Nobody Move, This Is A Review: MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY by John Boyne

At first glance it seems strange that John Boyne should choose to re-tell the well known tale of the mutiny aboard The Bounty for his follow-up to THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS. Those familiar with the tale courtesy of its various film versions will be surprised by what unfolds here, however: as recounted by Captain Bligh’s servant boy, John Jacob Turnstile, the villain of the piece is Fletcher Christian, while Bligh emerges as a brilliant, complex and benevolent character who perhaps erred on the side of caution in his approach to enforcing on-board discipline.
  Boyne includes a bibliography of reference sources to underpin his claim to be telling a story based on historical truth but he wears his learning lightly and the tale is very much an adventure yarn. This is partly due to the irrepressible spirit of its narrator, 14-year-old John Jacob Turnstile, an earthy and occasionally coarse but humorous and thoughtful Jim Hawkins, who, as the captain’s servant, has the perfect excuse to be present at all the crucial moments that lead to the mutiny and beyond. Comparisons to Joseph Conrad and William Golding’s RITES OF PASSAGE trilogy are not outrageous, and Boyne has clearly paid attention to TREASURE ISLAND. Throw in the exotic setting of Otaheite, the mutiny, and one of nautical history’s most impressive feats of endurance, and MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY is well-nigh irresistible.
  It’s not simply a boy’s own adventure, either. Turnstile is as complex a character as his master, a reluctant sailor forced to chose, at the outset, between a year in gaol and taking service aboard The Bounty. Once he comes to terms with seasickness and the rigidly hierarchical system aboard ship, Turnstile finds himself conflicted about the mission, which is to transport breadfruit trees from the island of Otaheite to the West Indies as a cheap food source for plantation slaves.

“‘It’s an adventure of great merit we are engaged in, Turnstile,’ [Captain Bligh] told me then, wagging his finger at me as if I was a babe in arms. ‘Some day, when you are an old man, you will look back and tell your grandchildren of it. Perhaps their own slaves will be fed on breadfruit then too, and you will feel enormous pride at our achievements.’
  I nodded but wasn’t sure that I would.”

  Turnstile, an orphan press-ganged into male prostitution as a young boy, empathises with the slaves rather than his master and peers. Observes the boy:

“He was not the type to follow my line of thinking; he was too well educated and of too high a social class to have respect for the rights of man.”

  The rights of women, too, are important to Turnstile when the shipload of sex-starved sailors finally reach Otaheite. Concerned that the women are only faking their delight, as he himself has had to do so many times, Turnstile is among a minority of two who refrain from indulging in carnal delights, the other being Captain Bligh. That the young boy eventually allows himself to be seduced by a Polynesian beauty in an idyllic glade may seem the stuff of stereotypical male fantasy, but Turnstile’s painfully slow progress towards the point where he finally allows himself to consent to what had been previously been a painful intimacy stands in stark contrast to the posturing and preening of Fletcher Christian’s alpha male, and his physical and emotional fulfilment is well-earned.
  That Christian is caricatured as a self-serving narcissist is this novel’s one real weakness, incidentally, particularly when he is compared to the multi-faceted Bligh; and while Boyne’s ambition to reverse the roles of hero and villain is laudable, it was unnecessary to bludgeon the point home with so blunt an instrument.
  That’s a minor caveat, however, and in truth the real conflict of MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY is not that of Bligh versus Christian, but Turnstile’s instinctive Christian responses to the repressive Christianity of the Empire’s establishment caste (Christ, where His name is invoked, is invariably referred to as ‘Saviour’). God-botherers and Bible-thumpers are given as short a shrift as those who denigrate their island hosts as ‘savages’ and loot their natural resources; Turnstile, the outcast, social pariah and former sex slave, naively and subversively and with no little humour preaches a sermon of equality, tolerance and respect for all, regardless of class, religion or race. It’s a relevant subtext for the contemporary reader, albeit one that’s bound up in a stirring tale of heroism and derring-do, and the result is a truly terrific novel. To paraphrase Robert Louis Stevenson on the publication of TREASURE ISLAND: “If this don’t fetch the kids, then they’ve gone rotten since I knew ’em.”

The Friday Project: WILD AT HEART by Barry Gifford

Patti Abbott is working on a project called Fridays: The Book You Have to Read, the gist of which is to refresh people’s memories about great books that might have slipped off the radar. Last week we did Horace McCoy’s KISS TOMORROW GOODBYE. This week we’re picking – trumpet parp, if you will, maestro – Barry Gifford’s WILD AT HEART.

“Findin’ out the meanin’ of life and all is fine, far as it goes, but dead’s dead, you know what I mean?”
  Barry Gifford, WILD AT HEART

Barry Gifford doesn’t waste words. WILD AT HEART – THE STORY OF SAILOR AND LULA (1990) is a novel written by an author who is also a prize-winning poet, which partially explains his ability to pack 44 chapters into 156 pages and also goes some way towards explaining the impressionistic, imagistic style he employs. Each chapter is a short, punchy vignette in which Sailor and Lula outline their philosophy on life while striving to stay one step ahead of the law and the potential killer Lula’s Mama has set on their trail. A seamless blend of ’30s hard-boiled brevity and the on-the-road Beat tradition of the ’50s, WILD AT HEART comes on like the deranged offspring of Horace McCoy and Jack Kerouac as he struggles to draw breath in the sultry atmosphere of a William Faulkner short story.
  On his release from prison after serving a term for manslaughter, Sailor Ripley breaks parole and takes to the road with Lula Pace Fortune in order to escape the oppressive grasp of Lula’s disproving mother, Marietta. The plot doesn’t get any more convoluted than that; what sustains WILD AT HEART’s narrative is the colourful cast of characters the couple encounter on their flight west towards California. By turns intriguing, bizarre, grotesque and lethal, the collection of misfits only serves to confirm Lula’s heartfelt conviction that the world is indeed ‘wild at heart and weird on top.’
  Imbued with Southern gentility and decorum, Gifford’s style has been described by critic Patrick Beach as ‘chicken-fried noir’ and – as per the rules of hard-boiled fiction – a happy ending is never on the cards for the star-crossed lovers. “Safe?” exclaims Marietta’s friend, Dal. “Safe? Ain’t that a stitch. Ain’t nobody nowhere never been safe a second of their life.” The frisson generated by a blend of uncertain direction and inevitable danger crackles from the back seat of Lula’s white ’75 Bonneville convertible. A distraught Lula can force Sailor to dump a crazy hitchhiker when the kid gets a little too weird for her liking, but she remains all too aware of the overwhelming forces – not least of which is that of Fate – ranged against the pair:

Sailor stroked Lula’s head.
“It ain’t gonna be forever, peanut.”
Lula closed her eyes.
“I know, Sailor. Nothin’ is.”

The Embiggened O # 2,014: Always Judge A Book By Its Cover Homage

A Minister for Propaganda Elf writes: “Things have been going rather swimmingly for our humble offering THE BIG O of late, people. The good folk at Harcourt recently sent through the art-work for the cover of the forthcoming US edition, with which the Grand Viz was well pleased, mainly because it suggested that the designer boffin responsible had paid close attention to the text, to the point where the ever-radiant Maxine Clarke was moved to suggest that the cover itself might represent something of a plot spoiler. That was swiftly followed by the news that THE BIG O has been short-listed for the Bristol Crime Fest ‘Last Laugh’ award, a huge boost to the GV’s scheme for world domination, not least because the vagaries of alphabeticisation mean that the moniker ‘Burke, Declan’ heads the short-list (literally, if not actually). Hot on the heels of that little nugget of joy came the news that the Book Witch had a quick gander at THE BIG O’s sequel, currently labouring under the unlikely title of THE BLUE ORANGE, and professed herself hugely impressed with GV’s ability to apply the spell-check function. Three cheers, two stools and a resounding huzzah, said we, as we limbered up to breast-stroke through the vat of our Patented Elf-Wonking Juice™. But lo! There’s more! For yea, it came to pass that the eagle-eyed John McFetridge dropped us a line to point up the similarities between our cover and that of an edition of KILLSHOT by some American tyro called Ellroy Leonard, or Elmore Lennox, or summat akin. Well, you could’ve knocked us down with a feather made of microscopic sledgehammers. Still, they do say imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, do they not? And, given that THE BIG O is a fourth-rate rip-off of Mr Lennox / Leonard’s style, it makes perfect sense that the Harcourt designer boffins should produce a first-rate homage to one of Mr Lennox / Leonard’s covers. Right, that’s us off for a couple of lengths in the vat of Patented Elf-Wonking Juice™. Be beautiful, people. Peace, out.”

The Jury Remains Out: CAL by Bernard MacLaverty

Acclaimed as literary novels, they are steeped in crime – but is it kosher to call them Irish crime fiction novels? YOU decide! Or, y’know, don’t! This week: CAL by Bernard MacLaverty

“Cal’s mother died when he was a child and he and his father, who works in the local abattoir, are under threat to get out from Loyalists who are itching to coin the phrase ethnic cleansing a decade or so early … What lifts CAL above its almost satirically grim subject matter is MacLaverty’s deliciously precise detailing and his dedication to his main character … not the least pleasure of reading it is to rediscover in Bernard MacLaverty another Northern Irish writer who can stand toe to toe with the rest of them, and with the great Brian Moore in particular.” John Self, Asylum

Comedy and humour are not among the stylistic features one would readily associate with Bernard MacLaverty’s works. CAL, for instance, his most famous book (which was also successfully filmed), is a haunting study of a nineteen-year-old Catholic in the midst of the Northern Irish Troubles and his desperate attempt to break away from this violent background—an attempt doomed to failure. On the surface, his writing seems a brilliant example of Seamus Deane’s hyperbolical dictum: “If there is anything more depressing than Ulster fact it must be Ulster fiction.” – International Fiction Review

Poolbeg: Putting The ‘Crim’ Into Crimson

You know things are all a-stir in the Irish crime fiction world when Poolbeg – the home of all things glittery, shiny and chick literary – dip a toe in the ‘psychological drama genre’. The first of their ‘Poolbeg Crimson’ line is GUARDING MAGGIE by Ellen McCarthy, with the blurb elves wibbling thusly:

Maggie walked into her yard and found a strange man standing there, with her dog walking circles around him. Maggie has lived at home all her life with only a brief stay in Scotland and Dublin. She cares for her elderly mother and older brother Pascal, who has controlled and dominated every aspect of her life. After Pascal’s suspicious death from an apparent asthmatic attack, secrets from the past start to emerge and Maggie discovers someone is watching her every move. Maggie thought she had control of her life for the first time in over forty years after Pascal’s death but now she’s more scared and alone than ever. All her life her family have sheltered her from the outside world. But who is guarding Maggie now?

Ooooooh, spooky. Incidentally, the novel is set in rural Donegal, which is where Brian McGilloway and Paul Charles have set their recent novels. Will there be anyone left alive to be murdered in Donegal by the end of the summer? Only time, that notoriously loose-lipped doity rat, will tell …

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

Zaney Is As Zaney Does

Zane by name, Radcliffe by nature. Yep, that’s Zane Radcliffe (right), people, author of THE KILLER’S GUIDE TO ICELAND, BIG JESSIE and LONDON IRISH. What do we know of him? Very little. Happily, our resident private dick elf was on the case like skin on custard. To wit:

Zane Radcliffe was born in Bangor, Northern Ireland in 1969, the year the Troubles started. The day he moved to London in 1994, the IRA declared a ceasefire. Typical.
  The undoubted highlight of Zane’s advertising career was writing the world’s first topless radio ad, voiced by glamour model Jo Guest. Bizarrely the ad was banned when listeners complained about such flagrant nudity on the airwaves.
In the summer of 2001, Zane penned his first novel LONDON IRISH, a black comedy concerning a disillusioned Ulsterman living in London who is forced to flee the city and ends up in Edinburgh. Spookily, life then imitated art, and Zane moved to Edinburgh six months after the book’s publication.
  LONDON IRISH went on to win the 2003 WH Smith ‘People’s Choice’ Award for New Talent. It was followed in September of that year by BIG JESSIE, a novel described by FHM as ‘ funny, absurd and memorable … the Peace Process written by The Fast Show.’

So there you have it. A prize-winning Irish crime fiction author, and we only heard about him last week. Doesn’t do an awful lot for our claim to be the third-most relevant interweb presence for Irish crime fiction, does it? In fact, we don’t really know why we bother. If it wasn’t that the blummin’ towers are so tough to erect again once you’ve packed them away, we’d have folded our tent long since …