of the Middle Ages. The Irish seemed to lose interest. Only in the nineteenth century did curiosity revive about gods.

Part two delves into more recent re-workings of the myths of the Irish gods and goddesses. Romanticism, antiquarianism and the occult all generated speculation. W.B. Yeats and George Russell epitomized the poetic turn of the Celtic Revival at the end of the Victorian period, in the wake of a British passion for the classics and the pagan to counter the tamed, the scriptural and the stolid. Gods, as redefined by the Irish revivalists, emerge as "spiritual entities." Among the Anglo-Irish gentry emerge intellectuals eager to fabricate a past for their country, rooted in wisdom of the earth and appeals to the forces lingering, despite the reign of Christendom, supposedly on fringes of the Celtic homeland.

The ninth chapter introduces William Sharp (1855-1905). Taking on the feminine alter ego of Fiona Macleod, Williams engagingly shares this fantasist of Gaelic Scotland. In Fiona, we encounter a fabled "self-sequestered Highland visionary." Williams labels her as "an imaginary personage, albeit an alarmingly insistent one." Characteristic of this author's tone, he keeps his investigations lively even as he grounds them in careful judgment. He counters the bent suppositions and fey imagination lavished upon sources that, in modern times, create a "feedback loop." Williams analyzes distortions within American anthropologist Walter Evans-Wentz's The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries. He adapted his Oxford dissertation oddly; this 1911 compendium persists as a New Age "crank piece."

For Mark Williams' predecessor at his university proved both an "exorbitant Celtophile" and a misled eccentric. Evans-Wentz conjured up the peasantry as informants for a pan-Celtic fairy belief system. He incorporated an unnamed mystic's testimony. Yet this was none other than George Russell. Williams reasons that Evans-Wentz betrayed a "spiritual crush on Russell." Testifying as to the endurance of this account lies beyond the scope of Williams' work, but he admits he had to cut a third of his own draft. The results remain impressive, even if the source of that apt John Cowper Powys colophon beginning Chapter Nine lacks attribution to that fabulist, as obsessive as many in this volume, of strange magic.

Nowadays, Williams tracks a second arc, again with diminishing attention to the old gods, among Irish writers. The Túath Dé and their replacements, the Túatha Dé Danann, as the Irish supernatural race, endure within the "wide uptake" by creative classes outside the isle. The fine arts alongside Celtic Paganism and Celtic Reconstructionism enshrine goddesses, notably the fire spirit of Brigit.

Unfortunately, opposition to the ancient forces still exists. Vandalism of historic sites and a modern sculpture to the Celtic sea-god testifies to the powers of these representations as feared by evangelicals. Unlike other cultures where monotheism replaced paganism, Williams concludes that in Ireland, a "restless refusal to resolve" the ambiguities of the survival of the venerable if often barely recalled deities within a Christian context distinguishes that island's literary legacy within the extant sources.

Fittingly, Williams ends his six-hundred page survey with a tribute to the late John Moriarty, a philosopher and shaman from County Kerry. Moriarty's "ecological and psychic sensitivity" to summon up again the mythic terrain's specters signifies the restoration of "imaginative vitality." In a nation divided by income inequality and sectarian squabbles, Moriarty's vision and Williams' precision combine. This learned volume contributes valuable insights that may guide all those who look to the Irish tales and Celtic heritage as a relevant force of energy.

(Interview with Mark Williams here. Amazon US 1/11/17 and Amazon British 1/12/17)

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)

Eric Cross' "The Tailor and Ansty": Book Review

While Eamon de Valera famously judged |"in its general tendency" this 1941 account as ''indecent," years later, the tone of these stories as told by the titular couple from Muskerry in West Cork feels quaint, conveyed from these believers in the fair folk. I found Eric Cross's editorial voice slightly patronizing, as if he was guiding us to a pair of animatronic figures programmed to speak on command their scripted recital. Still, the content, if you can handle the now-antiquated air of the tales told by Tom Buckley and his wife, Anastasia (Ansty).

In Gougane Barra, the earthy life is recounted, whether of people or of animals. Thus Dev's squeamishness. Ansty plays the more curdled to the less ruffled Tailor her partner. Originally published in the well-known The Bell, as fellow Corkman Frank O'Connor reminisces in his 1964 introduction, this take on the imagined and idealized benefits of rural Irish life resulted in the couple being boycotted while Cross' book was debated and denounced by many in the Irish government.

O'Connor also reminds us that the Tailor had a wider range in his native Irish of expression, and that the English is narrower, if still indicative second-hand of his wide-ranging mind and temperament. I'd say it's livelier for readers now than Peig Sayers' tales of woe, halfway to those parodied by Flann O'Brian in his The Poor Mouth, translated from his own Irish, sending-up such rustic ruminations and raw exaggerations. Classified as a biography "as told to," it stirs up blurred fact and lots of fiction.
(Amazon US 11-4-15)

Máirtín Ó Cadhain's "The Dirty Dust": Book Review

The most important prose work in Modern Irish, Máirtín Ó Cadhain's Cré na Cille has never before been published in English. This 1949 novel, as Alan Titley introduces his blunt, bold rendering into our language, carries the flow of chatter "you might hear outside a door when everyone inside is tearing themselves apart; or in a country churchyard in the light of day". The title resists easy equivalence, although "churchyard clay" has long served as as its English echo for critics. Titley, a skilled writer and critic in Irish, prefers the biblical resonance of ashes and soil, for this narrative takes place entirely in a Connemara cemetery, as its interred bicker and boast among themselves.

It was inspired by a report in the author's native West of Ireland where a woman was buried inadvertently atop her rival one day too rainy for the gravediggers to bother with niceties. An onlooker mourned: "Oh holy cow, there's going to be one almighty gabble!" Ó Cadhain set his novel, akin to what Titley calls switching channels between various conversations on a radio, in townlands he knew well in County Galway, near the Atlantic shore among its Irish-speaking community. Then, that language was still connected to those in the nineteenth century who had spoken no other. The author did not hear English until the age of six. Rich in imagery, curt in tone, this dialect of Irish can be difficult for those who encounter it today. Titley prefers a conversational, casual tide of chat, cursing, and reverie to wash over Ó Cadhain's characters. This eases the reader's challenge. The author plunges us immediately into a fictional tale told in dialogue and interruption.

Yet, even if Caítríona Paudeen's new arrival among the dead makes her by default the protagonist, the buried characters surrounding her six feet under crowd her out. Many of her neighbors resent her airs. It is best to let this rattling narrative roll on, rather than resist its banter or weary of its nagging. As a downed French pilot now and then complains in his own native tongue (untranslated): these scolds bore him. He had hoped to find peace in death, but the tomb seems not to be dead at all. Rather, the foreigner, struggling to figure out the meaning of the babble around him, finds it betrays the same old ennui. Sympathizing with his plight, I found myself drifting along as the voices resounded and receded. It's not hard to give way to them as background noise rather than scintillating exchanges.

The liveliest portions open most chapters. The "Trumpet of the Graveyard" summons souls to a reckoning. Ó Cadhain contrasts the joys of the living with the dread of the dead. He also here evokes the intricacy of Irish-language verse by departed bards: "But the flakes of foam on the fringe of a surge of a stream are slurping in towards the shallows of the river where they slobber on the rough sand." The alliteration and end-rhyme give way as they ebb into brutal phrases, and a sudden stop.

Meanwhile, without fresh news to filter into the soil, insults and laments repeat. No effort at organization lasts long; a Rotary Club, an election, a cultural society all flounder. Jonathan Swift's prediction of "a road on every track and English in every shack" threatens the isolation of the village. Its cadaverous inhabitants debate a medieval prophecy attributed to St. Colmcille about the signs of the world's end. This sense of doom deepens in the novel's vague duration during the middle of the Second World War. The corpses debate, as did their real-life counterparts, the comparative merits of the Germans and the British as allies for officially neutral Ireland. The Antichrist's return is rumored.

The talking dead are uncertain if D-Day has occurred. Only with the internment of the newest arrival, Billy the Postman, do the rest learn that none of their graveside crosses are made of Connemara marble. The dead had asserted this, each trying to put down the others, so as to boost their own status. That incident concludes this novel. Its recurring themes of discontent and rivalry dominate whatever  moments of tenderness and solidarity remain after village life has given way to common death. In this sobering depiction of a determined counter to the stereotypes of Irish rural relationships, native son Maírtín Ó Cadhain in his native language sought to correct myth with truth. As ably translated by Alan Titley, the results recall Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot and Martin McDonagh's play, both of which feature this same milieu, as they include too the telling phrase of "a skull in Connemara".
(PopMatters 2-24-15; Amazon US 3-12-15)

Gerard Cappa's "Black Boat Dancing": Book Review

Con Maknazpy is an odd name, one that was explained in the intricately plotted 2012 debut of his character, "Blood from a Shadow." That anticipated Obama's re-election, full of Iranian intrigue and the current situation that continues to reveal Western (and here, Eastern) superpowers battling over control of "Pipelineistan" and where oil from not only the Middle East but Eurasia will wind up. Gerard Cappa continues the mix of subtle allusion, rapidly paced violent set-pieces, and character reflection, for Con encounters from the earliest pages the "red frenzy" inherited, and perhaps passed on, from Irish ancestors, and in turn, the Ulster Cycle and Cú Chullain's "warp spasms."

Cappa handles these references lightly, such that you may not realize the preparation he gives in both tales to their literary and mythic resonance. Here, I reckoned the plot might be calmer than the frenetic and wide-ranging mayhem of the first installment. However, very soon, we leave the Yonkers of the narrator, as he is recruited and sent off off to Lisbon, where this story takes Con and his friend Ferdy McIlhane into an international conspiracy, one that again draws in current geopolitics, along with immigrants, CIA, Russian no-good-niks, Chinese eager for cash, police from all over, an old fisherman, a whore with if not a heart of gold than a familiar tale of pain and compliance, and black hat (well, maybe gray for one key talent who is trapped in this global, sticky, darknet web) hacking.

Cora Oneale (Cappa's spelling), Jack Gallogly, and, off stage for their own reasons, Rose and Con's son return. No plot spoilers but we find Lisbon evoked lovingly, and Sintra memorably. The chapters move along efficiently, with space for reflection and self-hatred galore, before another bloody sequence sets up another chance for Con to spread the "red frenzy" all over whomever opposes him. And that number of foes adds up over the course of this noir thriller. It's not my usual genre, I confess, so my reaction may not be that of readers who subsist on this fare, but I do like the conversations his characters engage in about politics, capitalism, greed, and history, even if as one remarks (perhaps speaking for readers?) that he tires of this blather (another word is used instead).

"An outlier. Pain and isolation for him. Extreme and random. A life of heartbreak and loss for anyone who had ever loved him." Con considers his father's legacy as he tries to prevent from passing it on. "The underworld never changes." He reflects on the same old temptations that sustain sins and crime. His nemesis opines how a "propensity to exacerbate collateral damage comes wrapped up" in Con's "collective baggage." He contends against how he causes such damage, as "their awareness of the real presence of my evil seeped through their numbed heads, my own brain retreated into self-defense mode, as if the real Con Maknazpy couldn't exist or function without this ancient imposer usurped my skin." He finds "China is a civilization, America is a business," at least from one informed p-o-v.

Against that, he tries to rally the patriotic defense. While Con has some trans-Atlantic connection, and while his military service may tip the word choice to measure in meters a distance, I am not sure a Yonkers man would say "shopping trolleys" rather than "carts," or "holiday" instead of "vacation," and whether an American would identify an overheard language spoken as "Latino" rather than "Spanish or Portuguese," but these are slight slips in a fast tale that conveys a lot of plot twists. I like the breaks from the action more than the action, often, but Cappa seems at his best when he is in the thick of the brawl, and in cinematic style, you see the scenes vividly. The author's in his element here and compared to volume one, his focus on place helps plot coherence, even if it remains as complex. This may prove a transitional story in what I surmise will be a longer series, as Con labors to evolve.

A couple of crucial characters, as more than one enemy of Con reminds him, don't enter his thoughts or at least his words. Their absence from the plot, except as motivation, provides a curious tilt. While I assume this is very intentional, and portends more novels in the series, it left me feeling left out as to this emotional ballast, even if it goads Con on. There may be references hidden here to older stories, perhaps. Cappa certainly embedded many in his earlier novel that introduced us all to Con.

From this Belfast-based writer, "all mouth and no trousers" is a nice turn of phrase no matter its origin; such sentences (others I cannot repeat lest I bowdlerize) as "The bar was silent, like they were all straining to hear the drama on a misfiring radio" recall quaintly the pulp fiction idiom. "When the devils burn out you'll find your true spirit," Con is told by one who knows. I predict that future adventures, for after all, he tells this one to us, will find Con eager to spit in the face of other devils. (Amazon US 1-5-15)

Maeve Binchy's "Maeve's Times": Book Review

Maeve Binchy's many novels have gained her a wide readership in and beyond Ireland. A teacher turned writer, she wrote more prolifically than many Irish storytellers; she produced bestsellers. The U.S. book jacket for this anthology of her Irish Times columns over five decades sketches her perspective as imagined by at least some of her readers abroad: pastel colors, a cat, a cup of tea, a neatly stacked newspaper, pen and notebook, all in an orderly room overlooking an idealized (no logos, no litter, no graffiti, no rain, no cars at all) market town's high street. But the reality, as this journalism (collected by Róisín Ingle, introduced by her husband, Gordon Snell) documents, reveals Binchy's sharp ear. She conveyed clearly the inner troubles hidden and then confessed or betrayed by everyday people living behind those sunny town facades. Her eye, in turn, focuses upon the contradictions between outward propriety and intimate shame, as many of those, mostly women like herself, whom she interviews or dramatizes betray their increasingly tense frustrations with their homeland's pious submission to Church, State, and Da. 

As she explains, she writes as she speaks. In her steady prose, without fuss or fancy, I hear her peer, my own Irish mother, on the page, for both express themselves candidly. Women born as they were seventy-odd years ago in Ireland faced barriers against advancement; Binchy speaks for those who broke free of the Irish stranglehold. She began as feminism roused many, starting her stint after she returned from a kibbutz (where she lapsed from her faith), as Women's Editor for the Times in 1968.

Her entries begin with pleasant but often lightweight wit. But a few years in, she creates three vignettes titled "Women Are Fools". Each tells, as her fiction might, the tale of someone who sins. But to the women themselves, each may feel, as filtered through Binchy's sympathetic portrayal, that perhaps they are not sinners but merely flawed, not to be cast aside by the Church or abandoned in a State where divorce and contraception continued to be outlawed. An unwanted child, promiscuity, infidelity, and marital breakdown are treated without sentiment, but with insight and understanding.

She continued to analyze her homeland with the same concern for the telling detail to make her point. Although she spent much of the 1970s as the London editor for the newspaper, she returned frequently. This slight distance combined with familiarity enlivened her observations, such as of a seaside resort. "Out in Killiney I saw people walking Afghan hounds which, I feel, must be a sign of prosperity, but I am assured that's it's just the same person with the same hound that I keep seeing."

In Britain, she found contrasts. "Here the parks are filled with children, in London they are filled with the old. In Dublin you hold a supermarket door open for a mother with a pram, in London for an elderly couple with a basket on wheels." She balances her sentences neatly, and she narrates briskly. 

Her range may surprise those expecting only domestic drama or casual comments. In 1980, she meets Samuel Beckett, who by 74 still looks 54, if by then more like a Frenchman than an Irishman to her. "He has spikey hair which looks as if he had just washed it or had made an unsuccessful attempt to do a Brylcreem job on it and given up halfway through. He has long narrow fingers, and the lines around his eyes go out in a fan, from years of smiling rather than years of intense brooding." So begins her encounter, and she shares her respect and camaraderie for the playwright, examining him carefully. 

She does the same for Margaret Thatcher, fifteen years her senior, under whose administration she lived in Britain for many years. In 1986, Binchy ponders Thatcher's bid for a third term as Prime Minister. "When people praise Thatcher, and many, many do every day, they praise her not at all for anything to do with being a woman. And perhaps that is her greatest achievement. She has almost single-handedly banished the notion that it is somehow unusual or special for a woman to be able to do anything. For that, if nothing else, women in the future may thank her." This statement deploys Binchy's command of tone and control over her style masterfully, and proves her journalistic skill. 

Yet not all is somber. Being Irish, she can spin a lively tale. In an "provincial town", a man sets up his office for the day in a hotel, in the ladies' cloakroom. He has no idea where he has settled down. When Binchy tells him, we see his reaction. "He stood up like a man who had been shot in the back in a film and was about to stagger all about the set before collapsing. 'I don't believe you,' he said." 

Many who mourned her death in 2012 praised Binchy's generosity towards other writers as well as ordinary folks. Her good-natured voice, as revealed in Maeve's Times: In Her Own Words, does not shirk criticism, but manages--as the Thatcher profile demonstrates--to challenge prejudice or piety on behalf of those who have been shut out or held down. She does this without scolding or posturing, although a 1992 entry welcoming the return of dullness after Thatcher's delayed exit is more bitter. 

Some of this goes on too long. Sitting next to a garrulous teller, no matter how fluent, a listener needs a break. So with a reader. These essays may be better sampled as they originally appeared, one at a time. I would find them in The Irish Times, where I wondered how she managed to produce so many novels, stories, and articles with seeming ease. She does not tell us here the pace or the cost, but she seems to have lived happily and delighted in her career. Certain Irish authors relegated to a small press backlist or a poetry seminar's syllabus may envy her promotion through Oprah's Book Club. 

Trained as an historian, from a well-educated suburban Dublin family, Binchy found success apart from academia, and she spoke to those who saw in her writing a concern for dignity and decency. She calls out her countrymen and women for stereotyped fecklessness, and she holds them accountable. 

Avoiding euphemism while remaining polite, she encourages her readers to confront death without cant, and to support those whose weakness or failures have led them to be too harshly condemned. Abortion, heartbreak, aging, and even a tacit case of murder "before I knew that people called things by different names" occur. By the 1990s, Binchy witnesses a much-changed Ireland, one which her generation had waited for. Traffic clogs Dublin, while coffee brews everywhere. But Binchy, who has "taken charge of her life" ever since she quit teaching and began writing, enjoys holidays and counsels readers who share her "senior moments". Her energy subsides, naturally, by the 2000s. Her novels are made into films, her portrait is made for the National Gallery of Ireland, and she lists ten things never to say to someone with arthritis as one of her final submissions. One of her last entries borrows a phrase from another creative spirit in his autumnal years, Woody Allen: "I'm so mellow I'm almost rotten." While the range of her earlier entries narrows by the conclusion of this anthology, no one can chide Maeve Binchy for showing her readers how to cherish all one can from a peaceful life. (Pop Matters 11-7-14)

"Flann O'Brien & Modernism": Book Review

The Irish writer born as Brian Ó Nualláin and best known under one of his many assumed names as Flann O'Brien has long been championed as a harbinger of post-modernism. Literary scholars scrutinized his life as a Dublin newspaperman and his relatively few fictional publications as proof of his eccentric genius, if as a talent overshadowed by a predecessor he both cultivated and resented, James Joyce. Their conventional wisdom lamented Brian O'Nolan the journalist/ O'Brien the fabulist as succumbing to ennui, drink, and hackwork, squandering subversive skills premiered in the novels At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman at the end of the 1930s. His modernist credentials, by contrast, have often been diminished.

So claim the fourteen participants from a University of New South Wales seminar commemorating the 2011 centenary of O'Brien's birth. Choosing not to focus on his life as Brian O'Nolan but on his works under many names, usually that of Flann O'Brien, professors expand their papers into academic essays. As with Maebh Long's "Assembling Flann O'Brien" (reviewed by me as "Making Sense of Nonsense", 14 April 2014) from the same publisher earlier this year, a reader may wonder what the author, who so gleefully and bitterly lampooned scholarship, would make of so many studious, posthumous tributes.

As co-editor Rónán McDonald explains, Brian O'Nolan's works elude genre conventions. O'Nolan's refusal to stay pinned down transcends his career as a civil servant in Dublin during the middle of the last century. His occupation impelled his taking on other names to disguise his mockery of the Irish government, its bureaucracy, and their mission to make the Irish language one that English-speaking natives would be compelled to learn. Furthermore, O'Brien, who as Myles na gCopaleen also penned witty columns for the Irish Times, ridiculed his nation's clerical and lay authorities, the humbugs and scolds around him, and the dull "Plain People of Ireland". He refined this raw material by savage wit.

McDonald introduces his essay on The Third Policeman's nihilism by summing him up: "His views and attitudes are shrouded in irony, ambiguity, linguistic play, ingenious obfuscation. There is abundant satire in his novels, as in his journalism, though the po-faced scholasticism of Flann contrasts with the populist posture of Myles. He lampoons patriotic Gaels in An Béal Bocht, the mythologies of the Irish Revival in At Swim-Two-Birds, finicky academicians in The Third Policeman." He loved to put down pretentiousness but he shied away from confrontation. Flann was more bold than Myles; his various personae masked his eccentricities even as they encouraged them.

Certainly, as contributors emphasize, O'Brien's disguises allowed him to sidle into arcane and odd controversies which he incorporated into his experimental fiction. Sean Pryor examines the influence of St. Augustine, and how good needs evil so God's creations can appreciate better their happy times; John Attridge compliments this approach with a study of O'Brien's use of Augustine of Hippo. He is a central character as is James Joyce, both in altered form, in O'Brien's last novel, The Dalkey Archive, published two years before O'Nolan's death in 1966. Augustinian notions of "sociable lies" reveal a slippery quality, in ethics as well as characterization, which warps scholastic satire into twisted plots.

Instability inspires the next three essays. Stefan Solomon investigates the relative failure of O'Brien's theatrical efforts to convey what in At Swim-Two-Birds succeeded as a subversive revolt of its tetchy characters against their scheming author. Solomon and Stephen Abbitt, regarding Flann's tribute to and travesty of James Joyce, agree that O'Brien emerges as a "reluctant modernist", contrary to most academic predecessors who have preferred to situate him among post-modernist literary pioneers.

However, as David Kelly insists, O'Nolan's many guises shared an "innate faculty for finding things funny", anticipating the post-modernist, mid-twentieth century "literature of exhaustion". Flann's repetition of his material attests to his living late enough to deal with the trauma of the past century in a more detached, obsessive, and playful manner. After all, he did not have to relive the difficulties of the early century, Kelly avers. In his ludicrous and bizarre creations, Flann is instead a harbinger of his century's "generational shift" away from recreating torment. Instead, post-modernist authors tend to mock, invert, and tease the pain of isolation and the power of obsession, through parody or irony.

These selections examine certain works from O'Nolan's varieties of names and works, but they bypass many others. The three novels cited above by McDonald garner most attention, but The Hard Life: An Exegesis of Squalor (1961), considered his weakest novel, gets two asides. As with Myles' prolific newspaper columns, under-examined here, a study of the strained attempts at satire in O'Nolan's later career, writing as Flann, might have balanced the general acclaim granted by contributors to his successful works. One needs to know where and how O'Nolan lost the plot.

The next set of entries roam into the linguistic methods employed by Flann O'Brien. Maebh Long  repeats some material from her recent book. She focuses here upon An Béal Bocht, to show how Flann's use of the Irish language addresses, or subverts, vexing preoccupations of naming and identity among conflicting Irish-speaking cohorts. Long compares Patrick Powers' 1973 translation as The Poor Mouth of this novel, by Myles na gCopaleen; her essay ends a bit eccentrically, if fittingly for this material, which evades cohesion even for the Irish-fluent reader, undoubtedly as its intention.

A peer of O'Nolan's, the poet Patrick Kavanagh, also jeered at the Irish government's propaganda about the doughty Gaelic peasant. Joseph Brooker compares Kavanagh's approach with O'Brien's.   Kavanagh and O'Brien's predecessors, Samuel Beckett and Joyce, connect via O'Nolan's marginalia in his copies of their works, as Dirk Van Hulle explains. These authors share an interest in parallax, "Chinese boxes" as nested narratives, and regression in theme and structure in their literary creations.

Regression and mathematical patterns via numerology in At Swim-Two-Birds, as Baylee Brits demonstrates, document O'Brien's scientific and technological interests, in the next section of essays. The coupling of mechanical devices and eerie inventions within The Third Policeman, as McDonald shows, represents darker corners of O'Brien's textual labyrinths, which continue to disorient readers.
The pull into infinity and regression reveals the abysmal and the dismal; co-editor Julian Murphet charts the tension between Myles the journalist and Flann the fabulist as he conjures up pataphysics and other esoteric send-ups of rational analysis, within O'Brien's fictions exposing a psychic death drive. The compulsions many of his characters exhibit pushes their pursuits beyond entertainment.

This aspect, the haunted quality within this troubled writer, does not earn the biographical context which Anthony Cronin's 1989 biography, No Laughing Matter, treated with compassion and insight. But, readers familiar with O'Brien's life and works already (a prerequisite, as little more than a nod to this background is given by the contributors or editors) will learn from Sam Dickson about Flann's propensity for fictions full of "hard drink". This compliments co-editor Sascha Morrell's congenial foray, as she aligns O'Brien's treatment of alcohol with the Australian writer Frank Moorhouse's The Electrical Experience: A Discontinuous Narrative (1974), about a soft drink maker Down Under. Culture and commodity feature here and in the final two, atypically off-beat (even by O'Nolan's standards) essays revealing Flann's range and curiosity. 

Mark Steven examines "aestho-autonomy" through At Swim-Two-Birds' Dermot Trellis. Trellis seeks solitude, to pursue masturbation. Steven frames this ambition as a "formal and narrative act", thus indicative of the political and economic stagnation in the new Irish Free State for which O'Nolan labored. Physical exertion, onanism, gender roles, and male potency also seeped into none other than the bicycle seat, as that machine and its rider merged, in O'Brien's The Third Policeman in forms that this short review cannot elucidate. Suffice to say that these learned essays may encourage the reader to take down O'Brien from the bookshelf. After perusing the ruminations of a coterie of his critics, why not enter, for the first time or another time, into the fictions of Flann O'Brien, Myles na gCopaleen, and various odd characters his writer wrote as, and about? The Irish labyrinth awaits you. (10-1-14 to  PopMatters)

Chapter 1 Making Evil, with Flann O’Brien
Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 2 Mythomaniac modernism: lying and bullshit in Flann O’Brien
John Attridge, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 3 ‘The outward accidents of illusion’: O’Brien and the Theatrical
Stefan Solomon, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 4 The Ghost of ‘Poor Jimmy Joyce’: A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist
Stephen Abblitt, La Trobe University, Australia

Chapter 5 ‘Do You Know What I’m Going to Tell You?’: Flann O’Brien, Risibility and the Anxiety of Influence
David Kelly, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 6 An Béal Bocht, Translation and the Proper Name
Maebh Long, University of the South Pacific, Fiji

Chapter 7 Ploughmen Without Land: Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh
Joseph Brooker, University of London, United Kingdom

Chapter 8 Flann O’Brien’s Ulysses: Marginalia and the Modernist Mind
Dirk Van Hulle, University of Antwerp, Belgium


Chapter 9 ‘Truth is an Odd Number’: Flann O’Brien and Infinite Imperfection
Baylee Brits, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 10 ‘An astonishing parade of nullity’: Nihilism in The Third Policeman
Rónán McDonald, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 11 Flann O’Brien and Modern Character
Julian Murphet, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 12 ‘No unauthorized boozing’: Flann O’Brien and the Thirsty Muse
Sam Dickson

Chapter 13 Soft drink, hard drink, and literary (re)production in Flann O’Brien and Frank Moorhouse
Sascha Morrell, University of New England, Australia

Chapter 14 Flann O’Brien’s Aestho-Autogamy
Mark Steven, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 15 Modernist Wheelmen
Mark Byron, University of Sydney, Australia - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/flann-obrien-modernism-9781623568504/#sthash.Z1ncj15a.dpu

Chapter 1 Making Evil, with Flann O’Brien
Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 2 Mythomaniac modernism: lying and bullshit in Flann O’Brien
John Attridge, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 3 ‘The outward accidents of illusion’: O’Brien and the Theatrical
Stefan Solomon, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 4 The Ghost of ‘Poor Jimmy Joyce’: A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist
Stephen Abblitt, La Trobe University, Australia

Chapter 5 ‘Do You Know What I’m Going to Tell You?’: Flann O’Brien, Risibility and the Anxiety of Influence
David Kelly, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 6 An Béal Bocht, Translation and the Proper Name
Maebh Long, University of the South Pacific, Fiji

Chapter 7 Ploughmen Without Land: Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh
Joseph Brooker, University of London, United Kingdom

Chapter 8 Flann O’Brien’s Ulysses: Marginalia and the Modernist Mind
Dirk Van Hulle, University of Antwerp, Belgium


Chapter 9 ‘Truth is an Odd Number’: Flann O’Brien and Infinite Imperfection
Baylee Brits, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 10 ‘An astonishing parade of nullity’: Nihilism in The Third Policeman
Rónán McDonald, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 11 Flann O’Brien and Modern Character
Julian Murphet, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 12 ‘No unauthorized boozing’: Flann O’Brien and the Thirsty Muse
Sam Dickson

Chapter 13 Soft drink, hard drink, and literary (re)production in Flann O’Brien and Frank Moorhouse
Sascha Morrell, University of New England, Australia

Chapter 14 Flann O’Brien’s Aestho-Autogamy
Mark Steven, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 15 Modernist Wheelmen
Mark Byron, University of Sydney, Australia - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/flann-obrien-modernism-9781623568504/#sthash.Z1ncj15a.dpuf

Chapter 1 Making Evil, with Flann O’Brien
Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 2 Mythomaniac modernism: lying and bullshit in Flann O’Brien
John Attridge, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 3 ‘The outward accidents of illusion’: O’Brien and the Theatrical
Stefan Solomon, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 4 The Ghost of ‘Poor Jimmy Joyce’: A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist
Stephen Abblitt, La Trobe University, Australia

Chapter 5 ‘Do You Know What I’m Going to Tell You?’: Flann O’Brien, Risibility and the Anxiety of Influence
David Kelly, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 6 An Béal Bocht, Translation and the Proper Name
Maebh Long, University of the South Pacific, Fiji

Chapter 7 Ploughmen Without Land: Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh
Joseph Brooker, University of London, United Kingdom

Chapter 8 Flann O’Brien’s Ulysses: Marginalia and the Modernist Mind
Dirk Van Hulle, University of Antwerp, Belgium


Chapter 9 ‘Truth is an Odd Number’: Flann O’Brien and Infinite Imperfection
Baylee Brits, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 10 ‘An astonishing parade of nullity’: Nihilism in The Third Policeman
Rónán McDonald, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 11 Flann O’Brien and Modern Character
Julian Murphet, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 12 ‘No unauthorized boozing’: Flann O’Brien and the Thirsty Muse
Sam Dickson

Chapter 13 Soft drink, hard drink, and literary (re)production in Flann O’Brien and Frank Moorhouse
Sascha Morrell, University of New England, Australia

Chapter 14 Flann O’Brien’s Aestho-Autogamy
Mark Steven, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 15 Modernist Wheelmen
Mark Byron, University of Sydney, Australia - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/flann-obrien-modernism-9781623568504/#sthash.Z1ncj15a.dpuf

Chapter 1 Making Evil, with Flann O’Brien
Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 2 Mythomaniac modernism: lying and bullshit in Flann O’Brien
John Attridge, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 3 ‘The outward accidents of illusion’: O’Brien and the Theatrical
Stefan Solomon, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 4 The Ghost of ‘Poor Jimmy Joyce’: A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist
Stephen Abblitt, La Trobe University, Australia

Chapter 5 ‘Do You Know What I’m Going to Tell You?’: Flann O’Brien, Risibility and the Anxiety of Influence
David Kelly, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 6 An Béal Bocht, Translation and the Proper Name
Maebh Long, University of the South Pacific, Fiji

Chapter 7 Ploughmen Without Land: Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh
Joseph Brooker, University of London, United Kingdom

Chapter 8 Flann O’Brien’s Ulysses: Marginalia and the Modernist Mind
Dirk Van Hulle, University of Antwerp, Belgium


Chapter 9 ‘Truth is an Odd Number’: Flann O’Brien and Infinite Imperfection
Baylee Brits, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 10 ‘An astonishing parade of nullity’: Nihilism in The Third Policeman
Rónán McDonald, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 11 Flann O’Brien and Modern Character
Julian Murphet, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 12 ‘No unauthorized boozing’: Flann O’Brien and the Thirsty Muse
Sam Dickson

Chapter 13 Soft drink, hard drink, and literary (re)production in Flann O’Brien and Frank Moorhouse
Sascha Morrell, University of New England, Australia

Chapter 14 Flann O’Brien’s Aestho-Autogamy
Mark Steven, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 15 Modernist Wheelmen
Mark Byron, University of Sydney, Australia - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/flann-obrien-modernism-9781623568504/#sthash.Z1ncj15a.dpuf

Chapter 1 Making Evil, with Flann O’Brien
Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 2 Mythomaniac modernism: lying and bullshit in Flann O’Brien
John Attridge, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 3 ‘The outward accidents of illusion’: O’Brien and the Theatrical
Stefan Solomon, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 4 The Ghost of ‘Poor Jimmy Joyce’: A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist
Stephen Abblitt, La Trobe University, Australia

Chapter 5 ‘Do You Know What I’m Going to Tell You?’: Flann O’Brien, Risibility and the Anxiety of Influence
David Kelly, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 6 An Béal Bocht, Translation and the Proper Name
Maebh Long, University of the South Pacific, Fiji

Chapter 7 Ploughmen Without Land: Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh
Joseph Brooker, University of London, United Kingdom

Chapter 8 Flann O’Brien’s Ulysses: Marginalia and the Modernist Mind
Dirk Van Hulle, University of Antwerp, Belgium


Chapter 9 ‘Truth is an Odd Number’: Flann O’Brien and Infinite Imperfection
Baylee Brits, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 10 ‘An astonishing parade of nullity’: Nihilism in The Third Policeman
Rónán McDonald, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 11 Flann O’Brien and Modern Character
Julian Murphet, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 12 ‘No unauthorized boozing’: Flann O’Brien and the Thirsty Muse
Sam Dickson

Chapter 13 Soft drink, hard drink, and literary (re)production in Flann O’Brien and Frank Moorhouse
Sascha Morrell, University of New England, Australia

Chapter 14 Flann O’Brien’s Aestho-Autogamy
Mark Steven, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 15 Modernist Wheelmen
Mark Byron, University of Sydney, Australia - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/flann-obrien-modernism-9781623568504/#sthash.58blLTNi.dpuf

Chapter 1 Making Evil, with Flann O’Brien
Sean Pryor, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 2 Mythomaniac modernism: lying and bullshit in Flann O’Brien
John Attridge, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 3 ‘The outward accidents of illusion’: O’Brien and the Theatrical
Stefan Solomon, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 4 The Ghost of ‘Poor Jimmy Joyce’: A Portrait of the Artist as a Reluctant Modernist
Stephen Abblitt, La Trobe University, Australia

Chapter 5 ‘Do You Know What I’m Going to Tell You?’: Flann O’Brien, Risibility and the Anxiety of Influence
David Kelly, University of Sydney, Australia

Chapter 6 An Béal Bocht, Translation and the Proper Name
Maebh Long, University of the South Pacific, Fiji

Chapter 7 Ploughmen Without Land: Flann O’Brien and Patrick Kavanagh
Joseph Brooker, University of London, United Kingdom

Chapter 8 Flann O’Brien’s Ulysses: Marginalia and the Modernist Mind
Dirk Van Hulle, University of Antwerp, Belgium


Chapter 9 ‘Truth is an Odd Number’: Flann O’Brien and Infinite Imperfection
Baylee Brits, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 10 ‘An astonishing parade of nullity’: Nihilism in The Third Policeman
Rónán McDonald, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 11 Flann O’Brien and Modern Character
Julian Murphet, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 12 ‘No unauthorized boozing’: Flann O’Brien and the Thirsty Muse
Sam Dickson

Chapter 13 Soft drink, hard drink, and literary (re)production in Flann O’Brien and Frank Moorhouse
Sascha Morrell, University of New England, Australia

Chapter 14 Flann O’Brien’s Aestho-Autogamy
Mark Steven, University of New South Wales, Australia

Chapter 15 Modernist Wheelmen
Mark Byron, University of Sydney, Australia - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/flann-obrien-modernism-9781623568504/#sthash.58blLTNi.dpuf

"Belfast Noir": Book Review

The Noir series from Akashic Books proliferates, as cities around the world inspire writers to set tales of crime in them. Long into the selection process now, it's Belfast's turn. As co-editors Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville introduce this short story collection: "You can see Belfast's bloodstains up close and personal. This is the city that gave the world its worst ever maritime disaster, and turned it into a tourist attraction; similarly, we are perversely proud of our thousands of murders, our wounds constantly on display." So, these fourteen contributors, many who live in the city or nearby in the province, display their fictional characters, full of wounds and eager in many cases to keep inflicting more wounds, despite two decades of (relative) peace. No matter what, death beckons.

Part One, "City of Ghosts," opens with Brian McGilloway's story of undertakers, a logical cover for nefarious goings-on as certain men driving hearse and a coffin try to cross the border and back again. Lucy Caldwell's "Poison" refreshingly avoids death or corpses, and her account of daring schoolgirls fascinated by their language teacher and their former classmate, a few years ahead, who he left his wife for, turns awry in convincingly matter-of-fact fashion. Lee Child's "Wet With Rain" captures the haunted quality around Great Victoria Street. Ruth Dudley Edwards' "Taking It Serious" sidles around dissident republicanism, and its appeal to those who look to the generation of executed rebels in 1916 and after as their heroes, to the discomfort of the established republicans who have largely accepted the status quo in spite of their regular parades and graveside rhetoric to the contrary. While many stories here seem as if the speakers could have lived anywhere in the English-speaking world, her story feels despite its contemporary setting as if from an earlier time that Sean O'Faolain might have conveyed.

"City Of Walls" looks at divisions within Belfast. Gerard Brennan's "Ligature" squints around the city through the disoriented eyes of an unsteady young woman who winds up incarcerated after a series of desperate actions throughout a city half-gentrifying, half-divided. In this realm which his novels have long detailed in impressive fashion, Glenn Patterson's "Belfast Punk REP" typifies his ability to capture the fractured psyche of some in Belfast, through the career of a disreputable ugly fellow nicknamed Milky, who also winds up behind bars. Ian McDonald, known for his fantasy and science fiction, here offers in "The Reservoir" a story of revenge, inflicted after a rival's daughter's wedding.

In the third part, "City of Commerce," Steve Cavanagh's "The Grey" roams the court system, a setting otherwise if tellingly largely skirted by his fellow contributors. Claire McGowan in young P.I. Aloysius Carson may have a protagonist who can outlast the foes arrayed against him; the winningly plucky and self-deprecating hero draws the reader into his adventure to track down the owner of "Rosie Grant's Finger." Another enduring if fictional hero outside these pages, Karl Kane, in Sam Millar's "Out of Time" returns to inflict mayhem and utter hard-boiled dialogue in reliably pulp fashion. Garbhan Downey's "To Die Like a Rat" compares a testy rodent's fate with a human victim.

Finally, entries in "Brave New City" feature fresh takes on the drama of dead bodies. Known for his "Resurrection Man" (1988) novel dramatizing some of the most brutal of the thousands of contenders for murder in Belfast, Eoin McNamee's "Corpse Flowers" uses the ubiquity of CCTV and surveillance installed in the city to set up a haunting, elliptical story. Arlene Hunt's "The Game" turns the tables on some who make sport out of the torment inflicted on those unable to bear it, and like all three stories in this concluding section, it ends suddenly and effectively. Last of all, Alex Barclay's "The Reveller" starts with comeuppance of Paddy the Publican and ends in an unsettled state of mind.

Not every story hooked me all the way through, for a few dragged, whatever they may have tallied in pages. Still, while some did not capitalize on the Belfast setting or its complex heritage as much as I'd have expected, the mix of those troubled by the sectarian past and present for their actions and those who were more disturbed by the conventional motives for revenge and retribution that crime fiction and fact thrive on in any city make for a generally satisfying contribution to this ongoing Noir series.
(11-3-14 to Amazon US)

John Boyne's "A History of Loneliness": Book Review

“Sure the mammies pushed us all into it.” Early in John Boyne’s novel, Father Odran Yates blurts out this explanation to the Archbishop of Dublin about why so many men once entered the priesthood there. A History of Loneliness dramatizes Father Yates’ (and given his insistence on keeping up appearances, it’s either Odran to his family or Father Yates to everyone else, not Father Odran) determination to continue as a good man. This becomes tougher during the last thirty-five years, as Ireland reacts to revelations of sexual abuse by too many in the clergy, and the government-sponsored collusion in shielding offenders from justice. Starting with his admission into the seminary as a teenager in 1973, up to the 2013 realization of his complicity in enabling his classmate, Tom Cardle, to avoid accounting for his own crimes against young men, Father Odran, in Boyne’s narrative, leaps back and forth in time as he tells us his story. He and Tom are men with a “history of loneliness” who have found their long-held position in Irish society erode, as challenges to traditional power have undermined the status of the Catholic Church.

Boyne carefully examines Father Odran’s predicament. While as a young man, he was brought up by his widowed mother to believe he had a vocation, he admits that this calling suited him nonetheless. He was brought up in the last generation to regard the priesthood as a respected career, and in the early 1980s, on a crowded train, the young priest resents the fawning attention given him, constantly, by all whom he meets. Wishing for everyone to leave him alone, he wonders “how a small twist of white plastic could inspire so much devotion.” He remembers, as always in public, that he wears his clerical garb. He chats with a Jewish refugee from the Holocaust, who reminds him not to resent those who pay him respect. “And one day that might change. And then there will be no more food for your friends. And you will all go hungry.” This moment will come two decades later, after the reports on clerical abuse and state cover-ups will enrage many Irish men and women. How one priest shifted from the moments of praise to the years of contempt creates a fluent narrative, through moral heft and measured judgments. While it wobbles through digressions, the central character holds one's interest.

Terrified of difference, seeking conformity, a few idealistic or resigned young men entered the seminary. Some found themselves pressured, as in Tom’s case, to remain there despite their unfit nature for the priesthood. Boyne illustrates the demands placed on those channeled into the clerical system, and the indifference with which many were treated by their superiors in the hierarchy.   The archbishop responds to Father Odran’s question in 2007 about Tom’s guilt in the crimes for which he is accused: “you can go back to your precious school and teach the little bastards about respecting the church.”

Soon, however, the Archbishop is disgraced for his own role in the abuse scandal, as he moved priests such as Tom about from parish to parish for decades, to evade accounting for his sins.  At his classmate’s trial, Father Odran notes the prevalence of black in the courtroom. He and the judge share “the pigment of power” in their garb; Tom appears in layman’s attire. His classmate reflects: “Of course the shades in my profession changed as one advanced through the ranks, from black to scarlet to white; darkness, blood, and a cleansing at the very top.” Boyne’s way with a phrase works well here, and the ease with which the author intersperses an occasional analogy or image into the priest’s first-person narration convinces the reader of the self-awareness of Father Odran about his own difficulties with his role. 

While a backstory placing Odran as a seminarian during his last terms of study in Rome, serving as a papal assistant in the Vatican chambers in 1978, the year of the three popes, remains a somewhat melodramatic if clever device engineered to account for his subsequent lack of rank in the Irish power structure, it does feature a sympathetic portrait of the Patriarch of Venice. Cardinal Luciani treats Odran kindly. This thoughtful man reigned for a month as Pope John Paul I. His predecessor, Paul VI, ends his only conversation with the seminarian by asking the unanswered query: “What will we do with Ireland?”

The answer comes after more popes, as the Vatican’s corruption reveals the Church’s inability to justify its control, given clerical misdeeds and a culture of protecting its own against the law and the laity.  Father Odran hears Tom’s plea of not guilty and feels a “darkness stirring” about his own fault, “for I had seen things and I had suspected things and I had turned away from things and I had done nothing.” Again, the direct style Boyne uses to convey his protagonist’s epiphany keeps the reader listening to Father Odran, but also able to distance an ethical reaction to his self-realization as it unfolds, after he has suppressed it for decades, from the seminary on. He struggles with how to treat Tom: “If I cannot see some good in all of us and hope that the pain we all share will come to an end, what kind of a priest am I anyway? What kind of man?” Throughout the narrative, Father Odran strives for decency, but he appears to have done so too quietly, as he has been spared the torments of some of his sexually frustrated or temperamentally warped colleagues, for the most part. Yet, he suffers, as this novel shows.

The guilt Father Odran finally articulates eludes facile resolution. Boyne leaves him at the end of this novel lamenting the current state of his homeland. In 2013, at fifty-eight, Father Odran speaks perhaps for his author and for many Irish who watch as European bankers intervene to impose austerity measures. Neither politicians nor priests command respect any more. Ireland has become “a country of drug addicts, losers, criminals, pedophiles, and incompetents.” Among them, Father Odran finds himself despised, as a survivor of clerical abuse hisses “pedophile” at him, not the only time in this narrative. 

Boyne’s story is recommended, along with Kevin Holohan’s satirical 2011 take on this serious subject, The Brothers’ Lot, as a depiction of the institutional breakdown of a pillar of Irish society. The fall of the Church from grace has received belated scrutiny by journalists and historians.  But for fictional treatments, which allow us to enter the minds of those who entered the ranks of the clergy under the pressure or cajoling of mothers once not long ago, A History of Loneliness fulfills a need for a novel on this timely, sad, subject.

This appeared in altered and shorter form on Spectrum Culture 2-5-15. See also Amazon US 2-2-15.