"Holding" by Graham Norton

A murder mystery set in a small village in Ireland, a place full of lonely people with unfulfilled destinies. Whose are the bones that are discovered when a new housing estate is being built? How do they relate to a love triangle from thirty years ago? Is the local policeman capable of investigating?

Despite the overwhelming sadness surrounding most of the characters, I felt that this was an attempt at a comedy murder mystery. The characters were stereotypical : the fat policeman, the alcoholic housewife, the cheating husband, a whole chorus-line of unfulfilled spinsters etc and although there were attempts to give them more dimensions, the fact that these too were from the stock of the genre failed to make any of them come alive for me. 

The story was told in the past tense from the multiple perspective of several of the main characters.

TV adaptation

I have been watching the ITV adaptation of Holding. Whereas the theme of the book seems to be chastity and regret, in the adaptation sex is rampant. The three Ross sisters at the centre of the novel are spinsters who regret their never-been-touched status. In the adaptation they are all having sex and the middle sister is having a lesbian affair with the mother of the young lad who is shagging the younger sister (who looks too young to have been in love with a man who died twenty years ago). One of the investigating policemen is also gay, in a reversal of his sexuality in the book. The purpose of this policeman and the completely new character of the young lad seems to be to add some male eye candy to the programme. The back story of the housekeeper in the Garda barracks has been gratuitously changed and the tenure of the main character dramatically shortened from fifteen years to just over three. There are performances in a village fete (actors love showing off; I suspect this was added as padding for their enjoyment; it certainly didn't enhance mine) which also isn't in the book. The dramatic final was similar to but not the same as the book's ending; I suppose I was grateful that at least the murderer was not changed. This has to be one of the loosest adaptations ever made, reminding me of the film version of Live and Let Die which shares its title and the character of James Bond but almost nothing else with the Ian Fleming book of the same name.

Selected quotes:

• "It was widely accepted by the residents of Duneen that, should a crime be committed and Sergeant Collins managed to apprehend the culprit, it would be very unlikely that the arrest had involved a pursuit on foot. People liked him well enough, and there was no name-calling as such, but it was still quite unsettling for the village that their safety depended on a man who broke into a sweat walking up for communion." (1.1; opening lines)
• "Time didn’t pass in Duneen; it seeped away." (1.1)
• "Some marriages combust, others die, and some just lie down like a wounded animal, defeated." (1.2)
• "like an animal spraying its scent she had covered every available surface with much-dusted china figurines and small glass ornaments." (1.3)
• "Was it really possible that she could have wasted so much of her own life out of a demented sort of politeness?" (1.8)
• "Life had taught them well. Feelings were to be feared, pain was to be avoided at all cost, and if that meant not experiencing joy, then so be it." (1.11)
• "He had managed to get through decades of adulthood without emotional attachment," (1.13)
• "such a powerful performance of ‘You’ll Never Walk Alone’ that it sounded like more of a threat than a promise." (1.13)
• "it gave the smokers an air of respectability rather than standing huddled against the wall like some very unappetising prostitutes." (2.1)
• "The brief flurry and excitement of his love triangle had soon flatlined." (2.1)
• "A funeral was always going to be more important than the person who was being buried." (2.14)

March 2022

A competently written example of the genre. For murder mystery with a light touch I would recommend: 

• Headline Murder, Stop Press Murder, and Front Page Murder by Peter Bartram
• The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
• The Cinderella Killer and A Decent Interval by Simon Brett and others of the Charles Paris series

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Strumpet City" by James Plunkett

The story of some interlinked lives in Dublin in the years before the First World War. There are rich people such as Mr Bradshaw who own gerry-built tenements, and his well-meaning but ineffectual wife, and their friend Mr Yearling, an employer who sympathises with the poor workers. There are the priests: Father O'Connor, blinded by his faith to the material hunger of his parishioners (to the extent of kidnapping children who are being sent by their parents to Liverpool so they don't starve to prevent them being sent into Protestant homes), Father Gilchrist, his poor-sympathising superior who is sinking into alcoholism, and Father O'Sullivan who does modest good. And there are the legions of the poor: Mary who loses her job as maid to the Bradshaws and becomes the wife of Fitz, a foundry worker, who is best friend to Pat who has fallen in love with good-hearted prostitute Lily; there are the others who live in their tenement: Hennesey who can never hold down a job but fathers a growing brood on his anxious wife; Rashers, beggar and busker, who lives in the basement with his dog Rusty; and Mulhall, a man so vigorous you can never imagine him going sick.

The theme of the book is the battle between the workers, striking for better wages, and the employers, determined to resist them. The backdrop is poverty and hunger. There are good people and there are bad people. Tragedies happen and there is happiness. The key of a good book is whether I wanted to read to the end to find out what happened ... and I did. The key to a good book is whether it contains moments that make you sit back and reflect upon the world ... and it did (they are below). But it sometimes felt a bit worthy and a bit preachy; there was no question who was right and who was wrong.

Great moments:
BOOK ONE 1907–1909
Chapter 1

• “Mrs. Bradshaw, in her efforts to stifle a scream, continued to pour strong tea over the tablecloth for some seconds.”
• “Almost from birth she had shaped his mind to regard life as a trivial moment which had slipped by mistake through the sieve of eternity, a scrap of absurdity which would glow for a little while before it was snatched back into eternity again.”
• “She thought, a little wistfully, that a touch of human weakness in her husband would have been nice, her husband who was so good but at times so meticulous, at times so grumpy with rectitude.”
• “The rockets made a playground of the sky.”

Chapter 2

• “‘The poor are generally regarded as being more religious than the rich,’ Yearling continued, ‘but of course that isn’t true. They are simply more impressionable and have less to lose.’”

Chapter 3

• “In this country the ones that don’t fight are not worth your attention and the ones that do bring nothing but heartbreak.”

Chapter 4

• “Miss Gilchrist’s partial paralysis remained, until in the end Mr. Bradshaw made up his mind. Her removal to the workhouse upset Mrs. Bradshaw for several months.”

Chapter 6

• “To get married. To sleep in the sweat of one bed and deposit in due time a few more animal faces among the dirt and the dilapidation.”

Chapter 9

• “But he had come to see that the security itself was a mirage; people he did not know and would never meet decided its extent and continuance for reasons that suited only themselves. He and the others did not count.”

BOOK TWO 1910–1912
Chapter 1

• “You were never so destitute that the only piece of property you ever owned was your poor body.”

Chapter 4

• “I’m a Catholic. I don’t want to be made ashamed of my Church.”
• “The poorer and hungrier they were, the less fitted to stand up against weather. The poorer and the hungrier, the more often they had to face it.”
• “That was one good thing about religion. No one owned it. No one could put a wall around it and lock the gate on you.”

Chapter 5

• “Horses, when you worked with them for a long time, he thought, were like any other working mate. Some were lazy and forgetful, some had good humours and bad, some were inexhaustible and patient and long suffering, pulling loads without flinching until the great heart inside them burst.”
• “But you couldn’t stop them using machinery. Machinery meant more profit, and profit was the beginning and the end of everything. Roads and bridges and buildings would be reduced to rubble wherever they impeded profit. Men would be laid off and children would go hungry. For the sake of the machines families would know want.”
• “There is no such thing as companionship ... when it comes to coping with the melancholy intimations of Anno Domini.”

Chapter 6

• “the gardens of the well-to-do he despised as so many useless acres of multi-coloured vegetation.”
• “When you were destitute nothing lucky ever happened. The more you were in want, the more you’d go without ... if it was raining soup, you’d have nothing but a fork.”

Chapter 7

• “The great thing was not to be clever but to have Faith."

BOOK THREE 1913–1914 
Chapter 6

• “Socialism, as a very eminent Jesuit has clearly shown, is the worst enemy of the working man. It uproots his confidence in hierarchical order. It preaches discontent. It makes him covetous of the property of his social superiors, and impatient with the trials and obligations of his own station in life.”

Chapter 8

• “There was a time when he had intended to grow a beard because it seemed a pity not to give expression to one’s total potentiality.”

Chapter 9

• “Poverty, he had noticed before, had its own peculiar smell. A man’s station could be judged by what the body exhaled. Expensive odours of brandy and cigars; sour odours of those who nourished nature with condensed milk and tea.”

Chapter 11

• “the cupped depression worn in the granite flag at the entrance gate by countless churchgoing feet.”

December 2019

Other fiction by Irish authors reviewed in this blog may be found here.

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Brooklyn" by Colm Toibin

Longlisted for the Booker Prize and winner of the Costa Award in 2009.

Eilis, younger daughter of a widowed mother, grows up in a small town in  1950s Dublin. Despite her intelligence, she can only get a part time job serving in a shop. Father Flood, a priest visiting his home town from Brooklyn, NY, arranges for her to go to New York and for a room and a job to be waiting for her. She realises that Rose, her elder sister, has sacrificed her own future to look after the mother, what with the three boys working in England and all. Eilis proceeds to fall in love in New York; then she is called back to Ireland.

At times this novel read like a documentary. Every last detail is lovingly recorded, from brother Jack's handwriting to seasickness on the Atlantic crossing to how to get through immigration to the nervous Jewish law professor. I found this rather over the top. I understand that the modern dictum is that the author should know every last detail about the characters down to what they carry in their pockets but I am not sure how much it needs to be shared: Shakespeare's stage directions are minimal compared with those in eg Pinter's The Homecoming or Osborne's Look Back in Anger; does this not then leave more for the audience to fill in. Certainly there were an awful lot of details that didn't add to the plot and I didn't think you needed that level of detail to make me know the character of the protagonist.

There were delightful moments: I loved the split in the boarding house between the prim and proper young ladies and those who wanted a good time; and Father Flood was reassuringly practical and empathetic. But the plot as a whole didn't really grip me until the conflict began between the mother who seemed to be manipulating Eilis to force her to stay in Ireland and Eilis missing her fella. This wasn't until the last quarter so the book was a slow burn.

Eilis had a very pedestrian inner life as well. Every dilemma she faced was spelt out clearly. This actually was a brilliant feature of the book because it made you follow her uncertainties. Did she love the boy or not? Even at the end you're not exactly sure but isn't that the way we all are? We weigh up our options (perhaps a little less cold-bloodedly than Eilis) based on our perceptions (which are perhaps a little less clear than Eilis) and we come to a conclusion which we will never know is right or wrong and which we might in any case change later on down the line. This was a tremendous strength of the book.

A carefully constructed jewel.

May 2016; 252 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God