21 minute read
Book Reviews
I KNOW I SAW HER
BY E.D. THOMPSON / HACHETTE $32.99
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Alison Payne is a struggling, part-time, teacher of English who lives, with her reclusive son Joe, in a down-at-heel house situated in quiet suburban Parnell Park. Not much seemingly happens in Parnell Park, and Alison, drifts along with the floe, apart from regular visits to see her mother in a care home. She and Joe observe their neighbours with some interest, especially the new ‘power’ couple, Kevin and Kim who have moved in opposite. On a trip to visit her sister in London, Alison thinks she spots Kim on a train coming from Gatwick Airport. ‘Not possible’, says Kevin, assuring Alison that Kim is on holiday in County Galway. With little else going in her humdrum life Alison’s interest is piqued, and she decides to investigate further. She becomes even more convinced that something is radically amiss when she sees a postcard, apparently posted by Kim from Galway, but which is affixed with a British stamp. Maybe there is a simple explanation to Kim’s disappearance. Perhaps, unknown to Kevin, Kim is having an illicit affair. Possibly Alison is a conspiracy theorist seeing dangers where there are none. But as she continues her investigation and meets Kim’s brother, Callum, Alison’s concern for Kim’s life intensifies as she plunges deeper in to a situation where things are not always as they seem and where too much curiosity may become fatal. Full of deception and surprises, intricately plotted with engaging characterization, Thompson has produced an immensely entertaining read. It’s great to see crime fiction play out against a Northern Ireland background. A prolific author of short stories, Thompson moves the action along with snappy, incisive, dialogue and has nailed the expressions, nuances and idioms of the local patois. Thompson’s new novel is a rousing warning about the power of our choices, and where they might ultimately lead.– Reviewed by John Hagan
SWEET JIMMY
BY BRYAN BROWN / ALLEN & UNWIN $29.99
Yes. It is indeed THAT Bryan Brown, laconic larrikin and star of a host of notable Australian movies including A Town like Alice, The Thorn Birds, Sweet Country, and my favourite, Breaker Morant. This is his debut novel which contains a collection of short stories with the first, Boys will be Killers, and the last, Sweet Jimmy, both connected. Revenge and retribution drive all seven tales featuring likeable and detestable criminals, corrupt and dedicated police, deserving and innocent victims. We follow swimming coach and Bondi
Icebergs member, Frank Testy, as he doggedly tracks down the woman who set him up as a drug mule resulting in him serving time in a Hong Kong prison. In another tale, single dad and Vietnam veteran, Paul Madden, despite there being no suspicious circumstances, does not believe that his daughter Hannah killed herself. With time on his hands and an enlarged sense of suspicion, he embarks on an intensive investigation which leads him in to peril. Muslim undercover cop, Ahmed, is convicted for drug dealing, serves time, and as he tries to rehabilitate himself he meets temptation and menace along the way. And what of ‘Sweet Jimmy’ as per title? Maybe he’s not so sweet at all. Like his cousin Johnny, electrician Jimmy is led in to crime by friend and orchid grower Phil, who is eventually stitched up for a crime he didn’t commit. In the book’s concluding stanza, Jimmy, now going straight, seeks to avenge himself on a lady who, he believes, has blighted his life. But will he be allowed to? Brown’s approach to storytelling is consistently one of short sentences almost dot point in style – ‘Anne Tierney kept a clean house. Two bedrooms. Beds made up. One room was obviously a guest room. She had a guest all right. Murdered her.’ Don’t expect any deep physiological, analytical exploration of the Australian criminal mind, but with Brown’s knockabout vocabulary, his cryptic, staccato style and dry dialogue, the pace moves along crisply. It’s not exactly Aussie noir, but there’s plenty of knockabout lingo, acerbic humour and clever plotting to herald Brown as a talented author. – Reviewed by John Hagan
I ALONE CAN FIX IT
BY CAROL LEONNIG & PHILIP RUCKER / BLOOMSBURY $29.99
When Donald Trump was elected as the 45th President of the United States in 2017, I was filled with enthusiasm, well mild euphoria at least. Here was someone from outside the beltway who promised to drain the Capitol Hill swamp. Besides, if he didn’t make it as a reforming president, I reckoned he could fall back on stand -up comedy. But while his term of office began with much bonhomie, the Trump presidency quickly descended into uninhibited chaos and despair. In their previous book, A Very Stable Genius, Pulitzer Prizewinning authors, Leonning and Rucker traced the first three years of the Trump presidency; their latest offering concentrates on his final, catastrophic year in office. Based on hundreds of hours of interviews with more than 140 sources, including administration officials, advisers, friends plus a two and a half meeting with Trump himself, they reveal a president who, by 2020, displayed rampant ignorance, malice, narcissism, disloyalty, deception and aggrandizement. Here was a leader who seemingly cared more about himself than the nation he presided over. This was a president who exacerbated a pandemic which claimed the lives of more than half a million Americans. Trump too oversaw an industrial recession invoking pain for low paid workers, a ‘black lives matter’ movement he wanted to crush with the military, and his claims
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of a ‘rigged election’, which saw insurgents storm the Capitol building. One of the unheralded true heroes of the Trump final year must be General Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Trump plotted a de facto coup d’état to hang on to power, Milley stood firm telling his lieutenants ‘can’t do this without the military …. We’re the guys with the guns’. Mike Pence, Trump’s long-serving loyal Vice-President, is another who is to be congratulated in opposing Trump’s power grab. Forensically researched, and amounting to over 500 illuminating, and at times punishing, pages, Leonnig and Rucker have penned an account which is essential reading for anyone interested in (American) politics, and for those concerned with the fate of democracy and how it might be undermined. – Reviewed by John Hagan
DEFECTS: LIVING WITH THE LEGACY OF THE CELTIC TIGER
BY EOIN Ó BROIN / MERRION PRESS $32.79
Between 1995 and 2007 the Irish economy grew rapidly with its GDP soaring a staggering 229%. These were the boom years of the Celtic Tiger, epitomized, in part, by greedy, inept and fly-by-night developers who stoked rampant building growth, leaving many families who had bought apartments and houses, with serious fire safety and major structural defects. In this punchy investigative critique of a political system which seemingly abrogated its power to protect homeowners and tenants, Sinn Fein TD, Eoin Ó Broin, details how it all occurred. He reveals some of the human cost associated with numerous shoddy and potentially fatal developments citing examples of families and individuals ensnared in the imbroglio. We meet Fiachra Daly and family who are forced to leave their north Dublin, Priory Hall home, because of serious fire-safety defects. We follow Mark, who, in 2006, moved in to his new Belmayne apartment, just off the Dublin’s Malahide Road, only to discover serious noise transmission between apartments because the timber frame system was not erected properly. Soon after, the Dublin Fire Brigade discovered that each of the units in Mark’s complex was a ‘fire risk’ and that a radical overhaul of the structure was necessary. All residents were forced to leave their homes, but still had to meet their mortgages. Retired couple, Lorraine and Gary, who purchased a unit from Paddy Burke Builders in Shannon (Co. Clare), was soon faced with a €10,000 bill to address maintenance problems due to shoddy construction. And so it goes on with Ó Broin citing many examples including from Donegal and Mayo, where homes built from mica and pyrite were literally crumbling around their owners. Tales of dodgy builders, tenant misery, homelessness, litigation and bankruptcy abound. In normal circumstances, badly made products are recalled, replaced or refunded, but this does not apply to the Irish family home, arguably the single biggest purchase in life. As construction lawyer Deirdre Ni Fhloinn remarks, “You have more rights if something goes wrong with your iPhone... than when you buy a house”. How did such a situation occur? Who is responsible? Why does it persist? Who will foot the bill for potentially fatal defects? All these questions, and more, are answered in this forceful, forensic examination of the Irish building industry and its dangers. – Reviewed by John Hagan
JELLETT, O’BRIEN, PURSER AND STOKES – SEVEN GENERATIONS, FOUR FAMILIES
BY MICHAEL PURSER / PREJMER VERLAG, IRELAND (2004)
Given to me as a gift, this book sat unread on the book shelf for some years. Then the COVID lockdown over the April long weekend happened and it was time to organise and declutter the book case when several unread books were found. I didn’t finish reading the book during the lockdown. It’s just not that kind of book.
The author, Michael Purser (born 1937) is founder of Baltimore Technologies which was a leading Irish internet security company prior to 2000s and was a mathematician at Trinity College, Dublin. This book is a history of his parents’ families from the 1790s to just after the second world war – although the last chapter is titled ‘1940 – 1970’. Yet he is still a young boy when the book ends. This and other inconsistencies highlight the book’s need to be edited. It varies in tone from objective reporter and story teller to conscientious commentator to the subjective. The author explains in the Acknowledgements that it was published privately. Although dry as an old stick in sections, it is interesting reading in that it places the every day lives of the families against the political, economic and social background of the times. Diaries, reminiscences and letters are the references and as such are very detailed. His ancestors’ stance on the issues of their times - Catholic Emancipation, the Act of Union, the agrarian unrest, rural poverty, the repeal of the Union, the Great War, 1916 rebellion all provide an interesting perspective that our Leaving Certificate history lessons did not provide. The author provides a potted biography of his greatgreat-grandfather, William Smith O’Brien (1803-1864) sentenced to death for treason but later commuted to exile to Tasmania, who he describes as ‘a reforming, proCatholic, aristocratic yet native Protestant’. The combined families of brewers, academics, doctors, scientists, anthropologists, musicians and artists produced suffragettes and many independent, talented women. Charlotte Grace O’Brien, an author, a political activist and a tireless advocate for the rights of emigrant women following the famine. A mention is also made of a letter she received from the Boston based Fenian, John Boyle O’Reilly giving her questionable advice regarding her endeavours to save the lives of these emigrant women. Margaret McNair Stokes (1832-1900), artist and antiquarian, had the reputation of being the most important Irish woman antiquary of her day. A renewed interest today in 19th century Irish art, antiquarianism and the Celtic Revival period is regenerating interest in her work (Archaeology Ireland, Summer 2020). Mabel O’Brien Purser, the author’s grandmother demonstrated for the vote for women and was sent to jail in Tullamore as a suffragette. Sarah Purser (1848 – 1843), is a renowned portrait artist who has painted WB Yeats, JB Yeats, Maud Gonne, Sir and Lady Gore-Booth and Douglas Hyde. She worked in America, London and studied in Paris and was involved in the establishment of the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art. Mainie Jellett (1897–1944), the author’s aunt is recognised as one of the most important figures in Irish art history. When her work in an exhibition in 1923 was savaged in a review by Æ (‘the subhuman art of Miss Jellett’) she took advantage of the platform that Æ had given her and became ‘the Irish missionary of the modern’ and played a key role in ‘forming the artistic life of the new Ireland, the Free State which emerged from revolution and Civil War’. The early generations got quite confusing at times and although the author referred to them as G4 and G3, etc., I found it best to just enjoy the story of the person’s life and achievements without worrying about the connections. The book is an interesting read for the insight it provides of the social and political times from the perspective of one strata of Irish society. – Reviewed by Speranza
THE LIGHT OF EVENING
BY EDNA O’BRIEN / WEIDENFELD & NICOLSON (2006)
Like Anne Enright’s Actress, The Light of Evening it is about a mother and daughter relationship where the daughter is a writer. There the similarity ends. Two very different relationships. Dilly, the mother, has two children. Her ‘hard-boiled son’ who seems to have little love or regard for any of the family members and throughout the book is trying to ensure his sister does not share in any inheritance. The story line is not linear and we meet Dilly as she is leaving home for the last time. She recalls many incidents in her life and reminisces about her time in Brooklyn, NY which ‘I loved and where I loved’. The description of the immigrant’s life in service (‘nothing but rules’) and the lumberjack’s grind in the early part of the 1900s is revealing and realistic. The life she has lived on a small farm is related complete
with all the trivial goings-on and the struggle to survive that epitomised the lives of rural women. The narrative shifts between the personal, the third person, stream of consciousness, letters (between Dilly and her mother and between Dilly and her daughter) and diaries. This mother / daughter relationship is turbulent; marked by misunderstanding and misinterpretation of gifts, acts and words. Eleanora moves to England and carves out a successful career as a writer. She contended that ‘literature was either a route out of life or into life and she could never be certain which, except that she had succumbed to it’. She marries, has a family and divorces and then has a series of affairs, all of which she finds unsatisfactory once the novelty wears off. At times Dilly seems envious of this lifestyle. The mother and daughter letters contain a mix of pride, hurt and recrimination. Eleanora describes her mother’s letters as ‘heady and headlong, forgiving and unforgiving’. Dilly saw these letters as ‘her one indulgence…asking to be heard, asking to be understood…’ Dilly is hurt by her estrangement from her daughter and never stops loving her and wanting to see her. She is bewildered by the ‘arms length’ relationship her daughter maintains with her even when Dilly visits Eleanora and her family in England. ‘It hurts the way you make yourself so aloof, always running away from us…..’ Eleanora’s last visit to Dilly is not the joyful event Dilly had dreamt of and in Eleanora’s rush to get back to her latest lover, she leaves her journal behind. The misplaced journal which is a stream of consciousness about her relationship with her mother and her resentments and hurts at some of her mother’s responses and reactions. What she will never know is if her mother read the journal but feels that she had because ‘her spirit seemed to permeate it’. Yet she can never know for sure and this not knowing tortures her. O’Brien writes beautifully and lyrically. However, the reader has to pay attention as her sentence structure is not straightforward. This is her 20th novel written when she was already in her 70s. Contrary to the marketing blurb, it does not ‘explore the complicated, incomparable bonds of mother-daughter love. I feel in the end the book left more questions than it answered about Dilly and Eleanora’s relationship. However, it is a good read. – Reviewed by Speranza
The incredible literary debut from one of Ireland’s best loved singer-songwriters THE PAWNBROKER’S REWARD
BY DECLAN O’ROURKE / ISLAND OF IRELAND, €22.99
Declan O’Rourke’s award winning album, Chronicles of the Great Irish Famine, was released to critical acclaim in 2017. It illuminated the story of Pádraig and Cáit ua Buachalla. Four years on, in Declan’s meticulously researched literary debut, the story of the ua Buachalla family is woven into a powerful, multilayered work showing us the famine as it happened through the lens of a single town - Macroom, Co. Cork - and its environs. Local pawnbroker Cornelius Creed is at the juncture between the classes. Sensitive and empathetic, he is a voice on behalf of the poor, and his story is entwined with that of Pádraig ua Buachalla. Through these characters - utilising local history and documentary evidence - Declan creates a kaleidoscopic view of this defining moment in Ireland’s history.
An interview with E.D. Thompson
BY JOHN HAGAN
WITH HER NEW BOOK, ‘I KNOW I SAW HER’, RECENTLY LAUNCHED IN AUSTRALIA, IRISH AUTHOR, E.D. THOMPSON TALKS TO JOHN HAGAN ABOUT HER INFLUENCES, MOTIVATIONS, THE BUSINESS OF WRITING LITERATURE AND PERSONAL ENJOYMENT.
WHAT DO YOU MOST ENJOY ABOUT WRITING?
I love every aspect of the creative process, from the daydreaming stage where I am semi-idly allowing ideas to land softly, through the hunched-over-the-keyboard part where I am actually putting down one sentence after another and hopefully working a little magic as I do so, to the editing, where I return to the manuscript after a time away, and come to it like a reader. After that, there follows some of the duller-but-necessary work, doing re-writing suggested by my wise editor, and then, fingers crossed, the thrill of feedback from readers who have enjoyed the story.
WHO/WHAT ENCOURAGED YOU TO BECOME A WRITER?
Being a reader made me want to write. It really was as simple as that. It’s not even that I read an extraordinary number of books – I don’t. But I had the very good fortune to happen on some writers from an early age who made reading hugely attractive. When I ran into the Mary Plain books by Gwynedd Rae at the age of six, I knew I’d stumbled on something special – even at that young age, I recognised at an instinctive level that I was under the spell of an utterly charming narrative voice, masterfully created. I didn’t just ‘read’ books - I had love affairs with them. ‘Charlotte’s Web’ and ‘The Hundred and One Dalmatians’ captured me in a similar way. I can now appreciate that stories are my ‘element’, to use the term coined by the late educationalist, Sir Ken Robinson. Reading, watching, listening to and writing stories are where I belong.
WHEN WRITING, DO YOU ADHERE TO A STRICT WORK REGIME?
I treat writing pretty much as a full-time job, albeit one with a good deal of flexibility. So it’s perfectly possible to take time off during the day to go to the dentist or run an errand, but on those days I can’t expect to be finished by tea-time. I don’t have an office or study, but I work at a desk placed in the bay window of my bedroom, overlooking the street. While the internet is a writer’s dream, in terms of making research quick and easy, it can also be a terrible means to procrastinate – although I’m not on Facebook or Twitter, there are websites, particularly writingrelated blogs, that I check far too regularly, when I should be getting on with work.
WHAT ASPECTS OF NOVEL WRITING DO YOU FIND MOST DIFFICULT?
Sometimes the sheer size of the challenge can be daunting. ‘I Know I Saw Her’ is about 72,000 words long, and the next one about 75,000 words. When you’re sitting at 12,000 words, it can seem there’s an awfully long way to go. However, I think writing literally hundreds of short stories for women’s magazines has been enormously helpful, in this regard. Establishing a working practice of writing a 2,000 or 3,000 word story in a day is a very good training, and if you can write a short story in a day, then why not 2,000 words of a novel? But there are days when it’s tough to move forward and I think there’s real skill in ensuring that those passages read just as effortlessly as the chapters which flowed easily.
IN THE PAST, YOU HAVE WRITTEN A 30 PART SERIES FOR PEOPLE’S FRIEND. WHAT ARE THE MAIN DIFFERENCES AND ADJUSTMENTS YOU HAVE TO MAKE BETWEEN WRITING EPISODES AND COMPOSING A NOVEL?
My first 30 part series in ‘The People’s Friend’ was set in a local weekly newspaper office, and it looks like I’ll have a second series starting in November in a new setting, about which I’m very excited. Working on a series requires a great deal of planning – I have to send off fairly detailed synopses of all 30 episodes before anything is approved to proceed. Then, I submit six episodes at a time, they are read by the fiction editor and then by the editor, before being returned to me for any tweaks. Only then can I write the next six instalments. So it’s a bit start-stop, compared to other forms. Because so much
work is done at the planning stage, it’s relatively quick to write the full episodes – and they’re very short, at 800 words. I have loved writing the two series, partly because there’s a chance to develop recurring characters over 30 weeks, and give them recognisable voices, and also because it’s an interesting discipline, trying to tell a complete story in each issue, but also supporting more over-arching narratives. With my novels, I don’t plan in the same detail – in fact, the ‘plan’ is about one side of A4 in my desk drawer, although I will scribble lots of reminders to myself as I go along as I have learned by cruel experience that, just because you have what you think is a good idea, or even a blindingly brilliant one, there’s no guarantee that you’ll remember it ten minutes later (or perhaps that’s just me!) Whereas writing a series is somewhat collaborative, writing a novel can be very lonely, particularly if, like me, you agree with Stephen King’s advice and don’t show a single word of it to a living soul until it is completely finished.
ANY IDEAS IN MIND FOR A FOLLOW UP NOVEL?
I have recently finished my next novel, the second in my two-book deal with Hachette. It is a completely new tale – new setting, new characters – but, again, what you might call small-town suspense. I’ve nervously submitted it to my agent and to my editor at Hachette. My agent emailed today and used the words “fantastic” and “couldn’t put it down”, which is a huge boost, and now I am desperately hoping my editor shares this enthusiasm – because, as you can imagine, when you write a book, you don’t just want people to like it, you want them to love it.
WHICH AUTHORS DO YOU MOST ENJOY READING?
Historically, my favourite authors have been John Irving, of ‘The World According to Garp’ and ‘A Prayer for Owen Meany’ fame, and William Goldman, perhaps best-known as the screenwriter of ‘Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid’, but also author of ‘The Princess Bride’ and ‘Marathon Man’. I have also loved Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole diaries with a passion. In Ireland, we have a wickedly funny chronicler of our times, Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, the fictional creation of journalist, Paul Howard, who delivers more laughs for your euro than anyone has a right to expect (his books definitely best read chronologically, from the start, when he is the star of the school rugby team). I have enjoyed Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie crime novels because they are more than just crime, and I love relative newcomer but big success story Joanna Cannon, who’s ‘The Trouble With Goats And Sheep’ is a book to sit up into the wee hours to finish reading – her twists are gentle, yet breath-taking – how does she do that?
Musical Entertainer / Teacher
David MacConnell
WHAT BRINGS YOU HAPPINESS?
Family. I am incredibly lucky to have my parents, Robin and Myra, living nearby, and they are an endless source of support, encouragement, fun and wisdom. I live with my journalist husband, Niall, who patiently tolerates my ‘desk’ spilling over increasingly into our bedroom and graciously reads my books even though as a rule he doesn’t ‘do’ fiction. We have three sons in their twenties, Keir, Clem and Nye, who are all penetrative thinkers but also love mischief, and Niall has a daughter, Lara, who is shaking things up by doing a potentially career-changing OU degree in her thirties. So lots to be thankful for. As I mentioned above, I also love to be immersed in stories. When not writing, I get very excited about, for example, a new series of ‘Endeavour’ or a repeat of ‘Happy Valley’. ☘
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