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Book Reviews
LEONARD COHEN: THE MYSTICAL ROOTS OF GENIUS
BY HARRY FREEDMAN / BLOOMSBURY $29.99
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In her book, ‘The Art Of Inheriting Secrets’, Barbara O’Neal says of Leonard Cohen, “I’ve studied his poetry, of course, but never heard him sing.” Maybe Cohen would have been pleased with this declaration since, according to book author, Harry Freedman, Cohen had no ambitions to be a singer, artist novelist, or musician; he merely wanted to be “recognized for his greatest love, his poetry.” In this analysis of Cohen’s songs (“what most people know him for”), Freedman sets out to examine how Cohen was influenced by Christian, Jewish and Buddhist traditions and how these helped shape his identity and the way he saw the world. Cohen’s knowledge of the Bible and religious folklore was profound, and nearly every song he wrote displays aspects of his religious ideologies. His most famous anthem, ‘Hallelujah’, recorded by over 300 other artists, is a case in point. It took Cohen five years to compose ‘Hallelujah’ and 20 years for it to eventually make the charts. Describing the biblical story of King David and drawing extensively on Talmudic tradition and legend, Cohen retells how this complex and contradictory king was musician, adulterer, warrior and murderer. ‘Hallelujah’ is a tale about a conflicted world in which things cannot be reconciled. For Cohen, “regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and throw open your arms... and you just say ‘Hallelujah’.” In May 2016, Cohen and Irish playwright John MacKenna cooperated to create a requiem commemorating the deaths of three of MacKenna’s friends, the premier of which took place in Carlow on 15 June 2017. Departing from the traditional biographical approaches, Freeman examines Cohen’s works song by song, exploring how the lyricist reworked religious myths, prayers and legends thus providing a window in to the landscape of his soul, and an understanding of the Canadian poet who became a cultural giant. Cohen died on 7 November 2016, the day preceding the election of Donald Trump. “The broken world he sang about had fractured even further”. – Reviewed by John Hagan
THE DARK REMAINS
BY WILLIAM MCILVANNEY & IAN RANKIN / CANNONGATE $29.99
When Scottish crime writer McIlvanney died in 2015, he left behind an unfinished manuscript featuring Glasgow’s original gritty, chain smoking, philosophical, hard-bitten policeman, DC Jack
Laidlaw. McIlvanney had already written three Laidlaw novels which, according to best-selling novelist, Val McDermid, “changed the face of Scottish fiction” creating a new genre acclaimed as ‘tartan noir’. Years after his death, McIlvanney’s widow, Siobhan Lynch, contacted her husband’s publishers, Cannongate, to see if there was any way his work might be completed. Award winning author, Ian Rankin was approached and ultimately agreed to the task with reservation, and some trepidation. “I’m a huge fan”, Rankin conceded, “and I didn’t want to do him a disservice”. Rankin and McIlvanney were old friends, having met at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 1985, when Rankin confided to McIlvanney that he was writing a crime novel featuring his own crime buster, John Rebus, who was “like Laidlaw” but set in Rankin’s home city of Edinburgh. “Good luck with the Edinburgh Laidlaw”, McIlvanney responded. The rest is history. Now, these two influential authors have cooperated to recreate the criminal world of 1972 Glasgow. The first few sentences of chapter one set the tone. “All cities are riddled with crime. It comes with the territory. Gather enough people together in one place and malignancy is guaranteed to manifest in some form or other. It’s the nature of the beast”. Shady lawyer, Bobby Carter, bagman for Glasgow crime boss, Cam Colvin is murdered and his body dumped in a lane behind a pub. Suspicion falls on drug overlord, and Colvin’s rival, John Rhodes, but would he want to start a turf war and invite intervention from the local constabulary? Laidlaw is assigned to investigate, but he’s not a team player and quickly antagonizes his superior officer, DI Milligan. However, like Rebus, Laidlaw has an innate sense for what’s happening on the city’s grimy streets. Carter’s slaying is a crime Laidlaw needs to solve quickly, before Glasgow explodes in gang warfare. This is champagne crime fiction from two great exponents of the craft. – Reviewed by John Hagan
SH*T TOWNS OF AUSTRALIA: THE GREAT AUSSIE ROAD TRIP
BY RICK FURPHY & GEOFF RISSOLE / ALLEN & UNWIN $19.99
Sir Thomas Beecham’s talent for aphorism risks overshadowing his towering achievements as a conductor and musician. He once famously admonished a female orchestral cello player by saying, “Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving pleasure to thousands, and all you can do is scratch it”. My own favourite Beecham witticism involves an elephant defecating on stage during a dress rehearsal of Aida. The great conductor, appalled by the singing of his diva, and, on observing the performance of the pachyderm, laid down his baton and dryly remarked, “Terrible stage manners, but what a critic”. It would appear that Furphy and Rissole have adopted the same standard, and mode of criticism in relation to some tourist towns and routes across ‘the sprawling expanse of medioctity known as Australia’. They present seven possible national tours including explorations of the ‘Crackpot coast’ – Brisbane to Sydney; ‘The Devil’s gooch’ – Melbourne to Adelaide, and along the ‘Methamphetamine Highway’ – from Darwin to Perth. The authors fling copious dollops of excrement on towns/cities such as Geraldton, Rockingham, Ararat, Frankston, Parramata, and Tennant Creek, in addition to observations on ‘dumb regional foods’, our somewhat offensive place names and ‘sh*t town songs’. Unfortunately, this book is neither funny or witty, but merely distasteful and vacuous. So, if your bent is crude, potty humour, have a roll around in this clabber. – Reviewed by John Hagan
TREASURE & DIRT
BY CHRIS HAMMER / ALLEN & UNWIN $32.99
The prologue to this well-paced novel reminds me of the first 20 minutes of the classical film ‘Rififi’, in which French villains silently move with precision to undertake the ‘perfect’ bank robbery. Hammer has replaced the Paris bank vault with an opal mine at
Finnigan’s Gap in outback Australia as four thieves pursue their heist following their well rehearsed plan. These men are the ‘ratters’, despicable looters who pillage opal mines when the owners are away. But the crooks get more than they bargained for when they discover the decaying and crucified body of the mine owner, Jonas McGee. Enter homicide detective, Ivan Lucic, an investigator with a gambling problem, who has been sent from Sydney to solve the grisly case. He teams up with local, inexperienced constable Nell Buchanan, who has previous history in the town following a drug bust, leading to enmity between her and her former colleagues. But this is not the only frustration which Lucic and Buchanan face. Local miners prove tightlipped and uncooperative; two unscrupulous mining magnates are at loggerheads over a valuable rare earth deposit; a local religious cult leader is resentful of Lucic and Buchanan nosing around, and to complicate matters even further a professional standards officer arrives from Sydney. But who, or what, is he investigating? Hammer etches his characters with colour and conviction penning a clever, intricate, wellplotted tale. However, it is his portrayal of the dry, unforgiving, fly infested, sun baked, landscape which arguably contributes most to the novel’s resonance. This is a class follow-up to Hammer’s previous three best sellers (‘Scrublands’, ‘Trust’, and ‘Silver’) as he again delivers a real sense of place and dramatic action, while exploring current Australian social, religious, moral and ethical issues. – Reviewed by John Hagan
MY FAVOURITE MOVIES
BY DAVID STRATTON / ALLEN & UNWIN $32.99
Sick of trawling through Netflix movies you don’t recognize? Puzzled as to which films are worth watching? Concerned about the content? Whether an avid movie buff, or the just the occasional cinemagoer, this book is a gem, as Australia’s film doyen reviews 111 of his favourite motion pictures from over a century of cinema. Stratton has spent most of his life embroiled in the film industry, with a lengthy career as director of the Sydney Film Festival, followed by 28 year stint with Margaret Pomeranz reviewing movies on SBS and ABC TV. ‘The films in this book are my favourites’, he writes, ‘not only because I love them as films, but sometimes because of the circumstances in which I originally saw them’. It’s an eclectic choice spanning westerns, musicals, romances, thrillers, arthouse classics, noir and comedy. Stratton reviews Hollywood blockbusters such as ‘Singin’ In The Rain’ and ‘Jaws’, as well as a plethora of foreign movies from all parts of the world. Also nominated are ten fine Aussie presentations, including two of my own particular favourites, ‘Breaker Morant’ and ‘Picnic At Hanging Rock’. During the planning process, Stratton made the decision to choose one film made by a particular director, so only single presentations from great directors such as Hitchcock (‘North By Northwest’), Loach (‘I, Daniel Blake’) and Losey (‘Accident’), make the cut. He admits being a little upset by having to omit the work of eminent directors like Carol Reed, Paul Cox, Michaelangelo Antonioni and Istvan Szabo. For each chosen movie, Stratton outlines the plot, roles of the principal actors, pertinent information on how the film was made, behind-the-scenes yarns, and discusses other films made by the same director. Over his decades in the industry, the author has met, and interviewed, scores of the world’s best film makers and stars, and many engaging anecdotes and memories arising from these encounters are shared. All these personal reminiscences add colour to, and understanding of, the particular film reviewed, and the business of movies in general. This book is the perfect companion for anyone who relishes entertainment on the silver screen either at home or in the cinema. – Reviewed by John Hagan
BY HERBERT L. BYRD JR.
I was taught Irish history in the ‘50’s in Primary School; the ‘60’s in Secondary School. In the ‘70’s I found out about the Civil War, still fresh in the silence of older people; the Civil War that left Irish society divided and embittered for generations; brother against brother, too horrible to mention. Dropped from the curriculum, lest we remember! Other events that have recently been ‘corrected’ include the assassination of Michael Collins, and The Great Famine in the 1840’s, now generally described as The Holocaust. Published in 2016 but new to me in 2021, is “Proclamation 1625” by Herbert L. Byrd Jr, whose information technology and intelligence analysis company supports the U.S. intelligence community and national-level decision makers; a mind highly qualified to evaluate the subject matter of this book. The book’s title refers to King James 1’s proclamation ordering that the Irish be placed in bondage. This “opened the door to wholesale slavery of Irish men, women and children … not indentured servitude but raw, brutal ‘I-ownyou’ slavery with all the mistreatment that goes with being a slave including being beaten to death”. Thousands of Irish were bought and traded like cattle and subjected to unspeakably inhumane treatment. When you’re grabbed from your community, taken to a ship, manacled for the trip to America, and then sold, you’re a slave – not an indentured servant. It started in England, in the 1600’s. More than 300,000 were shipped to America as slaves. Urchins were swept up from the streets to work in the tobacco fields, with a life expectancy of less than two years. Brothels were raided for breeding purposes. Migrants were conned into signing as indentured servants, unaware they would become personal property that could be bought, sold, and even gambled away. Transported convicts were paraded for sale like livestock. When they ran out of victims in England, they turned their attention to Ireland, with many thousands being enslaved in the British colonies of America and the West Indies, particularly in the tobacco fields of Virginia and Maryland and the sugar cane fields of Barbados and Jamaica. For over 179 years, the Irish were the primary source of slave labour in the British American colonies and the British West Indies. The Irish were forced from their land, kidnapped, with iron collars around their necks, chained to 50 other people and held in cargo holds as they were transported away from their homeland. Historian Ulrich Phillips, in “Life and Labor in the Old South”, states that African slaves were “late comers fitted into a system already developed.” Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, in “White Cargo”, show that the brutalities usually associated with black slavery, were perpetrated on whites throughout British rule. Sean O’Callaghan, in “To Hell or Barbados – The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland”, gives a vivid account of the Irish men, women, and children transported to America and the West Indies. By the time Africans became the primary source of labour, the plantation owners had already honed their skills in using violence to increase tobacco and sugar production. The Irish and African slaves lived, and were forced to mate, to provide the plantation owners with additional slaves. ‘Proclamation 1625: America’s Enslavement of the Irish’, the full title, is not a long book, and tells the story in a logical chronological order. References are numerous and show the detail of the underlying research. (You will find articles on Wikipedia saying that there were no Irish slaves, just indentured servants. These articles give no proof, just attempts to muddy the waters. Classic fake news!) The British abolished slavery in 1833. This emancipated the Irish slaves in the British West Indies. America followed in 1865. None of this freed the Irish fully because America had classified them as ‘coloured’ and treated them accordingly. It took many years for the ruling class in America to accept the Irish as ‘white’. At the end of the book you will understand how modern ‘racism’ came about, a deliberate, and successful, plan to ‘divide and rule’, to keep everyone in their place. I have now read the book 3 times, and checked many of the references. I have interviewed the author; you can listen at ozirish.com. The book is highly recommended. – Reviewed by Brian Corr, ozirish.com ☘
