"Ghost Mountain" by Ronan Hession

 “A meditation on grief and loss with some sex in it.” 

One day, on the outskirts of a small town, a mountain suddenly appears. This novel, written like a myth, chronicles the effect the mountain has on the lives of those living near it.

The most distinctive feature of this novel is its prose style. It is written in a deliberately simplistic manner, baldly stating facts, with a lot of repetition. It reminded me of the way that a myth is written: this hero did this, this happened, then he did this. It reminded me of the first paragraph of Kafka's Metamorphosis: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect. He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes." This is telling a fantastic story but it does it in such a pedestrian style that it allows no speculation as to how it can possibly be true. Compare it with four paragraphs taken from Book 3 (Elaine is not cold) of Ghost Mountain:

“As she was explaining everything she thought, ‘Am I cold? Is this a cold thing to think?’

But it was not a cold thing to think.

Elaine asked him what he would do afterwards.

Dominic said he would join a monastery. or he would go back to being the town drunk.” 

Perhaps the only way to tell a fantastic myth is to do it simplistically.

The other feature of the story is the repetition of leitmotifs, something else that crops up in myths and religious texts. For example, it seems that no-one can lie down on Ghost Mountain without feeling the discomfort of a stone pressing against their tailbone. Two characters in separate incidents lose their front teeth. A mother and daughter both vomit into a patch of nettles, although one does it because she is dying and the other because she is pregnant. One character enjoys watching European films, each one being described in the same was, as “a meditation on grief and loss with some sex in it.” (Book 1: Ocho wasn't always like this)

It is these features that make the book haunting (like the mountain, brooding over the landscape) and, despite the echoes of Kafka (and, perhaps, of Ivy Compton-Burnett), utterly original. Other reviewers have detected a Japanese influence and it has also been described as 'post-modern'. 

Selected quotes:

• “The new overseas landowner of Ghost Mountain sat at his desk, eating a sandwich he had bought from his savings. What he thought of as his savings was actually the limited spare capacity on his credit card.” (1: Overseas landowner)
• “He opened the cupboard to look for food but all he saw were ingredients.” (1: Ruth not with you?)
• “Ruth distrusted organised people. Organised people liked to take over, while pretending they were not taking over. Organised people liked to shape things their way and call it helping.” (1: Night on Ghost Mountain.)
• “They had organised a celebration or commemoration or festival. The organised people always seem to be carried away with something or other. They had a whole story about why the date was significant. It all sounded simplistic to Ruth. They were building a bonfire and playing crude, repetitive music. Drugs were involved.” (1: Bitter soup)
• “He and Ruth were like two sides of the same ladder. Her death was a sundering of the ladder down the middle. Holding one half of a ladder is in no way comparable to holding one side of a complete ladder.” (2: Ocho)
• “She thought about how even though young women were so pretty and older men were not so generally pretty, an older man with two missing teeth could still be a cause of jealousy.” (2: Is he dead?)
• “For the first time, Elaine began to understand likeness in her painting. It was not about recording what somebody looked like so that they could always look that way. It was about capturing a moment of change. A simultaneous moment of change in the subject and in the artist.” (2: Likeness)
• “She thought about the artist thinking about his meat pictures. How was he so sure they were terrible? That they weren't terrible art.” (3: Meat Gallery)
• “Ursula did not like landscapes. ... Most of all she disliked the mental projection that landscapes involved. The fly tipping of the mind onto the landscape. The turning of the landscape into things. Into metaphors.” (3: Ghost Mountain)
• “He had learned that credit disguised failure as success. That a person who owned and owed a lot was viewed as rich whereas a person who owned and owed a little was considered poor. That a rich person was someone who had access to credit and that a poor person was someone who had no access to credit.” (3: Christopher)
• “Dominic was no longer Elaine's husband. He was what was called a widower. That word felt new and also very old. It felt like a word that had been worn by many people and which was now offered to him to wear, even though it did not fit him. It felt too big and baggy and heavy. It was not tailored and had no lines. It was generic and it generically erased his past except for one event. My wife has died, it says. And that is who I am now.” (3: Diesel)

Trivia:

I was slightly thrown of kilter in Book 2 when a character seems to become another character momentarily while in a lift. I thought this was a moment of surreal magic. It was a misprint which has now been corrected in the new edition.

Delightfully enigmatic. November 2024; 281 pages

Published by Bluemoose books

I've also read Leonard and Hungry Paul, a delightful novel about new men from the same author.

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

"The Wren, The Wren" by Anne Enright

The Shelbourne hotel Dublin is mentioned in the novel

 The story consists of periods, shuffled chronologically, in the lives of three members of an Irish family. Each has their chance to narrate. Phil, the grandfather was a poet; he remembers his boyhood in the country. Carmel, one of his daughters, ran, or perhaps runs, a language school and brought up her daughter, Nell, as a single parent. Nell is a freelance writer, working for influencers and producing work to market, for example, travel destinations. No-one seems to need to work very hard in order to earn a decent living and, in Nell's case, travel the world but we're not focusing on their economic activity. Rather, the book targets their sex lives.

Phil believes that all poetry is about unrequited love, and that all love is unrequited. He deserts his wife and daughters to travel and marry an American; he probably had multiple affairs as well. Carmel has divorced sex and relationships; the only real loves in her life are her Dadda and her daughter and she abandons a potential partner when it becomes clear that he might expect her to look after him. Nell is trapped in a physically abusive relationship with a man who is clearly seeing other women but whom she is in love with. 

Men certainly don't come out of this well. Most of them are portrayed as violent. The nice ones are needy but they all (except the gay one) expect to be looked after and serviced. And yet Phil the poet seems irresistible to women, Nell can't leave the man who hits her because she loves him. So why can't the women treat the men as potential sperm donors and live without them? Perhaps because, as Mal, the gay friend in Utrecht, tells Nell: "The thing women don't understand is that love and sex are opposite things ... Love requires ... two acts of submission, and sex ... really doesn't." (p 201)

But the joy in this book doesn't lie in its characters, strong though they are, nor in its fragmented and meandering plot, nor in its exploration of the issue of domestic violence, but in its words. The narratives are separated by Phil's poetry, and I don't really understand poetry, but scattered throughout are phrases and sentences of pure gold. Some are descriptive, some are nuggets of wisdom, 

Selected quotes: page references are from the 2023 Jonathan Cape hardback edition

Funny moments:

• "I was making my way out in the big bad world, and for some reason this involved a lot of staying in." (p 10)
• "The Hoover sat gathering its own dust at the top of the stairs." (p 60) 

Perfectly captured descriptions:

• "I stayed over, waking in the morning to the sight of him asleep, his lips easy and full, the air slipping into his body and slipping out again." (p 17)
• "I feel the room carve in two in front of my jostled eyes and space remake itself. That is what the gristle of his soul-splitting prick can do to me. And when he has pulled me apart, I remain whole." (p 53) Oh my goodness. Jostled eyes! Gristle!
• "It was starting to rain again, but there was a brightness in the air. The river ran full and fast, and all the colours were stronger for being wet." (p 157) Wow! So true. Colours are 'stronger' when they are wet.
• "I stared until the air in front of me became particulate." (p 181)  Yes! It is as if the world pixellating in front of your eyes.

Words of wisdom:

• "We don't walk down the same street as the person walking beside us." (p 4) Which is why we need novels.
• "I never tell my mother anything. I am not that stupid." (p 23)
• "Most of the time, I think, people aren't listening to each other, they are just waiting their turn to speak." (p 18)
• "Without beauty there can be no fear." (p 206)

More magical moments:

• "A year out of college, I was poking my snout and whiskers into the fresh adult air and I knew how to be ... My body was not on mute. I knew how to enjoy sex, eat, get drunk and recover, touch myself, touch someone else. I knew how to dance, get a little out of it and have big deep stupid discussions" (p 6) Even at my age, I can remember student days and weren't they just like this!
• "A nightjar, by the way, can ventriloquise. Its song sounds as though it is coming from the other tree. This must be confusing when mating with a nightjar - you'd have to land on a lot of other trees first." (p 9) An original way of saying that you have to kiss a lot of frogs to find your prince, so relevant to Nell in this part of her life.
• "My mother is strongly of the opinion that, if you don't think about yourself then you won't have any problems. For Carmel, having a pain means you are self-obsessed." (p 11)
• "In those days, men were not expected to be around: the difference between married and deserted could be the seven hours your husband spent asleep in bed." (p 68)
• "The same mixture of cooing and shrieking around the cot that happened around the wedding ... It was the sound women make, she thought, when they are offering their lives up for slow destruction." (p 102)
• "Birth was not the end of pregnancy, she thought, it was just pregnancy externalised." (p 110)
• "There were scones on the bottom tier, tiny sandwiches in the middle, fancy pastries at the top - all of which remained untouched. It was a little competition. A cake off." (p 160)
• "I can't stop the giggles. They well up, burst out of my face in a slow-motion, peristaltic wave. I am a broken-hearted woman, trapped in a body that finds everything hilarious. It feels a bit like vomiting." (p 201)
• "The fear I have is the fear of angels. It is not terror, but awe." (p 206)
• "The first words out of every angels mouth are, Do not be afraid." (p 207)
• "Nell's thumbs flying on her screen - as though late capitalism ... could be defeated by hashtags and eating kimchi." (p 216)
• "For Imelda, information was like money. She didn't want you to have it, in case you spent it in the wrong shop." (p 227)
• "This guy's sense of humour is so bone dry, his jokes are identical to not funny at all." (p 246)

It's not so much a novel as a beautiful piece of jewellery, its scintillations catching your eye as you look at if under different slants of light.

February 2024; 273 pages

The author won the Booker Prize in 2007. 

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

"Close to Home" by Michael Magee

 

Sean escaped from Belfast, going to Liverpool to study English Literature. Now he's back in an environment of hardship and hopelessness. He works in a dead-end job for low wages, lives rent-free in a building due to be demolished, steals from the supermarket, cheats taxi drivers and does what he must to get by. He also takes drugs and gets drunk to cope with the depressing bleakness of his life and his future. 

Then, during a party,  he assaults another young man and he is charged with assault. 

The story charts Sean's precarious life. He wants to be a writer but his encounters with the arty-farty student crowd leave him feeling alienated. Temptation is ever present: his friends encourage him to take drugs and, given his prospects, why wouldn't he? Why shouldn't he call in sick? And the aftermath of the Troubles, when terrorists and paramilitaries shot and bombed, is still around.

It's a bleak world and Sean's future seems gloomy. I empathised with him almost immediately and then spent a lot of this book hoping he would behave himself and fearing he wouldn't. There were so many opportunities for him to fail. This made it a powerfully absorbing but sometimes gruelling read.

Selected quotes:

• "Silences hung like curtains around her." (Ch 11)
• "Only a few years before,I had watched her trail Debbie Porter by the hair across the pavement and punch her over and over again until she screamed for Mairead to stop. Now she was smiling along to the poems being read by a woman who had translated Catullus." (Ch 12)
• "She was a vegan. At least, she ordered a vegan meal, and I didn't know why anybody would do that to themselves if they weren't." (Ch 20)
• "It was one of those hugs that asks a lot of the other person." (Ch 20)
• "That leathery look had aged him, and dyeing your hair will only take you so far when you look like a handbag." (Ch 21)

December 2023; 278 pages

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

"Country" by Michael Hughes

 A 2018 Book of the Year in the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement.

The story is the story of the Iliad but transposed to Northern Ireland at the time of the Troubles, just before the ceasefire. The Greeks become Republican gunmen seeking to disrupt the fragile ceasefire; Achilles is their famous sniper Achill (aka Liam O'Brien), Agamemnon is Pig, their commanding officer, his brither Dog is Menelaus, Sid is Odysseus, and old Ned is Nestor. The Trojans are the British, holed up in an army base (called Castle William but some vandals have torn down the W so it had become Illiam), with their various allies including the police and the local Orangemen, Hector is Henry, married to Anna, father of baby Max. Helen is Nellie, married to Dog, but now, having become an informer, she is living with Alex, nicknamed Paris. The Olympian Gods are the Higher-Ups, the untouchable politicians, who make decisions and dispose of men's lives.

It is remarkably faithful to the plot, even including the necessary long speeches and some of the Iliad's hideous descriptions of the effects of violence on the human body. But it works! Written using the contemporary Irish slang, translating meals into fry-ups, chariots into cars and even the funeral games of Patroclus into competitions held between men at a wake. This is a clever and even insightful version of a classic epic.

In fact it is better than that. Yes, part of the pleasure of reading lies in the ability to decrypt it. But its immersion in Irishness and Irishisms give it an utterly authentic feel. 

Selected quotes:

• "Fury. Pure fury. The blood was up. Lost the head completely." (Ch 1; first lines)
• "Told her if she couldn't decide, to just give each of them a number and roll a dice. ... He said you didn't have to do what the dice said, but how you felt when the number came up would show you what you really wanted." (Ch 10) I've advised students to do this in multiple-choice exam papers but not as a way of choosing a boyfriend.
• "She couldn't believe they had a bottle of wine on the table while they were eating. Not that they opened it." (Ch 16)
• "He gave her a wee smiley frown that said, You really don't need to call me sir. And she gave him a wee smiley frown back that said, Och I know, but sure old habits die hard after eight hundred years of oppression. Sir." (Ch 29)
• "Dog hated being wounded. All that sitting around. Fuck all to do. He always ended up thinking. And he really hated thinking." (Ch 34)
• "Thinking gets you nowhere in this game. ... Crack on with the job, and leave the brain-work to the higher-ups." (Ch 35)
• "But like any man who got to be the best at what he did, they promoted him off that job, and sat him in a wee office directing others who weren't half as good." (Ch 37)
• "Death looks like glory to a young man. Get a few more years on you, and glory starts looking a lot like death." (Ch 47)
• "Back at the Ships, Ned was in full flow. He'd seen the like before, many's and many's the time. He'd heard all the pros and cons for and the pros and cons against." (Ch 49)
• "Of all the operations you set in motion, you were lucky if one out of fifty made the news. Most people never appreciated it was hard fucking work. Tedious. Frustrating. Soul-destroying." (Ch 50)
• "You don't listen to what a man says. You watch what he does, and you know who he is." (Ch 58)

Not only is it clever, not only is it well-written, but its transposition  into such a visceral context provides a fresh perspective on the original. Spell-binding.

December 2023; 314 pages

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

"At Swim-Two-Birds" by Flann O'Brien

The key to unlock this labyrinthine but ultimately rewarding book is to realise that it is meta-fiction. In the very first paragraph, the narrator (a student, living with his disapproving uncle, a clerk at the Guinness Brewery in Dublin) discusses his “spare-time literary activities. One beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with.” So he gives three beginnings (of course, there is a fourth beginning, because the book has already begun, with the narrator!):

• About “Pooka MacPhellimey, a member of the devil class”.
• About John Furriskey, the character in a book written, we will later learn, by Dermot Trellis, who is himself a character in stories told by the narrator.
• About Finn Mac Cool, the “legendary hero of old Ireland”, a the subject of many stories, who will go on, after a lot of prevarication, to tell a story about mad King Sweeney.

The book ends with a discussion of madness, which seems appropriate, and the formula “good-bye, good-bye, good-bye”; so there are three endings to go with the three beginnings.

There are stories within stories. At one point we have a story about someone called Bartley being told by someone who is a character (Shanahan) in a story told by a character (Trellis) in a story told by a character (the student) in a story told by the author.

The characters take on a life of their own, interacting, and conspiring to drug the author so he sleeps so that they can live ‘normal’ lives without the author making them do things that they don’t want to do. And towards the end the characters decide to revenge themselves of the author so that one of them writes the story of Trellis being tortured and then put on trial by the characters; he only escapes when his maid, making up the fire in his bedroom, burns the manuscript pages that give life to the rebellious characters.

No wonder it’s confusing!

The narrative moves up and down the levels. It pokes fun of literary conventions (one character complains that although he has been provided with outer clothing he was given no underpants and therefore caught pneumonia; another character is born as a twenty-five year old man) and figures of speech (litotes, synecdoche, anadiplosis and anaphora). As a sort of homage to (or possibly satire on) James Joyce’s Ulysses, several literary styles and genres are used (including different sorts of poetry); the characters repeatedly prefer everyday styles (eg westerns are preferred to Irish myth, even though both may be about cattle rustling). There are foreshadowing and echoes; for example, Finn Mac Cool (a character written about by the student who is written about by the author), who is a figure from Irish myth, tells a story about mad King Sweeny who perches in trees and when Trellis is punished by his characters he is made to roost in a tree.

These foreshadowings and others are considered by Gallagher 1992 [Reflecting Mirrors in Flann O'Brien's "At Swim-Two-Birds" by Monique Gallagher in The Journal of Narrative Technique , Spring, 1992, Vol. 22, No. 2 (Spring, 1992), pp. 128-135 https://www.jstor.org/stable/30225357] as part of a profusion of mirrorings reminiscent of Bach or Escher; others Gallagher suggests are the indifference of the narrator as the pages of Trellis's manuscript are burnt, destroying his characters, reflecting the indifference of Nero as Rome burns; and the multiple duplications, including the joke that is repeated twice and the triple openings of both the student's story and Orlick's story.

It’s very clever and there are moments of beautiful writing. I particularly enjoyed the discussion between Furriskey, Lamont and Shanahan which was a sort of conversation through free association which ranged from death by drowning to Hemlock to Homer to the persecution of the Christians to blindness to harpists to blackheads and pimples and boils. You can hear these three Irishman in the pub, arguing and discussing and getting things wrong.

Another great set piece is when Shanahan recounts a story in the western genre, with all the vernacular, about he and his mates trying to reclaim rustled cattle and holding up a train etc. In the course of this story the cattle rustler at prayer is likened to Brian Boru who was the founder of the O’Brien dynasty (from whom Flann O’Brien had taken part of his pseudonym) and a King of Munster and subsequently High King of all Ireland, a warrior who died defeating the Vikings (who founded Dublin) at the Battle of Clontarf (a seaside resort north of Dublin whose name means ‘Meadow of the Bull’, where James Joyce lived when he was young); the resemblance seems appropriate because many of the exploits of legendary Irish heroes seem to have been glorified cattle rustling.

There are so many in-jokes. Two characters who appear are called “Timothy Danaos and Dona Ferentes” (Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes = “I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts” is a famous line from the Aeneid). There is a wonderfully bad-tempered Good Fairy.

From time to time the frame story intrudes in which the student (who lives with his somewhat censorious uncle) lies in bed, goes to college, goes to the pub and gets drunk, is violently ill, and then goes back home to lie in bed again.

There’s part of me that wants to know what it all means. Great literature, I tell myself, should have a purpose. But does it ever? Is there a purpose for Ulysses? Presumably the work of Wodehouse is intended to make people laugh, to entertain. Is At Swim-Two-Birds no more than a prolonged joke? What is the point of it?

McMullen 1993 [Culture as Colloquy: Flann O'Brien's Postmodern Dialogue with Irish Tradition by Kim McMullen in NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction , Autumn, 1993, Vol. 27, No. 1 (Autumn, 1993), pp.

62-84 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1345981] points out that O'Brien was a member of the first generation that reached adulthood in the new Irish Free State and that the establishment of the time was trying to revivie the Irish language as part of a programme to redefine an Irish identity. McMullen argues that O'Brien was reacting against the monocular vision of Irishness promoted by the Roman Catholic church and other conservatives ideologies by showing that a language is an conglomeration of different influences; hence his incorporation of a variety of texts, from a racing tipster to early Irish epics, from mediaeval nature poetry to the pub jungles of the Workingman's Poet, and that "none of these discourses is privileged; none has the last word". 

Swim-Two-Birds is the rough translation of an Irish placename where there is a church which mad King Sweeny reportedly visited. I'm not sure whether that explains the title of the book.

The selected quotes include some wonderful observations of human behaviour, moments of original and beautiful description

Selected quotes:

There are no chapters so I have used page references for the 1967 Penguin Modern Classics edition.

• "I know the studying you do in your bedroom, said my uncle. Damn the studying you do in your bedroom." (p 11)
• "I am fond of wing-beating in dark belfries, cow-cries in pregnancy, trout-spurt in a lake-top. Also the whining of small otters in nettle-beds at evening, the croaking of small-jays behind a wall, these are heart-pleasing." (p 14)
• "The chest to him was ... pastured from chin to navel with meadows of black man-hair and meated with layers of fine man-meat." (p 14)
• "The mind may be impaired with alcohol, I mused, but withal it may be pleasantly impaired." (p 22)
• "On we slithered with as much sound out if us as an eel in a barrel of tripes." (p 56)
• "Shut the door, said Shanahan, but see you're in the room before you do so." (p 62)
• "He swallowed a draught of vesper-milk, restoring the cloudy glass swiftly to his knee and collecting little belated flavourings from the corners of his mouth." (p 72)
• "His laugh had a dual function, partly to applaud his jest, partly to cloak his anger." (p 93)
• "The idea that all spirits are accomplished instrumentalists is a popular fallacy, said the Good Fairy in a cold voice, just as it is wrong to assume that they all have golden tempers." (p 116)
• "Give the word, said Shorty with a waving menace of his hand, or it's gunplay and gravestones." (p 118)
• "He was as blind as the back of your neck." (p 156)
• "You can steam your face till your snot melts but damn the good it will do to your blackheads if you don't attend to your inside." (p 157)
• "Be damned but he wouldn't die. I'll live, says he, I'll live if it kills me, says he." (p 158)
• "To say which of them is worst, that would require a winter in a web of thought." (p 175)
• "To fly ... towards the east to discover the seam between night and day, that is an aesthetic delight" (p 180)
• "The gift of flight without the sister-art of landing ... is always a doubt." (p 180)

Similar works reviewed in this blog include:

• Lanark by Alasdair Gray: a surreal work with a clear element of meta-fiction
• Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: the grand-daddy of them all
• The Last Simple by Ray Sullivan
• Road-Kill  The Duchess of Frisian Tull by Pete Adams

Flann O'Brien also wrote The Third Policeman

July 2023; 218 pages

Robert McCrum rated this 64th on The Guardian's 100 best novels of all time. Time magazine selected it as one of the 100 best novels since Time began. 

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

"The Third Policeman" by Flann O'Brien

 A wonderful novel, a sort of cross between Ulysses by James Joyce and Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne. The unnamed narrator, a disciple of a crackpot philosopher whose works are critiqued in a series of footnotes, murders a man in the first paragraph and seeks the box containing his money. He then meets the dead man, then the king of one-legged men, and finally a number of policemen who are obsessed with bicycles. 

The reader is swept along through this apparently ridiculous story (there is a rationale which is revealed in the final pages) by the most wonderfully lyrical prose.

I've been looking out for something different in the way of fiction and this is surrealism at its best.

Selected quotes: (I could have picked loads more!)

• "I was born a long time ago." (Ch 1)
• "It ... was known as 'The Wrastler'. If you drank three or four pints of it, it was nearly bound to win." (Ch 1)
• "Something happened ... It was some change which came upon me or upon the room, indescribably subtle, yet momentous, ineffable. It was as if the daylight had changed with unnatural suddenness, as if the temperature of the evening had altered greatly in the instant or as if the air had become twice as rare or twice as dense as it had been in the winking of an eye." (Ch 2)
• "Never before has I believed or suspected that I had a soul but just then I knew I had. I also knew that my soul was friendly, was my senior in years and was solely concerned for my own welfare." (Ch 2)
• "The live right hand had gripped the pot of tea, raised it very awkwardly and slapped a filling into the empty cup." (Ch 2)
• "It is a curious enigma that so great a mind would question the most obvious realities and object even to things scientifically demonstrated ... while believing absolutely in his own fantastic explanations of the same phenomena." (Ch 4)
• "Nearly every sickness is from the teeth." (Ch 4)
• "Your talk ... is surely the handiwork of wisdom because not one word of it do I understand." (Ch 6)
• "You are as lively as twenty leprechauns doing a jog on top of a tombstone." (Ch 6)
• "Anything can be said in this place and it will be true and will have to be believed." (Ch 6)
• "It was a gloomy light and looked exactly as if there was a small area somewhere on the mangle and was merely devoid of darkness." (Ch 7)
• "Omnium is the business-end of everything. If you could find the right wave that results in a tree, you could make a small fortune out of timber for export." (Ch 7)
• "He is as crazy as bedamned, an incontestable character and a man of ungovernable exactitudes." (Ch 10)
• "It is a great thing to do what is necessary before it becomes essential and unavoidable." (Ch 10)
• "She now seemed to rest beneath my friendly eyes like a tame fowl which will crouch submissively, awaiting with out-hunched wings the caressing hand." (Ch 11)
• "'Is it about a bicycle?' he asked." (Ch 12)

October 2022; 206 pages

Other books by Irish authors reviewed in this blog can be found here. This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

"Paddy Clarke ha ha ha" by Roddy Doyle

A fictionalised memoir of an Irish childhood. Paddy grows up with his ma and da, his brother Sinbad (Francis) and his sisters, and the other boys of the neighbourhood. They go to school, they fight, they play football, they dare one another to steal from shops, start fires, they run down construction pipes. This is no idyll; it is a raw and honest account of childhood. Teeth are lost, a boy dies, friendships are made and broken. And as the narrative progresses a dark shadow grows. Paddy's ma and da begin to argue and fight.

The voice is the authentic voice of Irish childhood. My friend 'Karl' writes stories about Ireland and I could here his voice in the way Doyle uses language. The words and the syntax have an authentic Irish lilt to them.

To capture the essence of young Paddy Clarke, the narrative rambles. Paddy is simply too young, or too clever, to keep his thoughts in a single track. He may be describing the building of a new housing estate but that segues into how the cows were taken from the farm in a lorry and how Uncle Eddie, the farmer's brother, hit a cow with a stick when it slipped in the mud and how he used to run down the road to get the evening paper for his brother. He may be talking about the naming of their football team but this progresses into the boys investigating the first names of their mothers. A dreadful family outing in da's new car (which he hasn't yet learned to drive) in the pouring rain has all the elements of family life including the tension between ma and da, the relationship between Sinbad and Paddy, and the fact the when little Sinbad wouldn't ever smile for his photograph.

It sounds like a nightmare. Just stream of consciousness rambling. But it allows Doyle to explore his characters in all their complexities; it allows him to build a picture of his people from all the possible angles so that we see them as real, with faults and frailties and strengths and needs. There is no shirking the genuineness of the people portrayed. The structure of this book is hidden deep down. It is not so much a narrative as an atmosphere. As childhood progresses the dark clouds slowly gather and innocence becomes maturity.

A stunning portrayal of childhood well worth the 1993 Booker Prize.

It is difficult to select quotations from this book because so much of the brilliance is diffused across the pages but here are a few samples:

• "Jesus had his head tilted sideways, a bit like a kitten."
• "She was Mister O'Connell's girlfriend, although she wasn't a girl at all; she'd been a woman for ages."
• "Kevin turned his back to the sea and the wind and lit the match. He turned and saved the flame by the shield of his hand. I loved the way he could do that."
• "When my da was standing up he stood perfectly still. His feet clung to the ground. They only moved when he was going somewhere. My ma's feet were different. They didn't settle. They couldn't make their minds up."
• "She let go of my leg. She always said nothing when she was being annoyed. She clicked and pointed."
• "He was younger than me, and smaller. Safe smaller; he'd never be able to kill me, even if he was a brilliant fighter."
• "My ma said that you should chew the food well before you swallowed it. I never did; it was a waste of time and boring."
• "I looked for lipstick on his collar ... There wasn't any. I wondered, anyway, why there'd be lipstick on the collar. Maybe the women were bad shots in the dark."
• "They were both to blame. It took two to tango. It didn't take three; there was no room for me."

You will have your own selection when you read it and you must read it because this childish Joycean Odyssey is a masterclass in writing.

February 2019; 282 pages

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

"The testament of Mary" by Colm Toibin

This is a wonderful novella. The aged Mary, close to death, is reflecting on the terrible events that led to the crucifixion and death of her son. The son whom she sees as the flesh and blood little boy she bore, nursed, weaned, nurtured, and in whom she took such joy. The boy who died.

Now she is being 'looked after' and closely supervised by two men who ask her questions, hoping that the story she tells will corroborate their beliefs that her son was the Son of God.

A great story and told with beautiful detail. But what marks this tiny fiction out as extraordinary, leading to a Booker prize nomination in 2013, is the perfection of the prose. Toibin writes like an angel.

Selected quotes:

• "The bride and groom more like a couple to be sacrificed, for the sake of money, or status, or inheritance" (p 27)
• "And there was a hushed holding-in of things, no wind, no rustling in the leaves of trees, no animal sounds. Cats moved out of sight, and shadows - even the very shadows - stayed as they were." (p 30)
• "Death needs time and silence. The dead must be left alone with their new gift or their new freedom from affliction." (p 31)
• "They would have done anything to divert the stream, make it meander on the plain and dry up under the weight of the sun." (p 32)
• "When he took his last breath, when he was fully part of the sea, an invisible aspect of their rhythm. And during those days then, as river water slowly took on the taste of salt and they buried him and he lay fresh in the earth." (p 32)
• "A man filled with power, a power that seemed to have no memory of years before, when he needed my breast for milk, my hand to help steady him as he learned to walk, or my voice to soothe him to sleep." (p 54)
• "There are times in these days before death comes with my name in whispers, calling me towards the darkness, lulling me towards rest, when I know that I want more from the world. Not much, but more." (p 97)
• "The world has loosened, like a woman preparing for bed who lets her hair flow free." (p 104)

Beautiful. January 2018; 104 pages

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013

Toibin has also written (reviewed in this blog):

• The Story of the Night
• House of Names
• Brooklyn
• Long Island

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

"Dubliners" by James Joyce

Dubliners is a book of short stories written by the incomparable James Joyce, master of language, and published in 1914.

Cliffs Notes has a full glossary for Dubliners here:
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/d/dubliners/study-help/full-glossary-for-dubliners

The Sisters
This is narrated by a boy who lives with his uncle and aunt and concerns the death of an old priest who had taught the boy, of whom the boy was fond. He has expected the priest's death but hears the news from Old Cotter who hints that there was something wrong about his relationship with the priest. The next day he goes with his aunt to the house and meets Nannie and Eliza, the sisters of the title (and the sisters of the deceased priest), who talk about the events leading to the priest's death.

Joyce is brilliant at authentic dialogue. He uses no obvious markers for dialect but you can hear the Irish in phrases such as:

• Education is all very fine and large
• Ah, there's no friends like the old friends ... when all is said and done, no friends that a body can trust
• So one night he was wanted for to go on a call

He is also a master of tantalising. In the third paragraph Old Cotter says that "there was something uncanny" about the priest but it is not till the end of the story we discover the incident that made Cotter think this. On the second page, the narrator remarks that "I knew that I was under observation" but he fails to say why.

He is also the master of description. The priest takes snuff but his hand trembles and he spills it. The narrator is distracted from prayer because he notices the old woman's clothing: "how clumsily her skirt was hooked at the back and how the heels of her cloth boots were trodden down all to one side."

He can also say things without saying them. Eliza tells how Father O'Rourke took charge of everything, including the insurance and when 'my aunt' says "wasn't that good of him" Eliza shakes her head and says:  "Ah, there's no friends like the old friends ... when all is said and done, no friends that a body can trust". Clearly Eliza doesn't trust Father O'Rourke!

And Joyce beautifully mixes modes. The news of the death, a spiritual passage, is delivered by a man puffing on his pipe to a boy eating his stirabout. His uncle's speech contrasts the physical (boxing, taking exercise, cold baths) with the spiritual (Rosicrucian, Education). And why does the narrator tiptoe into the room where the corpse lies, why does he worry that eating crackers might make too much noise, why, after Eliza has talked of her brother's breakdown, does she stop and listen, as if the corpse will make a comment?

In An Encounter two schoolboys play truant and encounter a strange man who talks of boys and sweethearts and of whipping bad boys and how he would like to whip a boy, "there was nothing in this world he would like so well as that."

Again, this isn't really a story, for nothing is resolved; it is more of a vignette. But Joyce sketches pictures so compellingly.

I liked the way he used adjectives: one only to a noun. Because he can only use one adjective it has to be exactly the right one. When each noun has its own perfect adjective, the paragraph is painted with the apparent minimum of artifice.

I loved the ending. The narrator has to make an excuse to get away from the weird man; he calls his friend who comes to him. "He ran as if to bring me aid. And I was penitent; for in my heart I had always despised him a little." At the end of a story about one thing, a single sentence opens up a new dimension to explore.

In Araby a young boy fancies a girl. She isn't allowed to go the Araby bazaar at the weekend so he promises he will go and bring something back for her. But his uncle (he lives with his uncle and aunt) forgets and returns home late and he can only get to the bazaar when it is closing. It isn't as magical as it seems, the man at the turnstile looks weary, many stalls are closed, the lights are going off, the lady who asks if he wants to buy anything is not encouraging. He buts nothing

This is a poignant story; we have all experienced the timidity of youth. But it is also about how are illusions about the world of adulthood are destroyed by the mundaneness of reality.

Ironically, Joyce turns the everyday into magic with his pitch-perfect descriptions. The girl he admires can make him tingle with excitement: "my body was like a harp and her gestures were like fingers running upon the wires." Streets flare, street-singers chant nasally, cold air stings and houses on either side of a street "gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces." The perfect adjective turns prose to poetry.

I know this feeling! In Eveline "she looked around the room, reviewing all its familiar objects which she had dusted once a week for so many years, wondering where on earth all the dust came from." In wonder if Joyce knew that it was mostly from her own dead skin cells, discarded and shed when they were no longer needed. That would be a story!

The woman considers leaving the house in which she grew up, leaving her job at the Stores, leaving her father who has always been angry since his wife died and who makes her life so hard, to run away with Frank, a sailor, on the boat to Buenos Aires. She gets as far as the barrier but, in the end, she cannot leave it all behind.

After the Race follows the fortune of Jimmy Doyle, a young Irishman, "too excited to be genuinely happy", who is honoured to be riding in the back of a French car in the race; his rich butcher father intends that he shall invest in the car salesroom that the driver intends to start. The young men (there are two others, and later and fifth and a sixth) celebrate the race and one thing leads to another and they drink and party and drink and row out to a yacht and drink and make speeches and have a little supper and drink and gamble. And of course Doyle loses.

This is Joyce being political. In the opening paragraph, the spectators "raised the cheer of the gratefully oppressed"; they cheer for their friends, the French. Doyle's father, when young, was "an advanced Nationalist" but "modified his views" in order to make money, including from police contracts. Doyle, while drunk, "made a speech, a long speech" which "must have been a good speech" because they clapped when he sat down and they together drink toasts to "Ireland, England, France, Hungary, the United States of America." But in the end the losers are the American and the Irishman. This is about how Ireland is gulled and cheated and taken advantage of.

In Two Gallants, Lenehan, a man with no obvious means of support who often sponges drinks in pubs, is admiring Corley who is boasting about a romantic conquest he has made, a tart who brings him presents. Corley meets her and Lenehan has to kill the time until he returns from his escapade. He is hungry so he goes into a working-man's cafe and, after enquiring the price, buys a plate of peas and a ginger beer. He wonders if Corley has transacted his business with the "slavey". He talks to other friends and wanders around until it is time to meet up with Corley again. He sees Corley with the woman and has a premonition that the mission has failed. At last he meets up with Corley to discover...

Another beautiful story told with perfect observation. The down at heel gentility of the men, desperate to try anything, is at perfect odds with the description of them as gallants. Their characters are beautifully described. The twist comes in the very last line and makes you reappraise the situation perfectly. But the magic of the prose is the perfect way in which he describes everything. This is a really thin story, as underfed as Lenehan, but each detail is perfectly placed. You can build your own story (which he destroys at the end) exactly because he has laid the foundations so carefully. My favourite moment is when Lenehan watches Corley and the unnamed girl returning and observes how "Corley's head ... turned at every moment towards the young woman's face like a big ball revolving on a pivot." This moment of exquisite observation puts Corley perfectly as the supplicant while offering a dehumanised analogy. Wonderful.

Mrs Mooney who runs The Boarding House watches as her daughter, Polly, flirts with Mr Doran. When she judges that he is in so deep that he must marry, she asks to see her. The best description in this relatively simple tale is of the breakfast table at the boarding house: "covered with plates on which lay yellow streaks of eggs with morsels of bacon-fat and bacon-rind"

A Little Cloud follows Little Chandler; he has met his old pal Ignatius Gallaher who is now a journalist in London back in Dublin for a few days to patronise his old mates. Chandler wishes he were like his old friend and is resentful; surely he could have done better for himself. He goes home to his wife and has to look after the baby while she pops out for a few groceries; the child cries and Chandler is angry at which point it starts to scream. She is accusing when she returns and he cries secret tears of remorse.

Surely only Joyce could write about posh women in "noisy dresses" who "caught up their dresses, when they touched earth, like alarmed Atlantas" thus mingling acute observation of human foibles with myth. Or write about slum housing as "a band of tramps, huddled together along the river-banks ... stupefied by the panorama of sunset."

Deoc an doruis is Irish Gaelic for 'a drink at the door' ie the last drink before parting.

"Stupefied by the panorama of sunset". What a phrase!

Counterparts. Farrington is a clerk in an office. He has failed to finish copying some correspondence and is hauled over the coals by his boss who is physically much smaller and weaker than him. When he returns to his place he needs a drink and sneaks out of the office; he is a little tipsy when he returns and cannot concentrate properly; he sends the paperwork up to his boss incomplete. Found out, he resorts too cheek and is forced to apologise. That evening he pawns his watch for some drinks. He has a good time but he is defeated by a younger man in arm wrestling.Drunk, angry and resentful he returns home to find his wife out and his son, one of five children, who is supposed to cook Farrington his dinner has let the fire go out. As he beats his son with his stick the boy cries: "I'll say a Hail Mary for you, pa, if you don't beat me ... I'll say a Hail Mary ..."

Pathetic. Empathy.

In Clay, Maria, who works at the laundry, has the evening off to see her family; it is not clear whether she is a sister, an aunt or a mother. She takes them plumcake but it is stolen from her by a man in a tram. Because it is Hallow Eve they play games: she is blindfolded and made to feel something squidgy but the room goes quiet and when she tries again she finds a prayer book. She sings a song and Joe, her brother, nephew or son, is moved to tears.

A Painful Case follows Mr James Duffy, a bank clerk who leads a quiet life with his work, his lunch, his dinner and his books. One day he meets a married woman with her daughter; over the next few months he meets the mother more and more and more until she betrays the idea that she wants something physical and he breaks it off. She is interested in his thought and his writing and asks why he doesn't publish and he tells her he would not "submit himself to the criticisms of an obtuse middle class which entrusted its morality to policemen and its fine arts to impresarios."

Four years later he reads in the paper of her death, run over by a train, possibly suicide. He walks in the Park and sees the recumbent bodies of lovers at the bottom of the slope "in the shadow of the wall". He realises that "he was an outcast from life's feast." He realises that he will die unmourned, unremembered. It ends when the feeling he has had that she is somehow with him ends. "He could not feel her near him in the darkness nor her voice touch his ear. He waited for some minutes listening. He could hear nothing: the night was perfectly silent. He listened again: perfectly silent. He felt that he was alone."

It's a wonderful end. When her spirit leaves him you feel that he might be at peace but then the final sentence condemns him to the hell of loneliness.

Ivy Day in the Committee Room starts with O'Connor warming himself by the fire which Old Jack, the steward, is struggling to keep going; O'Connor should be out canvassing for Tricky Dicky Tierney but it is cold and wet so he is skiving off, although he still has hopes of being paid. Old Jack is worried about his drunkard nineteen-year-old son. Hynes arrives and argues with Old Jack about the relative merits of Tierney, a publican, and Colgan, a "good, honest bricklayer". Colgan, Hynes opines, will not toady up to Edward Rex (Edward VII is to visit Dublin, setting the story before 1907). Now Henchy, another canvasser for Tierney, arrives; he is also worried about whether Tierney will pay. Hynes goes and Henchy wonders whether he is a "spy for the other camp". Father Keon comes in; he is very timid and looking for Fanning; when invited to come in or to sit down he says "no, no, no" and he is desperate to be of no trouble. He goes. Shortly some bottles of stout arrive. The men have to borrow a corkscrew to open them and when more fellows arrive after the corkscrew is sent back they open them by putting the bottles by the fire until the cork pops out. The men start to discuss politics and remember Parnell (they wear Ivy in their buttonholes; Ivy Day, 6th October, is in memory of Irish Nationalist MP Charles Stewart Parnell who led calls for Irish Home Rule as an MP in the House of Commons until 1890 when he lost the support of the RC Church following the exposure of his long adulterous affair with Kitty O'Shea; Parnell died in 1891). At the end of the story Hynes recites a poem he has written (in iambic tetrameters) in honour of Parnell.

This story demonstrates Joyce's mastery of dialogue. The shifting population of men discuss shifting topics. What they mean is not always clear from what they say but what they say reveals something of their inner thoughts. Many of the sentences are constructed so as to suggest their dialect:

• "Fanning has such a loan of him"
• "I'm greatly afraid our friend is not nineteen carat."
• "Only I'm an old man now I'd change his tune for him."
• "in all my vermin"

The secret is to add a word that is out of place or to tweak the word order of the sentence so that what might otherwise be a cliche becomes fresh and new and noticeable. He also does this with his descriptions, eg "Imminent little drops of rain hung at the brim of his hat". Another technique he enjoys is to conjoin two contradictory things: Old Jack has a bony, hairy face with moist eyes and a moist mouth. O'Connor speaks in a "husky falsetto". The apologetic priest "opened his very long mouth suddenly to express disappointment and at the same time opened wide his very bright blue eyes to express pleasure and surprise". The priest himself is enigmatic: as a representative of the Church who brought down Parnell and so split the Nationalists, he should be expected to be dominant rather than submissive; the men don't know what he stands for.

Mrs Kearney is A Mother. She is determined that her daughter should be paid the eight guineas agreed to accompany verious singers at the four Irish Revival concerts. But Mt Holohan and Mr Fitzpatrick are hopeless organisers and they simply haven't drawn in the customers. The first two concerts happens, feeless, and the third is cancelled but Mrs Kearney will not permit anyone onstage at the fourth concert until her daughter is paid. At last four pounds are produced but in the end the standoff backfires; it is doubted that Miss Kearney will ever get another booking in Dublin. So the incompetent flourish at the expense of the righteously indignant.

Mr Kearney is a shadowy figure but we learn, delightfully, that "his conversation, which was serious, took place at intervals in his great brown beard."

Grace
A man is found bleeding at the foot of some stairs in a bar. The barmen (Joyce calls the 'curates') help to revive him and he is put into a cab and taken home; it appears that his wife and children have been waiting for him to bring home some money. So his friends decide to persuade him to go back to church, hoping that he will then lead a better life. Most of this short story is taken up with them promoting their subterfuge at his bedside.

Wonderful phrases include:

• "The ring of onlookers distended and closed again elastically" (at the moment when medical attention is required!
• "His line of life had not been the shortest distance between two points." Whose is?
• "M'Coy, who wanted to enter the conversation by any door, pretended that he had never heard the story." We've all done this!
• "He took up the bottle and helped others to a little more, Mr M'Coy, seeing that there was not enough to go round, pleaded that he had not finished his first measure. The others accepted under protest." We all know someone like M'Coy.

The Dead starts with the sentence: "Lily, the caretaker's daughter, was literally run off her feet." which makes it an early misuse of the word 'literally'. It concerns a Christmas party where relatives and friends gather and relax and enjoy music, food, dancing and drink together. But there is always an undercurrent of tension. Freddy is drunk when he arrives and is only encouraged by the hard-drinking Mr Browne. Gabriel, the star of the party, quarrels with Miss Ivors who has decided political views; she leaves the party early. Lily the maid is bitter about men trying to take advantage of her although we never learn any details behind a moment's outburst. And Gabriel's wife, Gretta, whom he adores ("A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart") is mourning for the love of her life, a young boy who loved her when she was a fresh maid; he died. It seems that Joyce is saying that we are all palimpsests: behind all that we say and do now are the memories of the people we have known and the people we have been.

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