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Books Ireland (May 2003): Review ([Shirley Kelly,] ‘Everyone was Terrified of Angela’ [interview], interview with Glenn Patterson, in Books Ireland, May 2003, pp.109-10: ‘My parents weren’t loyalist in any particular way and they actively discouraged us from getting involved in overt displays of unionism”, he says. “But all I wanted to do was belong, to be liked and admired by my peers, and if that meant joining a flute band, marching on the twelfth and lighting bonfires, then that was fine by me. I remember marching as a fifteen year old, holding the banner of an Orange Lodge, and every year from the age of six or seven I helped build a bonfire in my neighbourhood. These things were absolutely central to people’s lives and my participation was completely unreflective. Why wouldn’t I do that? It was what you did.’ Further, ‘In my mid-teens, the people I was at school with were into punk rock, going to see bands in town, and that was drawing me away from my old peer group. My best friend at school was a musician and he was heavily into both books and music. Also, I started going out with a girl who was Catholic and she was completely scathing of the sort of activities I had been engaged in. Not because she was Catholic, but because she thought it was contemptible.’ Longer version copied as separate file. Evelyn Conlon, ‘The trauma of a death is dragged out over years’ [interview], in Books Ireland (May 2003), p.113. Examines the death penalty in Skin of Dreams, starting with the case in the 1940s in which Harry Gleeson was executed for the murder of a single mother in Clonmel; Conlon rad Marcus Bourke’s treatment of the case in Murder at Marhill (1993) as a primer to her novel; recalls that she heard the death sentence read three times in a special criminal court in Dublin in the 1980s: ‘It took a long time and I’ll never forget the extraordinary silence in the court throughout that time.’ Shows concern about Death Row, and especialy the case of partents with untreated psychotic son of elderly who finally commits a murders. Calls the book ‘taumatic and emotionally exhaust[ing] I write’ Sue Leonard, review of Denise Deegan, Turning Turtle (Tivoli), 382pp., finds the plot stereotypically about ‘age-old theme of dissatisfied woman who cannot find happiness until she returns to the workplace’, and remarks: ‘We’re told, often, that Kim is a selfish woman … We can see this for ourselves. The problem is what the author liked her heroine so much that all the other characters continue to dance attendance, even when she is behaving like a selfish brat.’ (p.116.) Also, Cauvery Madhavan, The Uncoupling (BlackAmber), 250pp; story of Janaki, wife of Balu, a husband who assumes superiority; quotes from passage describing the packing for a European adventure [tour]: ‘From this position he was able to mutely claim a helpless inability to fetch anything,while at the same time vociferously exercising his veto over things that she handed to him.’ Plot deals with gradual liberation of Janaki in company with other non-Indian women, and details the passive sex-life of the Indian wife. Leonard calls it ‘a gem of a novel’ and ‘loved peeking into Indian culture’ with more instruction than any documentary. (pp.116-17.) Also, Una Brankin, Half Moon Lake (Pocket Books/TownHouse), 412pp.: tells of Grace Kane and the three ‘vultures’ Bobby, Ignatius and Georgina, who encircle her bed awaiting her death in an attempt to win back the family farm; reveals secret love of Grace which has caused her to live a celibate life. Leonard finds some poignant moments but thinks the whole excessively gloomy. (p.117.) Fred Johnston, reviewing John Ennis, Near St. Mullins (Dedalus Press), 78p., the eleventh collection of the poet, remarks that Suibhne Gelt [Sweeney], associated with St. Moling, ‘has become every poet’s symbol for something or other’ but that Ennis masterfully ignores previous versions […] and dives headlong into the imagined story itself.’ (p.117.) The book is dedicated to ‘Suibhne’s everywhere’. Also Michael O’Siadhail, The Gossamer Wall: Poems in Witness to the Holocaust (Bloodaxe), 128pp.; writes of O’Siadhail’s ‘heart-wrenching poems’ and quotes: ‘The overlords and barons of print and screen,/Oligarchies of news/Shaping our images. Everything overseen …’ - comparing the theme ironically with the Israeli exclusion of Palestinian entrants from poetry readings and film festivals; wonders at some length if the event can be represented and points to occasions in the poems when O’Siadhail tries to answer that question (e.g., ‘For some, for a while, bitter and sweet parallel/As rifts of light blink through the walls of hell’: “Chinks”); remarks, ‘This is, all in all, a fascinating book, a book of windows into a terror we in our soft Irihsness cannot begin to imagine. It’s a credit to Michael O’Siadhail and a brtal reminder to all of us.’ (pp.118-19.) Also Thomas McCarthy, ed., The Turning Tide: New writing from Co. Waterford (Waterford CC), 224pp., and Paul Perry, ed., Heartland: Writing from Longford (Longford CC), 176pp. The following pages are scanned from First Flush as a source of author- and plot-information, &c. Novels Raula Clamp, Beetle Mania (Poolbeg), 430pp. Following Standing in a Hammock this is about the Farrell sisters and their twenty-year-old VW beetle that could really tell the family secrets of joy, passion and drama. Can Kitty, Emer and Heather salvage both truth and car? Declan Burke, Eightball Boogie (Sitric), 248pp. New crime writer Burke heralded by Ken Bruen. Harry Rigby on a tough case involving paramilitaries, an internal Garda inquiry and the coke underworld as a politician’s wife is snuffed out. As if work isn’t a killer, his relationship with the girlfriend is getting shaky - he’s on the sauce and the cigs and has to put up with Gonzo, his loose cannon of a brother. Punchy dialogue. Gavin Corbett, Innocence (Pocket Books/TownHouse), 250pp Rites of passage with a sharp edge, drawing on the author’s own experience of bereavement and the fallout for a young teen, Jerome Morris, in southside Dublin, who sets off on a skite through drink and urban realism in search of the mother who abandoned him. The humour is dark in this first outing in fiction for Corbett. A classy production with a compelling cover. Glenn Patterson, No. 5 (Hamilton), 316pp. Fifth novel set in second half of twentieth-century. Belfast, grim and comic at the same time for people such as the McGoverns and the Tans whose seemingly mundane lives centre on a terraced house. Stella, Rodney, Tan, Catriona, Mel and Toni face the extraordinary in the hands of an established novelist, whom Shirley Kelly interviews up front this month. Edmund Power, No Christian Grave (Pocket Books/TownHouse), 410pp. First foray into thriller fiction by Power, brother of commentator Brenda. Cautionary tale about two pre-uni lads on a spree at the Heather Blazing which ends with the serious crime squad, evidence, statements and a night out that becomes a nightmare. Audrey Corr, The Outing (Pocket Books/Town House), 376pp. Following on Dead Organised where Iris and Helen go fundraising for the residents of the Cross and Passion Nursing Home, this time it’s a mystery tour. Sister Carmody is dead against the outing and as minor disaster follows disaster it seems that the wily old nun might well have been right. A comic treatment. Anna Dillon, Seasons (Poolbeg), 588pp. Dillon is one of the noms de guerre of the prolific Michael Scott and this is the first part of his/her best-selling trilogy first published in 1988 in which Katherine, an English girl, becomes a maid in Captain Lewis’s household in Dublin. She is soon infatuated with the captain and also Dermot Corcoran, a patriotic young man - all set at the turn of the turbulent twentieth century. Catherine Donnelly, The State of Grace (Sitric), 256pp. Irish Tatler columnist and Indo diarist with a tale of a fall before a rise to grace. Grace of the title loses her TV producer’s job due to ageism, then the house and hits the bottle. When her mother dies it seems al I too much but she claws her way back into life, a t relationship that outs a new twist in her relationship with her children and of course she starts a new career. ++ o * / Patrick Devaney, Through the Gate of Ivory (Lilliput), 288pp. Distinguished first novel, historical without being the slave of research, evoking Charles Stanihurst, renegade Trinity student in this tale of two cultures in pre-Cromwellian Ireland after the flight of the earls. Stanihurst’s tour of Connaught encounters echoes of the old Gaelic ways beyond the pale and hellish realities of what is to come. With key dates of the period, a glossary and bibliography. Jason Mordaunt, Welcome to Coolsville (Cape), 362pp. With plaudits from Roddy Doyle and set in an Ireland you may or may not recognise based around WentWest - a global conglomerate - and its cast of characters Mantra, Marshall McLemon and Sisterjasmine Ylang-Ylang. Cyber-terrorism, drug trials and other ‘normal’ executive life in this zany dystopian romp. June Considine, When The Bough Breaks (New Island), 502pp. Into paperback for Considine’s, page-turner about Eva Frawley, abandoned birth but as she grows up the unfinished business of her mysterious past haunts a life that cannot be resolved without finding her mother and the man who corrupted her innocence. Poetry Ciaran Carson, Breaking News (Gallery), 74pp. Intrepid poet Carson with his tenth collection including a long piece “The War Correspondent” (based on Crimea War dispatches) and “The Indian Mutiny” surrounded by epigrammatic shorter poems and others inspired by Goya, Géricault and Hopper. His many admirers will want this. Mary Melvin Geoghegan, The Bright Unknown (Lapwing), 44pp. Poet and children’s creative writing facilitator under the name Free The Butterfly-the latter-inspires such a poem as ‘Brainstorm’. A lot of poems crammed in here and each with a lightness of touch and usually some simple observation. Anthony J. Jordan, W. B. Yeats: Vain, Glorious Lout - A Maker of Modern Ireland (Westport Books 2003), 200pp. Charles Hobday, Elegy For a Sergeant: a Poem for Voices (Lapwing), 40pp. His most recent collection is How Goes the Enemy?: Selected Poems 1960-2000. Formidable dramatic war monologue from established poe using two narrators along with various military ranks, Sir Douglas Haig, the Archbishop of Canterbury and William Shakespeare. This is worthy of a stage or radio dramatisation and with the notes referring to war poets and others which infiltrate the verse it is all immensely satisfying. Matthew Geden, Traces (Cork: Maximus Press), 20pp. [ltd. edn. 50 copies]. From the poet co-founder of the Cork Festival of International Poetry. This is the first section of a proposed longer work entitled Day’s Journey. The publisher or poet (unlike most poets, who wouldn’t know Times from Baskerville and wouldn’t care) has taken an interest in the layout and format with good results. But a pretty little limited edition deserves to be sewn with thread rather than Margaret Moore, What The Wind Scatters (Lapwing), 40pp. Ballymena-born poet winner of a King’s Lynn Poetry Festival prize with four crime novels to her credit and a life criss-crossing between Northern Ireland and Britain. This is a mature first collection in its own delicate manner. Childhood themes, poems with an English backdrop and “Michelle”, a lament fora school-child killed by a car bomb reveal her strengths. D. Vincent Twomey, The End of Irish Catholicism? (Veritas), 220pp. Twomey’s credentials as editor-in-chief of the Irish Theological Quarterly and lecturer at Maynooth ably assist him to tackle this tough nut. He discusses Catholic identity, how Catholic is Irish Catholicism (?), which paths to follow, structures for a new millennium, beyond Church v. State, as well as theology. Naturally the drop in vocations figures in the discussion, but Twomey is optimistic about winning the fight for the Irish soul. The notes are not just on sources, but are pointers to further reading and research. Dermot A. Lane, ed., Catholic Theology Facing the Future: Historical Perspectives (Columba), 160pp. Seven contributors (Irish, US and European) plus the editor with their lectures (notes for each) from a conference in July 2000 at St Michael’s College, Vermont. Topics are weighty as you might expect: Theology in transition, Biblical scholarship past, present and future, a note on Vatican 11 in historical perspective and ‘Let’s begin - not end-theology with hope’. Peter Barrett, The Measure and the Pledge of Love: Reflections on the Cross (Columba), 80pp. Barrett, who is Bishop of Cashel and Ossory, has lectured in Anglican spirituality and was Irish consultant on Love’s Redeeming Work. Over twelve chapters ending with a prayer, questions and things to consider, he reflects on the passion of Christ in dealing with many issues facing the modern Christian. Though obviously focused on Good Friday and Easter, this will be of help to those whose faith is centred on the crucifixion. Philip Fogarty, The Missing God Who is not Missed: Christian Belief in a Secular Society (Columba), 150pp. Jesuit Fogarty tackles the toughest questions in this formidable text pitting science versus God and not shirking from asking ‘Is God unfair?’ and ‘Whatever happened to Hell?’ The third part is ‘Has the Church a future?’ A typically good Bill Bolger cover. The Navarre Bible: Chronicles Maccabees (Four Courts), 630pp. Also contains the three picturesque narratives of Tobit, ludith and Esther along with Ezra and Nehemiah, all in the Revised Standard Version and new vulgate with a commentary by members of the faculty of theology of the University of Navarre. Texts of the sacred books in single column and below in the Latin, with notes on the same page (double column). Excellent production values and highly recommended as with previous volumes of the Bible. Maps and list of headings added to the Biblical text. Short Stories
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