Launch: THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN by Sebastian Barry

The Morning Redness In The West

Paul Lynch is a name you’ll be hearing quite a bit of in 2013, methinks. His debut novel, RED SKY IN MORNING (Quercus) won’t be published until April 25th, but it’s already creating something of a word of mouth buzz. Quoth the blurb elves:

Spring 1832: Donegal, north west Ireland. Coll Coyle wakes to a blood dawn and a day he does not want to face. The young father stands to lose everything on account of the cruel intentions of his landowner’s heedless son. Although reluctant, Coll sets out to confront his trouble. And so begins his fall from the rain-soaked, cloud-swirling Eden, and a pursuit across the wild bog lands of Donegal. Behind him is John Faller - a man who has vowed to hunt Coll to the ends of the earth - in a pursuit that will stretch to an epic voyage across the Atlantic, and to greater tragedy in the new American frontier. RED SKY IN MORNING is a dark tale of oppression bathed in sparkling, unconstrained imagery. A compassionate and sensitive exploration of the merciless side of man and the indifference of nature, it is both a mesmerizing feat of imagination and a landmark piece of fiction.

  Nice. Meanwhile, the early word is very positive indeed. To wit:

‘Classic storytelling, rough and haunted people and the times that made them, powerfully conjured, written in language that demands attention. Lynch is bardic, given to sly and inspired word selections, with his own sprung rhythms and angled, stark musicality.’ - Daniel Woodrell

‘This book makes the literary synapses spark and burn. Forged in his own new and wonderful language, Paul Lynch reaches to the root, branch and bole of things, and unfurls a signal masterpiece.’ - Sebastian Barry

  So there you have it. RED SKY IN MORNING by Paul Lynch - mark it down in your calendars, people …

Pleasant Tally Monday

Well, the votes are tallied, and the winner has been announced: Derek Landy’s SKULDUGGERY PLEASANT has won the ‘Irish Book of the Decade’ award. No mean feat, when you consider that the novel was up against the likes of John Banville, John Connolly, Anne Enright and Sebastian Barry, to name but a few. And pretty damn amazing, to be frank about it, when you consider that Landy’s novel is a YA title featuring a dead / skeletal private eye. A hat-tip to Irish Publishing News for the nod …

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Kevin McCarthy

Being the latest in a very occasional series in which the Grand Vizier reclines in his hammock with a jeroboam of Elf-Wonking Juice™ and lets proper writers have a say. This week: Kevin McCarthy (right), whose debut novel PEELER is published next week. To wit:

A Debasing Pastime;
or, Notes from a Darkened Room (On FA Cup Final Saturday)

“The funny thing about having a novel published is the number of people who you would categorise as friends—close friends even—who had no idea you wrote novels in the first place. It’s not something you tell people, when they ask you what you did at the weekend. Good weekend? Oh, yeah, I spent it in a darkened room by myself making stuff up.
  “I laughed aloud in recognition when I read a recent Guardian interview with novelist Nicola Barker. In it, she says, “Writing is kind of a debased pastime ...” It is, I thought. You slink off, alone, to a darkened room to engage with fantasy. You spend sunny weekends—and early mornings before work and every weekday afternoon and early evenings at it. You sometimes skip dinner to do it. You ignore the sprouting weeds and chipped paint and dysfunctional bathroom fan to do it. You feel guilty when you do it too much and terribly guilty when you don’t do it. Truly, debased.
  “So you don’t tell your friends that you spend your free time wallowing in the guilt ridden, guilt driven pastime that is novel writing until, that is, you want them to know about it so they’ll buy your book and make all that reclusive, brain-chafing effort, somehow worthwhile. And in that sense, when you’ve finally had a novel accepted for publication—over a year and a half ago and PEELER will finally hit the shelves next week—it’s as if you are coming out of that darkened room for the first time. Revealing something vaguely shameful about yourself. Dude, your friends say, you don’t strike me as the type to … you know. Write books. Can you hear the music? ‘I’m coming out, I want the world to know…’
  “The second thing, inevitably, your friends—or anyone, for that matter—asks when they discover you’ve written a novel that is about to be published is: What’s it about? To this, over time, you come up with a summary of sorts, that reduces the three years of work to a pitch line straight out of Altman’s The Player. It’s called PEELER. It’s about the brutal murder of a woman during the War of Independence. A good cop, an RIC man, a wounded veteran of the Great War, investigates the murder while the IRA investigates it from their side.
  “Sounds cool, your friend says. I didn’t know you studied Irish history…
  “I didn’t. But I did to write this book. Researching an historical novel is the fun part. It is where you take your general knowledge of a time and place in history, and read out from there and then, read in—primary sources, first hand accounts, police reports, diaries, letters—narrowing the focus until you get inside the heads and the hearts of the men and women who were living through it. How they acted. Why they acted. What they felt. In this, you get beneath the skin of the accepted versions we’re taught in school. Get to the underbelly, so to speak.
  “The accepted version is what you are, in essence, reading against and if you read enough, you find that this version merely skims the surface of the truth of history at best. Skims the surface wielding a large brush and bucket of green paint at worst. The interesting thing for me has always been the parts that this conventional, accepted history leaves out.
  “JG Farrell, the Liverpool-Irish novelist, renowned for his historical fictions and who died, too young, only a few miles from where I set PEELER in West Cork, wrote: ‘History leaves so much out … It leaves out the most important thing: the detail of what being alive is like.’ The best in popular history strive to uncover this ‘detail,’ lately, more and more. John Keegan, Anthony Beevor, Stephen Ambrose, John D Brewer, Dermot Ferriter, Michael Hopkinson, Peter Hart among others. It is a recent (and lucrative) and much needed step in the democratising of non-fiction historical narrative. But the best historical fiction has always done this. From Robert Graves to Stephen Crane to James Ellroy to Alan Furst. All of these writers scouring the margins, scraping and prodding at the underbelly of the time and place and characters they’ve used and invented to recreate the ‘detail of what being alive is like’—in Imperial Rome or a Civil War battlefield or wartime LA or wartime Bulgaria. With the exception of Graves, they write about the bit players in the larger historical dramas as if they were the grandest players on the stage of history and this is exactly how it should be, because this is how history is to every one of us as we are living through it. It is what I have attempted to do, in my no doubt flawed and modest way, in PEELER.
  “Get beyond the accepted version and the War of Independence becomes one fought at close range. More men were killed with revolvers than any other type of weapon. Shotguns were often used, again at close quarters. More often than not, killers knew their victims personally. A war of gangland style, tit for tat murders rather than pitched battles. A war of hitmen and death squads on both sides, hunting marked targets and targets of opportunity. It was a war mainly fought in alley ways and ditches and country lanes.
  “The version we are taught in school is one of set piece battles and masterfully planned ambushes; of outnumbered Flying Columns sending hardened British Army troops fleeing in retreat. These things happened, I learned, but rarely. The alley way, the darkened lane; the assassination set up in the brothel used by Crown troops, prostitutes tipping off gunmen and ‘donating’ money for the IRA arms fund. The underbelly.
  This is where the War of Independence was fought; this is also, it would seem obvious, where crime novels are set. It seemed only natural to go into the darkened room and come out with a crime novel about a PEELER trying to do his work as a policeman while dodging bullets and yearning openly for an end to the killing and an independent Ireland at the same time. This is how most RIC men felt, you learn in your researches. Charged with defending the Crown, most Peelers desired independence for Ireland. They were rightly terrified by the campaign of murder being waged against them by the IRA and yet felt only disgust for most of the Black and Tans and Auxiliaries brought to Ireland to help with ‘policing.’ Brilliant contradictions that are so human you can’t not write about them.
  “So you narrow the focus, writing now against the accepted version. Using what you have learned in your research, you find you have to write of such things because you are amazed when you read about them and want other people to know.
  Still, even in the darkened room, outside life intervenes. Making the ‘debasing pastime’, on occasion difficult, but more often than not, enriching it. As I sit here now (debasing myself!) I can hear the burping rattle of light and heavy machine guns from a live firing exercise at Gormanstown Army barracks, a couple of miles up the coast from my home. Throughout the writing of my new novel PEELER, this was often the case and oddly appropriate, given the subject matter of the book. There is one line in the book, in fact, that I wrote—not an important one, just a small line of atmospheric detail—just because I happened to hear the gunnery exercise that day when I was writing the scene. It is a post curfew prowl through the war ravaged streets of Cork city for the protagonist. In it, RIC sergeant, Séan O’Keefe … ‘made it back to the Daly house without seeing another soul in the streets, sticking to the shadows, using alleys and laneways when he could. Damp pavements. Shot out streetlamps. The distant roar of revving engines, bursts of machine gun fire.’ Of course, I have taken my description of war time Cork from any number of contemporary accounts, but I’m not sure if I would have included that last bit, the ‘bursts of machine gun fire’ had I not heard, just then from outside my window, the sustained, mechanical pop-pop-pop, stu-tt-tt-tter of the gunners in Gormanstown. The outside world intruding.
  “Before one even gets to the darkened room, however—forces him/herself there when the sun is (rarely) splitting the proverbials or the local is showing an Arabic broadcast of Man United on a wet Saturday afternoon that begs for the high stool and warm fire—it is outside life that determines what novel you will begin to write in the first place.
  “Time between novels—I had written three other as yet unpublished novels before PEELER—is like this: a restless, half-waking state where ideas for new projects come to you with all the promise of a sure thing and are tossed aside like crumpled betting slips before the initial elation has even faded. You find yourself staring blankly at Late Night Poker on the TV, thinking how you would have folded those eights, when suddenly you’re sitting up, scrabbling for pen and paper and scratching out lines of dialogue, scenes envisioned, plotlines, possibilities. Generally, it’s not long after you’ve done this that you realise you’ve just outlined the plot to HEART OF DARKNESS or LONESOME DOVE or DOG SOLDIERS or GOSHAWK SQUADRON; those favourite novels that lie dormant in the mind and influence, in some way, everything you write. But one day, you sit up and scratch out your ideas and say, Yeah, hold on. There’s something here…
  “Like all novels, I imagine, PEELER came from a serendipitous convergence things and events. For me: books stumbled upon, snippets of conversation, a plaque on a bridge.
  “With PEELER, I chanced upon Myles Dungan’s IRISH VOICES FROM THE GREAT WAR in the local library returned books stack. Entering the library, I always make my way to this pile first, for some reason and always have since I was a child, anxious to see what others have been reading. More often than not, it’s self-help and the driver’s theory test or Harry Potter novels, but the odd time, a gem like this one reveals itself. Halfway through the reading of Irish Voices—first hand accounts of WWI on all its fronts from the diaries and letters of those who fought, brilliantly compiled and contextualised—it occurred to me to write a fictional account of the bloody assault on V Beach by the Dublin and Munster Fusiliers in the Dardanelles in which over a thousand Irishmen died in a single morning. Fortunately I didn’t write it, as the book I outlined on the back of an envelope was strikingly similar to Sebastian Barry’s book, A LONG, LONG WAY which appeared halfway through the second draft of PEELER. But a seed was planted.
  “Luck would have it, however, that a second book landed in front of me at roughly the same time, courtesy of my mother-in-law’s research into her own father’s service in the Royal Irish Constabulary. Your father was an RIC man? I thought he owned a shop? He did, after he retired from the Peelers … He’s listed here, in this book …
  “Jim Herlihy’s THE ROYAL IRISH CONSTABULARY: A SHORT HISTORY AND GENEALOGICAL GUIDE is a fantastic history and compendium of the names and details of service of virtually every man who once served in the RIC. Reading this, I discovered that many RIC men had volunteered to serve in the Great War and returned—if they returned at all—to another more personalised sort of war in Ireland in which they were the primary targets of the IRA campaign for independence. I had known this. I had read of this before, but after having read the stories of the men who had fought in the trenches and beaches of Europe and the Dardanelles in Dungan’s book and now the story of the RIC men returning to home to another war, the story was slowly shifting and reshaping in my head. Questions arising, conflicting with my previous assumptions. Irish men killing other Irish men for the sake of Irish Independence? That was the Civil War, wasn’t it? No, not yet. It wasn’t just the IRA vs. brutal Black and Tans and the British Army? No. Yes. There is more to this, I felt. Dig deeper, go wider to the margins and then hone in, find the detail of what being a copper, a gunman, a Black and Tan was like.
  “Then, there was the plaque on the bridge in a nearby town. It is outside of a pub I drink in and I pass it every time I enter the pub. It reads: Near this spot Seamus Lawless and Sean Gibbons were Brutally Done to Death by British Forces while in their custody. September 20, 1920. An deis de go raib a n-anam.
  “It is well-known locally, that these Occupying Forces were trainee members of the Black and Tans based at the training depot at Gormanstown Aerodrome—now home to the Irish Army and the live firing exercises I can hear from my room—who sacked the town in revenge for the killing of an RIC man who had just been promoted to District Inspector. This RIC man had been drinking in a local bar with his brother, also an RIC man, to celebrate the promotion, when they became involved in an argument—politics, no doubt—with some members of the local IRA company. Drink had been taken, so the story goes—as do most in the crime reports from the local newspaper today—and a pistol was produced, a man shot dead, the town burnt to the ground and two men tortured, then bayoneted to death and left in the middle of the road at dawn amidst the smouldering ruins. What, I couldn’t help but thinking, were two armed policemen—men with a bounty on their heads throughout the country—doing drinking in a bar with armed republicans? What was it like living, drinking, working in a town where virtually anybody could be armed and there were more police per capita than almost any country in the world at the time and yet, common crime was rampant? What kind of war was the War of Independence?
  “It was the kind of war, I discovered, where the most violent and bloody of killings were carried out by men who then organised ceasefires for race meetings and market days. It was a war where women were targeted, tarred and feathered, stripped and raped and daubed with red and blue paint and sometimes murdered for associating with members of the Crown forces. It was a place where innocent men were dragged out of bed by members of an occupying army and shot dead ‘while trying to escape.’ It was a war fought by damaged men fresh from the slaughterhouse of the Great War unleashed at a pound a day upon the people of Ireland. It was a war fought by brave, idealistic, articulate and intelligent men on both sides; men who hated war fighting and policing alongside other men who weren’t living unless they were killing.
  “This is, really, what PEELER is about. But enough now. It’s sunny outside, for once. The FA Cup final is on the TV. Time to go back into the darkened room. Back to debasement!” - Kevin McCarthy

  Kevin McCarthy’s PEELER is published by Mercier Press.

What Would Ray Chandler Do?

Last year, over coffee, a good friend of mine asked if I’d be interested in joining a book club, which request sent hot frothy milk spurting from my nose. No thanks, says I, as politely as you can after showering a lady friend in second-hand latte, I’m afraid I have trouble finding the time to read the books I already need to read without adding another to the list on a monthly basis. I also mumbled something about being a bloke, and not wanting my testosterone throwing its weight around the room. What I didn’t say is that my wife is in a book club, and most of the titles she brings home seem to reek of the most irritating kind of smug, middle-class respectability, which probably says a lot more about me than about the books in question.
  Anyway, the Irish bookseller chain Eason recently published their ‘Best Books of the Noughties’ Top 50, which list was voted on by the public in a poll conducted by the on-line Eason Book Club, and it’s mildly dispiriting but not entirely surprising to find that THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO and WHEN WILL THERE BE GOOD NEWS? are the only crime titles therein, unless you want to stretch the boundaries and include NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and THE WHITE TIGER. Given the week that’s in it, it’s disappointing that the list featured no Irish crime writers at all, and this for a decade in which Irish crime fiction exploded onto the bookshelves, in a poll of Irish readers conducted by an Irish bookseller. Depressing stuff, although I’m not necessarily blaming anyone, because the list seems to be made up of the kind of stuff people are directed towards today, including a lot of Booker Prize nominees / winners, and the usual kind of Book Club bait you find in such company. That said, there’s some cracking novels there too – a couple of Banvilles, David Mitchell’s CLOUD ATLAS, two Cormac McCarthys, Sebastian Barry’s A LONG, LONG WAY, the Dark Materials trilogy, a Margaret Atwood, a John McGahern …
  So what’s my beef? Well, I’m just wondering where the crime titles are. It’s either true that crime fiction is hugely popular or it’s not; and if it is, how come it never shows up on such lists? Is it the case that people tend to vote for the kind of thing they think they should be voting for, rather than what they like, and actually read? Were – just for random example – SHANTARAM, THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST and I’M NOT SCARED really three of the fifty best novels of the last decade, or are they simply three of the novels people had shoved under their noses by a combination of booksellers, broadsheets and the arbiters of public taste? Or is the list simply skewed towards the conventional kind of Book Club book because it’s a Book Club list?
  Yet more questions: does my antipathy to Book Clubs stem from the fact that I write books that are highly unlikely to feature on Book Club lists, even if I could get them published? Am I, in fact, a scruffy urchin shivering in the snow with my nose pressed up against the drawing-room windows, craving the warm glow of smug middle-class respectability?
  I should say at this point, if you haven’t already guessed, that I’ve gone bi-polar about writing, mainly due to the pointlessness of the exercise. And it’s not just an up-and-down experience – it’s the kind of bi-polar in which you’re up and down at the same time, which makes for an interesting tone in the piece I’m working on at the moment. I have a guy who’s going through the Beckett thing of ‘I can’t go on, I’ll go on’, a kind of passive acceptance of his need for momentum, even as he concedes that his best efforts are a waste of time. He has his own reasons for not wanting to engage with the rest of the characters, and that’s fair enough, but I’m very much afraid that he’s as likely to just throw himself off the ferry he’s on right now as do something constructive, or destructive, or at least do something that’s interesting to potential readers. Maybe it’s the paralysing stasis that’s affecting Ireland right now, as it grinds to an economic halt with precious little direction from those responsible for such things, but there’s every chance the chap in the story will just down tools and call a sit-in protest on the top deck of the ferry, a kind of one-man campaign of civil disobedience against being forced to jump through hoops on behalf of an audience that simply doesn’t exist. What would Chandler do? He’d have a drink, and send a guy through a door with a gun already in his hand … but sometimes even that, or Chandler, isn’t enough to get the blood stirring.
  Incidentally, my wife’s Book Club is this month reading FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS, on the basis that one of the ladies decided it was high time for some proper reading. Good for her.

  Recently I have been reading: IF I NEVER SEE YOU AGAIN by Niamh O’Connor; THE RISING by Brian McGilloway; THE MARRIAGE OF CADMUS AND HARMONY by Robert Calasso; THE SNOWMAN by Jo Nesbø.

Putting The Ire Into Ireland

Yesterday the Guardian picked up on a rather fine rant by Julian Gough (right) on the state of Irish letters, in which the Berlin-based scribe put the boot into the current generation of Irish writers for not engaging with modern Ireland. The gist runneth thusly:

“I hardly read Irish writers any more, I’ve been disappointed so often. I mean, what the FECK are writers in their 20s and 30s doing, copying the very great John McGahern, his style, his subject matter, in the 21st century? To revive a useful old Celtic literary-critical expression: I puke my ring. And the older, more sophisticated Irish writers that want to be Nabokov give me the yellow squirts and a scaldy hole …
“The role of the Irish writer is not really to win prizes in Ireland; their role historically has been to get kicked out of the country for telling the truth. And there’s not quite enough of that going on. Just when we need a furious army of novelists, we are getting fairly polite stuff published by Faber & Faber that fits into the grand tradition … At the moment Ireland has one, massively developed, lyrical realism arm which is all biceps, and the other arm, the odd, freaky, tattooed arm, needs to be built up. In a way I’m trying to rally a few young writers around a flag which hasn’t been waved in a while. You can’t save the world with a novel, but it can put a tiny featherweight on the scales.”

  Ach, Julian, get down off the fence and say what you mean, squire.
  For the full and delightfully bilious rant, clickety-click here. For the reaction of various Irish writers, including John Banville and Sebastian Barry, clickety-click here.
  If you want to give Julian an even scaldier hole for overlooking the horde of Irish crime writers currently putting the ire into Ireland, or if you don’t believe that crime fiction is entitled to consider itself part of Irish literature, the comment box is open for business ...

  This week I have been mostly reading: SICILIAN CAROUSEL by Lawrence Durrell; THE TEMPEST by William Shakespeare; and CLOUD ATLAS by David Mitchell.

The Public Wants What The Public Gets: A Booker Prize Jam

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but here’s a couple of snippets from items that have popped up in my inbox over the last day or so. First up, John Connolly (right) from the latest post to his rather excellent blog, the remit of which is to keep his readers abreast on the trials and tribulations of whatever novel he happens to be working on:

“I’m also trying to get a handle on what kind of book THE LOVERS is. In a recent interview, I said that each book I write seems to be a reaction to the one that preceded it, and I suppose that’s true of THE LOVERS. Where THE REAPERS was fast and linear, with a very straightforward narrative, THE LOVERS is more complex, more allusive. A lot of it concerns events that have happened in the past, and a large part of the second half is taken up with one character revealing, over the course of a single evening, the truth behind the death of Parker’s father. I want to see if I can retain the reader’s interest by juggling the desire to find out ‘what happens next’ with gradual revelations about what has gone before.”

  I’ve met John Connolly on a few occasions, and heard him speak publicly about books a couple of times. He is, as most of you know, a very fine stylist, a superb storyteller, and a best-seller to boot. And when John Connolly speaks about writing, the conversation tends to quickly narrow down to one thing: WHAT. THE. READER. WANTS.
  I don’t know if the following pair of snippets should be placed in direct contrast to Connolly’s approach, but both of them are just two examples of what seems to be a growing backlash against the Booker Prize. First, from Wednesday, author James Delingpole in The Telegraph:

“I reckon that, too often, what our literary prize panels confuse with proper writing is in fact just overwriting, and that the problem is exacerbated by a salon of smug, sanctimonious, mostly Left-leaning literary-tastemakers (and gullible book groups) who feel a novel isn’t “valid” unless it’s a) a bit hard to read, b) weighed down with purple prose or poetry, c) socially worthy (madness, disability, child abuse, etc.) and d) best of all, imbued with lashings of fashionable, Zadie-Smith-style, melting-pot ethnic exoticism.”

  Then, today, critic Boyd Tonkin in The Independent:

“Behind the storm-in-a-wineglass feuds that surround the Man Booker Prize, a true and even tragic sub-plot may be starting to unfold. To be mass-market blunt rather than literary-novel elliptical: is the British audience for ambitious fiction dying off, losing faith, or just drifting away? […] In the five weeks after the long-list announcement on 29 July, the 13 titles of the “Booker dozen” sold fewer than 14,000 UK copies; on average, barely 1,000 each. This is, frankly, pathetic.”

  Back at the end of July, the Bookseller published a list of the sales of the newly nominated novels:

1. The Enchantress of Florence 15,433
2. Child 44 8,278
3. Sea of Poppies 5,034
4. Netherland 4,023
5. The Clothes on Their Backs 3,592
6. The White Tiger 1,852
7. The Secret Scripture 1,568
8. A Case of Exploding Mangoes 1,000
9. The Northern Clemency 916
10. A Fraction of the Whole 392
11. The Lost Dog 363

  A week later, they were back with this update:

Whilst Salman Rushdie’s THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE (Cape) remains the overall sales leader with an increase in book sales of 56.5% since last week, Linda Grant’s THE CLOTHES ON THEIR BACKS (Virago) has seen the biggest proportional increase. From selling just 13 copies during the week ending 26th July, the book has gone on to sell 144 copies the following week.
  Another notable increase was for Tom Rob Smith’s CHILD 44 (Simon & Schuster), one of the most controversial choices on the longlist. Sales increased by 250% for the thriller that had already shifted over 8,000 copies prior to the longlist announcement.

  CHILD 44, of course, didn’t made the Booker shortlist announced this week. Neither did THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE or Joseph O’Neill’s NETHERLAND, previously the bookies’ favourites with Ladbrokes and William Hill respectively. Sebastian Barry is now the 2/1 favourite with THE SECRET SCRIPTURE.
  I can’t find any weekly sales figures for later than the week ending August 16, but in that week THE SECRET SCRIPTURE had sold less than THE LOST DOG, which had sold 127 copies that week.
  Erm, folks? Y’think the reading public is trying to tell you something?