On Putting The ‘Laughter’ Into ‘Slaughter’

‘Writing 3.0’ is the rather bold title of the 2012 Fingal Annual Writing Festival, which runs from November 2nd - 10th and describes itself thusly:

Writing 3.0 initially evolved from the well established ‘Finscéal: A Writer’s Trail of Fingal’ an initiative for writers and readers throughout Fingal since 2005. The shift to Writing 3.0 in 2010 conceptualised the writing process in the twenty-first century; how it evolves from the blank page across a range of technologies associated with creativity that potentially reaches vast audiences. Writing 3.0 2012 continues its focus on the writing process today, with Fingal Libraries Department and Fingal Arts Office collaborating once again to extend the emphasis on writing towards performance and uplifting experiences. This year we have programmed workshops and performances on rap, coding for computer games and animation, improvisation, songwriting, screenwriting and performance poetry, as well as the traditional focus on writing and reading poetry and fiction.

  It’s a heady brew, and I’m very much looking forward to taking part when I take to the stage at 8pm next Thursday evening, November 8th, for a reading from SLAUGHTER’S HOUND and an interview in the company of Edel Coffey, when we’ll do our level best to put the ‘laughter’ into ‘slaughter’. If you’re likely to be in the vicinity of Blanchardstown Library next Thursday, I’d love to see you there. All the information and booking details can be found here …
  In other news, SLAUGHTER’S HOUND received a rather interesting review from Dana King. To wit:

“The writing … is dead-on and perfect for the situation. Burke is able to capture the occasional absurdity of Rigby’s early situation and inexorably ratchet up the tension to the darkness that captures the end of the book […] Rigby’s actions become progressively more violent until gruesome is not too strong a word. It’s a risk worth taking for those who like their crime fiction to look at the effects of a story’s events on both the doer and those who have been done.”

  Dana reckons that SH is a ‘seamless blend’ of Ray Chandler and Ray Banks, although he does concede that such a blend won’t be to the taste of every reader. For the full review, clickety-click here …
  Finally, the lovely people at TV3’s Ireland AM programme - who sponsor the Crime Fiction gong at the Irish Book Awards - were kind enough to invite me along to their couch for interview yesterday morning. As always, the experience was a hugely enjoyable one, although Mark Cagney’s insistence that Harry Rigby is a colder-than-usual killer had me feeling that I was sitting on a different kind of couch entirely by the time it was all over. Watch out for all the other nominees on the Ireland AM Best Crime Fiction Novel list, who will be taking their place on the couch in the next couple of weeks. And if you think you can stand it, here’s the link to yesterday’s interview …

On Intelligent Reading

I had an interview with Howard Jacobson published today in the Irish Examiner, in which he speaks of intelligent reading as a dying art, which put me in mind of John Boland’s review of SLAUGHTER’S HOUND a few weeks ago in the Irish Independent. At the time, I mentioned that John didn’t much care for SLAUGHTER’S HOUND; and it should go without saying, although I’ll say it anyway, that John is as entitled as anyone else to dislike any book; moreover, being a reviewer commissioned to express his opinion, he is duty bound to say so as honestly as possible.
  In fact, all Three Regular Readers of this blog will know that I have for some time been an advocate for a more rigorous quality of review when it comes to crime and mystery writing, and the review in the Irish Independent certainly provided that. Not only was the reviewer afforded plenty of space, the review itself was quite detailed. Having established that the protagonist, Harry Rigby, is inherently implausible on the basis that he is both capable of thuggish violence and a basic grasp of poetry and philosophy, John concludes as follows:

“Indeed, more persuasive is the response of teenage Grainne, who midway through the book tells Harry: “You’re a horrible human being” -- a judgment the reader had already made after noting the abuse he had just meted out to his ex-partner and to the troubled son he professed to care about.
  “There’s no reason, of course, why the principal character of a book has to be endearing or even likeable (Richard Stark’s icily amoral killer, Parker, comes to mind), but there’s no indication here that the author finds his vengeful anti-hero inherently repellent or that he wants the reader to judge him in any negative way.
  “Matters aren’t helped by the fact that every single other character is just as aggressively unpleasant. The result is as bleak a picture of contemporary Ireland as you’ll encounter -- though undermined by the reader’s sense that the author has nothing interesting to say about such an Ireland and that it’s all merely being served up for lurid thrills. On that level, the book is brutally efficient.” - John Boland, Irish Independent

  Now, I’m not going to suggest that John Boland’s overall verdict on the book is wrong. That is his opinion, as I say, and given that I review books myself, it would be hypocritical of me to engage in special pleading on behalf of my own. I am, however, going to suggest that he misread SLAUGHTER’S HOUND.
  The word ‘abuse’, for example, is a loaded one, particularly as John uses it to set up his claim that the reader will have already judged Harry Rigby a ‘horrible human being’ by the time young Grainne delivers her verdict. The word ‘abuse’ often comes prefaced with ‘domestic’, ‘emotional’, ‘psychological’ or even ‘sexual’, whereas Harry Rigby is guilty of engaging in bitter arguments with his ex-partner, Denise (she is his ex-, after all), arguments Harry invariably loses given that Denise is smarter and more pragmatic. As for his son, Ben, the ‘abuse’ there consists of verbal tough love when Harry discovers that 12-year-old Ben is indulging in substances not appropriate for any 12-year-old. Certainly, Harry Rigby will win no prizes for sensitivity. A ‘horrible human being’, on the other hand, would simply walk away from complex emotional scenarios rather than try to engage with them in his clumsy, inarticulate way.
  Grainne’s judgment of Harry, incidentally, as a ‘horrible human being’ may well be true by the time it is delivered, by which point Harry has been well and truly slapped around by life; it’s as true a judgement as when she tells him, some pages later, “Fuck, you’re cold.” The crucial line in the book follows on directly from this comment, when Harry says, “I wasn’t born this way.” By this point, squeezed on all sides and physically and emotionally drained, bent out of shape by forces beyond his control and trapped in a vice between cops and ex-paramilitaries, it’s perhaps understandable that Harry Rigby has little time for the social niceties.
  But the crux of the review, I think, and the misreading, comes with John’s assertion that, “there’s no indication here that the author finds his vengeful anti-hero inherently repellent or that he wants the reader to judge him in any negative way.”
  SLAUGHTER’S HOUND is not about my finding Harry Rigby inherently likeable, or about providing a scenario in which readers might judge him in a positive way. A character is a product of his or her story, just as a person is a product of his or her time and place, their culture and society. If Harry Rigby is perceived as inherently repellent and negative, then I’d suggest that he becomes that way as a result of his experiences, most of which impact on him personally in a negative way. He wasn’t, as he says in one of his few sentimental statements, born that way.
  The author has nothing interesting to say about a bleakly pictured contemporary Ireland, reckons John, but he may have misread Harry Rigby: by turns thuggishly violent and capable of poetry and philosophy, of sentimental self-pity and delusion, of self-wounding hypocrisy, a desperate, ruined figure who finally erupts in a terrible rage when he is systematically stripped of all hope, he is intended as a symbol for modern Ireland in these benighted times. I certainly didn’t aim for ‘lurid thrills’ when writing the book, but then, any book belongs as much to its reader as it does to its writer, and perhaps I simply didn’t write it well enough to clarify such issues.
  All of which is a (very) roundabout way of bringing me to that Irish Examiner interview with Howard Jacobson. Well, it was ostensibly an interview, but given that his new book, ZOO TIME, is a black comedy about a failing writer, with which yours truly was able to empathise with a little more than I’d like to admit, the interview pretty much amounted to a series of increasingly entertaining digressions about the state of writing and reading today.
  At one point the notion of a character’s ‘likeability’ came up, this in the context of one of ZOO TIME’s themes, the slow death of the intelligent reader.

To wit:

Winning the Booker Prize has not mellowed him, nor changed his unfashionable view — which gets hilarious treatment in ZOO TIME — that intelligent reading is a dying art.
  “If you’ve ever been invited to a book club reading,” [Jacobson] says, “you’ll have encountered this notion about the hero being ‘likeable’. People saying that they can’t identify with the hero. Likeability?” He rears back, as if startled. “What is this? Where did this come from? I don’t remember this when I was first writing books.
  “Certainly, when I was a young man reading books, ‘likeability’ was not a criterion. Or ‘identifiability’. In fact, non-identifiabilty was a criterion. ‘I am not Raskolnikov, therefore I am interested in Raskolnikov.’ You used to read to experience something that was not you. Now it’s a complaint.”

  For the rest of that interview, which is published today in the Irish Examiner, clickety-click here …

It Was The Best Of Books, It Was The Worst Of Books …

You learn more from a negative review than a positive one, as they say, and by that reckoning there was much to be learned from John Boland’s review of SLAUGHTER’S HOUND, which was published in the Irish Independent yesterday. It’s not understating the case to say that John wasn’t particularly fond of the book - ‘frequently implausible’, ‘inherently repellent’ and ‘aggressively unpleasant’ are a few of the choicer phrases that sum up the review, while Harry Rigby is ‘as much a thug as most of the lowlifes he encounters’ compared to Raymond Chandler’s noble knight errant, Philip Marlowe. He concludes:

“The result is as bleak a picture of contemporary Ireland as you’ll encounter - though undermined by the reader’s sense that the author has nothing interesting to say about such an Ireland and that it’s all being served up for lurid thrills. On that level, the book is brutally efficient.” John Boland, Irish Independent

  Oh, the humanity, etc. Over in the Sunday Times (no link), Kristoffer Mullin liked SLAUGHTER’S HOUND a little bit more, with the gist running thusly:

“Declan Burke sets the scene for the most perfect noir novel, a screwball caper set in a recognisable Sligo where the rich scurry beneath the shadow of Nama and the drug gangs are run by former dissidents. The real joy in this set-up is that the writer somehow makes the west coast of modern-day Ireland feel like the west coast of 1940s America. The only way Harry Rigby could be more like Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe would be if he rode around in a 1930s Chrysler and called all the women ‘dames’ …
  “Burke recently professed his adoration for Rollerskate Skinny, saying the 1990s indie rockers managed that rare feat of being Irish without necessarily sounding Irish. In the very American realm of hard-boiled crime fiction, Burke has managed the same trick. In fact, on this evidence, few of his peers over the Atlantic can hold a candle to him.” - Kristoffer Mullin, Sunday Times

  So there you have it: two very different takes on the very same book, and I suppose the best thing to do is take them in the spirit of Kipling’s twin imposters. That said, you won’t be even remotely surprised to learn which of the twins is my favourite …