Category: Ireland

A year with John Banville, Author, Benjamin Black, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, historical fiction, Ireland, John Banville, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘Birchwood’ by John Banville

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A Year With John Banville | #JohnBanville2024

Fiction – Kindle edition; Picador; 178 pages; 2011.

Birchwood is John Banville’s second novel, a dizzyingly audacious confection, first published in 1973.

It’s the story of the Godkins, an Anglo-Irish family living in a Big House on the Birchwood estate, whose money and influence are long gone. The dynamics within the family, including power struggles, dark secrets and eccentric, often violent, behaviour, drive much of the plot forward.

Once, in a row with Aunt Martha, when she had flung an ashtray at his head, he snapped his teeth abruptly shut in the middle of a howl of fury and turned on his heel and stalked out into the garden. We sat in silence and inexplicable horror and listened to his laughter booming in the flower-scented darkness outside, and I, cowering in my corner, felt my face grinning wildly, uncontrollably, at this intimation of splendour, of violence and of pain. [page 20]

It’s told through the eyes of Gabriel Godkin, the first-person narrator, who reflects on his upbringing, relationships and experiences. He’s trying to work out how he fits into the family hierarchy and is surprised to discover he will inherit the estate — although certain forces are out to ensure this does not happen.

So Birchwood was to be mine, that much I understood, albeit dimly. What I failed to see was the plot to deprive me of my inheritance. Aunt Martha was the instigator and prime conspirator. She arrived one bright windy morning in June. [page 32]

A story of two halves

Midway through the book, there’s a distinct change in gear and style, as Gabriel runs away to join the circus (yes, really) in pursuit of his long-lost twin sister, who may or may not exist.

But a sister! Half of me, somewhere, stolen by the circus, or spirited away by an evil aunt, or kidnapped by a jealous cousin – and why? A part of me stolen, yes, that was a thrilling notion. I was incomplete, and would remain so until I found her. All this was real to me, and perfectly reasonable. [page 78]

The story is full of eccentric characters, many of whom are badly behaved (Granny Godkins, for instance, is a bit of an old witch, and Aunt Martha is duplicitous), and told through a series of equally eccentric set-pieces that become increasingly more outlandish (and abhorrent) as the book wends its way towards a not altogether satisfactory conclusion.

It feels part black comedy, part Gothic fairy tale, and the section set in the circus — or “travelling theatre” as Gabriel describes it — borders on the surreal.

It’s fair to say that the sum of Birchwood isn’t as good as its individual parts. I can’t help thinking that Banville, then a young author (he was 27), threw all his thematic interests — time, memory, family dynamics, art, sex, guilt, Irish political history et al — into one big pot, let it all ferment and then served up a complex and rich narrative stew, some of which is outlandishly funny, absurd or both.

Despite the lush prose and vividly descriptive writing, the book is uneven in plot and tone of voice. Yes, it’s deeply flawed (and perhaps not a good one to start with if you have never read John Banville before), but I had a thoroughly entertaining time reading it!

So here then is an ending, of a kind, to my story. It may not have been like that, any of it. I invent, necessarily. [page 170]

Cathy has also read this one and her review is much more eloquent than mine.

I read this book as part of A Year With John Banville, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #JohnBanville2024. To learn more, including our monthly reading schedule, please visit my John Banville page.

You may have noticed that I’m a little behind in my John Banville reading — I was supposed to read and review this one in March — but other things got in the way. I am playing catch-up now and expect to review both my April (‘Mefisto’) and May (‘The Book of Evidence’) reads by the end of this month. Thanks for your patience.

♥ In March Cathy reviewed ‘Christine Falls‘, the first crime novel written under Banville’s pen name Benjamin Black. I have previously reviewed that one here.

♥ My scheduled April read is ‘Mefisto’, published in 1986, and Cathy’s read is ‘Ghosts’. Expect reviews soonish.

A year with John Banville, Author, Benjamin Black, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, historical fiction, Ireland, John Banville, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘Nightspawn’ by John Banville

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A Year With John Banville | #JohnBanville2024

Fiction – Kindle edition; The Gallery Press; 224 pages; 2018.

Nightspawn is John Banville’s debut novel, first published in 1971.

It’s a slippery story, impossible to get a handle on. It’s full of political, often murderously violent, intrigue, peopled with a cast of strange characters and, despite its Greek island setting, pulses with a darkly Gothic atmosphere.

From an alleyway came the flash of a fang and one red eye, there, gone. (Location 264)

It’s narrated by an expatriate Irish writer called Benjamin White who’s entangled in a devious revolutionary plot he doesn’t quite understand and, for much of the story, he lurches from one strange catastrophe to another as he tries to work out what is real and what is not.

Secret document

At the heart of the story is a mysterious document — “containing certain signatures” and sometimes described as “the little thing, the little thing which means so much” — that could be used to help a cause or put certain people in power.

A revolution is brewing and Benjamin, constantly mistaken for an Englishman (a running joke throughout the book), is advised to leave.

The army was everywhere, in tanks, in jeeps, in lorries, on foot, but through it all, the battered yellow cab came nosing, its windows wide, and the car radio blaring martial music, appropriately enough, filling the streets with the strains of war. (Location 2598)

Murder, kidnapping and violent assaults abound. Their ferocity is only matched by the moody weather, the stormy sea “alive with ghostly glimmers of phosphorescence” and the “uneasiness in the air”.

Out over the sea a gathering of ugly black cloud was smeared like a grease stain on the sky. (Location 78)

A game of chess

Benjamin’s detailed moves — including his steamy love affair with Helen, a married woman, whom on one occasion he rapes — is a bit like a game of chess. (Interestingly, there are characters named Black, White and Knight, which can’t be a coincidence. Even the novel’s title could be a pun on “Knight’s pawn”.)

Toward the end of the story, there’s a quote that perfectly describes the experience of reading this book:

My mind would not work very well; my thoughts were fragmented and dispersed, and I had a vertiginous sensation of planes of awareness slipping and sliding uncontrollably, running into each other and locking, like loose, shuffled pages of a book. (Location 2564)

Not a ‘normal’ novel

Nightspawn isn’t an easy book to follow — but it seems Banville deliberately intended it to be so. In an article he wrote in 1994 looking back on his first novel, he said he had a “deep distrust of the novel form” and “at the age of 25 I had no doubt that I was about to transform the novel as we knew it”.

Plot, character, psychology: such words had me reaching for my revolver. 

He apparently wrote eight drafts, all in the third person; it wasn’t until he introduced a first-person narrator that he felt happy with it.

Do not mistake me: the book holds a dear place in my heart. Whatever its faults, it contains the best of what I could do. It is incandescent, crotchety, posturing, absurdly pretentious, yet in my memory it crackles with frantic, antic energy; there are sentences in it that I still quote to myself with secret and slightly shame-faced pleasure.

I understand what he means. The prose is astonishingly good; he writes with a painterly eye and has an uncanny ability to make inanimate things come alive:

The fog comes to my window, nuzzles at my window like some friendly blind animal. (Location 1279)

And:

The ancient telephone spoke. One could not say that it rang, for it had an oddly querulous, croaking call, like that of some awkward, ugly and sullen bird. (Location 1672)

And:

Her hands fluttered nervously, and fell together like frightened animals. (Location 2709)

And despite the heavy subject matter — death, betrayal and the Greek junta — humour is never far away:

I took a couple of steps across the floor, and then, in a flash of blinding white light, something hard fell on the back of my head, behind my ear, and I was falling, down, down into total darkn— wait now, wait, I am getting carried away with all this thriller stuff. Backspace, a bit. I took a couple of steps across the floor, and halted. (Location 2142)

Challenging romp

Nightspawn is probably not the right novel for first-time Banville readers, but if you are relatively acquainted with this work, you’ll likely recognise some of his trademarks — a flare for showy writing, wonderful descriptions of art and a focus on the unreliability of memory.

I found it an enjoyable, if somewhat ambiguous, challenging and occasionally perplexing, romp.

It’s the sort of book you read not for the plot or the storyline but for the sheer delight in the wordplay and the stylistic prose. It’s strange and bonkers and beautifully Baroque, perfect if you like that sort of thing.

I read this book as part of A Year With John Banville, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #JohnBanville2024. To learn more, including our monthly reading schedule, please visit my John Banville page.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘The Newton Letter‘, the last in his Revolutions trilogy, published in 1982.

♥ Next month I plan to read ‘Birchwood’, published in 1973, and Cathy plans to read ‘Christine Falls’, the first book penned under his pseudonym Benjamin Black. (I have previously reviewed ‘Christine Falls’ here.)

A year with John Banville, Author, Benjamin Black, Book review, crime/thriller, Fiction, historical fiction, Ireland, John Banville, Penguin, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting

‘The Secret Guests’ by B.W. Black (aka John Banville)

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A Year With John Banville | #JohnBanville2024

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 275 pages; 2020.

The Secret Guests is one of John Banville’s “entertainments” written under his pseudonym B.W. Black.

It’s a story that could have fallen right out of the hands of the scriptwriters of The Crown because it posits what might have happened if the two royal princesses — Elizabeth and Margaret — had been evacuated from London during the Blitz and spirited away to neutral Ireland for safekeeping.

In reality, this would never have happened, but Banville makes the arrangement seem plausible [1]: the Irish Government has agreed to keep the pair in a “safe house” in exchange for Whitehall-sanctioned shipments of desperately needed coal.

Secret mission

Under the top secret operation, the girls are given new names — 14-year-old Elizabeth becomes “Ellen” and her 10-year-old sister Margaret becomes “Mary” — and they are taken to Clonmillis Hall in Tipperary, home of their distant relative, the Duke of Edenmore.

They are accompanied by Celia Nashe, a MI5 agent, who acts as their (reluctant) governess, while Detective Garda Strafford [2] is sent from Dublin to provide police protection.

The legend that had been put about among the servants, who would, naturally, spread it beyond the Hall, was that the two girls, evacuated until the nightly bombing raids on London should have eased, were the daughters of the duke’s grand-niece—there was, of course, no such person—married to an officer high up in the military, who had been posted, along with his wife, to Cairo. (page 64)

Plotwise, it takes a little while for the story to get going as Banville takes his time to set the scene and introduce us to a small cast of characters — the people who run the household and those who live in the neighbouring village, some of whom “have pledged to drive the British out of the North and reunite the country”.

Suspense builds

The threat of politically motivated kidnap lends the novel a suspenseful atmosphere, but there are just as many tensions within the household as outwith. Will Strafford strike up a relationship with Nashe, for instance? Will the servants keep their mouths shut about the real identity of the girls staying at the Hall? Will haughty Ellen and curious Mary keep up the pretence or say something that will put them in real danger?

Throughout The Secret Guests Banville reminds us of the differences — political, personal, cultural — between the English and the Irish. For Nashe, the M15 agent, it’s an eye-opening experience to discover that

her England, a place of rolling downs and country cottages, of Big Ben and the Pearly Kings and Queens, of Yorkshire pudding and seaside ices, could be the object of such violent hatred and contempt. (page 96)

While for Anglo-Irish Strafford, a Protestant amongst Catholics (and the only Protestant detective in the country), the situation merely confirms his position as an outsider.

Yet as a descendant of the land-grabbers who had flooded over from England three centuries before, was he not himself suspended between two worlds, two sets of sensibilities, two impossible choices? Poor Ireland, poor divided little country, gnawing away at immemorial grievances, like a fox caught in a snare trying to bite off its trapped leg.

Eventually, things come to a head in a dramatic climax, making this book an enjoyable romp and one that is hard to pigeonhole — it’s not quite a crime novel, neither is it a thriller; perhaps it’s best described as historical fiction with a literary bent.

My favourite similies

And it’s the literary angle I most appreciated in this novel. Banville has a way with similies, which he often uses in a mischievous, amusing way. Here’s a selection of my favourite from this book:

He sported a small black moustache, like a smudged, sooty thumbprint applied to the groove under his nose, which was a godsend to his opponents, whose nickname for him was ‘Adolf’. (page 8)

♥

Hegarty held his face bent over his plate—like a sheep over a patch of grass, Strafford thought—mashing the potatoes into the fish juices and inserting forkfuls of the resulting mush into his mouth, the process accompanied by small, surely unconscious, mumbling slurps of appreciation. (page 20)

♥

For years this house had drifted along contentedly enough, like a great anchorless hulk in a torpid sea. (page 64)

♥

Strafford had become aware of a vague sense of desperation rising inside him, like seawater in the hold of a foundering ship. (page 66)

♥

Denton took off his cap and set his gun on the table—on the bare wood it looked uncannily like the severed, dried-out haunch of some spindle-legged animal—and went to the sink. (page 215)

♥

What had woken him was the rug slipping from his shoulders and dropping on to the floor behind his chair; it was as if he had shed his own pelt, in one slithering go. (page 253)

I read this book as part of A Year With John Banville, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #JohnBanville2024. To learn more, including our monthly reading schedule, please visit my John Banville page.

♥ This month Cathy reviewed ‘Birchwood’, his second novel, which was originally published in 1973.

♥ Next month I plan to read his first novel, ‘Nightspawn’, and Cathy plans to read ‘The Newton Letter’.

[1] Perhaps what is less plausible is that he makes Éamon de Valera’s son a Major in the British Army. Éamon de Valera was the taoiseach (prime minister) and no friend of the British.

[2] Readers of Banville’s recent crime series — Snow, April in Spain and The Lock-Up — will recognise Strafford as the main protagonist from those novels. In this book, he is much younger. His boss, Inspector Hackett, also features.

Author, Book review, Fiction, horror, Ireland, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, Sophie White, Tramp Press

‘Where I End’ by Sophie White

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Tramp Press; 178 pages; 2022.

We will wash the thing and dry the thing. New clothes, fresh sheets. We’ll brush its hair and brush its teeth. We do the bath every Thursday but on a Thursday before Dada comes, we take extra time. (p20)

Meet 19-year-old Aoileann. Yes, that’s how she talks about her mother (“the thing”) with whom she lives, along with her grandmother. The trio reside on a small island off the Irish coast.

But this is no romantic idyll. This is a cruel place steeped in superstition and folklore, where dead babies are heard crying, people go missing and locals spit at Aoileann because they regard her as some kind of monster — for reasons that are never fully explained.

And what happens on this island, and specifically in Aoileann’s home, is horrific. It’s so horrific they don’t want anyone on the island to find out what they get up to behind closed doors. They stack blades of serrated limestone in the square frames of the windows — to block the view in and the view out — and they keep Aoileann’s unsuspecting father, who lives elsewhere, in the dark.

A darkly compelling tale

Oh, Where I End is a creepy book. Part horror, part psychological thriller, and with a nod to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Doris Lessing’s The Fifth Child, it’s a strange but hugely compelling story.

Sophie White cleverly withholds information so that you’re plunged right into the drama without fully understanding what it is about and so it’s up to you as the reader to interpret what’s going on — and why.

The protagonist’s first-person voice is engaging and intriguing, but as the narrative unfolds disturbing elements of her personality begin to shine through. She’s uneducated and naive, but she’s also frustrated by the dreary routine she’s forced to perform as one of her mother’s carers.

My days have always been obligation after obligation arranged into rows of tedium. (p93)

Cruel and despicable

She treats her bedridden, non-verbal, incontinent mother appallingly. We don’t know why her mother is in such a state — we find that out right at the end — but we know she’s always trying to scrawl messages on the walls and floors of her bedroom and occasionally manages to escape.

My bed-thing is a tormentor too, but with different methods. The bed-thing punishes very passively. It torments us in its listless way, holding us in a grip of obligation. Locked into its care, we try to slow the rot of it, we try to contain the mess of it. (p98)

But life takes an exciting turn for Aoileann when a stranger — an unmarried mother of a baby infant — arrives on the island to take up a short-term artist’s residency at the local museum. Desperate for any kind of relationship, she befriends Rachael, who is grateful for the company, but it soon morphs into a creepy obsession. Yet Rachael appears to be none the wiser about her new babysitter’s nefarious intentions.

Horror story

Where I End is so OMINOUS, UNNERVING and, in some places, deeply UNPLEASANT.

I don’t know why I kept turning the pages. Well, actually, I do know: it’s because Sophie White is a terrific writer.

Her prose is lyrical yet completely devoid of sentiment. She’s not afraid to push boundaries and tear up the genre playbook to create something that is both confronting and curious. She is brilliant at evoking atmosphere and creating genuinely chilling moments without using exposition.

While I’m not sure there’s any point to the story beyond being “entertainment” (if you like being creeped out, that is), This is the End is an unforgettable read. And the ending, when it comes, is next to perfect.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Hamish Hamilton, Ireland, literary fiction, Paul Murray, Publisher, Setting

‘The Bee Sting’ by Paul Murray

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Fiction – paperback; Hamish Hamilton; 645 pages; 2023.

We are only two weeks into January and I think I have already found my favourite book of the year!

Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting is a spellbinding tragicomic tale that explores the emotional and financial outfall of the 2008 economic crash on one well-to-do Irish family.

It comes in at a stonking 645 pages of small print text, but the story is so perfectly structured and paced that it didn’t feel at all baggy or over-written.

Even the significance of the title is pitch-perfect. It not only refers to an actual bee sting that happens in the book, but when you say it out loud, several times in quick succession, it becomes “beasting”, a term that has multiple meanings but generally implies harsh treatment.

A family in crisis

The story is told in the third person through the eyes of four members of the comfortably well-off Barnes family:

  • Cass, the teenage daughter, who is in her last year of secondary school and destined to study literature at Trinity University
  • PJ, her younger brother, who is obsessed with video games
  • Imelda, the mother, who is renowned for her beauty and loves to shop
  • Dickie, who runs a lucrative Volkswagen dealership originally set up by his own father (now retired and living in Portugal) which is now likely to go under.

Each character’s voice is distinctive and their individual reactions to the family’s change in circumstances are expertly fleshed out in hefty but compulsively readable sections. Their backstories are explored in such a vivid and deeply compassionate way that each character feels flesh-and-blood real.

As the focus moves from character to character, following their missteps and bad decision-making along the way, we gain a more rounded perspective of the family and come to understand why each person is the way they are.

Subsidiary storylines

Threaded throughout the overarching narrative are additional story strands involving subsidiary characters, including a charming but dangerous Polish man who befriends Cass and ends up being hired at her father’s garage; Victor, a conspiracy theorist handyman, who helps Dickie convert a stone cabin in the woods into an apocalypse-proof bunker; Mike, a local businessman and womaniser, who sets his sights on bedding Imelda; and Rose, Imelda’s aunt who has “second sight” but refuses to tell a teenage Imelda her future — probably because she knows it’s not a happy one.

Murray also seamlessly weaves in a catalogue of contemporary issues including climate change, online risks for minors, sexual assault, blackmail, identity politics, childhood poverty, materialism and consumerism, binge drinking and alcoholism, and gangster-related crime.

The result is a hugely ambitious and immersive novel, one that comes right out of the Jonathan Franzen school of storytelling.

A grand finale

I’m conscious that I haven’t gone into any great detail about the plot or what happens to individual characters, first, because it’s beyond my capabilities to do the story justice in a 750-word review, and second, I believe it’s just better if you experience the revelations (of which there are many) without knowing about them first.

Reading The Bee Sting is entertaining, heartbreaking, humourous, shocking and bittersweet, often all at once. The ending, set on a dark and stormy evening, proves to be a fitting (and heart-stopping) grand finale.

If I were to fault it, I would argue that some of the issues feel too contemporary for the year in which the story is set, but that’s a minor quibble. I actually loved this novel — it held me in its sway for two whole weeks and left me feeling bereft when I finished. This has set the bar very high for the rest of the reading year!

The Bee Sting was named the 2023 Irish Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and a slew of other literary prizes.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, Joseph O'Connor, literary fiction, New York, Publisher, Setting, Vintage Digital

‘Inishowen’ by Joseph O’Connor

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage; 482 pages; 2011.

I couldn’t have picked a more appropriately seasonal book to entertain me over the Christmas break than Inishowen, an early career novel by Irish writer Joseph O’Connor.

Set between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve 1994, this hugely immersive story is about a dysfunctional American family from Manhattan and a recently divorced Irish policeman working in Dublin whose worlds collide unexpectedly.

It deals with some dark issues — including terminal cancer, parental bereavement and infidelity — but presents them in a fast-paced, page-turning package with oodles of compassion and a healthy dose of laugh-out-loud comic moments. (The one-liners are brilliant — and once you spot them, you keep finding them, on almost every page.)

Trio of characters

The story, told entirely in the third-person, focuses on three main characters: Ellen Donnelly, a 46-year-old American woman trying to track down her Irish birth mother; Ellen’s unfaithful husband, the cosmetic surgeon Dr Milton Amery; and Garda Inspector Martin Aitken who has never quite gotten over the hit-and-run death of his son six years earlier.

This trio of disparate characters are drawn together when Ellen walks out on her family and flies to Dublin. On Christmas Eve she collapses in the street, where she is “rescued” by Inspector Aitken, who takes an interest in her case.

The pair eventually go on a road trip to Inishowen, where Ellen believes her birth mother resides, and it’s during this journey, which is filled with drama and high jinks, that their friendship morphs into something sexual.

Meanwhile, Dr Amery is at his wit’s end in Manhattan, wondering whether his wife is ever going to come home. She’s often walked out on the family before but always returns in a night or two. This time the stakes are much higher because Ellen has pancreatic cancer and has less than a year left to live but is yet to tell her two teenage children.

Despite this, Amery uses his wife’s ongoing absence to continue sleeping with the much younger woman he’s been involved with for the past two years.

All these multiple narrative threads come together in the end, but this novel is less about the destination and more about the journey each character makes to get to Inishowen, a peninsula in the north of County Donegal. It is best described as an enjoyable romp, which includes moments of tension, high drama, fun and frivolity.

Reliance on stereotypes

But O’Connor does roll out some old tropes. There’s the melancholic troubled cop who self-medicates to get by, the teenage mother who had to give up her child for adoption under duress, and the serial philanderer who thinks only of his own sexual urges despite claiming to love his wife. Yet each of his characters is well-drawn, with interesting backstories and distinctive personalities.

O’Connor also conveys the Irish political situation of the time — several years before the Good Friday Agreement — with delicacy and aplomb.

Unfortunately, the last few chapters of the book slide into farce, when Ellen’s former boyfriend, Dick Spiggott, enters the fray. His over-the-top (loud, American) antics aren’t in keeping with the overall tone of the book.

But on the whole, this is a fun read full of witty dialogue, some great set pieces, and terrifically believable, if somewhat damaged, characters.

Inishowen was first published in 2000. I’ve previously read O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2003), Ghost Light (2010), The Thrill of it All (2014), Shadowplay (2019) and My Father’s House (2023) and have a couple more of his earlier novels in my TBR.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Penguin, Publisher, Setting, short stories, William Trevor

‘Bodily Secrets’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Classics; 144 pages; 2007.

Bodily Secrets, by William Trevor, was published in 2007 as part of a 20-book series called “Penguin Great Loves”^^ which I bought as a beautifully designed boxed set many years ago.

This slim volume features five short stories — previously published in The Collected Stories of William Trevor in 1992 — all revolving around various forms of love, including unreciprocated love, adulterous love, sexual love and convenient love.

Black comedy

The opening story, The Day We Got Drunk on Cake, is a black comedy in which four people — Mike, his colleague Swann, and two of Swann’s friends, Jo and Margo — go on a boozy lunch in London’s Soho that extends long into the night.

During this farce-like escapade, Mike is constantly looking for a phone to ring Lucy (in the days before mobile phones), a woman he is in love with but who doesn’t reciprocate his feelings. In all the multiple conversations he has with her over the course of the day, Lucy is unfailingly polite, but he begins to wear her patience:

“Hello, Lucy. How are you?”
“I’m fine, Mike.”
“Good.”
“Mike, you telephoned me at four fifteen. Do you know what time it is now?”
“What time is it now?”
“Four thirty-five.” (p9)

These nuisance calls are interleaved with conversations in which Margo beseeches Mike to help her with a personal problem. Her husband Nigel brings home elderly women, “explaining he has been attending some meeting with them and has brought them back for coffee”. But Margo doesn’t know what the meetings are about and is worried Nigel will start bringing home “tramps, grocers, one-legged soldiers”.

To find out what’s really going on, Mike pretends to call Nigel — under the guise of being an official from the Ministry of Pensions — but instead, he rings Lucy for advice. It’s ludicrously funny in places, especially when he reports back to Margo, telling her one lie after another.

The story ends with Mike musing on his need to get over Lucy — “the love of my life” — and to let time work its magic.

Unreciprocated love also features In Love with Ariadne, but this story is bittersweet rather than farcical. Barney, a medical student residing in a Dún Laoghaire boarding house, falls in love with the landlady’s daughter — but nothing comes of the relationship.

Forbidden love

Trevor turns his focus to illicit love between a married man and a much younger woman in Lovers of Their Time. The affair between Norman, a travel agent, and Marie, who is a shop assistant in a pharmacy, begins tentatively on New Year’s Day in 1963.

For the first 12 months, it’s a largely chaste relationship because they have nowhere private to go until Norman discovers a hotel where they can consummate their relationship.

Marriage and the prospect of children beckons, but ever-practical Norman is aware that getting a divorce from his wife Hilda will likely drive him into poverty: is his illicit love for Marie worth it?

This is a beautiful, largely melancholic story, but Trevor upends traditional stereotypes by making Hilda, the cheated-upon wife, as painfully uncouth. She’s lusty and “demanding in the bedroom” and makes Norman feel inadequate and unhappy, while Marie, whom he initially suspects may have a “tartish disposition”, turns out to be “prim and proper” and a genuinely lovely person who thinks highly of him.

Their love affair, gentle, romantic and sweet, offers the prospect of happiness for both of them.

“Oh darling,” she whispered one October evening at Paddington, huddling herself against him. […]
“I know,” he said, feeling as inadequate as he always did at the station.
“I lie awake and think of you,” she whispered.
“You’ve made me live,” he whispered back.
“And you me. Oh, God, and you me.”

Marriage of convenience

In the titular story, Bodily Secrets, a wealthy widow, 59-year-old Norah O’Neill, contemplates remarrying to have a “companion for her advancing years”. Her choice is limited, but the town’s affirmed bachelor Agnew, who is 51, seems the best fit — although her adult children and most of the townfolk think otherwise.

Agnew is a dapper dresser, a good dancer and has been a loyal employee: for 17 years he managed the family’s toy factory until Mrs O’Neill’s son, the angry and opinionated Cathal, shut it down. The only blot on his character (apart from his Protestant religion) is his frequent weekenders to Dublin, where it is thought he sleeps around with women or goes drinking.

Mrs O’Neill, a handsome woman, despises her ageing body and is not seeking a sexual partner. Her marriage to Agnew is ideal. Not only do they have separate bedrooms, but she also gets the emotional support she craves, along with a man who can manage the apple orchard she wants to establish on the site of the closed factory. While Agnew gets the financial security he needs, along with a cover for his homosexuality (the “bodily secret” of the title).

A similar “marriage of convenience” occurs in Honeymoon in Tramore in which a farm labourer, Davy Toome, marries Kitty, the farmer’s daughter, when she falls pregnant to someone else. It’s 1948 and pregnancy out of wedlock is viewed as a sin, so a hurried marriage is arranged. The real father, who is revealed at the end of the story, comes as something of a blow to Davy who had been told it was someone else entirely.

As ever, Trevor’s stories are compelling and expertly crafted and full of memorable characters and incidents. Each one looks at how love — in all its many various forms — profoundly shapes, challenges and transforms the men in these vastly different stories, all set in different periods and locations.

These poignant tales also showcase the complexities and vulnerabilities of human relationships, which is why reading them is such a wonderfully intimate and rewarding experience.

And that’s a wrap! This is the final book in my 12-month project A Year With William Trevor, which I co-hosted with  Cathy from 746 Books. Please click here to see all the books we read between us and to see a brief round-up of William Trevor reviews published on other blogs. If you have reviewed a William Trevor book this year and it hasn’t been included, please do leave a comment (either under this post or the main William Trevor page) and I will update accordingly.

Update: This month Cathy has reviewed Trevor’s posthumously published short story collection ‘Last Stories‘. I have previously reviewed this collection here.

^^ Other books in this series which I have reviewed here are:

A Year With William Trevor, Author, Book review, Fiction, Ireland, Italy, literary fiction, Penguin Classic, Publisher, Reading Projects, Setting, William Trevor

‘Two Lives’ by William Trevor

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A Year With William Trevor | #WilliamTrevor2023

Fiction – Kindle edition; Penguin; 384 pages; 2016.

Two very different women, with different attitudes, personalities and lived experiences, star in William Trevor’s novellas, Reading Turgenev and My House in Umbria, which are brought together in one volume under the title Two Lives, originally published in 1991.

It’s perhaps drawing a long bow to suggest the two female protagonists in this volume share commonalities, or are linked in any way, but reading each story, one after the other, it’s hard not to draw comparisons.

Both Mary Louise Dallon, who stars in Reading Turgenev, and Emily Delahunty (Mrs Delahunty), from My House in Umbria, are childfree and financially secure, but they are lonely and yearn for romance.

And perhaps because they don’t fit into the templated lives that society deems “normal”, both experience a kind of insanity. Mary Louise, moves into an attic to escape her much older alcoholic husband and his controlling sisters, and is later committed to an asylum, while Mrs Delahunty’s behaviour, fuelled by drink, becomes increasingly more unhinged as her past comes back to haunt her.

Innocence versus experience

Of course, they are also vastly different. Mary Louise is sexually inexperienced, having entered a marriage that has never been consummated, while Mrs Delahunty was sexually abused as a child and once supported herself through prostitution.

Mary Louise is quiet and introverted; Mrs Delahunty loud and convivial. Mary Louise longs to escape the family she married into; Miss Delahunty dreams of finding a family she can call her own.

The tone, style and setting of both novellas are also different. Reading Turgenev employs a third-person narrator to tell Mary Louise’s sad and melancholy story. It also features a dual timeline that intertwines the story of an unhappy marriage with Mary Louise’s confinement in a psychiatric institution for more than 30 years

By contrast, My House in Umbria is narrated in the first person using a jolly, upbeat and deeply intimate voice.

The former is set in Ireland in the mid-20th century, the latter in Italy in 1987.

So, what are the stories about? Let me briefly explain each in turn.

Reading Turgenev

Reading Turgenev is about a farm girl who secures her future by marrying Elmer Quarry, a man much older than her — “the only well-to-do Protestant for miles around” — who runs a drapery store in town with his two (meddling and not very nice) spinster sisters, Matilda and Rose.

And why should they put themselves out by the slightest iota for a penniless creature whom their brother might have bought at a fun-fair if they’d all been living a hundred years ago? He’d married her to breed with. He’d married her because of his sentimental notion that the name should continue above the shop.

The marriage does not get off to a good start, because Elmer, who is normally a teetotaller, gets drunk on their honeymoon and passes out. The pair never consummate their relationship, even when they return home, and consequently never have children, to the puzzlement of many, including family (his and hers), village residents and busybodies.

But the issue is never discussed between the pair. Instead, Elmer deals with it by drinking in secret, while Mary Louise begins bicycling out to visit her impoverished aunt and her invalid cousin, Robert, with whom she has been in love since she was a young girl.

It is Robert who reads the works of Russian writer Ivan Turgenev to her, hence the novella’s title, but their relationship is a clandestine one, which is what makes it all so heart-rending when he dies unexpectedly.

In her bereavement, Mary Louise becomes increasingly more introverted and isolated, with dire consequences for her own sanity. When she is seen buying rat poison, the sisters believe their lives are being put at risk… but is that really the case?

Reading Turgenev was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1991.

My House in Umbria

My House in Umbria is about a romantic novelist who survives a terrorist attack on a train in Italy and invites fellow survivors from her carriage to spend their convalescence at her villa free of charge.

This brings together a diverse group of individuals, including a British general, a German man whose fiancee was killed in the bombing, and Aimee, a young American girl who has been orphaned and has now retreated into silence.

Mrs Delahunty delights in the company of this new “family”, especially as their imagined lives and backstories will provide fodder for her next novel, but everything is thrown into disarray when Aimee’s uncle, a rather aloof man called Thomas Riversmith, arrives to take his niece back home.

Our narrator, who has a troubled past — her sideshow parents sold her to a foster family and her foster father later “satisfied his base desires” with her — becomes infatuated by Mr Riversmith and sets her amorous sights on him. When she overhears him saying not very nice things about her, she’s even more determined to have her way with him.

He was remarking, when I lifted the receiver, that he had never before encountered a romantic novelist. Then, distressing me considerably, he referred to as ‘trash’ what last night he had called most interesting. He referred to the grappa we’d enjoyed together as an unpleasant drink. The word ‘grotesque’ was used in a sentence I couldn’t catch.

The book ends with all the patients returning to their respective homes and Mrs Delahunty renting out her spare rooms once again to tourists, but something has irrevocably changed in her: “Perhaps I’ll become old, perhaps not,” she muses. “Perhaps something else will happen in my life, but I doubt it.”

My House in Umbria was adapted for American television in 2003, starring Maggie Smith.

Trevor’s trademark best

Together these two novellas pack a powerful punch and demonstrate Trevor at his trademark best: showing us the remarkable interior lives of two ordinary but highly resilient women getting by as best they can. The first showcases his melancholy life-in-an-Irish-village style, the second his black comedic style.

If you have not read him before and want to get a taster for his different types of writing, this would be a good one to start with.

Both are highly engaging reads, but if I had to choose between the two, I preferred My House in Umbria, only because the voice was more comedic and the story less gloomy. I found Mrs Delahunty larger than life and her antics ludicrously entertaining, somewhat reminiscent of Mrs Eckdorf in his 1970 novel Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel, and also Miss Gomez in Miss Gomez and the Brethren (1971).

Finally, there’s an eloquent review of both published in the New York Times, which describes Two Lives so much better than I ever could.

I read this book as part of A Year With William Trevor, which I am co-hosting with  Cathy from 746 Books. You are invited to join in using the hashtag #WilliamTrevor2023. 
Please click here to learn more, including our monthly reading schedule.

♥ This month Cathy also reviewed ‘Two Lives’.

♥ Next month Sadly, December will mark the end of ‘A Year with William Trevor’. Cathy plans to read ‘Last Stories’ (which I have previously reviewed here) and in a slight change to our schedule, I plan on reading the novella ‘Bodily Secrets’, which was published as part of Penguin’s Great Love series.

I also read this for Novellas in November (#NovNov23) hosted by Cathy of 746 Books and Rebecca of Bookish Beck. This annual celebration of novella reading runs all month. Click the links above to find out more.

Author, Book review, Hachette Ireland, History, Ireland, John Banville, memoir, Non-fiction, Publisher, Setting

‘Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir’ by John Banville

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Non-fiction – Kindle edition; Hachette Books Ireland; 224 pages; 2016.

When does the past become the past? Or as Irish writer John Banville so eloquently puts it:

What transmutation must the present go through in order to become the past? Time’s alchemy works in a bright abyss.

This fascination with the juncture between now and then is a constant refrain in Banville’s Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir, an intriguing book that is part memoir, part nostalgic travel guide, illustrated with photographs by Paul Joyce.

Full of Banville’s trademark wit and literary flourishes, combined with historical insights into “this city of stories”, it’s an intimate glimpse of the author’s life and personal recollections.

Escape from Wexford

Banville was born and raised in Co. Wexford — which is where Colm Tóibín, Eoin Colfer and Billy Roche also come from — and moved to Dublin, about 100 miles north, aged 18, keen to escape his provincial roots.

I left home with a cruel insouciance, shaking the dust of Wexford from my heels and heading for what I took to be the dazzling bright lights of Dublin. It must have been a wrench for my parents to see me go, so carelessly and with hardly a backward glance. I was the last of their children, and now the household that once had numbered five was reduced to its original two.

But he had visited Dublin during his childhood, and the book opens with his fond memories of annual birthday trips to Dublin, taken with his mother and sister, on the train. This sets the scene for Time Pieces, which is not about the Dublin of now, but the Dublin of the past.

Much of the book covers his wanderings across the city, led by his friend “Cicero”, who has “amassed a great store of arcane knowledge of a hidden city” (and who I think is probably property developer Harry Crosbie, whom the book is dedicated to).

He takes us on a fascinating tour of Dublin, including its famous and not-so-famous landmarks, such as the Abbey Theatre, Phoenix Park and Sandymount Strand, dropping in intriguing historical (both physical and social) facts and literary references, all the while describing scenes with his painterly eye:

It is a May morning of luminous loveliness. The sunlight glows through a delicate muslin mist, the soft air is fragrant with the smell of lilac, and out over the tawny reaches of Sandymount strand, where Stephen Dedalus once trod upon seaspawn and seawrack while seeking myopically to make out the signatures of all the things he was sent there to read, the pale sky shines and shimmers like the inner skin of a vast soap bubble.

Unsurprisingly, he mentions many writers and artists, from James Joyce to Patrick Kavanagh, who used the city as inspiration for their work. But it took him some time to see Dublin as a suitable backdrop for his own writing, mainly because he thought Joyce “had used it up”.

It was not until much later, when I invented my dark brother Benjamin Black, that I saw the potential of 1950s Dublin as a setting for his noir novels.

Interestingly, the shabby flat that Banville once shared with his Aunt Nan, on Upper Mount Street, is the same flat where his protagonist Quirke (from his historical crime novels) lives, although “I smartened it up considerably”.

A parental tribute

As well as being a heartfelt homage to his adopted city, Time Pieces is also a lovely tribute to Banville’s parents, both of whom died by the time he was 35. But comparing his life to theirs “is a dizzying exercise”, he writes.

His father was a quiet man who led a life of routine, something that Banville claims he couldn’t do himself but which was just the way things were back then:

He worked all his life at a white-collar job—though he did wear a brown shop-coat over his suit and shirt and tie—in a large garage that supplied motor parts to much of County Wexford. Ironically, he never learned to drive a car.

His mother, he thinks, was probably dissatisfied with her life to some degree, partly because she read widely and would have had “more of an inkling of what the world of elsewhere had to offer, and of all that she was missing”.

And yet Banville claims he was indifferent to their lives and the place where he grew up, adding that he’s never “paid much attention to my surroundings”:

For good or ill, as a writer I am and always have been most concerned not with what people do—that, as Joyce might say, with typical Joycean disdain, can be left to the journalists—but with what they are. Art is a constant effort to strike past the mere daily doings of humankind in order to arrive at, or at least to approach as closely as possible to, the essence of what it is, simply to be.

Perhaps it is that exact attitude that makes Time Pieces: A Dublin Memoir such a compelling read: Banville lets the city, and his own history, speak for themselves. He’s not searching for philosophical meaning, nor is he trying to imbue the past with misplaced nostalgia. He’s merely offering it up — this is how it was — and wondering at what point history begins when, essentially, you are living through it.

If you like the sound of this book, perhaps add it to your reading list for 2024 — it would be a great contender for  A Year with John Banville, a celebration of all things Banville, which I am co-hosting with Cathy from 746 Books.

Author, Book review, Claire Keegan, Faber and Faber, Fiction, Ireland, literary fiction, Publisher, Setting, short stories

‘So Late in the Day’ by Claire Keegan

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Fiction – hardcover; Faber & Faber; 43 pages; 2023.

Claire Keegan’s So Late in the Day is a sublime tale about a man who is not what he first appears to be.

This short story was first published as a standalone text in 2022 by Keegan’s French publisher, Sabine Wespieser, under the title Misogynie (which might give you a slight inkling as to what it is about).

It is set on a single summer’s day — Friday 29 July — but despite the sunshine and “a taste of cut grass” in the air, something is amiss.

Lonely man

Keegan paints an evocative portrait of Cathal, an office worker in Dublin, who seems lonely and unsure of himself, but as the story unfolds, we learn that our pity for the protagonist is misplaced.

Cathal, we discover, once fell in love with a British-Franco woman called Sabine. He suggested that she move in with him (to save her paying the rent) and then asked, in a roundabout way, for her hand in marriage.

But Sabine is now gone and Cathal is spending Friday night alone at home, eating cake and drinking champagne with only his cat for company. What happened?

The story of their love affair is revealed in flashbacks and provides glimpses of Cathal’s personality through the things he says and does.

When Sabine moves into his house, for instance, he doesn’t like that she brings all her possessions with her, including a desk and chair, a bookshelf, boxes of books and DVDs, clothes and artwork. “What did you imagine?” she asks him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Not this. Just not this.”
“I cannot understand,” she told him. “You knew I had to leave the flat in Rathgar by the end of the month. You asked me to come here, to marry you.”
“I just didn’t think it would be like this, is all,” he said. “I just thought about your being here and having dinner, waking up with you. Maybe it’s just too much reality.”

Mean with money

Cathal is also the sort of person who knows the cost of everything and the value of nothing. In other words, he is mean with money.

He begrudges paying six euros for a bag of cherries, for instance, even though he knows Sabine needs the fruit for a classic clafoutis she is going to bake him. He also resents paying a separate fee to get a Chinese meal delivered when Sabine says she’s too tired to walk to the restaurant to pick up the food.

But it’s how he reacts when he finds out the jeweller wants to charge an additional 128 euros (plus VAT) to have Sabine’s engagement ring resized that is most telling.

“Do you think I’m made of money?” he’d said — and immediately felt the shadow of his father’s language crossing over his life, on what should have been a good day, if not one of his happiest.

No compromise

At its most basic, So Late in the Day is the tale of a man who doesn’t understand the concept of compromise or the need for give and take in a relationship.

But it’s also a story about misogynistic attitudes and is a pitch-perfect examination of what happens when you are stuck in your ways, view the world in a narrow-minded, mean-spirited way and refuse to be generous.

Quick to read, it brims with insightful observations about human behaviour and the power dynamics within relationships.

The story is currently issued as a slim (but expensive) single volume, but you can read it for free on The New Yorker website, where it was first published in February 2022.