Category: Northern Ireland

2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Author, Bloomsbury Circus, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Literary prizes, Louise Kennedy, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Setting

‘Trespasses’ by Louise Kennedy

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Bloomsbury Circus; 320 pages; 2022.

Winner of the An Post Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year 2022 and shortlisted for a slew of other awards, Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses is the tale of a doomed love affair set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles.

Every second person in the world seems to have read it — and loved it. But as much as I enjoyed it on a superficial level, I found the storyline predictable and cliched.

At one point, Cushla Lavery, the main character, tells her lover: “This is going to end badly, isn’t it?” And I wondered why it had taken her so long to figure it out because when a young woman falls for an older married man it never really ends well.

Throw in the complexities of their religious divide — she’s Catholic, he’s Protestant — class differences and a bloody and violent sectarian war playing out around them, then the chance of a happy-ever-after seems particularly far-fetched. But maybe I’m being harsh — or too cynical.

A secret affair

The main story is about Cushla’s clandestine relationship with Michael Agnew, an older married man she meets in the “garrison town” pub owned by her family. She’s from working-class Catholic stock and teaches at the local primary school. He’s an Ulster protestant and works as a criminal barrister in Belfast.

But there are subsidiary storylines that showcase other aspects of Cushla’s life and go some way to explain why she’s embarked on a forbidden relationship.

These include looking after her widowed mother, Gina, who is an alcoholic and sometimes can’t even get out of bed she’s so drunk or hungover; working evenings in the pub run by her brother Eamonn and having to serve the clientele, some of which are British soldiers; and taking an outside interest in the care of one of her young students, seven-year-old Davy McGeown, whose father is the victim of a particularly vicious attack by paramilitaries. This all place demands on her time and her inner resources, so that there is little left for her; she’s too busy mothering everyone else.

Did Cushla fancy Michael because he was the only man she knew who didn’t talk incessantly about his mummy?

A friendship with a male teacher, Gerry Devlin, who many think is her boyfriend, acts as a convenient cover. But many of her rendezvous with Michael happen out in the open when he draws her into his sophisticated circle of friends by inviting her along to teach them the Irish language.

One-sided relationship

But right from the start the relationship is one-sided and we know next to nothing about Michael, except that he has had many affairs and he’s the one that calls the shots:

He would never give her more than this. For her there would just be liaisons arranged an hour or two in advance, couplings in lay-bys, evenings at his friends’ house under unconvincing pretexts. When her thoughts flitted – briefly – to his wife, the guilt at what she was doing to her did not take.

What makes their relationship seem even more reckless is the frisson of danger that infects the whole city in an “unspeakable war”. The threat of death, from bombs and guns, is on every page. Some chapters open with a series of news headlines — about deadly explosions and arrests and caches of weapons being found — to hammer home the point that this affair is happening in a war zone.

This death and violence are so normalised that the pair never discuss how Michael’s job paints him as a terrorist target…

As a story of a woman navigating multiple battlefields, Trespasses is an entertaining read.

It’s largely told as a series of vignettes, with the affair underpinning the narrative. But because I knew exactly where that narrative was headed, some of the vignettes felt like filler. That said, the denouement is suitably powerful and shocking and leaves a lasting impression.

I liked the book, I just didn’t love it.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘Shadows on Our Skin’ by Jennifer Johnston: through the eyes of a young Derry schoolboy, this gently nuanced novel shows what it is like to grow up while The Troubles rage around you.

‘Lies of Silence’ by Brian Moore: A heart-hammering tale set during The Troubles in which the IRA orders a hotel manager to park a car in the hotel’s car park. If he refuses, his wife, who has been taken captive, will be murdered.

I read this book as part of Cathy’s #ReadingIrelandMonth23, which runs throughout March. I’m a little behind so that’s why this review is more than a week late. You can find out more about this annual blog event at Cathy’s blog 746 Books.

Update 1 May 2023: This book has been shortlisted for the 2023 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. I am attempting to read all the books on the shortlist before the winner is announced at the end of May. This qualifies as the first book read (out of a total of five).

2022 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, Adam Kay, Author, Book review, Fiction, Grove Press, historical fiction, Jan Carson, Lily King, literary fiction, Literary prizes, memoir, New Guinea, Non-fiction, Northern Ireland, Pan Books, Publisher, Setting, Transworld Digital, UK

Three Quick Reviews: Jan Carson, Adam Kay & Lily King

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I’m a bit behind in my reviewing, so here’s a quick round-up of books I have recently read. This trio comprises an Irish “supernatural” story, a medical memoir from the UK and a historical novel by an American writer. They have been reviewed in alphabetical order by author’s surname.

‘The Raptures’ by Jan Carson

Fiction – Kindle edition; Transworld Digital; 332 pages; 2022.

Shortlisted for the 2022 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year award, Jan Carson’s The Raptures is an unusual tale about a mysterious illness that spreads through a group of children from the same village, killing them one by one. But one young girl, Hannah Adger, remains healthy, the sole survivor of her entire classroom. Scared and haunted by survivor’s guilt, Hannah, who is from an evangelical Protestant family, discovers she can see and communicate with her dead friends.

Set in Ulster in 1993 during The Troubles, the illness that sweeps the small community is a metaphor for a war that rages on with seemingly no end in sight. As the children fall prey to the mystery illness, the community is brought together by a desire to end the disease that is killing its loved ones — but many families get caught up in the fear and the anger of an out-of-control plague and look for someone to blame, contributing to the divisions in an already divided community.

Admittedly, I struggled a little with this book. The structure, repetitive and predictable, quickly wore thin and I found the supernatural elements hard to believe. Ditto for the explanation of what caused the illness (which I guessed long before it was revealed). Perhaps it didn’t help that I had Covid-19 when I read the tale, so I wasn’t in the mood for reading about sick people dying. But as a treatise on religion, grief and faith, The Raptures is an unusual — and unique — read.

‘This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor’ by Adam Kay

Non-fiction – memoir; Pan Macmillan; 256 pages; 2018.

One of the best things about living in the UK (which I did between 1998-2019) was the free medical treatment I was able to access under the National Health Service (NHS), a centrally funded universal healthcare system, free at the point of delivery. But the system is not perfect and is chronically underfunded and overstretched. Adam Kay’s memoir of his time working in the NHS as a junior doctor highlights what it is like to work on the front line, where every decision you make has life and death implications for the people under your care.

Written in diary form over the course of several years, This is Going to Hurt is a no-holds-barred account of a medical career forged in an overwhelmingly stressful environment dominated by long hours, poor pay and next to no emotional support. But Kay, who has since left the profession to become a stand-up comic, takes a cynical, often sarcastic tone, recounting stories and events — mostly to do with obstetrics and gynaecology, the areas in which he specialised  — with sharp-edged humour, so I tittered my way through most of the book.

And when I wasn’t laughing, I was crying because it’s so heartbreaking in places. Mind you, it’s nowhere near as dark and oppressive as the recent BBC drama series, which prompted me to read the book.

(Note, I wouldn’t advise anyone who is pregnant or has had a traumatic birth experience to pick it up.)

‘Euphoria’ by Lily King

Fiction – paperback; Grove Press; 288 pages; 2014.

Said to be loosely based on American anthropologist Margaret Mead’s time spent researching tribes in New Guinea in the 1940s, Euphoria is a story about a love triangle set in the jungle. It’s the first time I’ve ever read a novel about anthropologists and I found it a fascinating tale about ego, arrogance, academic controversy and desire.

I knew nothing about Mead and her achievements, so I can only judge the book on the power of its storytelling, which I found compelling even if the plot was a little thin. This is essentially a character-driven story — and what characters they are! We meet American Nell Stone, the central character, upon which the others revolve, including her Australian husband Fen, and the couple’s English friend Andrew Bankson.

King paints a convincing portrait of a trio of anthropologists at work, fleshing out each character so that we meet them in the past and the present, understand what drives them, what infuriates them and why they do what they do.

And the setting, including the (fictional) tribes that are described in such vivid detail, imbues the story with a rich sense of atmosphere and realism.

I read ‘The Raptures’ as part of my project to read all the shortlisted titles for the 2022 Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award. 
20 books of summer, 20 books of summer (2020), Author, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Salt Publishing, Setting

‘The Good Son’ by Paul McVeigh

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Salt Publishing; 256 pages; 2015.

Paul McVeigh’s The Good Son is a coming-of-age story set in the Catholic working-class and Irish Republican district of Ardoyne, in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during The Troubles.

It is narrated by a schoolboy, Mickey Donnelly, who’s a smart kid with big dreams — when he grows up he wants to move to America.

I can’t wait to get to America. I’m going to work in a diner. I’ve got dreams.

But life is tough for Mickey, the apple of his mother’s eye, because his one shot at going to St Malachy’s, the local grammar school, has just been blown: his father has spent the required funds on alcohol and gambling.

Summer holiday

The book follows nine weeks in Mickey’s life during the long school summer holidays in which he dreads having to go to St Gabriel’s, where’s his older brother Paddy is in the sixth form and where all the boys are horrible and there will be no dancing or singing or acting lessons.

Caught between childhood and puberty, Mickey longs for his voice to drop so he can be regarded as a man rather than being labelled “gay” and “weird” by other children, including Paddy. It doesn’t help his reputation that he mainly hangs out with his little sister, Wee Maggie, whom he dotes on, and her friends instead of other boys (with the exception of Fartin’ Martin, a boy from school) and speaks in a “posh” way, using good manners which mark him out as different to other boys his age.

During his holidays he mainly plays with his pet dog Killer, lusts after his neighbour Martine, who encourages him to teach her to “lumber” (slang for sex) and has occasional run-ins with local bad girl Briege, whose father is in prison — rumour has it, he stole some sausages for the IRA.

Mother love

Mickey runs a lot of errands for his mother, whom he loves dearly. She becomes increasingly dependent on him to be her “good son” when Mickey’s dad leaves, taking the TV with him, but this proves a challenge when his freedom is constantly curtailed.

I have very clear instructions. Don’t go to the top of the street cuz there’s always riots. Don’t go to the bottom of the street cuz there’s No Man’s Land and there’s always riots. Don’t go near the Bray or the Bone hills cuz that leads to Proddy Oldpark where they throw stones across the road from their side. Don’t go into the aul houses cuz a wee boy fell through the stairs in one and broke his two legs. I think his neck too. Ma could be exaggerating. Oh, and don’t go onto the Eggy field cuz there’s glue-sniffers. Ma should have just tied me to the gate or locked me in a cupboard.

On one occasion, when he ventures to a part of town he is forbidden to visit, he gets caught up in a bomb explosion that kills his dog and injures his own head, though not seriously. He hides this fact from his mother, worried that he will get in trouble, and does not tell her that he saw Paddy, who may or may not be involved with the IRA, at the scene.

It’s this kind of careful balancing between comedy and melodrama that gives The Good Son its emotional power. It’s the kind of book in which the reader laughs out loud on one page, then turns over to be confronted by the stark reality of what it is like to be a child in a war zone.

I check there’s no Prods or gangs about in Alliance Avenue and cross to the corrugated iron barricades. There’s a tiny little door to the Prods. You’re not allowed to use it. You’d be murdered. They’ve started callin’ them peace lines which really makes me laugh cuz actually this is where people come to kill each other.

As the story inches towards the end of the school holidays, the drama slowly builds as Mickey’s family get caught up in events that put them at risk, forcing the “good son” to do something bad to protect them all. It’s a deftly told tale, compelling and charming in equal measure, but also alarming and heart-rending too.

The Good Son won the Polari First Book Prize in 2016.

Cathy, who blogs at 746 books, liked this novel a lot too.

If you liked this, you might also like:

‘Shadows on our Skin’ by Jennifer Johnston: another coming-of-age story set during The Troubles. It follows a Derry schoolboy, surrounded by violence and danger, who develops a platonic relationship with a female teacher and then discovers his world opening up…

This is my 12th book for #20BooksofSummer / #20BooksOfSouthernHemisphereWinter. I purchased it on 30 August 2017, I think because I had seen a good review of it on Savidge Reads, back in the day when Simon blogged.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, David Park, England, Fiction, literary fiction, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Setting, UK

‘Travelling in a Strange Land’ by David Park

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Travelling in a strange land

Fiction – hardcover; Bloomsbury; 176 pages; 2018. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I was so gripped by David Park’s latest novel Travelling in a Strange Land that I read it in a day.

The book has a simple premise: a severe winter snowstorm a few days before Christmas has made all road journeys treacherous and flights have been grounded. Tom, who lives in Belfast, drives his car from Stranraer, on the west coast of Scotland, to Newcastle, on the east coast of England, to collect his university-aged son, Luke, who is ill and stranded in his student lodgings.

The narrative, written in eloquent, beautifully visual language, traces Tom’s physical journey. It details the ferry crossing, the monotonous drone of the satnav instructions (“Drive for six point four miles. […] At the next roundabout take the second exit“), the treacherous conditions on the roads, the constant phone calls back home to inform his wife and 10-year-old daughter of his progress, the additional phone calls to Luke to check his flu hasn’t worsened, the little stops and starts he makes on the road, and the people he meets along the way.

But that road journey is merely a metaphor for another journey Tom has recently had to make: that of a newly bereaved parent grappling with the death of his oldest son, Daniel, and the legacy of guilt and bewilderment and loss he now feels.

Deeply contemplative read

Travelling in a Strange Land — even the title is a metaphor for grief — is a deeply affecting read. It’s not sentimental in any way, shape or form. Instead it’s a wonderfully contemplative read, understated in its beauty, in its power to show the inner life of a man trying to make sense of the world and his place in it.

The narrative winds all over the place in tune with Tom’s thoughts. One minute we learn how he met and fell in love with his wife, who was engaged to another man at the time, during The Troubles; the next we are discovering how much he hates working as a wedding photographer because all today’s couples are shallow and obsessed with image over substance.

Music references are a constant refrain — “In the car I have the music I’ve chosen for the long hours ahead — Robert Wyatt, Van Morrison, REM, John Martyn, Nick Cave” — as are references to photography, including the types of pictures he wants to take of  “the moment that lies just below the surface of things, or a glimpse of the familiar from a different angle”.

And I have come to understand the truth of what Ansel Adams said: that you don’t make a photograph just with a camera but that you bring to the act all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard and the people you have loved.

The plot, which is paper-thin and barely there, is compensated by the exemplary characterisation — even those people who are “off-page” such as his wife, his daughter, and even Luke are brought to vividly to life by Tom’s memories of conversations, incidents and day-to-day interactions. His late son, Daniel, of whom we really know nothing about, flits in and out of the storyline, as enigmatic in death as he was in life.

But everything is held together in an expertly crafted portrait of a father’s grief and of a man realising that the picture we present to the world is never quite what it seems.

Things to click:

Listen to the Spotify playlist of all the music mentioned in the book.

Look at Sonya Whitefield’s photographs inspired by the book.

Read my review of David Park’s The Light of Amsterdam (2012)

Read my review of David Park’s The Truth Commissioner (2009)

Author, Bernard MacLaverty, Book review, Fiction, literary fiction, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Setting, Vintage

‘Cal’ by Bernard MacLaverty

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Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage; 178 pages; 1998.

Guilt, atonement and the futility of war are the central themes in Bernard MacLaverty’s 1983 novel Cal.

Set in Northern Ireland, it tells the story of Cal, a young, unemployed Catholic man living on a Protestant housing estate at the height of The Troubles. Each night he waits to be fire-bombed out of the home he shares with his father and each morning he gets up to find everything is okay.

But there’s a dark, pervasive atmosphere, one that seems only conducive to fear and violence, and for much of this novel we follow Cal’s tortured path as he wrestles with his own conscience, for he has been the accomplice in a horrendous crime for which it seems impossible to atone.

He felt that he had a brand stamped in blood in the middle of his forehead which would take him the rest of his life to purge.

Refusing to work in the nearby abattoir with his father (for reasons that become apparent much later in the story), Cal is a drifter but under pressure from local IRA men, including a shady character known as Crilly, to take sides. When he refuses to do so, the pressure only intensifies:

‘Do you still want to – refuse to help?’ ‘I’m afraid so.’ ‘Not to act – you know – is to act.’ Crilly looked confused. ‘By not doing anything you are helping to keep the Brits here.’ Crilly nodded his head vigorously and said, ‘If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’ ‘But it all seems so pointless,’ said Cal. Skeffington paused and looked at him. He spoke distinctly, as if addressing one of his primary classes. ‘It’s like sitting in a chair that squeaks. Eventually they will become so annoyed they’ll get up and sit somewhere else.’ ‘How can you compare blowing somebody’s brains out to a squeaking chair?’ said Cal. Skeffington shrugged his shoulders. ‘That’s the way it will look in a hundred years’ time.’ ‘You have no feelings.’

When Cal gets a job working on a local Protestant farm, he finds his fortunes slightly improved: the young librarian he has been admiring from afar lives on the farm with her small daughter. She’s a widow and Cal befriends her. Before long, he is obsessed and falls in love with her. But she’s unattainable — and not merely because she’s from the “wrong” religion.

A love story

Cal is often described as a love story. On the face of it, that’s a good description. But it’s also a deeply moving story about how the political effects the personal, how ordinary people can get caught up in wider conflicts and the impact that has on their day-to-day lives.

I read it with a mixture of horror and fascination. There’s exquisite anguish and pain on every page. The pacing is brilliant, and MacLaverty’s use of flashbacks to explain events in Cal’s past are so expertly done that each new scene comes as a powerful revelation: that nothing in this story should be accepted on face value, that everyone has secrets to keep and allegiances to maintain.

Out of this horrific mire, Cal’s tortured existence, caught between the terrible deed he has committed and the redemption he seeks, is nothing short of stunning. He seems to be constantly in a state of paralysis: unable to move ahead of his own accord, passively waiting to be the victim he feels he deserves to become:

To explain how the events of his life were never what he wanted, how he seemed unable to influence what was going on around him. He had had a recurring dream of sitting at the wheel of a car driving and at a critical point turning the wheel and nothing happening.

Despite being an avid Irish literature fan, this is the first novel by Bernard MacLaverty that I have read. It won’t be the last.

 

Author, Book review, Deirdre Madden, Faber and Faber, Fiction, literary fiction, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Setting

‘Hidden Symptoms’ by Deirdre Madden

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Hidden-symptoms

Fiction – paperback; Faber & Faber; 144 pages; 2014.

In recent years, Deirdre Madden has become one of my favourite writers. She has 10 novels to her name, but I’ve only reviewed three of them — One by One in the Darkness (published in 1996), Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) and Time Present and Time Past (2013) — which means I have many years of reading pleasure ahead of me if I space them out accordingly.

Her debut novel, Hidden Symptoms,  first published in 1986, is a densely constructed story about a trio of characters living in Belfast during The Troubles.

It revolves around university student Theresa, a devout Catholic, whose faith is tested by the murder of her twin brother, whose badly mutilated body was found dumped on a patch of waste ground near the city centre several years earlier, the result of sectarian violence.

Love and violence

But the story is just as much about the faith — and the trust — placed in friendships, for Theresa spends most of her time with Robert, a writer and frustrated intellectual, who aspires to better things and despises his sister’s sheltered suburban life, and Robert’s girlfriend, Kathy, a fellow student, who discovers that the father she thought had died when she was a baby is actually living in London with his new young family.

The background to these family dramas — “people marrying, mating and mixing genes” —  is Belfast in the 1980s, a time of great conflict between paramilitary forces, British state security forces and political activists. Yet despite the violence, Theresa views it as “normal” because, as she explains early on in the novel, “she had watched it [Belfast] sink since her childhood from ‘normality’ to its present state”.

What she cannot come to terms with, however, is knowing that someone in the city killed her brother purely because of his religion (he was not known to be a member of any paramilitary organisation). She is plagued by pain, distress and paranoia:

… she arrived too early for an arranged meeting with Kathy in a city-centre pub. She bought a drink and while she waited she looked around at the other customers, the majority of whom were men, until slowly the thought of the man who had killed her brother crept back into her mind. Those men who were laughing in the corner; that man with reddish hair and big, rough hands who was drinking alone; even the white-coated barman, cutting wedges of lemon for gin-and-tonics: any one of them might have done it. She gazed at each of them in turn and thought in cold fright: “Is he the one? Did he do it? Is he the man who murdered Francis?”

The political and religious divide

Admittedly, Theresa is not a terribly likeable person — she’s (understandably) bitter and angry, and all her conversations tend towards the argumentative, particularly where politics is concerned. Her relationship with Robert, initiated in a cafe when she roundly criticises and condemns a piece about Irish literature that he wrote in a magazine, is fraught from the outset but it soon descends into irreconcilable differences because their views on politics and religion are so polarised.

And yet despite her fierce talk and hard-held opinions, there’s a fragility about Theresa that is hard to ignore. Her grief, at times, is palpable, and it is to Madden’s credit that it never descends into maudlin self-pity or sentimentality.

Hidden Symptoms is a short novel — indeed, it was originally published in Faber’s First Fictions anthology where it was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1987 — but it’s so tightly written it would take an age to unpick all the issues and themes it contains. As a dark exploration of bereavement, faith, love, loyalty and violence, you would be hard-pressed to find a book more powerful — or intelligent.

Author, Book review, Faber and Faber, Fiction, general, literary fiction, London, Lucy Caldwell, Northern Ireland

‘All the Beggars Riding’ by Lucy Caldwell

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All-the-beggars-riding-large

Fiction – paperback; Faber & Faber; 253 pages; 2013. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Imagine that you grow up with a father, never knowing that his long absences from the family home are not due to his job, but because he is leading a secret life in which he is married with two other children. This is the premise behind Northern Irish playwright and author Lucy Caldwell’s novel All the Beggars Riding.

The story is told from the perspective of Lara Moorhouse as an adult nearing 40. She’s coming to terms with the break down of her own long-term relationship and the impending death of her mother, and begins writing a kind of memoir about her childhood as part of the healing process. She tries to imagine what it was that her mother, a Harley Street nurse, saw in the man who wooed her but never married her — and why it was that she never confronted him about the truth of their relationship.

It’s a highly readable account, full of emotion — anger, sadness, joy, frustration and shame. Most of all it highlights the way in which one man’s hidden life has long-term repercussions on those he brazenly betrayed.

Despite the premise at its heart — a successful plastic surgeon has a “first” family in Belfast, but hides his “second” family, which comprises a mistress, a son and a daughter, in rather shabby digs in West London — it feels wholly credible throughout. Indeed the author, whom I met at a Faber preview event shortly before the book’s publication last year, told me she’d done mountains of research about men and their hidden families and what she’d discovered was shocking. The effects on the children, particularly when they discovered the truth, were what she found most disturbing.

My only quibble with the book is that the narrator constantly apologises for struggling to express herself, which wears slightly thin, but on the whole this is an engaging — and redemptive — story about family secrets and the power of love.

Author, Book review, Fiction, Kevin Smith, literary fiction, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Sandstone Press, satire, Setting

‘Jammy Dodger’ by Kevin Smith

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Jammy-dodger

Fiction – Kindle edition; Sandstone Press; 320 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Tomorrow, the shortlist for the 2013 Desmond Elliot Prize — an award for new writers — will be announced, so what better time to review Kevin Smith’s Jammy Dodger, which is on the longlist?

Black comedy

Set in 198os Belfast, this debut novel is a darkly comic tale about an audacious literary hoax that goes awry.

The narrator is bohemian slacker Artie Conville, who is joint-editor of a poetry magazine called Lyre — and subtitled “A Supplement for the Imagination” — which is funded by quarterly grants from the government aimed at “normalising life in the province”. Most of the money goes on booze and long lunches and it allows the pair to drift along without ever having to worry about the usual 9 to 5 regime of normal adult life.

But when the grant money looks like drying up, Artie and his co-editor Oliver Sweeney dream up a rather bold and cheeky way to keep the money coming in — they fill the magazine with poetry they have penned themselves but publish it under a pseudonym. This cunning plan looks to be a success until the powers that be want to meet this new exciting poet in person and have him go on a literary tour around Northern Ireland…

An Irish twist

If you think this sounds strangely like the Ern Malley affair, you’d be right. The book does pretty much mirror the events of a real life literary hoax in 1940s Australia.

But Jammy Dodger gives it an Irish twist and the way that Smith cleverly contrasts the beauty of poetry with the godawful violence of The Troubles — which are only ever mentioned in passing — shows a real flare for black comedy.

Sandwich boards on the pavement outside the newsagent’s proclaimed the day’s headlines: Six Soldiers Killed in Lisburn Bombing, (Long, long the
death …), Provos Claim Fun-Run Slaughter, (… Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace / And that high-builded cloud …), Ten Civilians Injured In No
Warning Blast, (… Moving at summer’s pace.)

Peopled with quirky characters who get dangerously embroiled in a series of strange events, Jammy Dodger is one of those books that is a joy to read.

It’s not just the one-liners, of which there are plenty — “‘How’s the wine? Is it amusing?’ he asked, slapping my shoulder. ‘Oh, it’s hilarious. Just don’t get any in your mouth’” — nor the succession of very funny set pieces throughout, but the way it sends up the art world and pokes fun at the whole pretentiousness of literary circles and egotistical writers, including the ways in which certain people are fawned over while talentless wannabes think they are god’s gift to literature.

That said, it also reveres and celebrates literature. It name-checks so many classic authors and poets, it’s enough to warm the very cockles of your heart. Indeed, if you love poetry and poets, then I doubt you’ll find a better novel that celebrates this particular art form. But for me (who doesn’t know very much about poetry) I loved the James Joyce references:

After lunch (beans on toast), I continued with Ulysses. God it was
intense! Hallucinatory almost. The detail. The energy. The flow. The
colours. Paris rawly waking, crude sunlight on her lemon streets … Moist
pith of farls … the froggreen wormwood … mouths yellowed with the pus
of flan Breton … rolls gunpowder cigarettes through fingers smeared with
printer’s ink … sanguineflowered … Old hag with the yellow teeth …
Green eyes … the blue fuse burns deadly … orangeblossoms … breeches of
silk of whiterose ivory … a dryingline with two crucified shirts … Pure
poetry. Every page. Totally absorbed, I read until I realised the
afternoon had gone and then feeling thoroughly Bloomish strolled round
to Kavanagh’s for a pint and a plate of stew.

The book isn’t just a comedy, however. A gentle romance is interwoven into the narrative, which sounds soppy written down like this, but is actually quite touching, because it makes Artie feel like a proper flesh-and-blood character.

On the whole, Jammy Dodger is the kind of novel that might normally have slipped under the radar had it not been for its Desmond Elliot Prize nomination, of which it’s a very worthy contender. It’s a laugh-out-loud funny satire, sharp and witty one moment, tender and painfully honest the next, all delivered with a lightness of touch that marks Smith as a writer to watch.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, David Park, Fiction, Holland/Netherlands, literary fiction, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Setting

‘The Light of Amsterdam’ by David Park

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Light-of-amsterdam_final

Fiction – hardcover; Bloomsbury; 384 pages; 2012. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

They say travel broadens the mind. It can also shake us out of complacency or give us the opportunity to see things in a new light. This is what happens to three people from Belfast who travel to Amsterdam for a long weekend one December.

Three diverse characters

Alan, a university art teacher, is still coming to terms with an adulterous “fling” that resulted in the end of his marriage. Karen, a worker at a care home, is struggling to save enough money for her daughter’s upcoming wedding. And Marion, who runs a garden centre with her husband Alan, is feeling old and unloved.

All three, who do not know each other, are middle-aged. But they have other things in common, too. Each one nurses a private hurt, lacks self-esteem and is beginning to think that life has passed them by. Their individual trips to Amsterdam — all taken on the same weekend and on board the same flight — show them it is possible to change things for the better.

It also shows them that their loved ones are not the people they imagined them to be.

Multiple narratives

As with David Park’s previous novel, The Truth Commissioner, the book is comprised of multiple narratives. But this time around, instead of isolating each narrative thread in a self-enclosed section, Park intertwines them in alternate chapters. This choppiness helps keep the momentum going and reveals the unusual and often unpredictable ways in which these characters bump against each other, both in Belfast and in Amsterdam. And it also helps highlight the similarities between them, such as their poor personal morale and the need to find new meaning in their life and relationships.

As each character’s story unfurls, we get to see their flaws and weaknesses — as well as their understated strengths. There are “lightbulb moments” for each character as they suddenly see things in a new light — the light of Amsterdam of the title — and realise there is a way forward out of their current rut.

Alan, who is trying to relive his youth by attending a Bob Dylan concert, finds a new way to reconnect with his monosyllabic teenage son, who has reluctantly joined him on the trip. Karen, who is on her daughter’s crazy hen party, realises she no longer has to be taken for granted by the self-absorbed young woman she has struggled to raise alone. (I loved this bit, and I think a cheer may have emitted from my lips when the pair of them have the world’s biggest row.) And Marion, in Amsterdam for her birthday, discovers that she has misunderstood her husband’s needs for far too long.

A compassionate novel

The Light of Amsterdam is a gentle, worldly-wise novel about human relationships. It explores the gap between generations — and within marriage — and shows how our desire to be loved and respected is a common trait among all people, regardless of age or background. But it’s also a lovely and evocative portrait of Amsterdam, its tree-lined canals and quiet cobbled courtyards.

The Light of Amsterdam is David Park’s eighth novel. It has just been named on Fiction Uncovered’s list of British fiction for 2012, so expect to hear more about this book and its Belfast-born author in the weeks and months ahead.

Author, Bloomsbury, Book review, David Park, Fiction, literary fiction, Northern Ireland, Publisher, Setting

‘The Truth Commissioner’ by David Park

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TruthCommissioner

Fiction – paperback; Bloomsbury; 372 pages; 2009.

All good things come to those that wait, which is a fairly apt description for how I felt as I read David Park’s The Truth Commissioner. I considered abandoning the book several times, before everything began to kick into gear somewhere around page 242. That’s a lot of pages to wade through, and a lot of information to hold in your head, before things begin to make sense. It’s worth the effort though.

The story revolves around a Truth and Reconciliation Commission designed to heal the scars of Northern Ireland’s past by finding out what happened to citizens who disappeared during the Troubles. It hones in on one particular case in which a 14-year-old boy, Connor Walshe, disappeared, believed killed by the IRA on the basis that he was a “tout”.

The Commission is headed up by Harry Stanfield, a human rights lawyer, especially appointed by the British Prime Minister as the Truth Commissioner because “he has no personal or political baggage to be packed on either side”. But Stanfield, who spent the first 12 years of his life in Belfast, feels no affinity for the place and thinks the process of the Commission is a bit like “an old manged, flea-infested dog returning to inspect its own sick”.

Later we are introduced to three other characters: Francis Gilroy, a former political prisoner who is the newly appointed Minister with responsibility for Children and Culture; James Fenton, a retired RUC detective who now spends his time climbing mountains and helping a Romanian orphanage; and Danny, a young man living in Florida who’s looking forward to the birth of his first child with his Latino girlfriend, Ramona.

The current lives of these four men are explored in rather sizable “pen portraits”, which read almost as if they are standalone stories. This is an interesting approach to take, because it gives the reader a real sense of these people as human beings, rather than as the stereotypical characters one might expect from a book that is about the Troubles (for instance, the Brit, the cop, the IRA leader and the young terrorist). But it also makes for a slightly frustrating read, because you have no knowledge of how these characters are connected, nor how they fit into the nugget of the story, until some 150 pages from the end.

The novel doesn’t hit its stride until the four divergent storylines merge into one. But once the pace picks up it becomes almost thriller-like as you wait for the “truth” to come out: what did happen to Connor and who is to blame?

This is not a book for impatient readers, but it is a rewarding one. Given it’s set in Belfast and explores the notion of relatives reclaiming their dead in a war that raged for 30 years, I had expected the book to focus on politics and religion. But these are mentioned in mere passing, and often with the sense that it was all rather pointless, as these observations by Stanfield attest:

He looks at the faces of those standing outside the drawing office. The wind has whipped their cheeks so that they look as if they bear thin tribal incisions cut in their flesh. And after all, what was it really, except some rather pathetic and primitive tribal war where only the replacement of traditional weapons by Semtex and the rest succeeded in bringing it to temporary attention on a bigger stage?

The Truth Commissioner is essentially a book about people, with foibles and troubled histories, who are trying to find their way in unfamiliar, peaceful terrain. You get the sense that none of the four main characters are bad people, but that they got caught up in events that were “normal” at the time but now, through the lense of peace, look barbaric and wrong. Each of them, grappling with secrets of their own — whether it be Stanfield’s penchant for sleeping with prostitutes or Gilroy’s belief that he’s not cultured enough to be the minister for culture — are plagued by guilt, fear of retribution and denial. Each of them wants a way out. The “truth” isn’t always the answer…