Crace Notes

The Booker Prize winner will be announced tomorrow, October 15th, which is as good an excuse as any to run this interview I conducted with Jim Crace (right) way back at the start of the year. Crace has been shortlisted for HARVEST, of course, which he says will be his last book.
  And so to the interview:

Jim Crace is a Titan of the modern English novel. From Continent (1986) and The Gift of Stones (1988) on to Quarantine (1997) and The Pesthouse (2007), he has won a slew of literary prizes without ever losing his popular touch. Hailed as the natural heir to William Golding, he has just published his latest novel, Harvest, to universal acclaim.
  When we meet at Dublin’s Brooks Hotel, he suggests that there is ‘a certain icy distance’ to his novels, this on the basis that he is not an autobiographical writer, but in person he is warm and friendly. For a publishing veteran, he is also charmingly direct about the appeal of being a novelist.
  “It’s such fun writing books,” he says. “And it’s a tremendous opportunity to be working in a form that is both mischievous and wise at the same time. I don’t want to sound New Age-y about it, but narrative knows a lot. Fiction has been around for thousands of years and it’s got all sorts of moves. As a writer, you shouldn’t resist them – you should listen out for them, because you can bet it’ll come up with better things than you can come up with.”
  Crace, to be fair, has come up with his fair share. He invented a whole new landmass for his debut, Continent, which won three prizes straight out of the gate.
  “I genuinely was naïve. When I brought out Continent, I thought the best that would happen was that my mum would like it, even if she didn’t read it, and that my cousins would buy it. And then, within about three weeks, it won three of the main prizes – the Guardian prize, the David Higham prize and the Whitbread.” He grins. “And I thought this was the most natural thing in the world.”
  He very modestly credits luck with the best part of his success. “I was lucky in that my natural voice, my ‘singing’ voice as a writer, was a rare one. That’s not to boast about it – it just had this unusual tone. There were plenty of writers around who were just as good as me that didn’t do as well as me, because they were writing conventional books brilliantly, but there were plenty of them around. I was writing books that might have been okay, but they were of their own kind.”
  Perversely, Crace seems much happier talking about the failings in his writing.
  “I’ve always felt a little bit embarrassed that my books aren’t more autobiographical,” he says. “The reason they’re not, of course, is that I don’t have an autobiographical life. I’ve had a long marriage, a happy childhood, no ill-health, and literature doesn’t like any of those things. Happiness writes white, to use that phrase. But I’ve always felt that somehow or another that this was a failing.”
  If it is a failing, it’s of the Samuel Beckett variety, where the writer is urged to fail, fail again, fail better. Time and again Crace has offered us stories in which individuals rise to the challenge of adapting to periods of great change.

  Harvest, narrated by one Walter Thirsk, is a story about how mediaeval English villagers react when their ancient commonage is threatened by the enclosures that represent the future of agriculture. It’s a story that’s ‘knitted into the fabric of English and Irish history’, he says, although it’s not without contemporary resonance. Witness the soya farmers, for example, thrown off their land to make way for cattle in South America.
  “There’s this idea,” he says of his abiding theme, “that everything new worth having is paid for by the loss of something old worth keeping. There’s a lovely balance there, and of course, fiction likes that. So it suits me to set novels at a time of change, when things will be gained and things will be lost. The reason I’m interested in that is not because I know the answer, but because I want to find out what it is. So maybe with this book, or maybe with all the books – Pesthouse, Gift of Stones, Signals of Distress, Harvest – something new is on the scene which destroys the old ways of life. But people are always breasting the future at the end of the books, going out into the new world, of which they are fearful and hopeful. So I hope that at the end of this book, we feel fearful for the future of Walter Thirsk, but we also feel hopeful for him.”
  Unusually, Harvest – as the title suggests – has a pastoral setting. It contrasts sharply with the bleak Stone Age setting of The Gift of Stones, the Judean desert of Quarantine or the post-apocalyptic nightmare of Pesthouse.
  It’s a deceptively idyllic setting, however. No sooner has Crace sketched in Harvest’s lush fields and forests than he reveals the village’s hidden cruelties, its latent paganism. “We do, though, have our wooden cross,” Walter Thirsk tells us, “our neglected pillory, standing at the unbuilt gateway of our unbuilt church.”
  The punishments inflicted on the unwary outsiders who wander into the village set in train a series of events that essentially mimic the fall of Eden, as the innocent Walter and his neighbours witness corruption, betrayal and eventually murder.
  Beautifully detailed, the writing doubles as a paean to the natural world, as Crace precisely outlines a rural peasantry’s paradise lost.
  The quality of the prose is of the standard we have come to expect from one of the contemporary masters of the English language, but what makes Harvest astonishing is that he wrote it in less than six months. The previous book, his first attempt at a ‘personal, autobiographical’ book, fell apart when he realised the voice was wrong. “I was a baritone trying to sing soprano,” he says ruefully.
  With only six months to deliver a book which he had already been paid for, and with the advance long spent, Crace found inspiration in a train journey to London. Travelling through ridge-and-furrow fields of middle England had him wondering about the history of their commonage; when he visited the Tate Britain the following day, the first painting he saw was of an East Anglian ‘enclosure’.
  “And there it was – I’d got the novel. People are saying, ‘Well, it’s been three years since his last book, we can see he’s worked hard on it.’ That’s crap. It just fell onto the page.
  “Sometimes you do a bit of writing,” he continues, “and right from the word go until almost the finish it’s like pushing a great chunk of granite up a hill. But at some point, that piece of granite will turn into a helium-filled balloon. Normally, with a book of mine, that moment of loss-of-weight happens halfway through, or towards the end. With this book it happened on the first page. That book became full of hot air,” he laughs, “very early on.”
  What gives Harvest’s elegiac tone an especially poignant air is that Crace has announced it will be his final novel.
  “I’ve had an unusual furrow to plough, and I’ve ploughed it until it doesn’t produce anything anymore,” he says. “I want to leave on a high, avoid bitterness, and I feel like I’ve written enough books already. Twelve is plenty for anybody. If you haven’t read all 12 of my books, there’s still some to read. If you’ve read all 12, read someone else.”
  But won’t he miss the writing that has sustained him creatively for the past three decades?
  “I’m still young, I’m still fit, and I’ve got things to do. And I don’t want to spend any more time on my own in front of a blank screen, getting anxious. I’ve been that soldier, I’ve littered the bookshops with enough corpses. So there’s nothing for anyone to feel sorry about. I’m going to have a ball.”

  Harvest by Jim Crace is published by Picador.

  This interview was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Ka-Bloom!

It’s Bloomsday today, as you probably know, that one day in the year when everyone cheerfully admits to being unable to read ULYSSES, although they quite like DUBLINERS, and as for FINNEGANS WAKE, well, it’s mad, Ted, and if the man couldn’t be bothered punctuating his own titles, why should I waste my time reading it, etc.
  So happy Bloomsday, folks, and enjoy your grilled kidneys. For those of you interested in Chief Justice Adrian Hardiman’s take on why ULYSSES has a murder mystery at its heart, clickety-click here …
  As always, my favourite bit about Bloomsday is the opportunity to run, yet again, Donald Clarke’s masterful short movie, aka “Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Beckett and Joyce”. Roll it there, Collette …

On Flesh And Blood And Ink

Those crazy kids and their rock ‘n’ roll tattoos, eh? Norn Iron scribe Gerard Brennan displays an admirable level of commitment to his books in getting FIREPROOF punched into his arm, which may well be the most quixotic gesture I’ve seen this year, given its combination of flesh, blood and ink. For the full story, clickety-click here …
  Has anyone else ever tattooed themselves with their own books? Or with any literary reference? I’ve got one of Wile E. Coyote, which isn’t very bookish, although I do think that Wile. E is the very essence of Beckett given his ‘fail, fail better’ modus operandi …

On Penny Candles And Leading Lights

I never got to meet Maeve Binchy (right), which is a sad state of affairs, because by all accounts she was one of the nicest people on the planet, as well as being one of the most influential Irish writers of the last 30 years.
  Maeve Binchy played a huge part, and arguably the crucial part, in legitimising popular fiction of all stripes in Ireland. Time and again she demonstrated that you didn’t need to differentiate between good writing and popular writing, and she did so by writing about ordinary Irish people and their ordinary Irish concerns, in the process, a la Patrick Kavanagh, making it all extraordinary. She will be sadly missed. Ar dheis Dé go raibh a hanam.
  I had a piece published in the Irish Examiner last Wednesday, in which some of Maeve’s peers spoke about her influence on successive generations of writers. It opened up a lot like this:

With the death of Maeve Binchy at the age of 72, Ireland has lost one of its leading literary lights.
  “I don’t think that Maeve was ever accorded the same kind of respect that some of the novelists who are considered more literary received,” says her colleague Sheila O’Flanagan, “but I think her storytelling certainly set a benchmark for commercial fiction that is very high and rarely surpassed.”
  […]
  Her place in the pantheon of great Irish writers has long been secured, but for many years Binchy has served as another kind of leading light, as a literary pathfinder who guided and inspired a younger generation.
  “It was simply the fact that she made it okay to write about Ireland,” says Marian Keyes. “I remember reading The Lilac Bus, I suppose I was about 17, and that was back in the days when nothing Irish was any good. All our things were just crap versions of US or UK TV shows or bands or books or whatever. And suddenly, somebody was writing about the Ireland we all knew. So that gave me confidence when I came to write, to think, ‘I don’t have to pretend to be English or American.’”
  Nor was it necessary to want to emulate James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, et al.
  “That was it as well,” Marian agrees. “The way she wrote was so conversational, and it was so true to how people talked, how Irish people are.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Jeffrey Siger

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
Though one might not think of it as a ‘traditional’ crime novel, I’d have to say BLOOD MERIDIAN by Cormac McCarthy. There’s none better to my way of thinking.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
No question about it. Sherlock Holmes, original version. Golden Victorian prose and none of that DNA detecting stuff to clutter one’s tiny attic of an investigative mind.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
The plays of August Wilson, he’s a master of dialect.

Most satisfying writing moment?
When my new Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis novel, TARGET: TINOS, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly. Although I’ve received similar reviews for earlier works, TARGET: TINOS was a particularly long haul to complete; indeed I had to write two books to come up with just one. I’d written the first one in 2010 and it was scheduled to come out in January 2012, when out of the blue its central storyline and later my primary bad guy came to life and played out across the world as independent, front-page headline news events. What I’d put forth as an original story line now seemed hopelessly derivative and my publisher and I agreed to kill it. Writing the novel that replaced it was not a pleasant experience … for all the while I had an eye on the headlines, praying events I imagined would not again be overrun by reality. As things turned out they were! But by then I was smiling ear-to-ear for the first reviews were in, calling TARGET: TINOS, “another of Jeffrey Siger’s thoughtful police procedurals set in picturesque but not untroubled Greek locales”—The New York Times, “superb…a winner”—Publishers Weekly, “complex portrait of contemporary Greece to bolster another solid whodunit”—Kirkus Reviews, “fast paced…interesting and highly entertaining”— Library Journal, “throbs with the pulse of Greek culture…an entertaining series”—Booklist.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
Excluding my host’s novels, which must be included at the very top of any such list, and since I’m being pressed to answer, I’ll say IN THE WOODS by Tana French.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
Worst: you can very easily forget about your obligations to the rest of your life. Best: you can very easily forget about your obligations to the rest of your life.

The pitch for your next book is …?
“Honest, it’s almost done.” Oh, you don’t mean to my editor. Then I’d say: “Life as we know it is changing in the West. Forces of occupation no longer come with armaments, but with pens, promises, and lots of cash.”

Who are you reading right now?
Believe it or not, Samuel Beckett. Just finishing up WAITING FOR GODOT for the zillionth time.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write. Although I think it would be in everyone’s best interest that I be allowed to read my work for editing purposes.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Authoritative, compelling, authentic.

Jeffrey Siger’s TARGET: TINOS is published by the Poisoned Pen Press.

The Cave

The sign on the door says ‘Toad Hall’ but I call it ‘The Cave’. Yea, verily, this is where the magic happens, on the rare occasion when it happens: the Writing Room.
  It’s a remarkably bright room for a cave, of course. For some reason I need lots of light, perhaps because most of my fiction gets written between the hours of 5am-7.30am. Light isn’t a problem during the summer months, when it’s generally bright outside by 4.30am; in the winter, though, which is always a more productive time for me, light becomes something of a metaphor, I think. Writing a novel, or the way I write one, at least, is a kind of spelunking, in which I advance further and further into the darkness of a cave with only a tiny light, aka the sentence I’m working on, to guide the way. I trip and stumble, bark my shins and bang my head on overhangs, walk into walls … and that light at the end of the tunnel, to further mangle the metaphor, is as often as not a psychopathic miner. Wot larks, eh Pip?
  As for the rest, well, you can’t tell from the photo above, but the cave is lined on three walls by books. Apart from everything else, floor-to-ceiling books make for wonderful insulation, and the most interesting wallpaper you could ever have. The shelves over the desk - the top two - are taken up by Irish crime novels, which have now begun to spill down onto the third shelf, and at the rate Irish crime writers are churning them out, I’m gonna need a bigger boat.
  The three shelves you can’t see, which lie to the right of the map in the top right of the picture, are taken up with work-related books: books for review, books to be read for interview prep, background material, etc. There is currently in the region of 75 books in that particular pile. The shelf to the top left of the computer monitor is my non-work reading, when I can fit it in; right now I’m dipping very tentatively into writing a spy novel, and I’m also in the first flush of a passionate affair with baseball, so it’s a mixed bag up there.
  The shelves to the left of the desk hold my own stuff, books I’ve been lucky enough to have published to date, occasionally in translation. So far I’ve been translated into French and Dutch (EIGHTBALL BOOGIE), with an Italian translation of THE BIG O to come early next year. As of this week, French and Italian publishers have expressed an interest in ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL, which officially launches next week; and an American publisher is taking a long, hard look at it too.
  I write on a PC, as you can see. The traditionalist in me wishes it was a typewriter, but about 90% of the work done on the PC is non-fiction, given that I work full-time as an arts journalist, and were I to lose the convenience of a computer, and particularly its internet connection, then the Writing Room would very quickly come to resemble a real cave. I learned to type as part of a pre-employment course I took in genealogy many moons ago, not long after bailing out of a Business-related degree I was doing at my local college; I don’t know what my typing speed is, but it’s not bad, even if the backspace key is the most worn on any keyboard I’ve ever owned.
  The monitor is ‘decorated’ with a passport picture of my little girl, Lily in the top left corner; a set of Greek kombolói, or worry beads; a tiny bas relief of a Greek fishing village, complete with windmill; and a quote from Isak Dinesen, aka Karen Blixen: ‘I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.’
  Up on the shelf of my non-work reading material, by the way, I have a framed newspaper rip-out paraphrasing Samuel Beckett: ‘Try again, fail again, fail better.’
  Elsewhere on the desk are the writing essentials: a notepad and pen; a pack of rolling tobacco, along with papers and a lighter; and a mug of coffee. To paraphrase one of the Russians: ‘All I need to write is a man, a woman and an ashtray.’ I’ll be giving up the smokes (again) in the New Year; Lily is now old enough to ask why, if cigarettes are so nasty, as Daddy always says, he insists on smoking them. And there’s no good answer to that.
  The map on the right of the picture, by the way, is a map of Western Crete, which is where my current novel is set. The picture to the right of the PC monitor is a self-portrait by my uncle, Jimmy, who passed away three years ago. Formerly the Head Designer of Waterford Glass, Jim was something of an amateur scribbler himself, and an artist, a modest Renaissance Man in general, who was hugely inspirational and supportive of my earliest efforts to write. I like the idea that he’s keeping an eye on me as I stumble blindly through the cave.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: BULLFIGHTING by Roddy Doyle

The BULLFIGHTING collection has an unusually pervasive theme. The stories all concern themselves with middle-aged men coming to terms with the limitations of their lives. There are no publication dates given for the individual stories, eight of which were first published in the ‘New Yorker’, while the remaining six stories were published in a variety of Irish and UK publications. They all appear, however, to be written relatively recently. Certainly they are for the most part timely, in that the physical, spiritual and emotional diminishment of the protagonists’ seem to chime with Ireland’s economic downturn.
  All of the stories concern themselves with men in their forties and fifties, all of whom are struggling to understand their place in a rapidly changing world.
  In some cases, as in ‘Animals’, George is struggling to cope with the fact that his kids are now fully grown, thus leaching his life of the meaning of being a parent. In ‘Funerals’, a middle-aged man grasping after meaning in his life ferries his aged parents to funerals, only to discover that they - or the mother, at least - is regressing to childhood. In some of the stories, such as ‘The Photograph’, a man ponders on the way in which communication with his wife has dwindled away to be replaced by virtual silence.
  These three variations on the theme of quietly observed mid-life crises are repeated throughout. That’s not to say that the collection is necessarily repetitive - personally, and despite the surface similarities, I found most of the stories intriguing in their own right, and some of them very moving.
  The backdrop to most of the stories is Ireland’s economic downturn, which chimes with the sense of ‘redundancy’ most of the men seem to experience. In some of the stories, such as ‘Animals’, Doyle makes it explicit that the main character, George, is unemployed as a result of the downturn. In other places, he harks back to a previous generation that also experienced recession and austerity.
  While Doyle’s characters often offer flashes of bitterness at their ‘redundancy’ as men, now that their children are reared, there’s very little by way of anger or rage. Most of the characters appear to be aiming, consciously or otherwise, for an acceptance of their status, as it’s easier to accept the status quo than it is to gird their loins for a battle that might rejuvenate their lives, or might shatter them entirely.
  ‘Blood’ is a story that is the exception to this rule; in fact, it’s an exception to most of the stories in the collection. In ‘Blood’, the male character develops a sudden compulsion to eat raw meat, and to drink blood. While he initially attempts to rationalise his desire as a biological manifestation of his creeping middle-age and growing appreciation of his being surplus to requirements (the character has had a vasectomy), all logic goes out the window when he finds himself biting the head off one of “the next-door neighbours’ recession hens”:

“There were three of them, scrabbling around in the garden. He hated them, the whole idea of them. The world economy wobbled and the middle classes immediately started growing their own spuds and carrots, buying their own chickens, and denying they had property portfolios in Eastern Europe. And they stopped talking to him because he’d become the enemy, and evil, because he worked in a bank. The shiftless bitch next door could pretend she was busy all day looking after the hens. Well, she’d have one less to look after because he was over the wall.”

  The language used here - ‘hated’, ‘evil’, ‘enemy’, ‘shiftless bitch’ - is notably stronger than elsewhere in the collection, while the story itself has a quality of the absurd (“He wasn’t a vampire or a werewolf.”) that borders on fantasy, a quality that is in marked contrast to the muted realism of the other stories. Amid the quiet desperation and acceptance of the other stories, if feels as if Doyle is lashing out at Ireland’s quiescent acceptance of the new status quo.
  In terms of style, Doyle’s language here is very stark, very direct, and almost harks back to the early days of the ‘Barrytown Trilogy’. Despite the conversational tone of the stories, which are for the most part delivered as internal monologues, Doyle employs a style that is stark, precise and unambiguous. There are very few poetic flourishes, which would have been incongruous given that the characters are for the most part working-class Dubliners.
  By the same token, the vernacular Doyle employs when writing dialogue has a kind of brusque lyricism to it, especially in the title story, in which four men, drinking buddies, decide to take a holiday in the south of Spain. From ‘Bullfighting’, pg 189:

- Is that a bruise?
- Varicose vein.
- Lovely.
- You can show it to whatever young one you pick up tonight in town.
- I’ll tell yeh. Show a bird your varicose veins and she’ll be on you like a fuckin’ barnacle.

  The men here are unapologetically urban, reliably stolid and relatively inarticulate when it comes to expressing emotion. That said, and despite the unadorned style, there’s no mistaking Doyle’s affection for his characters. There is a sense that he is celebrating their ability to endure despite their circumstances, to absorb the slings and arrows without complaint.
  In fact, as the collection progresses, there’s a real sense that what Doyle is celebrating is the quality of forbearance and fortitude summed up by the Beckettian mantra of ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’. Few of the characters are educated enough, or self-aware, to be conscious of this philosophy, but it does permeate the collection.
  These are not men of the conventional literary mid-life crisis, who are lampooned for their obsession with younger women and fast cars. Neither are they privy to the epiphanies common in the Irish short story. They may glimpse an epiphany, as the unnamed character does at the end of ‘The Joke’, but it’s rare that they act upon it.
  In the same way as THE COMMITMENTS was considered a radical departure in the way it gave contemporary working-class Dubliners a literary voice in their own vernacular, BULLFIGHTING does the same for the invisible demographic of plodding male survivors who carry on with their lives, uncomplaining.
  Overall, and as someone who isn’t as a rule drawn to the short story form, I thoroughly enjoyed BULLFIGHTING. Perhaps it’s the fact that the repetition of the theme made the collection seem like an experimental novel, but that’s to err on the whimsical side. There really isn’t a bum note in the entire collection. Even ‘Blood’, which could very easily have gone off the rails, is a beautifully modulated piece.
  Ultimately, Doyle has presented us with a collection of stories that really do run the emotional gamut from A-Z. There were times when I found myself grinning wryly, other times when I was laughing aloud, and more than once I was genuinely moved to tears. Most important of all, perhaps, I was always in that very delightful place between envy and admiration of a writer who is obviously in total control of all his gifts. - Declan Burke

On Final Revisions And The Inevitable Self-Loathing

O, the hypocrisy. A source of teeth-grinding envy when he puts pen to paper himself, Allan Guthrie (not pictured, right) was kind enough to ask me to contribute a post to his new blog, Criminal-E, which concerns itself with crime and mystery novels available as ebooks, and said post went live today - herewith be the linkity-link.
  Why the hypocrisy? Well, the gist of the post - and that of all the other authors featured on Criminal-E - is that we talk about the process of writing. Now, as a rule, I love talking about books but hate talking about writing, mainly because, as a writer, I’m shooting in the dark every time I sit down at the desk. My books aren’t so much written as eventually cobbled together into some kind of legible form, and possibly by pixies who come out at night when I’m asleep, to very generously reassemble my pathetic efforts into a coherent narrative. Asking me about issues like style, pace, character and so on is akin to asking a three-toed sloth about its digestion. It needs to get done, and somehow it gets done, but the process and consequences don’t bear too much close scrutiny.
  That’s me on a good day. On a bad day, I just shrug and say, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be marvellous to be a three-toed sloth and not have to give a crap about all this?’
  All of which is pertinent, given that I’m having a bad week. I’m revising - for the last time, I hope - my current offering, formerly known as THE BABY KILLERS, now revelling in the unlikely title of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL. The book is due with the publishers, Liberties Press, in two weeks time, to be published in September. The revision, as always, began as ‘just a final spit-and-polish, I’ll breeze through it’, but has now - as always - become a rather more serious redraft. Why this should be a surprise at this stage is beyond me, because (mixed metaphor ahoy!) I’m an inveterate tinkerer, and once you tug at a single stray thread, the whole tapestry starts to unravel.
  At this point, having spent most of the week redrafting, and currently up to my oxters in loose threads and tufts of wool, I feel like I’m actually doing damage rather than making improvements. It doesn’t help that this is the twelfth, thirteenth or maybe twentieth time I’ve been over some of the sections, but it feels unpardonably dull (it’s supposed to be a black comedy), dead and brittle as old bones that have been raked over once too often. Part of the problem, too, is that it will have been over three years since the publication of my last novel, THE BIG O, by the time ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL arrives, and I have no guarantee that I’ll ever seen another novel published after that. So I think I’m trying too hard, trying to say too much, placing too much hope on the book’s slender shoulders (it’s only a story, after all).
  I’ll get through it. Slog on, plough through, slice away. Slough off the self-loathing. In two weeks time, or possibly three, I’ll send off the final revisions and waltz around on a cloud, eight miles high, for about a couple of hours. Then, the next morning, I’ll wake up seeing all the mistakes and blunders, the clumsy non sequiturs, the clichés, the irrelevancies, and come crashing down to earth again, utterly deflated.
  Still, there’s always the proofs, isn’t there? Maybe then I’ll finally get it right-right-right ...
  My line for today comes courtesy of Samuel Beckett: Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: SUNSET PARK by Paul Auster

SUNSET PARK centres on Miles, a 28-year-old college drop-out who lives in Florida ‘trashing out’ foreclosed properties. Thoughtful and meditative, Miles photographs items from the house his crew ‘trashes out’, as opposed to stealing them, as the rest of the crew does. When Miles meets Pilar, a 17-year-old High School student, his ascetic life changes. They’re relationship is consenting, a meeting of minds, but it is also illegal under Florida law. Blackmailed by Pilar’s sister, Miles leaves Florida for New York, planning to live in the squat his friend Bing Nathan maintains in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. Once Pilar turns 18, the pair can be reunited. So runs Miles’ plan, but as Miles knows only too well, fate has a way of intervening in the best laid plans of mice and men.
  Running parallel to Miles’ story are a number of narratives. Miles has abandoned his family in the wake of a tragedy in which is stepbrother died, and for which Miles blames himself, but Miles’ father, Morris, has been keeping tabs on Miles throughout the years via the updates he receives from Bing Nathan. The owner of a small publishing house, Morris is going through an upheaval of his own, as his marriage to his second wife, Willa, appears to have hit the rocks due to a one-off infidelity by Morris. Meanwhile, the economic climate is crushing down hard on his publishing business, leaving Morris, though determined to continue, fearful for his future.
  Miles’ mother, Mary-Lee, a Hollywood actress, is another major character. Aging now, she has learned to play character roles, and has come to New York to play Winnie in a production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days. Mary-Lee abandoned both Morris and Miles shortly after her son was born, leaving New York for LA in the hope of building an acting career.
  A number of minor characters populate the squat at Sunset Park. Apart from Bing Nathan, a ‘bear’ of a man who runs a quirky business repairing old typewriters and old-fashioned technology, and has a sideline as a jazz musician, there is Alice and Ellen, both of whom have artistic ambitions.
  SUNSET PARK is a hugely enjoyable meditation on love, absence and loss. While Auster addresses big themes, however, he does so in a way that is modest and subtle, allowing the characters to grow by increments until they have wormed their way into the reader’s consciousness. There are few grand gestures here.
  The novel touches on many recurring themes in Auster’s fiction. While the meta-fiction aspects for which he is famous are largely absent, the novel is strongest when exploring the father-son relationship between Morris and Miles. While Auster tends to write more often about absent fathers, here it’s the son who is absent from his family’s life, having exiled himself after accidentally contributing to the death of his stepbrother, Bobby, as a teenager.
  Miles is a fascinating character, and has the ascetic qualities Auster tends to repeat in his male protagonists. Miles lives very sparely, with few indulgences or personal belongings. He is disgusted, for example, when Pilar’s older sister attempts to blackmail him in the hope that Miles will steal objects from the houses he trashes out:

“ … and even if it was all to a good purpose, he couldn’t help feeling revolted by her avidity, her inexhaustible craving for those ugly, stupid things.”

  By the same token, Miles is a little too ascetic, a little too much the strong, silent hero for the reader to take him entirely seriously. According to Bing Nathan,

“ … Miles seemed different from everyone else, to possess some magnetic, animal force that changed the atmosphere whenever he walked into a room. Was it the power of his silences that made him attact so much attention, the mysterious, closed-in nature of his personality that turned him into a kind of mirror for others to project themselves onto, the eerie sense that he was there and not there at the same time?”

  You can only presume that Auster is mocking himself, or Miles, or both, with a depiction of a contemporary character such as that, as if Miles has walked into Brooklyn straight off the set of the cowboy movie Shane.
  That said, Auster devotes quite a bit of the novel to legendary baseball players - Miles and his father bond over the game of baseball - and mostly baseball pitchers, those men who stand on the mound on their own, the gunslingers who hurl their fastballs and dictate the narrative of the game.
  It’s not necessarily an exercise in nostalgia for a better time, for a cleaner cut hero, however. Most of the baseball players Miles is drawn to are defined by their luck. For the most part, they are defined by bad luck, by accidents or bad plays that subsequently defined their careers, but he also references players who are known for their good luck, such as Lucky Lohrke, who cheated death three times before dying peacefully at the age of 85. Here Auster is invoking blind fate, the extent to which the tiniest details can blow up into catastrophic consequences. Such is the case, certainly, with the finale of the novel.
  Auster also frequently cites the movie, The Best Years of Our Lives, a film made in the wake of WWII to illustrate the difficulty that GIs had in returning to a non-combat life. The title is an ironic one, especially as the ‘best years’ of the title refers to the killing fields of WWII Europe, or the Pacific theatre of war. Again and again, too often perhaps, he has various characters reference the movie, and the baseball heroes, to illustrate the vast gulf between reality and our perception of it.
  Morris is the most fascinating character in the novel for me, a man old enough to have acquired wisdom but still young enough to put it to good use. There’s a real tang of authenticity when it comes to Morris’ character that seems absent when Auster is writing about Miles, and particularly in terms of Morris’ relationships with his wife, his ex-wife and his friends, most of whom are in the publishing business. The scene in which Miles and his father are finally reunited after seven years is arguably the finest in the novel, when neither, despite their best intentions, can rise to the occasion. It’s not very dramatic, certainly, but it’s heartbreaking in its poignancy, in the inability of both men to reach beyond their limited capacity for emotional engagement.
  Mary-Lee, too, is a well drawn character, both self-centred but sympathetic, and Auster has terrific fun with her playing the role of Winnie in Beckett’s Happy Days. Mary-Lee’s tragedy, in fact, appears to be that she cannot stop performing; even when she is reunited with Miles after so many years apart, she finds herself wondering how he is evaluating her, as if he were an audience like any other. Again, this has the ring of authenticity, and represents a perversely touching moment.
  Quietly told, without recourse to Auster’s usual brand of literary pyrotechnics such as meta-fiction or inter-textual fun and games, SUNSET PARK is a real grower of a novel. Set in a contemporary America that in which ordinary people are suffering badly due to the economic downturn, it offers a pleasing sense of cautious optimism that, when the chips are down, people still can turn to one another for assistance, be it financial, social or emotional help. The ending is downbeat and somewhat fatalistic, certainly, given Miles’ predicament, but Auster does a fine job of contextualising that predicament, framing it with understated grace notes of hope and expectation. - Declan Burke

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE IGNORANCE OF BLOOD by Robert Wilson

At its best, the crime novel is a raw wound and a primal scream. This is not simply a matter of style. In recent times, Ken Bruen, David Peace and James Ellroy have written police procedurals that are virtually incoherent and spittle-flecked with inarticulate rage. Robert Wilson, the creator of Inspector Jefe Javier Falcón, offers a more measured, traditional style, one reminiscent of Charles Willeford, but one which – again, like Willeford – is all the more compellingly terrifying for the way in which his mannered craft serves as a civilised veneer stretched thinly across the abyss.
  The final novel in the Javier Falcón quartet, which is set for the most part in Seville, opens in the wake of a terrorist bombing, the perpetrators of which Falcón has publicly sworn to bring to justice. A parallel investigation, into the Russian mafia, which mainly operates on the Costa del Sol but is spreading further into Andalucia, appears to be connected with the bombing. That would represent more than enough plot for most writers, but this is a fiendishly complex and labyrinthine tale: as Wilson brings together the loose threads of the preceding triptych, Falcón investigates the murder of his ex-wife, discovers that his friend Yacoub is being blackmailed by Islamic radicals, and has to deal with the kidnapping of the son of his current lover, Consuelo, by protagonists unknown, as they bid to deflect Falcón from his various investigations.
  If all of the above makes Falcón sound like a genre-friendly superman, nothing could be further from the truth. Urbane and dogged, he is nonetheless the first to admit his failings and limitations, be they personal or professional. Confronting the alleged murderer of his ex-wife, for example, his approach is not the eye-bulging, desk-thumping bluster beloved of Hollywood. Polite and reasonable, attentive to detail, Falcón adheres to protocol. It’s only later, in the privacy of his own torment, that Falcón allows himself the luxury of internalised rage and bitter recrimination. Despite the high number of expertly crafted action sequences, ‘The Ignorance of Blood’ is first and foremost a fascinating psychological study of a complicated Everyman, the reluctant voice of a generation that is resolute in the face of unprecedented threat and yet fearful of its inability, ultimately, to cope with the subtleties of the parasites that gnaw at the underbelly of the traditional European mores of logic, reason and enlightenment, be they Russian mafia or Islamic extremist.
  Despite his paralysing predicament, Falcón, like Beckett’s unnameable, goes on. Wilson, who won the 1999 CWA Gold Dagger for the historically split narrative of A SMALL DEATH IN LISBON, understands that he is writing within the parameters of genre fiction, and that his primary duty is to provide a work of entertainment, regardless of how challenging its contents might be to the reader more accustomed to crime fiction’s sentimental notions of justice, truth and chivalry. But to describe THE IGNORANCE OF BLOOD as an entertainment is akin to calling Picasso’s ‘Guernica’ a wall hanging. By the end, the endemic corruption that underpins Seville’s beautiful façade has permeated Falcón’s soul, and the implicit message is that anyone who wishes to survive the impending world order had best roll up his or her sleeves and get their hands good and dirty.
  The conceit of a good man doing the wrong thing for the right reasons is not a revolutionary one, and Wilson is too canny to offer one last saddle-up for the tarnished knight. Instead he offers a hugely satisfying and authentic police procedural, in which a group of individually flawed but reasonably effective group of all-too-human beings try again, and fail again, and fail better. - Declan Burke

This review first appeared in the Sunday Business Post

Failure Is NOT An Option

Failure ain’t an option, according to Sam Beckett (right), it’s an inevitability. It’s amazing how easy the writing lark gets when you embrace that fact …
  Anyone else collect mottos? I don’t go bananas on it, but over the years I have picked up a few choice writing-related lines that I keep dotted around the desk for those times when the muse is gone on the razz with her cider-swilling buddies. To wit:

“Try again, fail again, fail better.” – Samuel Beckett

“When you leave your typewriter you leave your machine-gun and the rats come pouring through.” – Charles Bukowski

“If you’re out to describe the truth, leave elegance to the tailor.” – Albert Einstein

“Crime is but a left-handed form of human endeavour.” – WR Burnett

  The Big Question - What’s the line that gets you girding your loins and thundering once more unto the breach, Horatio?

ReJoyce: ’Tis Bloomsday In All Its Feckin’ Nuttiness

It being June 16, aka Bloomsday, the anniversary of some ULYSSES-related malarkey involving the scoffing of much fried kidneys whilst wearing wardrobe cast-offs from Oliver Twist, we’d like to mark the occasion with yet another Crime Always Pays outing for our favourite short film of all time, Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Joyce ‘n’ Beckett, which was written and directed by genius-in-waiting Donald Clarke. Roll it there, Collette …

Not All Spades Are Blond Satans, Sadly

Last week the Sons of Spade were gracious enough to host a Q&A with CAP Grand Vizier Declan Burke (right), simply but elegantly titled ‘Q&A with Declan Burke’. The sordid results come below …

Q: What makes your P.I. Harry Rigby different from other fictional private eyes?
A: I could be literal and say he’s the only one from Sligo, Ireland … This is actually a difficult question for me to answer, because of the way Harry originated, which was as an exercise in style. I never had any intention of writing a full novel – I started out writing a chapter in which a PI meets a potential client for the first time, just to have fun with it. Harry’s a PI who is aware of all the tropes, he’s a fan of the hardboiled movies and books – so while he’s a PI, he’s also aware of fiction’s PI heritage, Marlowe, Archer, et al. It says something that my favourite PI movie isn’t THE BIG SLEEP, it’s Robert Altman’s THE LONG GOODBYE. Which is a roundabout way of saying Harry Rigby is different because he’s so knowingly similar to all his fictional predecessors. Except for the fact that he’s from Sligo …

Q: What are your thoughts on the psycho sidekick in PI novels?
A: I guess if it’s done well then it’s valid, and if it’s not, it’s a cliché. I take every character on its own merits. My instinct is that it could work well as a one-off, if the protagonist has a pyscho sidekick foisted on him, but that it wouldn’t make any sense, if you want your stories to have any kind of realism, for a PI – someone who earns their living through stealth and subterfuge – to associate with a psychotic person for too long. They’d attract too much notice. It’d be like hunting tiger with a hippo in tow.

Q: What would a soundtrack to your novels sound like?
A: Pretty bleak, probably, although it’d depend on the circumstances – if your protagonist found him or herself in a karaoke bar, say, then the clientele is highly unlikely to be belting out Leonard Cohen songs (although I like the idea, now that I think of it). In general, there’s quite a bit of fatalism in my stories, so the soundtrack would ideally be composed of artists such as The Tindersticks, Leonard Cohen, Antony and the Johnsons, Radiohead, Townes Van Zandt, Jacques Brel … melancholy stuff, glimmerings of hope in the darkness, that kind of thing. Mind you, I have Abba in my car stereo at the moment …

Q: Has your writing changed much since the first novel?
A: I’m probably more aware at this stage of how bad a line is when I write it, but as for my ability to improve that line … I don’t know. No, probably. In saying that, I’m interested in writing in different kinds of styles, so it’s hard to judge. EIGHTBALL BOOGIE (the first Harry Rigby novel) was a homage to Chandler, and was written in that kind of style. THE BIG O was styled as a homage to two American writers I read for pure, unadulterated pleasure – Elmore Leonard and Barry Gifford. And, once I finish the sequel to THE BIG O, I have a story bubbling away on the back-burner that’s heavily influenced by some of my favourite writers from the ’40s and ’50s – David Goodis, Gil Brewer. That probably sounds as if I’m spending all my time ripping off other writers, but that’s only partially true – it’s early days in my writing yet, and I’m happy enough to learn whatever craft I can from studying the writers I like. I don’t have the time to go copying out their novels, the way Hemingway did, so this is the next best thing. That’s my excuse, anyway.

Q: Do you do a lot of research?
A: It depends on the story, really. I wrote a book set on the south coast of Crete that involved a hell of a lot of research – I probably spent longer reading up on the various subjects that went into the story than I did writing it. For the most part, though, my stories aren’t all that high concept. They’re fairly stripped-back, character-based tales about ordinary people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances, so they don’t need a lot of research. In saying that, I’m generally very particular about detail – I can be quite disappointed if I come across a glaringly wrong detail when I’m reading, it can ruin a story for me. So I try to get it as realistic as possible within the parameters of the story.

Q: What’s next for you and Harry?
A: I’ve written a follow-up to EIGHTBALL BOOGIE, in which Harry witnesses a suicide and is then asked by the dead man’s mother to investigate the reasons why a seemingly happy, well-adjusted person would kill himself. At the moment, though, Harry has retreated to the snug of The Cellars bar and is enjoying some quiet drinking time, because the emphasis is on THE BIG O and its sequel, both of which have been signed up by Harcourt in the US – THE BIG O will be published in the US in Fall ’08.

Q: Do you have any favourite Sons of Spade yourself?
A: I certainly don’t mean any disrespect to any of the names on this fine site, and I appreciate that it sounds a bit old-fashioned, but for me there’s only one son of Spade, and that’s Marlowe – everyone else is competing to be nephews, grand-nieces, etc. I say that in full awareness of Chandler’s flaws in terms of plotting, and all the other flaws attributed to him. But I think what Chandler achieved with Marlowe goes beyond his ability in terms of style. Yes, he was reacting to Hammett, but I think Chandler shaped the paradigm of the private eye to the extent that everyone since has been writing according to his rules – obeying them, bending them, breaking them, parodying them. When you look at the non-crime fiction writers who dabbled as a once-off because they believed the form was worth exploring – Norman Mailer, say, or Hank Bukowski, Ray Bradbury, Jonathan Lethem – the model they reshape is Chandler’s.

Q: In the last century we’ve seen new waves of PI-writers, first influenced by Hammett, then Chandler, Macdonald, Parker, later Lehane. Who do you think will influence the coming generation and in what way?
A: I’m going to sound biased here because he’s Irish, and because I know the guy personally, but I think Ken Bruen [right] will exert a massive influence on the next generation of PI writers. His Jack Taylor series is genuinely breaking new ground, given that it’s a post-modern appraisal of the notion of the PI and the PI novel – Bruen has gone beyond the conventional three-act investigation of a crime, gone beyond the protagonist as a righter of wrongs, a man or woman who uncovers dirty deeds and precipitates a satisfactory resolution. In Taylor’s world, everyone is equally culpable, and Bruen has inverted the focus of his PI’s gaze so that it’s himself he’s investigating, his morality, the part that he plays in creating the kind of world where good, bad and indifferent all jostle for pre-eminence. What Bruen is doing for crime fiction right now is akin to what Camus and Sartre, in their different ways, did for philosophy sixty or seventy years ago – although a more appropriate, Irish, reference would be that of Samuel Beckett.

Q: Ed Lynskey, writer of the Frank Johnson novels, came up with this question: “Would you have the patience and grit to work as a PI?”
A: Definitely not. The reality of PI work is bone-numbing drudgery spent checking facts and figures, and endless hours wasted in surveillance, more often than not with no positive result. The wastage of time would drive me insane in a week. I’m also quite a private person. The notion of prying into other people’s lives – knowing that your prying will very probably have a devastating effect on their lives – offends my sense of mutual respect. In other words, if I don’t pry into your life, and you don’t pry into mine, all will be well. Of course, that’s the diametric opposite of the dynamic that propels the PI narrative …

Q: Is it absolutely essential your writing is published, and why?
A: No, and for two reasons: One, there’s far too much rubbish on the shelves already. Two, I need to write every bit as much as I like to write, and I’ll keep on writing long after it’s decided that I’m no longer worth publishing.

If You’ve Got The Time, We’ve Got The Paradox

It’s a little-known (or cared about) fact that the Crime Always Pays elves are, in fact, trans-dimensional escapees from the ever-evolving lunatic asylum that is the world of Artemis Fowl (right). As you might expect, they tend to keep an eye on all things Eoin Colfer-shaped, and the latest news to blippity-blip across their radar is that Artemis 6 (Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox) is to be released next July 15, that it will feature a villain called Dr. Kronski, and that the twins’ names have been confirmed as Myles and Beckett – it being no small coincidence, of course, that Colfer’s brand of absurdist humour has much in common with the work of Myles na gCopaleen (aka Flann O’Brien) and Samuel Beckett. Quoth Mr Colfer-shaped thusly:

“I’m working on Artemis 6, which involves a lot of time travel, which you have to be clever and careful about, as to not contradict yourself. I did a bit of time-travel in the last book, well, it wasn’t really time travel, more dimensional travel, and you have to be really careful with that.”

You certainly do. It’s like juggling hot trout, that blummin’ time / dimensional travel malarkey …