November reviews

The slowest review month since I started the blog; it's been extraordinarily busy time. My book of the month was Reed Farrel Coleman's 'Walking the Perfect Square'.

If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr ****
Rubble by Jeff Byles **
Death of a Red Heroine by Qui Xiaolong ***
The Builders by frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan ***
Dirty Sweet by John McFetridge ****
Walking the Perfect Square by Reed Farrel Coleman *****

Review of Banksters by David Murphy and Martina Devlin (Hachette, 2009)

In Banksters, RTE business correspondent, David Murphy, and Martina Devlin, columnist with the Irish Independent, seek to chart the rise, collapse and rescuing of the Irish banking system. The story they tell is split into four parts – the origins of the crisis, an overview of each of the banks and the key banking officials, the crisis, and the fallout. Their tale can essentially be boiled down to the following:

1) In the early 2000s, Irish banks stopped using their deposits to underpin loans and started to borrow money from other (international) banks and to offer easier forms of credit to home buyers (such as 100% mortgages over longer time spans) and investors (such as deferred interest payments).

2) Property prices, especially development land spiralled exponentially and unsustainably upwards (and did not meet stress test criteria) and yet the bankers kept lending money to developers driven by personal bonus schemes and inter-bank rivalry to generate record annual profits.

3) Regulation was very light and the financial regulator failed to intervene in poor and suspect banking practices or overheated property speculation; the Irish Central Bank could not directly influence consumer spending as it did not have control of interest rates (which resided with the European Central Bank); and the political establishment were in cahoots with the developers and were not only blind to the potential problem but poured scorn on anybody who tried to warn of the impending disaster. Crony capitalism was in full swing.

4) As property markets slowed and financial crash hit, international banks stopped lending Irish banks money.

5) Banks thus didn’t have funds to lend to investors and businesses, nor did they have the means to pay back loans to international banks.

6) This prompted a share price collapse. (Between May 2007 and November 2008 Irish shares fell in value from €55b to €4b).

7) Which in turn spooked depositors who, worried that the bank might fail, withdrew their deposits to move them to a more secure institution.

8) This took all the liquidity out of the Irish banking system and reduced the share price further.

9) A run on the banks thus became inevitable without intervention which, given that the Irish government had decided that the banks could not be allowed to fail, came in the form of the Irish government underwriting the entire banking network (to the tune of €440b), thus halting the outflow of deposits.

10) By guaranteeing the banks, the Irish government in turn put the country’s future on the line, making tax payers liable for all bad debts.

11) Once the brake was in place the Irish government needed to decide how to proceed to put liquidity into the banking system. Initially it wanted to avoid recapitalisation and nationalisation and instead it tried to force mergers between financial institutions to gain economies of scale and to recapitalise the banks through private equity investment.

12) Ultimately though it had to nationalise Anglo-Irish Bank and partly recapitalise the others, taking the role of a preferred shareholder, and also created NAMA (National Assets Management Agency) – the world’s largest, state-owned, property portfolio - to take the bad debts off the banks' books.

For the rest of the review see Ireland After NAMA blog.

How to look like a twit ...

I'm in Galway today at a conference on the relationship between the public policy and the social sciences. I turned up to find I was meant to be giving the 15 minute introductory speech. Sometimes it pays to actually read the programme and the advance material that conference organisers send through! What they got was a hastily constructed, half-baked, back of an envelope address. What I got was a new manifestation of the crisis management lifestyle that I seem to be leading these days. Not a great way to stumble through life, but there we go; sometimes it's probably not a bad thing to look like a twit ...

Review of Walking the Perfect Square by Reed Farrel Coleman (Busted Flush Press, 2001)

After a number of years as a cop in the New York Police Department, in 1978 Moe Prager is invalided out after busting his knee slipping on a piece of carbon paper. His brother Aaron wants Moe to join him in opening a wine store, but they’re short of the money required. Then opportunity comes knocking in the form of Rico Tripoli, his former partner. The son of one of Rico’s in-laws, the politically connected Francis Maloney, has gone missing. Finding Patrick Maloney will not only provide some cash and an easy route to a liquor license, but the chance to once again play being a cop. The only trouble is, Patrick Maloney seems to have vanished off the face of the earth. Trying to uncover his life before he disappeared is equally vexing, Patrick being somewhat of an enigma. To add to Moe’s woes, the case has two other thorny issues – first, it’s clear that he’s caught up in some other game and, second, he’s falling in love with Patrick’s sister. What he needs is a way to extradite himself whilst keeping everyone still sweet.

Walking the Perfect Square shuttles back and forth between 1978 and 1998, with Moe reflecting back on the case as he waits to meet a dying man who holds the promise of adding the final piece to a puzzle that has shaped the course of his life over the previous twenty years. It’s a plot device that works well; indeed, the plot unfolds and twists cleverly, hooking the reader in early and never letting go. Whilst the writing is quite functional (rather than the poetic prose I was expecting given other reviews), the narrative is nonetheless multi-textured, with excellent characterisation, sparkling dialogue, and a philosophical undertow that pervades the text without explicitly dominating it. In Prager, Coleman has created a character with rare emotional depth; someone whose life seems worth exploring further. Some books are all surface, telling an entertaining story but little more, others demand you reflect on the moral complexities of life. The first kind fizzle for a moment, the second hangs round to haunt you. Walking the Perfect Square is the second kind.

The Lazy Sunday Service

After two days of catching up with family, this post comes to you from a coffee shop in Birmingham airport whilst I wait for a flight home. After a late night I'm somewhat worse for wear, so this really will be a lazy Sunday service. The party was a great success - it's a funny experience being at an event where you're related to pretty much everybody in the room. At one point the folk on the dance floor ranged in age from 96 to 6! Other than writing my posts here this week, I've written some for a new collective blog - Ireland After NAMA. If you're interested in how the global recession has been playing out in Ireland, then this blog should hopefully provide an informative read.

Platinum day

I'm travelling today to attend a 70th wedding anniversary celebration this evening. I'll be happy if I make 70 years, let alone being married for that long. You can tell this kind of anniversary is pretty rare as the naming at the top end of the scale starts to get a bit ropey - 60th and 65th is a diamond anniversary, 70th is platinum, and 75th is back to diamond. 80th is oak apparently. I can't imagine there are many oaks around (and even with life expectency going up, so are separations so I doubt they'll be much of a growth in numbers in the next few years). I'm looking forward to catching up with folk and also the journey as I'm planning on getting tucked into some fiction - which has lost out to academic stuff recently. I'm hooked into Reed Farrel Coleman's 'Walking the Perfect Square' at the minute.

Gatekeeping duties

I've spent most of the week reading a manuscript for an academic publisher who wants to know whether to go ahead and put a book into production. For obvious reasons, I can't share the review here. I usually perform this role two or three times a year. To tell the truth it's an awkward task. It's one thing to review a book proposal or a sample chapter when the book has not yet been written. It's another to have to make a decision on a 3-400 page manuscript that has probably taken someone the best part of two years to write. The author has vested a lot time, energy and emotional toil into a work that seemed like a relatively sure bet of publication (they will have received a conditional contract on the basis of a proposal) and yet the book can fall at the last hurdle. Thankfully the manuscript I was reading, whilst it had its faults, was an interesting read and I expect the publisher to nod it through to production on the basis of a few revisions. I'll get back to open reviewing next week.

You too can be an academic ...

How to write like a professor. Yes, really, academic writing on tap. Four clicks and a PhD seems tantalizingly in reach courtesy of the Virtual Academic at the University of Chicago. Thank god for the internet. My three creations:

"The eroticization of post-capitalist hegemony asks to be read as the politics of the specular economy."

"The epistemology of civil society opens a space for the historicization of the nation-state."

"The illusion of normative value(s) invests itself in the authentication of exchange value."

And yes, after year's of editing an academic journal I can attest that such sentences appear all the time - in fact I'm so attuned to them that these seem entirely plausible to me! (they probably are)

Thanks to The Bunburyist for the initial link.

A parcel from Oz

My guest from Australia arrives next week, but an advance parcel turned up today with the five imports recommended to me here. I'm looking forward to reading these as a quick scan of the first few pages of each suggests that they all hold a lot of promise. Their arrival creates two questions though: (1) where to slot them into a TBR pile that's getting out of hand and (2) which one to read first!

Ireland after NAMA

I spent most of yesterday at the ‘Geography after NAMA’ workshop that bought together some of the leading geographers in Ireland to consider the NAMA legislation and its implications for Irish communities. The title refers to both the geography of Ireland after NAMA and what the discipline of Geography might add to the debate and our understanding of the situation.

For those not familiar with how the financial crisis has played out in Ireland, NAMA is the new National Assets Management Agency. It is, in effect, a toxic bank that buys the property loan books of five Irish banks for any transaction worth more than five million euro. That covers circa 21,500 assets held by around 2,000 companies and individuals which were collectively valued at €88 billion at the time of the loan (for which €68b was borrowed and €9b is presently owed in interest payments). (The building right is what was to be Anglo Irish Bank's new HQs, now on hold and almost certainly in the NAMA portfolio - €28b of Anglo's loans will be transferred to NAMA, more than any other bank).

Ireland has particularly suffered following the global economic crisis because its property market was so overheated, inflated and poorly regulated. Average land prices at the peak of the market were twice that of any other European country, with the banks borrowing heavily on the international money markets to lend onto individual buyers and developers. This left the banks massively overexposed with assets that were rapidly losing value as well as plummeting share price, resulting in the banks becoming vulnerable to failure as liquidity dried up. Unwilling to let any of the banks fail or to recapitalise or nationalise them, the Irish government initially tried to force some mergers and to recapitalise the banks through private equity investment. Ultimately it has had to nationalise Anglo-Irish Bank and partly recapitalise the others, taking the role of a preferred shareholder, and also create NAMA – the world’s largest, state-owned, property portfolio - to take the bad debts off the banks' books. Ironically, because the state has effectly bailed the banks out it has had to make NAMA a Special Purpose Vehicle, with 51% of the projected €100m running costs provided by private investors in order to keep the debt off the state accounts!

Geographically, NAMA's assets roughly breakdown as: 66% in Ireland, 6% Northern Ireland, 21% Great Britain, 4% Europe, 3% USA, though we do not know how these are geographically configured at the sub-national scale. And although we don’t have a full breakdown of the kinds of assets in the portfolio, Ronan Lyons estimates them as Irish commercial (€11.8bn), Irish residential (€12.4bn), Irish land (€31bn), all foreign (€31.6bn). In fact, we have no real idea as to the true worth of the assets in the portfolio, despite the fact that the government have agreed to pay €54b for what they acknowledge are assets estimated to be worth at best €47b. It seems likely to many analysts that the real value might be somewhat less than this given the amount of development land in the portfolio, much of which will not even be zoned for planning, and even if it was it’ll not be needed for some time given the surplus of vacant and half-finished commercial and residential properties around the country (the so-called ghost estates).

The purpose of the day was to try and work out a research agenda that seeks to take space and scale seriously and acknowledges how NAMA will play out is spatially uneven and unequal, affecting parts of the country in different ways, and its grounding in particular communities is the result of processes operating at different scales from the local through to the global. Too often the analysis of the crisis in Ireland takes a journalist form that focuses on the role of elite actors at the expense of an analysis that examines the neoliberalisation of the Irish state and economy, or works from a macro-economic perspective that treats the country as a universalised, flat plane wherein all places have equal opportunities and risk. The reality is that how the crisis is playing out in rural Tipperary is quite different to Dublin 4, which is quite different to the commuting belts and the border counties for a variety of reasons. What we’ve agreed to do is to collectively try and get a relatively quick handle on what is happening in four different spatial arenas – cities and their commuting zones; the border counties; rural areas; and specific sites of Irish capital investment abroad such as Liverpool – to provide some case study material. This material will form the basis for interpreting what is happening and to set that in an international context. Should be an interesting exercise. We aim to communicate our analysis through a new blog - Ireland After NAMA - which should hopefully start to take shape soon.

Review of Dirty Sweet by John McFetridge (Harcourt, 2006)

Roxanne Keyes is a real estate agent who’s in a bind, her credit over-extended and afraid of losing her unaffordable life-style. Then one morning she witnesses a murder – a man shot dead in traffic in broad daylight – and an opportunity presents itself to work herself free; an opportunity that has high risks given that the driver of the getaway car is a Russian gangster, Boris Suliemanov, who runs an upscale strip club and smuggles women, high-end cars and drugs to and from Eastern Europe. All she needs to do is lie to the police and find a safe way to blackmail the Russian. Then Vince Fournier, who rents out space in one of Roxanne’s buildings where he runs an online porn business, not only provides a safe route to the Russian, but also a means to make all three of them a lot of money. The only problem is that the police don’t believe Roxanne’s initial witness statement and a rival gang have their eye on Boris' business.

There’s a lot to like about Dirty Sweet. The characters and plot were entirely plausible. The dialogue was mostly excellent, although I did lose the thread in a couple of places. The moral ambiguity of all the characters, including the police, was realistic. McFetridge's knowledge of Toronto shines through and the story comes with its own soundtrack. And yet, what had the potential to be a five star review fell a little short for me. I think there are two main reasons. First, because the three main characters were morally dubious, self-centred and shallow, and there was nothing much appealing about the police officers, there was no-one to root for or will on. Second, the pace and tension remained relatively sedate, instead of being gradually ratcheted up. Whilst this was probably true to the story it meant the book never quite became the page-turner, edge of the seat read that it could have been. That said, McFetridge writes well and hooks you in early, and he does a good job of exposing the moral ambiguities we all face – how people get themselves into trouble, in spite of their best intentions, and then slide into another life on the promise of a quick solution; how greed, ambition and the frisson of risk provide fresh temptations from which it’s difficult to backtrack. A lot of promise here and the short, teaser excerpt of Everybody Knows this is Nowhere at the end of my copy does its job - I'll be keeping an eye out for it.

The Lazy Sunday Service: Fearing water

I had a reminder as to why I'm cautious about buying an e-reader yesterday evening when my niece spilt an entire cup of tea over my copy of Dirty Sweet by John McFetridge, which I've nearly finished reading. A bit of a shakedown and mopping up and its still okay, albeit with half-brown, wavy pages. A kindle, I suspect, would be completely kaput, I'd have lost a lot of books, and it would cost a small fortune to replace everything.

This unfortunately has happened to a lot of people round Ireland in the past couple of days after levels of rainfall that the meterologists have said occurs every 1 in 800 years. Indeed, some weather stations are reporting their highest ever recorded levels of rainfall for a November, eight days before the month is over. The result has been much of the south and west of the country lying under several feet of water, including the whole of Cork city centre, which has just about run out of clean drinking water after a treatment plant was flooded. Several other towns including Galway, Clonmel, Carrick on Shannon, Ballinasloe, Fermoy, and Ennis are also under water, as well as many villages and individual houses, and many roads and rail routes are closed.

The rule of thumb seems to be that for every inch of water rising up a wall a month of drying is required; every foot of dirty, stinking water flowing through a house requires a year before redecorating can start. If things weren't bad enough with the recession, businesses have lost millions of euro of stock, and many homeowners will spending christmas in temporary accommodation. And to make things worse, it's still raining. I suspect 2009 will be an annus mirabilis for many Irish people. The way the economy and weather seems to be going, 2010 is unlikely to be any better.

Saturday Snippet: The White Gallows

This is a snippet that is unlikey to see the light of day beyond this post. It was the opening of The White Gallows, the next book in the series after The Rule Book, but I've decided to drop it. It took a little bit of persuasion, but on reflection I think the person who made the case is right. It feels kind of funny to edit out because it was written as flash fiction and then the rest of the novel was imagined and built from it. Dropping it somehow feels like erasing the key, initial cornerstone from the foundation of the story, although the book seems to work better without it - it provides some kind of haunting absence, I think. The cover, right, was the best I could mock up in five minutes and I'm lacking a bit of inspiration on that front. Ideas gratefully received. Anyway, here it is:

It was the same recurring nightmare, though nightmare was probably the wrong word. It wasn’t some fantastical labyrinth of cryptic signs and symbols, of ghosts and monsters. It was the Truth – of skeletal people he’d tortured, beaten and shot; of people so dehumanized they were merely automations; fragile beasts in a vast machine that ensnared them, extracted value, and disposed of their broken bodies. They were mules - animals of labour to be worked to death; stupid creatures that needed cajoling, disciplining and punishment to make them comply. They didn’t merit compassion or pity or aid when they broke; they were to be shot as lame mules were shot.

He was shouting at an emaciated figure - his head shorn of hair, face gaunt and drawn - only he couldn’t hear his own words, just the deafening noise of the factory. The man stared back blankly - no sign of comprehension or fear or defiance or hate; just emptiness. He could feel the gun in his hand, his arm lifting, coming into vision. He shouted again, waited for a reaction, then pulled the trigger.

A hole appeared in the man’s forehead just above his left eyebrow. He stayed on his feet a couple of moments, then dropped to his knees, his dark brown eyes still staring back, but now, ironically, somehow alive, his lips pulled in a slight smile. The corpse toppled forward its face smashing into cold concrete.

He moved the gun across the scared and hate-filled faces of witnesses, challenging them to defy his authority. A fellow, older mule hesitantly moved forward, his arms raised, hands open, and crouched down in the blood next to the body offering comfort and grief. His hollow, tear-stained face glanced up as the well polished boot arrived, his head jerking violently, his body toppling backwards, arms flailing. His skull cracked off the edge of a workbench and he slumped unconscious to the floor.

Koch woke with a start, his breathing laboured, heart pounding. His chest felt constricted as if tightly corseted. His striped cotton pyjamas were damp with cold sweat, the bed clothes kicked to the floor. He pushed himself up against the headboard, trying to slow his rapid breaths, and reached for a glass of water from the bedside locker. The room was near dark, dimly lit by a pale orange nightlight.

The nightmare had ended early - the shooting was always near the beginning. It was followed by a sequence of other atrocities he’d performed or witnessed – beatings, torture, rapes, punishments, humiliations, executions - all without mercy; none merited.

He took a sip of cool water and shivered. For over sixty years he’d been plagued by the memories. He could push them away during the day, but they haunted him each night, eating away at his soul, denying him peace. He knew they would never stop; that he could never be forgiven.

He deserved as much, he knew that. He’d killed people in cold blood and watched thousands more die; he’d been a willing participant. He’d thought of them as no more than animals; sub-humans that were devious, conniving enemies of the state. They deserved to pay the ultimate price for the crimes of their race and religion.

It was over thirty years later before he started to change his mind; before he admitted to himself that his victims were as human as he was – were more human than he was. He’d never told anybody else and he had no intention of ever doing so.

There was a sound downstairs, something being knocked over, thudding to the floor. He sat perfectly still and listened. The house was silent, then a creak. The floorboards were as old as the house and they sang with age. He’d once read that Japanese palaces were built with nightingale floors – boards that creaked however lightly and skilfully they were trodden on. That’s what the old farmhouse had become - a Japanese palace. A floorboard sang out again.

He picked up his cheap digital watch and brought it close to his face. Roza, his housekeeper, had long left the farmhouse. She lived in a barn conversion across the yard, although he knew it was unlikely she was there; she’d be spending the night with her boyfriend in Athboy.

It was probably a burglar. If they were going to come for him, they would have done so by now. And they would have come straight to his bedroom and searched the house later. If he could survive the Russians as they swept through Eastern Europe and the aftermath of the war, he could handle a burglar. He placed the watch back on the locker and eased his thin, frail legs out of the bed, sliding his bare feet into cheap slippers.

Koch crept across the room to an old wardrobe, the floorboards beneath a thick white rug revealing his slow progress. His fingers were shaking slightly with age, as they had periodically for the past two years, and he struggled to open the secret panel at the back of the unit. After a few moments it popped open and he pulled free a small handgun. It felt heavy in his hand despite its size, the grip comfortable in his palm.

He moved to the door, eased it open, and stood still listening for movement. The house was quiet; then the creaking of a misplaced step. Stealthily, he headed for the top of the stairs, the gun held in front of him, steadied by both hands, the training from sixty years ago still remembered. He eased himself forward, the gun pointing down into the darkness below.

The house had once again become silent. Gingerly he descended the stairs, the pale light of the night sky eating into the shadows through the semi-circular window above the Georgian door, the dull thump of his heart filling his ears. As he neared the ground floor he flicked on the light switch, swinging the gun round the empty hallway. He nudged open the door to his left, reached in, switched on the lights and slipped into the room. From behind the door somebody yanked the gun from his hand and something heavy landed on the crown of his head.

A slow, wet week ...

I was hoping to head off this weekend, but it seems that just about every road in Ireland is under water and it's forecast to lash rain again tomorrow and Sunday. Thank god I don't live on a floodplain! It should give me time to catch up a few on things. It's been a couple of slow weeks on the reviews front. It's not that I've not been reading, it's that I've been reading research papers and student essays. And I'm reading two books at the same time, which slows the cycle. As you can guess what that means is that this post is a filler. And not a very interesting one at that. For anyone remotely interested, here is a link to the three promo videos for the encyclopedia, which I was going to write a separate post about, but I fear would have been equally uninspiring.

Plugging away

Two titles in a book series I edit - Key Concepts in Human Geography - have been recently published so I thought I'd give them a plug.

Key Concepts in Political Geography by Carolyn Gallaher, Carl Dahlman, Mary Gilmartin, Alison Mountz with Peter Shirlow. Here for more details.

Key Concepts in Urban Geography by Alan Latham, Derek McCormack, Kim McNamara and Donald McNeil. Here for more details.

Both books provide a great introduction to the most important conceptual ideas currently used to think through and explain geopolitics and cities.