The North Will Rise Again, Again

Apologies to all Three Regular Readers for the intemperate outburst regarding Irish politics yesterday, a post I had to take down on the basis that it was attracting all kinds of bizarre comments, most of them even more radical in terms of visiting violence on Irish politicians than my own. Normal service is hereby resumed …
  I’ve mentioned Eoin McNamee’s ORCHID BLUE on these pages more than once in the last few weeks, but it really is a terrific read. If you don’t believe me, check out John Burnside’s review in The Guardian last week. The gist runneth thusly:

“Northern Ireland, 1961. The body of a young woman, stripped naked, brutally beaten, stabbed and finally strangled, is discovered in a stubble field after a dance at Newry Orange Hall. Though the police have nothing to go on other than the most circumstantial evidence, the whole town agrees that the killer is a young bodybuilder and ne'er-do-well named Robert McGladdery …
“It is this sense of how the defining moments come to be agreed – of how they are essentially defined by the ruling class – that illuminates ORCHID BLUE, so that what begins as a crime thriller gradually builds not only into a political novel of the highest order but also that rare phenomenon, a genuinely tragic work of art.” - John Burnside

  Nice. Meanwhile, I was delighted to see Stuart Neville’s very fine COLLUSION reviewed by Marilyn Stasio in the New York Times at the weekend, although it has to be said, it was less of a review and more of a synopsis. To wit:

The violence in Stuart Neville’s novels about Northern Ireland is about as nasty as it gets in noir crime fiction. But while the bloodshed in Neville’s first novel, THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, was viewed from the perspective of a professional killer named Gerry Fegan, in COLLUSION (Soho, $25), a law enforcement officer is drawn into the brutality, which only adds to the sense of despair. Detective Inspector Jack Lennon, a Belfast policeman with an unsavory past, has a chance to redeem himself by coddling an informant with intelligence on local gangsters doing business with a Lithuanian mob. But in the process Lennon learns of more serious criminal collusion involving “the cops, the Brits, the Irish government, the party” — not to mention the mob bosses.
  This corruption can be traced all the way back to the Troubles and to one particular bloodbath that made fugitives of Lennon’s estranged lover and daughter. In his frantic efforts to find them, the detective turns to Fegan, the assassin, who is his only hope of finding out why that old atrocity is being revisited. What he doesn’t hold out any hope for is an end to the cycle of violence — not in Northern Ireland, where even today, in the midst of peace, organized crime is relentlessly intruding. - Marilyn Stasio

  Now, I’m sure Stuart Neville isn’t exactly complaining, but I was left scratching my head as to the point of a ‘review’ like that. Maybe I’m being obtuse, but if I hadn’t read the novel, I’d be no wiser as to if it was actually any good, and if so, why. Which is the point, is it not, of a review?

Thieves Like Them

You wait ages for an Irish crime writing gig to go to, and then two come along at the same time. William Ryan launches his debut novel THE HOLY THIEF at O’Mahony’s Bookshop in Limerick next Wednesday evening, May 12th, with the event kicking off at 6.30pm. Who he? I hear you cry. Well, the pre-pub praise has been pretty strong so far. To wit:

‘A subtle, superb mystery, a wonderful central character and with a sense of place and period to rival even the greatest of the Russian masters. More please!’ - KATE MOSSE, author of Labyrinth

‘A first-rate crime novel: a genuinely memorable detective, powerful story and a seamlessly convincing setting. William Ryan is the real thing.’ - A L KENNEDY

‘THE HOLY THIEF is an utterly compelling and beautifully lucid novel, in which murder, history and suspicion combine to create an atmosphere of ever-increasing and constantly shifting suspense.’ - JOHN BURNSIDE, author of Glister

‘With THE HOLY THIEF, Ryan establishes himself as a fresh voice, rendering the snow-slicked streets of Thirties’ Moscow with brilliant clarity. His picture of Captain Korolev as a conflicted, yet loyal, state servant is acutely real, as is his world, slouching toward terror and war. A masterful evocation of a dark time, wrapped around an even darker mystery, THE HOLY THIEF does its magic on the head as well as the nerves.’ - OLEN STEINHAUER, author of The Tourist

  THE HOLY THIEF is currently suffering from oxygen deprivation on the peak of Mt TBR, so hopefully we’ll have a review here in the next week or so. Meanwhile, Library Voices in Dun Laoghaire hosts Declan Hughes and Alan Glynn on the same evening, with the blurb elves wittering thusly:

Library Voices presents two of Ireland’s leading exponents of noir crime writing, Declan Hughes and Alan Glynn. Of Declan Hughes’s Ed Loy series, Val McDermid said: “If you don’t love this, don’t dare call yourself a crime fiction fan”. The fifth in the series, CITY OF LOST GIRLS, is set in Dublin and LA. Alan Glynn’s marvellous second novel, WINTERLAND, is a gripping thriller set in the Dublin underworld of hitmen, big business and government corruption.

Details: Wednesday, May 12th, at 7.30pm in County Hall, Marine Rd, Dun Laoghaire. Tickets €5.00 from the Pavilion Box Office. Call (01) 231 2929.

  So there it is. If anyone masters the art of bi-location and manages to get to both the Limerick and Dun Laoghaire gigs, be sure to let us know how it all panned out …

  Lately I have been mostly reading: THE DEVIL by Ken Bruen, THE WHISPERERS by John Connolly, PEELER by Kevin McCarthy, and A QUESTION OF BELIEF by Donna Leon.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: GLISTER by John Burnside

A poet with 11 published collections to his name, along with six novels, John Burnside is a master of descriptive prose, particularly when it comes to fleshing out the subtleties of the natural world. One of the many ironies of GLISTER is that while Burnside’s evocation of the novel’s geographical setting is rich in detail, the world it describes – ‘Homeland’ – is a headland devastated by a disused chemical factory, the economy now in ruins, the environment curdled, its soil and woods and sea left lifeless.
  Post-apocalyptic in tone, GLISTER tells of a community enduring a living hell. Multiple narrators, some third-person, one first-person, contribute to a tale of emotional and psychological paralysis, as the inhabitants of Innertown avert their collective gaze from the ongoing disappearance of a succession of teenage boys. Morrison, the hapless local police officer, is reduced to tending a shrine in ‘the poisoned wood’, while at home his wife Alice nurtures a breakdown that allows her abdicate her responsibilities. Brian Smith, the Outertown entrepreneur who owns the community body and soul, may be somehow responsible for the disappearances; but those who still care enough to contemplate the horrifying consequences of absolute corruption, including the 15-year-old bibliophile Leonard, are powerless to penetrate Smith’s inner sanctum.
  Despite Burnside’s sharply observed vignettes, the cumulative effect of multiple narrative voices is to create a disorientating, meandering story. This is Burnside’s intention. GLISTER is a bewildering, Kafkaesque howl of anguish for lost innocence, in which Burnside explicitly references Melville’s MOBY-DICK while implicitly evoking Dante’s DIVINE COMEDY. The notion that a metaphorical great white whale of redemption is available only via a whole new circle of hell, one created to cater for those responsible for mankind’s rapacious abuse of the planet and its denizens, human and animal, is a sobering one, but Burnside refuses to take the easy option by pointing a finger at any one individual, or even the Brian Smiths of this world. We are all, the subtext suggests, equally guilty of abnegating our responsibilities, condemned by ourselves and our neighbours and the fragile blue ball on which we live. Or would be, had we the will to call ourselves to account.
  Burnside does offer that faint prospect of redemption, courtesy of the spectral Mothman who befriends the lost soul that is Leonard, but even at the finale the notion of hope is shot through with a shocking pragmatism. Accused of an apparent indifference to the fate of the teenage boys, the police officer Morrison protests that the soul is not ‘intrinsically good’; rather, he says, “ … the soul is wet and dark, a creature that takes up residence in the human body like a parasite and feeds on it, a creature hungry for experience and power and possessed of an inhuman joy that cares nothing for its host, but lives, as it must live, in perpetual, disfigured longing.”
  It is a ‘disfigured longing’ that glisters just beneath the surface of this sinuously compelling novel, the ancient, inarticulate desire to have the promise of life finally delivered, however compromised that promise might be by the dirty, poisonous business of living. Just as the chemical fall-out from the disused plant will pollute Burnside’s mythical Homeland for generations to come, GLISTER will radiate darkly in your mind long after it is done. – Declan Burke

This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post