Blessed Am I Amongst Women

The internet really is a wonderful place. You hang out, you meet lovely people, you talk about blowing up hospitals and Kurt Vonnegut. That is to say, you talk about blowing up hospitals, and Kurt Vonnegut. There’ll be no exploding Kurt Vonneguts on these pages, no sirree, ma’am.
  Anyway, Alex Donald was kind enough to host me over at her Multiverse yesterday, where she asked me, among other things, about the meta-fictional elements of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL and who influenced the novel most, which is when the name Kurt Vonnegut came up. If you’re interested, the interview can be found here …
  Alex was also good enough to read and review AZC last week, with the gist of her opinion running thusly:

“Darkly funny, superbly written, meta-fictional and with more than a passing nod to Paul Auster, Flann O’Brien and (dare I say it) Chuck Palahniuk’s FIGHT CLUB, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL l fuses literary and crime fiction to create something utterly original.” - Alex Donald

  I thank you kindly, ma’am.
  Meanwhile, over on the other side of the Atlantic, Elizabeth White hosted a guest post from yours truly on her blog, in which I talked about violence in the crime novel, and how the impact of real-life violence alters what you write - or whether you write at all. It also features such searing insights into the contemporary crime novel as the following:

“Meanwhile, it’s also true that the Irish crime novel, in common with most other territories’ crime novels, has for its structure the basic three-act drama of Greek tragedy. To wit: 1) Things Are Mostly Okay; 2) Things Get Screwed Up and / or Someone Sleeps With His Mom; 3) Things Are Mostly Okay Again.”

  For the rest, clickety-click here …
  Not all the internet ladies have been so kind, of course. Over at Good Reads, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL is currently thriving on a 4.29 average from 17 ratings. The average would probably be considerably higher had not one Celia Lynch, bless her cotton socks, given the book a one-star rating, even though the book’s status is ‘gave up’. Now, I know there’s absolutely no rules when it comes to internet reviewing, and that the ethics and standards that apply to professional reviewers go out the window, but isn’t it a bit much, regardless of your reviewing status, to award a rating to a book you haven’t had the courtesy to finish? Mind you, I suppose I should feel chuffed; the only other books Celia gave up on were by Joanne Harris and William Burroughs.
  Finally, and for all of you who have been waiting breathlessly for the Tuam Herald verdict on AZC - it’s in. To wit:

“While the character-coming-to-life device is clever enough, the real beauty of this book is the sharp dialogue, the witty vignettes and the well-sharpened digs. The running commentary on the state of the world is priceless … his delightfully jaundiced take on our current ‘reality’ could provide a political primer for any arriving alien unluckily enough to be beamed down here right now.” - Tuam Herald

  For the full report, including the reviewer’s appreciation of Raquel Welch in her fur bikini, clickety-click here …

  Finally, this week’s reading: Paul Johnston’s THE SILVER STAIN is the latest Alex Mavros novel, is set on Crete and dabbles in the Nazi invasion of that island in 1941; it’s terrific stuff. I’m also reading THE BOOK OF JOB AS A GREEK TRAGEDY by Horace M. Kallen, which is a hoot and a half; and THE GOLDEN SCALES by Parker Bilal, a private eye tale set in contemporary Cairo that may or may not herald a wave of Egyptian hardboiled noir.
  So there you have it: this week’s AZC flummery in full. Do tune in next week, when we’ll very probably be talking about Sophia Loren, Edward Anderson’s THIEVES LIKE US, the new Donald Westlake novel from Hard Case Crime and what it was like to meet Amanda Hocking (lovely person, very unassuming, big Kurt Vonnegut fan).

ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL: So It Goes

Is it really five months since the publication of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL? Jayz. Seems like it happened only a couple of weeks ago, and at the same time it feels like half a lifetime ago. Weird. Anyway, 2012 is off to a good start, review-wise; my cup fairly ran over last weekend.
  First up was the inimitable Glenn Harper of International Noir, who opened his review by referencing a number of authors who dabbled in meta-fiction, most of whom (to be perfectly frank) I’d never even heard of. Glenn finished up something like this:

“Among the many crime fiction references, it’s [Patricia] Highsmith that resonates most with ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL (for me) … Declan Burke has cemented his central position in the current wave of neo-noir and contemporary crime fiction.” - Glenn Harper, International Noir

  As you can imagine, I was pretty pleased with that; Glenn Harper knows of what he speaks. Then a review popped up from an Irish blogger, Alex Donald. Now, I should declare an interest here: about 18 months ago, Alex and I were two of a quartet of writers who sat down to establish a writing group, essentially to motivate one another into finding the time to write. As it happens, I was working on a different book entirely for that writing group, and only managed to make it along to two sessions; despite the writers being a smart and funny bunch, the truth was that I didn’t have the time to devote to any motivational sessions designed to find me time to write. Anyway, cutting a long and not very interesting story short, Alex was kind enough to review AZC over at her blog, with the gist running thusly:

“Darkly funny, superbly written, meta-fictional and with more than a passing nod to Paul Auster, Flann O’Brien and (dare I say it) Chuck Palahniuk’s FIGHT CLUB, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL fuses literary and crime fiction to create something utterly original.” - Alex Donald

  Last weekend, incidentally, Dufour Editions was good enough to declare AZC its Book of the Week. I’m not really sure what that means, to be honest, although it was very nice indeed of the Dufour people to republish the Publishers Weekly review of ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL that compares it (favourably) to Stephen King’s THE DARK HALF.
  Also last weekend, the Sunday Independent carried a review of AZC, under the headline, ‘Darkly hilarious classic takes modern crime writing to a whole new level’. As you can probably imagine, the review that followed was broadly positive. To wit:

“Stylistically removed from anything being attempted by his peers … [a] darkly hilarious amalgam of classic crime riffing (hep Elmore Leonard-isms and screwballing) and the dimension-warping reflections of Charlie Kaufman or Kurt Vonnegut. Like the latter’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL sees another Billy ‘come unstuck’ in what is, frankly, a brilliant premise.” - Hilary White, Sunday Independent

  I have to say, it’s all getting a little confusing in terms of the references. Patricia Highsmith, Paul Auster, Flann O’Brien, Chuck Palahniuk, Stephen King, Elmore Leonard, Charlie Kaufman, Kurt Vonnegut … that’s a pretty wild brew.

  I should also say that Hilary White was inspired, in terms of references, in his choice of SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE. The Billy in AZC is so called as a homage to Billy Pilgrim in Vonnegut’s classic, which is one of my favourite novels from one of my favourite writers; Vonnegut is one of those very rare writers who combines hugely entertaining and accessible stories with great profundity. In my head, Kurt Vonnegut’s fingerprints are all over AZC, to the extent that I went out of my way to erase all traces of his influence in the final drafts - apart, of course, from renaming Karlsson ‘Billy’.
  God, I wish I had the time to go read a Vonnegut RIGHT NOW …

My Week At The Movies

You get to see a lot of rubbish when you review movies for a living, and while it’s nowhere as bad as thinning turnips or working on a building site, it’s incredibly frustrating to waste a couple of hours (plus the couple of hours it takes to get there and back) watching complete tosh when you could be doing something more useful, like staring at a blank screen and trying to remember how this whole writing lark goes again. Last week was a bad week, upon which we won’t dwell, but this week has been one of the better ones.
  I saw Waltz With Bashir (above, right) on Monday morning, an animated film dealing with the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war, the Sabra and Shatila massacres, and the voluntary amnesia of some of the Israeli soldiers involved. Written and directed by Ari Folman, who served during the conflict, it’s a fairly straightforward narrative, in that it’s constructed from a series of interviews Ari conducts with former comrades in an attempt to fill in the missing gaps in his memory of that time. The animation is crude, a technique called ‘rotor-scoping’ that involves filming live and then painting over the resulting film; it’s deliberately crude, however, designed to place the kind of dream-like barrier between audience and action that the soldiers themselves seem to experience when they try to remember the details of the war. Naturally, it’s those details, as they emerge in a drip-feed manner, that prove harrowing. A brave and haunting film, Waltz With Bashir is as compelling as its subject matter is repellent.
  I saw Choke on Tuesday morning, the movie version of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel. I thought the novel overwrought and grating when I read it years ago, a story with all the idiosyncrasies of FIGHT CLUB but none of the substance. The movie isn’t much of an improvement; the main character, Victor, is an accumulation of quirks and oddities, and never really convinces as a fully rounded person. Yes, I know he’s supposed to be a despicable human being, and that I’m not supposed to like him, but I’d have been equally happy to hate the sex addict-cum-scam artist. I just didn’t care enough either way, although Angelica Huston’s performance, as Victor’s dying mother, is a strong one.
  Tuesday afternoon brought the Irish movie Kisses. To wit:

Two kids, Dylan (Shane Curry) and Kylie (Kelly O’Neill) run away from home to escape Dylan’s abusive father and Kylie’s creepy uncle, and spend the night wandering the streets of Dublin. That’s the very simple set-up to Kisses, which was written and directed by Lance Daly, and the movie is as beautiful as it is simple. That’s not to say it’s a picture-postcard depiction of Dublin, or of its central characters. Dylan and Kylie are expertly drawn pre-teens from one of Dublin’s less salubrious suburban estates, with all the angst, conflict and hormonally-charged naïvety that that suggests, and both have the vocabulary of a fishwife. Most of the situations the pair find themselves in are not ones that will have Bord Failte rushing to promote this movie – Kylie and Dylan, searching for Dylan’s homeless brother, find themselves dealing with a variety of winos, perverts and security guards keen to make a name for themselves. But it’s the chemistry and relationship between the leading pair that make this work, as well as a script that showcases a very sharp ear for Dublin slang, and despite their sordid environment, this is an uplifting tale that’s similar in tone and intent with the last great Irish movie, Adam and Paul.

  Wonderful, wonderful stuff.
  Tuesday night found me in the Abbey Theatre for The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Berthold Brecht’s tale of the rise of an Italian-American gangster in 1930’s Chicago and the parallels between his coming to power and that of Adolf Hitler in Germany. Jimmy Fay, who has been turning out some terrific productions in the last couple of years, directs, and it’s a long but always compelling tale. Central to its success is the performance of Tom Vaughn Lawlor as Ui, a stunning piece of work in which Lawlor somehow manages to channel Hitler, Al Capone, Groucho Marx, Charlie Chaplin and Richard III. It’s as fine a performance as I’ve seen on a Dublin stage in 10 years of reviewing theatre; if you’re in the vicinity of Dublin over the next few weeks, don’t miss it.
  Finally, the clip below is the trailer to Kisses. Roll it there, Collette …