“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?” Thomas Mogford

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?
DIRTY TRICKS by Michael Dibdin. A stand-alone novel, rather than one of the ‘Zen’ series, it pulls off the near-impossible trick of making a thoroughly reprehensible main character utterly likeable. As someone who was brought up in Oxford, and has taught more than his fair share of foreign language classes, I felt a worrying sense of solidarity when the venal owner of language school receives a rather shocking comeuppance ...

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Keith Talent from Martin Amis’s LONDON FIELDS. Indefatigability and darts skills.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t often feel guilty about reading books. Free magazines and certain online newspapers, maybe…

Most satisfying writing moment?
When my wife reads something I’ve written, and doesn’t have a hint of a look that says ‘This could be better …’.

If you could recommend one Irish crime novel, what would it be?
DIVORCING JACK by Colin Bateman. My wife’s family are from Belfast, and this book convinced me that at any point while visiting them I would be kidnapped and trussed-up in a tower block. Still hasn’t happened, unfortunately …

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Irish-written, rather than Irish-set, but THE DOGS OF ROME by Conor Fitzgerald. Dog fights, mafia double dealings, all with the shimmering seedy backdrop of Rome… I’d buy a multiplex ticket for that.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing is experiencing a scene as you write it in a way that is almost as intense as living it. The worst is the crippling sense of uncertainty as to whether that scene is any good.

The pitch for your next book is …?
Gibraltarian lawyer Spike Sanguinetti travels to Malta after the deaths of his uncle and aunt. What appears to be a blood-soaked murder-suicide turns out a great deal more dark and sinister…

Who are you reading right now?
An English translation of the crime novel BRENNER AND GOD by Wolf Haas. Gives the lie to the fact that German-speakers can’t be funny and cool.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I think write, so as to try and pen poems to persuade Him to increase our daily rations of manna.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
The Times called SHADOW OF THE ROCK, ‘Evocative, engrossing and entertaining’, so if I can be forgiven the hideous self-promotion, I’ll go for that.

Thomas Mogford’s SHADOW OF THE ROCK is published by Bloomsbury

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Adrian McKinty On Ronan Bennett

Evil genius Adrian McKinty (right) sends us yet another literary missive from his mountain lair, this one on the ‘fearless, gifted Irishman from Newtownabbey’, aka Ronan Bennett. Take it away, O Dark Lord, sir …

Ronan Bennett’s HAVOC, IN ITS THIRD YEAR is set in the north of England in the 1630s. It is the story of John Brigge, a respectable county civil servant who is also a covert follower of the “old religion”. Brigge is the parish coroner, and the book begins with his investigation into a local woman who appears to have murdered her baby. There may be more to the story than meets the eye or it could be that Brigge’s compassion towards the desperate wretches that appear before him day-in and day-out has clouded his judgement. In either case, Brigge raises suspicions among some of the local townsfolk and his life, complicated already by his own wife’s pregnancy, takes a dramatic turn for the worse.
  Bennett skilfully portrays a man on the edge and a country at the cusp of a disastrous civil war; among many remarkable passages he gives us Brigge’s dreams that mix murderers, wives, victims, secret priests and unborn children in a swirling whirlpool of guilt and fear.
  Brigge is ultimately betrayed as a Catholic by a jealous clerk and he and his family go on the run through a nightmare landscape no less vivid than the dreamscape.
  Ronan Bennett and all right-thinking people will hate this analogy, but sometimes you read a novel that impresses you, but whose power, like the festering bite of the komodo dragon, only increases with time. HAVOC, IN ITS THIRD YEAR is such a book for me. When I read it several months ago, I liked it, I thought it was a good read, I recommended it to friends, but I didn’t think it was transcendent. Since then, however, it has resonated in my consciousness at odd times of the day and night; whole scenes played out like a film, entire passages recalled like poetry.
  Last week I bought Bennett’s THE CATASTROPHIST and that too is an extraordinary read. Set in the Belgian Congo in 1959 and 1960, it is a love story and political thriller that takes place in the wake of Belgium’s hasty attempt to divest itself of its African empire. It too is a great book, both moving and gripping and a powerful allegory for imperialism closer to home.
  Ronan Bennett and I were born only a few miles and a few years apart but we’re from different cultural and political universes. Bennett was radicalised in the early seventies and apparently he has lost none of his righteous indignation. He has got himself into passionate debates with Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens and he has said unfortunate things about the Omagh bombing - things which he has since recanted.
  But surely no one can fault Bennett’s fury at our contemporary scene, and his prose tells us something about the writer behind the disputes: clinical, dispassionate, ironic, intelligent, careful and ultimately incendiary.
  His plots move, his writing pulses, and his characters live and breathe and disagree with each other and often him. He takes his time with his protagonists, allowing them psychological and spiritual depth and yet he understands that characters alone aren’t enough; for a book to succeed it must have a strong, well planned narrative. Bennett’s novels are structurally sound and that hardest of combinations: unpredictable, yet completely convincing.
  Bennett is a profound writer in the tradition of early Le Carré or middle period Greene. He takes his job seriously and never underestimates the intelligence of his readers. And, speaking of Greene (this is where Bennett fans begin to groan), occasionally the British press will play the perennially popular game of wondering who “the new Graham Greene” could possibly be. A few – almost always English – authors are often tossed out and then summarily critiqued and dismissed as mere pretenders. No dauphin has yet been found, but if Ronan Bennett keeps on going the way he’s been going, I’d say the contest is over. Although Bennett would no doubt reject the dubious honour, the new Graham Greene isn’t an Englishman at all – he’s a fearless, gifted, Irishman from Newtownabbey. – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty blogs at The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. His latest novel, FIFTY GRAND, is due in 2009 from Holt

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Julie Parsons

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?
There are actually three – A FATAL INVERSION by Ruth Rendell / Barbara Vine – amazing plot and wonderful atmosphere; THE SHINING by Stephen King, not so much a plot more a way of death; and THE BUTCHER BOY by Patrick McCabe, which doesn’t usually figure in crime fiction lists, but does it for me in horror, sadness and a meditation on loss and pain.
What fictional character would you most like to have been?
When I was a kid I was crazy about the books by the American writer, Mary O’Hara. So I would have loved to have been Ken McLaughlin, who grew up on a horse ranch in the Rocky Mountains, in Wyoming.
Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. For pleasure I read anything by Martin Amis, Nadine Gordimer, Philip Roth and J.M Coetzee.
Most satisfying writing moment?
Writing the synopsis for my first book, MARY, MARY, and knowing, even before I sent it to Treasa Coady of TownHouse, that I had a winner.
The best Irish crime novel is …?
You know, I don’t read crime novels since I started writing them … terrified I’d be so put off by their brilliance and never write another word. Best Irish novel? THE BUTCHER BOY [by Patrick McCabe] for the above reasons.
What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
For the above reason, I can’t really say, but three of my books – MARY, MARY, THE COURTSHIP GIFT and EAGER TO PLEASE – have all been optioned for film and TV and I think they’d all be great - with the right writer, director, cast of course.
Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best is being on your own in complete control of your own world, and the worst is pretty much the same.
The pitch for your next book is …?
The next book is a high-concept, international DAY OF THE JACKAL-type thriller – the inhabitants of an island off the southwest coast of Ireland discover when the last ferry of the day has left, that they are NOT on their own.
Who are you reading right now?
I’m reading HUMAN SMOKE by Nicholson Baker, which tells in extracts from newspapers, letters and biographies of the build-up in the late 1930s and early 1940s to the Final Solution. Stunning and terrifying.
God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I don’t believe in God, but if I did the God I would believe in would never make such a demand. Because that God would know that to be a writer, you have to be a reader …
The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Powerful, vivid, unforgettable.

Julie Parsons’ I SAW YOU has just been published in paperback by Pan Books

Mi Casa, Su Casa: Adrian McKinty

The continuing stooooooory of how the Grand Vizier puts his feet up and lets other writers talk some sense for a change. This week: Adrian McKinty (right) on THE THIEF AND THE DOGS by Naguib Mahfouz.

Less Bark, More Bite: THE THIEF AND THE DOGS

Osama Bin Laden’s latest attack on western culture criticized Danish cartoons, western movies, western books, and freedom of speech, while praising – like tedious undergraduates everywhere – the work of Noam Chomsky and Robert Fisk.
  Lately the west has been fighting back against the Islamists through the writings of Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens and others who seem to think that nothing good has come out of Araby since they gave us the words for alcohol and tobacco.
  Mystery novelists seldom venture onto this field and it’s not my intent here to add to any of this debate but rather to draw interested readers to the work of Naguib Mahfouz, whose crime novel THE THIEF AND THE DOGS is not only a classic of the genre but is a wonderful example of how west and east, genre fiction and literary fiction, religious writing and secular prose, can all get along famously in one great book.
  Everyone can learn a little from THE THIEF AND THE DOGS and even if you couldn’t care less about the current political debates, the book should still delight as a fast-paced thriller.
  Set in post-revolutionary 1950s Cairo, THE THIEF AND THE DOGS is about master-burglar Said Mahran and the weeks following his release from prison. During this time he attempts to reconcile with his family, to reconnect with his old friends, and eventually to seek revenge on the men who he feels have betrayed him.
  His first day of freedom is a disaster. His daughter Sana doesn’t remember him and his former girlfriend (Sana’s mother) Nabawaiyya has married one of his old confederates, Illish. Mocked by Illish’s friends, Said wanders the boiling, confusing streets of Cairo seething with anger in one of the first of Mahfouz’s extraordinary expressionistic scenes that are strangely reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s early New York crime movie KILLER’S KISS (which is set at roughly the same time as Dogs).
  Both Kubrick and Mahfouz (right) are attracted to outsiders, betrayal, sexual dishonesty and conspiracies, and both love plunging their characters deep into the abyss to see if they will survive.
  Said Mahran fails the first of these tests, deciding to take up burglary again but without the gang of associates who used to help him case rich neighborhoods and work as servants inside the mansions of the elite to give him information on money and valuables.   His anarchic unplanned solo burglary attempts are failures and Said narrowly escapes death. He seeks refuge with a Sufi Sheikh, a former friend of his father’s. The Sheikh offers him a bed and sanctuary but Said moves on again, eventually shacking up with a young prostitute called Nur. The story has its own inexorable momentum but its Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo that is the real eye-opener. Whores, thieves, beggars, whisky-drinking soldiers, corrupt officials – the whole fermenting underbelly of the ancient city laid bare. This is an Islamic culture that we seldom see in the west and it’s completely different from the shady Arab underworld that is given to us in perennially popular novels such as [Paul Bowles’] THE SHELTERING SKY or [Lawrence Durrell’s] Alexandria Quartet. Here the reader is inside the culture peering out, not the reverse, and this position is much more interesting.   Seeking revenge against the whole of “cruel humanity”, Said settles on Rauf Illwan, an old school chum who has become a rich newspaper columnist. If he assassinates “the betrayer” Rauf, Said feels that his life will attain some kind of fame and meaning.
  Nur begs him to abandon his plan and the Sufi Sheikh goes deeper telling him that a dramatic act is not necessary. The Sufis believe that we all have a chance at redemption, right here, right now. All our pain, all our suffering, is the proof that we are alive. Our hurts and our humiliations are what make us human and seeing that is a path to peace and acceptance. Inverting the famous line of the morning call to prayer (“come to the mosque, for prayer is better than sleep”) the Sheikh tells Said that for him sleep is a form of prayer. He should sleep and then wake up and love his life today, right now, for who knows what comes in the tomorrow or even the sweet hereafter.
  Naturally Said rejects all of this and puts everything in place to carry out his assassination plan. Hunted by the newspapers, the police and informers, doors start closing on Said, his allies desert him, and his last refuge becomes a sprawling Cairo cemetery.
  Despite his acclaim, Islamists dislike Naguib Mahfouz and dismiss THE THIEF AND THE DOGS as decadent western fiction (In 1994 one of these Islamist fanatics even tried to kill him). His defence of Salman Rushdie has made Mahfouz suspect in the Arab world and his failure to praise Rushdie as a writer annoyed some in the west. Literary critics prefer Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize-winning Cairo Trilogy to his crime fictions, but it would be a shame if the forces of reaction or counter-reaction kept THE THIEF AND THE DOGS from a wider readership.
  All of us, including Osama Bin Laden and his largely Egyptian followers, would get so much more from Naguib Mahfouz than by any number of tracts by Chomsky, Fisk, Amis or Danish cartoonists. Certainly anyone looking for a terrific crime novel set in Egypt that doesn’t feature Belgian detectives or western lotus eaters could do worse than read Mahfouz’s short masterpiece, THE THIEF AND THE DOGS. – Adrian McKinty

Adrian McKinty is the author of THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD. His latest novel, FIFTY GRAND, will be published by Holt later this year.

Brain Candy

Just in case you thought we were over-stating the case just a tad last week in our review of neurologist Liam Durcan’s (right) rather fine debut novel GARCIA’S HEART, we herewith present a selection of big-ups and hup-yas from Durcan’s Canadian hinterland, to wit:

“Engrossing. . . . Durcan doesn’t offer any easy answers in this searching, meticulously observed novel of moral complexity. He does offer plenty to think about.” — Toronto Star

“Lucid and subtle. . . . Durcan has crafted an entertaining and convincing portrayal of a man awkwardly perched atop a precipice of identities and histories on the verge of collapse.” — Montreal Review of Books

“Stunningly well-written. . . . Durcan writes the way one imagines a brain surgeon employs his tools — with strength to cut through bone and feather-light delicacy to excise minute strands of tissue. Durcan’s style is a mixture of precision and playfulness, irony and moral seriousness reminiscent of British master Ian McEwan, or even a slightly restrained Martin Amis … A remarkable accomplishment.” — Winnipeg Free Press

“With this remarkable debut novel, Liam Durcan … has firmly ensconced himself within the hallowed ranks of doctors making successful forays into literature, a line running straight from Chekov through William Carlos Williams and W. Somerset Maugham to, most recently, Scotiabank Giller Prize winner Vincent Lam. . . .There are evocations of Ian McEwan’s SATURDAY here . . . Durcan beats McEwan at his own game by resisting the tendency to show off and, in doing so, produces a restrained, artfully paced work built around its central ethical question, which is not so much “what is evil?” as “what, exactly, is the nature of good?” — Quill & Quire (starred review)

“Like a cross between John le Carré and Ian McEwan – GARCIA’S HEART, treads the line between an elegant, elegiac novel of ideas and a sophisticated political thriller. It was exciting, intellectually compelling, and beautifully written. It was also that rarest of books: A literary work with an intensely humanistic core. I am so happy to have discovered Liam Durcan; he will be a major writer for years to come.” — Pauls Toutonghi

“Eloquent and haunting, GARCIA’S HEART fearlessly explores the moral ambiguities of the modern world. Durcan demonstrates his supreme versatility with this psychologically penetrating, technically assured, yet empathic and human portrait of a man struggling to come to terms with a terrible angel.” — Eden Robinson,

“In his debut novel, Liam Durcan skilfully performs complex forensic procedures: autopsies on mysteriously damaged hearts, brain scans on characters whose deepest thoughts remain beyond diagnosis. Throughout, Durcan writes with operating room precision. A grim, gripping, confident, and provocative book.” — Steven Heighton

“Liam Durcan raises complex and important issues in GARCIA’S HEART, exposing the frailty of human nature against the background of medical science. It’s an intelligent book, thought-provoking and satisfying — a meditation on the workings of the mind. I found myself thinking about it for a long time afterwards.” — Clare Morrall

So, there you have it. Liam Durcan. GARCIA’S HEART. Make yourself happy, people …

Ready, Amis, Fire …

Just when you start to believe that today’s writers are only in it for the Ferraris and hot chicks, along comes Ronan Bennett (right). In a piece in Monday’s Guardian, the author of ZUGWANG takes Martin Amis to task in no uncertain terms for what Bennett believes are Amis’s inflammatory remarks about Muslims. Bennett, who was wrongly convicted of murdering an RUC officer in 1974, and spent 18 months imprisoned in Long Kesh, was subsequently arrested in London in the mid-’70s for the now-legendary offence of “conspiring to commit crimes unknown against persons unknown in places unknown” and tried at the Old Bailey in the so-called ‘anarchists’ trial’. Acquitted after defending himself in court, he has perhaps more capacity than most for the ‘imaginative sympathy’ he believes is lacking in the West for a persecuted minority. The gist, proceeding by excerpts, runneth thusly:

What do you make of the following statement: “Asians are gaining on us demographically at a huge rate. A quarter of humanity now and by 2025 they’ll be a third. Italy’s down to 1.1 child per woman. We’re just going to be outnumbered.” While we’re at it, what do you think of this, incidentally from the same speaker: “The Black community will have to suffer until it gets its house in order.” Or this, the same speaker again: “I just don’t hear from moderate Judaism, do you?” And (yes, same speaker): “Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough with their children.” The speaker was Martin Amis and, yes, the quotations have been modified, with Asians, Blacks and Irish here substituted for Muslims, and Judaism for Islam - though, it should be stressed, these are the only amendments. Terry Eagleton, professor of English literature at Manchester University, where Amis has also started to teach, recently quoted the remarks in a new edition of his book IDEOLOGY: AN INTRODUCTION. Amis, Eagleton claimed, was advocating nothing less than the “hounding and humiliation” of Muslims so “they would return home and teach their children to be obedient to the White Man’s law”. […] The views quoted by Eagleton first appeared last year, in an interview Amis [right] gave to Ginny Dougary of the Times. That they passed with virtually no comment at the time says a great deal about the depoliticised state of intellectual debate in Britain. While a great deal of media time and energy is spent discussing the latest translation of WAR AND PEACE or the artwork in the refurbished St Pancras station, there has been, with a few notable exceptions, a puzzling lack of effort when it comes to something as critical as expressing support for an increasingly demonised minority in our society. Martin Amis should have been taken to task by his peers for his views. He was not. […] This is a community under attack, and not just by novelists. By every official index, violence and discrimination against Muslims have increased since 2001. The victims of physical violence will always be a minority – although Asian people are twice as likely to be stabbed to death than they were ten years ago – but what the majority experience in their daily lives is much more insidious, the kind of coded rejection that in this more enlightened age takes the place of outright expressions of racism. And, of course, hanging over them are threats of control orders, curfews, arrest and extended periods of detention without trial. Just as the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act left the Irish community in Britain feeling like a suspect nation, so the infinitely more repressive anti- terrorist legislation – including 28 days’ detention without charge rather than the old seven when the IRA were active – of today intimidates, alienates and inflames Muslims. […] I can’t help feeling that Amis’s remarks, his defence of them, and the reaction to them were a test. They were a test of our commitment to a society in which imaginative sympathy applies not just to those like us but to those whose lives and beliefs run along different lines. And I can’t help feeling we failed that test. Amis got away with it. He got away with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time. Shame on him for saying it, and shame on us for tolerating it.

Ronan Bennett wrote the screenplay of THE HAMBURG CELL, a film about the 9/11 hijackers. His latest novel is ZUGZWANG.