Books Ireland (April 2003): Review

‘Two weeks That Changed My Life’ [interview with Cauvery Madhavan], in Books Ireland (April 2003), p.77: b. Madras; worked as copy-writer; moved to Ireland with her husband settled in Straffan, Co. Kildare; issued Paddy Indian (2000), published by BlackAmber and dealing with a young doctor working in Ireland; began writing it at Anam Cara when her husband took two weeks off work to enable her to do so; moved to Dublin on her husband’s appointment as vascular surgeon at St. James’s; issued The Uncoupling (2003), a story of marital separation in a mature Indian couple on coach-tour in Europe; currently working on novel about the mutiny of the Connaught Rangers in India in 1916. Madhavan was published by BlackAmber, the blackand Asian UK publisher, to whom she was introduced by Sue Booth-Forbes, the manager of Anam Cara.

Herbie Brennan, ‘Staying True to the Story’, [interview] in Books Ireland (April 2003), p.79; b. Banbridge, Co. Down; lives in Co. Carlow; worked as journalist; first non-fiction work, Astal Doorways, published by Thorsons; achieved success with series of ‘role-play’ adventure gamebooks in 1980s as GrailQuest series; his new book Faerie Wars concerns the life of a boy Henry who is helped in dealing with the demise of his parents marriage - his mother is having an affair with another woman - by a rebel fairy prince called Pyrgus Malvae.

Kate O’Riordan, ‘First Novel was a Great Leap of Faith’, in Books Ireland (April 2003), pp.81-82. Winner of Sunday Tribune Award for Best Emerging Writer, 1991; first books Involved (q.d.) and The Boy in the Moon (1998); fourth book, The Memory of Stones (2003); set in Paris and Kerry, reflecting the new diaspora.

Eamon Kelly, review of Corbett, Toby, Brian Friel: Decoding the Language of the Tribe [Contemp. Irish Writers & Filmmakers Ser.] (Dublin: Liffey Press 2002), 188pp.

Also Brian Friel, Three Plays After (Oldcastle: Gallery Books 2002), 104pp. [The Bear, Yalta Game, and Afterplay].

On Liffey Press’s Contemp. Irish Writers & Filmmakers Series: ‘[it] aims to examine the state of contemporary Irish culture through an analysis of its writers and filmmakers. Making a distinction between the many studies of Irish culture taken through the work of Joyce and Yeats, and the completely altered cultural landscape of contemporary Ireland, the series sets out to show how writers are not only shaped by the changing cultural landscape, but also how their works serve to influence attitude and opinions which in their turn also have a transformative effect on the culture. / Taking as their inspiration the Luke Gibbons’s view that “a people has not found its voice until it expresed itself, not only in a body of creative works but also in a body of critical works”’ [no source; here p.84.]

Eamon Kelly: Brian Friel’s adaptations of The Bear, The Yalta Game and Afterplay have been published [as] Three Plays After. Brian Friel’s adaptations of Chekov have been widely praised with many critics struck by the similarities between the Irish and Russian mindsets and how perfectly placed Friel is to adapt the works of the Russian master. His first adaptation of Chekov came shortly after the completion of Aristocrats and it seemed a natural progression from there to an adaptation of Chekov’s Three Sisters. He went from this to an adaptation of Turgenev’s Father’s and Sons following this-interspersed of course with his own plays-with an adaptation of Chekov’s Uncle Vanya. More recently he gave us a dramatisation of The Lady with the Lapdog, The Yalta Came which was produced along with Friel’s version of The Bear. These were followed by Afterplay, a short play that features two Chekov characters, Andrey from The Three Sisters and Sonya from Uncle Vanya, meeting some twenty years after the action of their respective plays in a Moscow café. / This is a playful work and was very well received when it played in London last year with John Hurt as Andrey and Penelope Wilton as Sonya. Both characters in their respective plays looked forward to bright futures. Friel has taken these two hopefuls and in a neat Chekovian twist has paired them off in a dismal café trading disappointments. Andrey, the younger brother from The Three Sisters is, in Chekov’s original, a romantic idealist with his eyes fixed on romantically idealistic futures. So disinclined is he to be involved in the present that he even seems reluctant to take part in the play, having to be cajoled on time and again by the other characters. He prefers to read behind the scenes and play his violin while dreaming of going to university in Moscow. Instead he falls in love and gets married but soon tires of this, a dream in the present soon fades. Besides, his new wife has no ear for his violin playing describing it as “scratching away”. / In Friel’s Afterplay we find Andrey twenty years on in a rundown Moscow café looking the worse for wear after a day’s busking with his violin. Here he meets Sonya from Uncle Vanya. Plain, diligent, hardworking Sonya is still searching for ways to save her father’s estate. After a round of the banks for financial advice she retires to the same caf6 she had found the day before. As the play begins, we learn that she met Andrey the previous day in the café. Sonya can barely remember the meeting. Andrey, after a lifetime of looking to futures, seems incapable of making an imprint in the present. But more than that, Sonya has given up on love. The result is a play both poignant and funny.

Tom Kilroy’s adaptation of Ibsen’s Ghosts first produced at the Peacock in 1989, revived in 2002, and toured by Brown Penny productions.

‘In a freely adapted version Kilroy examines the interactions between private and public lives, and between church and secular values. Ibsen’s original caused riots over a century ago. The furore was caused by a combination of the subject matter and the form we now know as realism. The play deals with such hair-raising matters as adultery, women’s rights, illegitimate children and venereal disease while abandoning certain accepted theatrical conventions. […] Essentially a study and critique of Catholic [sic] morality and immorality Ghosts transfers well to an Irish context. The questions it raises in Kilroy’s version may have seemed of marginal interest even on its first outing in 1989, perhaps then seen as more relevant to 1950s Ireland. But this was more than a decade before the clerical abuse scandals came to light. The latest production while being after the fact as it were is no less powerful as an analysis of how Irish social and political culture willingly surrendered its will to a church of men now shown to have not only feet of clay but extremely mucky boots. The figure of Father Manning now seems anachronistic when dishing out moral advice. The effect is to see the whole shape of the play twist and warp so that the solid ground of morality represented by the priest now seems morally defunct. / The shame that would earlier have accrued to the secular characters shifts to what was once the high moral ground. A good priest represented on the Irish stage saying all the things [84] a good priest should say now seems to have a oddly subversive effect. […]. Quotes Mrs Aylward in Kilroy’s version: ‘Do you know what I think is really ghostly in this life? Things inside ourselves that haunt us, stopping us from being fully alive … the place is full of haunted suffering people.’ (pp.84-85.)

Robert Greacen, review of Nicholas Allen, George Russell (AE) and the New Ireland, 1905-1930 (Dublin: Four Courts Press), 268pp., in Books Ireland (April 2003).

Joan Breen, Winter in the Eye: New and Selected Poems (Clare: Salmon Publ. 2003), p.96pp.

Paul Perry, A Drowning of the Saints (Salmon Publ. 2003), 80pp.

Brendan Anderson, Joe Cahill: A Life in the IRA (O’Brien Press), 384pp., ill. [32pp. photos.] Reviewed by Lucille Redmond, with full biographical synopsis, Boks Ireland, April 2003, pp.86-87.

Eliza Lynch; b. Cork 1835; moved to pari, 1847; m. older man, and became courtesan; introduced to Francisco Solano Lopex, son of President of Paraguay; her husband plunged Paraguay into disasterous war; collapse of Paraguay, 1870; death of Lopez in his sole military engagement; though obese, Lopez enjoyed his wife’s devotion during and after his life; Paraguay continued to be ruled by dictators to 1992.

Jonathan Shackleton & John McKenna, Shackleton: An Irishman in Antartica (Dublin: Lilliput Press), 208pp.; Ernest Shackleton, Shackleton: : The Polar Journeys (Collins Press), 718pp., ill. [148pp. photos]; F. A. Worsley, Shackleton’s Boat Journey (Collins Press), 162pp., ill. [42pp. photos]. Shackleton b. to Quaker family in Kilkea, co. Kildare, second-born of eleven children; family moved to Dubln where his father studied medicine at TCD; moved to London; ed. Dulwich College; joined mercht navy, 1890; met his older wife Emma [var. Emily], June 1897; several affairs later but remained passionately attached; travelled with Robert. Scott to Antarctic on Discovery, 1901-04; distrusted Scott’s lack of leadership skills. Returned to the Antartic on Nimrod; reached 97 short of Pole, at 730 miles from base; took Endurance and Aurora on Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, 1914; locked in ice in Endurance; made boat out of timbers of crushed Endurance, calling it James Caird, and hauled it towards Elephant Island; sailed in boat to S. Georgia at 800 miles distance with six men; crossed the deserted island with Worsley and Crean.

Andy Bielenberg, The Shannon Scheme and the Electrification of the Irish Free State: A Inspirational Milestone (Dublin: Lilliput Press), 168pp.

The following pages are scanned from First Flush as a source of author- and plot-information, &c.

Morgan Llywelyn, 1949 : a Novel of the Irish Free State (London: Forge 2003), 414pp. $25.95 Can$35.95 hb 24 cm 0-312-86753-0. Third in her Irish Century series (previous titles were 1916 and 1921) using as heroine Ursula Halloran who firs appeared in the second book and whose story i .here recounted from then, through the great depression, the Emergency years and up to 1949. As before, Llywelyn surrounds (indeed almost fills) the tale with real-life events, scrupulously researched, though from mainly secondary sources. Idealist nationalist Ursula is torn between an Irish and an English lover; works for the incipient Radio tireann and then the League of Nations, goes to Britain to bear a fatherless child, returns. Long settled in Ireland,

Llywelyn-part Welsh-is really writing popular histories rather than novels for the hungry Irish-American market, where she is clearly a bestseller. You might think an English imprint would find a reasonably lively demand and would buy in, but they don’t and they don’t, and that no doubt goes a long way to define the difference between Irish-British and Irish-Americans.

Allegations of Love. Kevin Brophy. Wynkin de Worde. 282pp. ‘E 14.99 pb 24 cm 0-9542607-4-0. Daniel Best who is settled in London makes a longish foray to Galway where there is a lot of unfinished life business for him to sort out and an old flame-a nun. Galway is fully evoked as he sets out to unravel the past. By the sensitive author of Walking with Wolves and a first novel in 1997, Almost Heaven. A handsome original paperback

Beyond the Green Hills. Anne Doughty. Blackstaff Press. 422pp. £6.99 pb 18 cm 0-85640-737-2. Sequel to On a Clear Day in which Clare Hamilton plans a new life with Andrew Richardson in faraway Canada but a family tragedy alters her chosen course and she embarks alone for Paris. With new friends and a new career, is Andrew totally in her past? Was it all a childhood idyll?

Dark Souls. Sam Millar. Wynkin de Worde. 172pp. E 14.99 pb 24 cm 0-9542607-6-7. First novel from a Belfast-born prolific and prizewinning short writer: the somewhat Gothic tale of Dominic Tranor, crime reporter assigned to a story concerning a multiple murderer condemned to death. Tranor’s return to his Dakotan hometown results in a final and absolute loss of innocence as he confronts evil without and within. Another of the high-quality offerings from the new imprint-a hardback in all but flexibility […]

Dancing with Minnie the Twig. Mogue Doyle. Black Swan. 252pp. £6.99 Can$19.95 pb 20 cm 0-552-99985-7. Into paper for last year’s rites of passage account of 1 960s rural Ireland such as even caught Edna O’Brien’s eye. Tony endures parents at strife as well as a bullying father so he seeks solace with his brother’s girlfriend to heal his wounds. A tragedy awaits the growing boy in this first-person narration of a dire Catholic childhood with some humour for leavening.

In the Castle of the Flynns. Michael Raleigh. HarperCollins. 352pp. £6.99 pb 20 cm 0-00-713446-0. Paperback of last year’s hardback, which we didn’t see for review. A detailed recreation of a Chicago Catholic childhood in the 1950s, the movie theatres, baseball and the mad antics of the Irish-American forebears, grandparents, uncles and aunts help the orphaned Daniel Dorsey come to terms with the world. Raleigh has five thrillers to his credit but this is a gentler departure.

A Kind of Innocence, Gerard O’Brien (Athenry: Blue Horse Publ. 2003), 176pp. 4E1 1 pb 20 cm 0-9543864-0-X First novel with heroine Mary Sheehan from outside Fermoy who succumbs to the hash pipe in Cork city and the two useless goms in her life, Corney and Seamus. A decidedly anti-feelgood slice of realism. Mary Sheehan is a pretty dangerous woman but somehow one is glad she gets away with it in the end. We’re told nothing about the author, and the publisher is a dark blue horse too. What we do know about them is that they went to a design outfit called Propeller in Galway and came out with a book that for once looks as though it wasn’t designed by early 20th-century rules of thumb. You don’t see many books in Bodoni type, and what there are usually come from the continong rather than the fields of Athenry. If it’s as good as it looks, it’s very good.

The Magdalen Martyrs: a Jack Tailor story. Ken Bruen. Brandon. 318pp. ~E12.99 pb 20 cm 0-86322-302-8. Following on The Guards and The Killing of the Tinkers Tailor is back, a bit shaky remembering his period in rehab, and coping with living alone. He soon gets embroiled in two cases: one involves a woman who tried to help out some of the unfortunates of the title while the other case is just as dark. Bruen shoots from the hip as his page-turner trawls through the lower echelons of Galway with whom he has a love-hate relationship. Shirley Kelly was interviewing him last month, remember?

Paul Howard, The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years (Dublin: O’Brien Press 2003), 206pp. f 9.95 £6.99 $12.95 $Can 19.95 pb 20 em 0-86278-809-9. Ross O’Carroll-Kelly (as seen in a Sunday Tribune column) is named on the cover as author of this send-up. RO’CK is a southside yuppie whose knowledge of the universe hardly passes outside the orbit of Dublin 4 so when the going gets tough he has to move down in the world to a friend’s apartment in Killiney. Wouldn’t your heart bleed for him? Howard sends up the spoiled brats of the bay area and their pampered girlfriends in this playful satire.

Patrick: son of Ireland. Stephen Lawhead. HarperCollins. 464pp. £17.99 hb 24 em 0-00-714884-4. Blockbuster as Succat, a son of a distinguished Roman family is kidnapped into slavery in tire. He is known as Corthirthiac to the Druids and becomes a novice to their mysteries (like pronouncing Corthirthiac) but he was destined to be Magonus (famous) and would become ordained Patricius. Flamboyant retelling of the our patron saint’s life and times in the first person, with splendid dialogue in faultless Old High Pseudo-Archaic. What’s more unlike most novels the hero is allowed to micturate: 1 slept ... never sti rri ng from the wagon save once when ... 1 stood long enough to relieve myself before crawling back to my warm nest.” A human hero-what a relief.

Brian Callagher, Payback (Dublin: Poolbeg Press 2003), 576pp. fE9.99 pb 16 cm 1-84223-110-3. From his first thriller Flight, police officers Jack Thompson and Penny Harte re-emerge in a tale of international terrorism against an evil assassin Abdullah Majid who targets the entire EU cabinet. Laura Kennedy, a ruthless story-chasing-journo, adds sparkle to the plot putting her own life on the line along with lack and Penny. Set in Budapest, Lebanon, Marbella and Dublin.

Spin the Bottle. Monica McInerney. Poolbeg. 478pp. 4E9.99 pb 16 em 1-84223-057-3. From the Australian born author of A Taste for It and Upside Down Inside Out which sold well in both Australia and Ireland comes Lainey Byrne and her noisy family, hectic job and boyfriend Adam. The going gets tougher when she inherits a B&B in County Meath, so she leaves Melbourne for a glimpse of the Hill of Tara, meets a childhood sweetheart and enters a world of bed and bedlam.

Turning Turtle. Denise Deegan. Tivoli. 382 E9.99 pb 20 em 0-7171-3569-1. Kim enjoya her life, husband, kids and PR agency work. During a restless phase of boredom she decides to become a novelist. Her disastrous U-turn leads to distress and then her husband begins an affair. All can be put right if she moves into the art world. But how? Classy getup from C&M’s new fiction imprint, and no free trips to Canad,~ with this one.

Walking Back to Happiness. Anne Bennett HarperCollins. 544pp. £5.99 pb 18 cm 0-00-713981-0. Pageturner about the plight of Hannah Delaney, from a large family in Ireland who goes across the water to find a better life, failing for a soldier who leaves her pregnant and goes off to France in 1944 never to return. What are her options? A future with Arthur Bradley in Birmingham but what kind a prospect is he? The Irish background only just wins it a listing here, for author Anne is second-generation Birmingham.

When Twilight Comes. Roger Derham. Wynkin de Worde. 316pp. E 14.99 pb 24 em 0-9542607-3-2. A roller coaster encounter with terrorism--Continuity IRA, ETA, TUPAC (Peru), CIA (Algeria) and FI-NC in Corsica. Hero Michael Mara sets out to destroy illicit cocaine production through his scientific brainchild-a cocaine leaf-virus. He’d better watch his back from warlords and there is further ducking and dodging as he pursues Isabefla Sanjil on the QT while his wife is busy at the US Department of the Treasury. Set in Granada, Mexico, Armenia and Corsica up to September 2001 with no attempt at being PC. Derham is Corkman gynaecologist who took a sabbatical to write full time and to start the WdeW imprint. He’s clearly put a lot of enthusiasm and taste into it a well as money, with no sign of flagging in his second season.

Ireland. Patrick Maher (text) and Philip Plisson (photos). Octopus. 184pp. £25 hb 26 x 31 em (wide) 1-842-02182-6. Frenchman Plisson is a marine photographer, and stuck faithfully to the coast for his circuit of the island. His worst shots are workmanlike and worthwhile, his best terrific, and he tweaks the colours occasionally to surprise you with a vicious viridian, a turbulent turquoise or a livid lobster: that’s something that was much more difficult before digital scanning. He has an eye for drama. Mah6, formerly of Paris-Match provides passabl( text. A good gift or memento, it appeared first ir France and French, where they wouldn’t know the difference if you told them the Titanic was built by ‘Howland and Wolf’ in ‘rustic dockyards’; we think he meant rusty, because he’s talking of their restoration.

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