Sometimes things work out for the best

I managed to leave the book I was reading on the kitchen table this morning. Nathan Jones' White Sky, Black Ice turned up in the post at work, however, so I headed to the airport this afternoon to fly to London with high expectations after the review I read over at Reactions to Reading a couple of weeks ago. The book I was reading was so-so. I'm a 150 pages into WKBI, set in a small Alaskan town and introducing State Trooper Nathan Active, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I think there's probably legs in this series, assuming the second half continues in the same vein. More when I've finished. So far though, so good.

Review of Winterland by Alan Glynn (Faber, 2009)

A gangland thug is shot dead at the back of a pub. A structural engineer drives down an embankment dying in the crash. Both are named Noel Rafferty and they are nephew and uncle. The official line is that it is pure coincidence that they died on the same night. Gina Rafferty though cannot accept that verdict. She starts to investigate, concentrating in particular on her brother, the engineer. He had been working on a massive development nearing completion on Dublin's quays. The night he died he was agitated and sober. The crash report says he was well over the limit. Gina prods and pushes the developer Paddy Norton, a man with strong political connections, for answers. Her actions are like poking a wasps’ nest with a stick ...

In Winterland Alan Glynn manages to intertwine two criminal cultures of Ireland – the gangland underworld and the boardrooms of corrupt developers and political cronies. It’s a searing social commentary on Irish life, full of keen observational insight and emotional depth. Glynn writes with deceptively engaging prose, appearing quite ordinary but actually well layered and lyrical. The principal characters are all nicely developed, with full contextual back stories. The plot was well structured and despite the story being framed as a thriller that links a disparate set of characters it is very believable. One of the things I found quite fascinating is that Winterland is not a whodunit or even a howdunnit. The reader knows pretty much from the start who did the killings, why and how. They also know the answers to the secondary story. And yet, Glynn manages to maintain and ratchet up the tension throughout. It was an interesting approach and worked surprisingly well. The story is slightly flabby in places and could have done with a little tightening, and the ending felt a tad weak even though it had nice symmetry, but these are minor issues. Overall, a very entertaining read that provides real insight into twenty first century Ireland.

Lazy Sunday Service

I'm just finishing off Michelle Williams' Down Among The Dead Men: A Year in the Life of Mortuary Technician. It's not the descriptions of eviscerations and postmortems that is making me squirm, but rather the way in which some people die. The description that has stuck in my head is of a doctor who's patient has died and his treatment is being investigated. If your squeamish, stop reading now. The doctor fearing he is going to be struck off, takes his jeep and backs it up to a tree. Then he ties a rope around the trunk, threads it in through the back door, leaving a lot of slack, and ties it around his neck. He then revs the vehicle and drives off. Ouch! I can't seem to dislodge that image from my overactive imagination.

My posts this week
Review of City of Bohane by Kevin Barry
Winterland
Moonlighting and Northern Exposure
Review of The Big Mango by Jake Needham
Final notice

Final notice

They stare at the envelopes, all of them clearly bills or statements.

‘Don’t open them.’

‘We can’t just ignore them, Niall. They’re not going to go away.’

He shakes his head sadly. ‘How the fuck did we get into this mess?’

‘You know how.’

‘Fucking banks.’

‘It was us that borrowed the money, Niall.’

‘Yeah, but they shouldn’t have lent us so much. Jesus!’ He kicks the door.

‘Don’t.’

‘What difference does it make? They’ll be taking it back off us soon.’ He kicks the door again, cracking the wood.

‘Niall.’ Her head feels like it is going to implode.


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Review of The Big Mango by Jake Needham (Marshall Cavendish, 1999)

Eddie Dare is a downwardly mobile lawyer working in San Francisco, with two divorces and one son. One day a photograph arrives in the post with his head circled. Soon after a man turns up looking to hire him to find 400 million dollars that was removed from the South Vietnam’s national bank vault in the last days of the regime. It seems that he was a member of a company of American marines who unknowingly transported the money to Thailand. There it and his company commander, Captain Austin, disappears. Only Austin has recently died and now the US government, the Vietnamese and other interested parties are in a race to find the money. They all think that Eddie either knows where it is or can locate it. Persuaded to travel to Bangkok for a finder’s fee, Eddie arrives into a lively city with his fellow marine veteran, Winnebago Jones. Very quickly they’re floundering around trying to find the money and to stay alive.

The Big Mango was Needham’s first novel and it and his subsequent novels have all sold well in Asia (for some reason Needham refuses to allow his books to be published in North America). It’s competently written and plotted, with some relatively straightforward prose, some nice observational passages and occasional comic flourishes. Dare is a rather ordinary character and it’s the folk around him who add the colour. Bangkok is well detailed and there’s a good sense of place, giving a view of the city from a Western perspective. The plot was simple enough, with effectively four groups chasing down the money, intersecting at various points, and it comes to a nice, tense conclusion. There were a couple of niggles - one team dropped from view towards the end and the thread dealing with Dare’s relationship with his son is never fully developed. Overall, an enjoyable romp.

Moonlighting and Northern Exposure

Two DVD box sets turned up in the post yesterday (if you only have four TV channels, they're great backup viewing) - Moonlighting and Northern Exposure. I was somewhat surprised to see that they first aired when I was still a teenager (Moonlighting 1985, Northern Exposure 1989). Watched the pilot episode of each. Both comedy dramas. They've dated a little, especially Moonlighting, but they both still work because of the chemistry between the actors. The story in the Moonlighting pilot was very weak and some of it is as cheesy as brie, but the vibe between Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd makes it work and its good fun. The end of the Northern Exposure episode just fizzles out as if there was no attempt to close the opening programme. Rob Morrow though carries the episode as the New York doctor out of place in Alaska. Looking forward to working through these over the next year or so.

Winterland

After a blitz through Jake Needham's The Big Mango (review later in the week), I bit the bullet and started Alan Glynn's Winterland last night. I'm 100 pages in and it lives up to my high expectations. Glynn has a got a keen observational eye and like Gene Kerrigan perfectly captures the social and political relations in Ireland. If, as Declan Burke is suggesting over on Crime Always Pays, Glynn's next book, Bloodland, is just as good, if not better, then it's going to be one heck of a read. Thankfully, in my own as yet unpublished novel on property development and corruption in Ireland, I concentrate on the rural midlands. With regards to Dublin, Glynn and Kerrigan have been there and done that. I've been toying about writing an academic book on housing, property and planning in Ireland. I think I'll just tell the students to read their novels. They'll get the same insights without the dryness.

Review of City of Bohane by Kevin Barry (Jonathan Cape, 2011)

Forty years into the future and the once great city of Bohane, on the Irish west coast, is ridden with tribal factions fighting for power and control. For years, Logan Hartnett has been the godfather of the Fancy, unofficially ruling over the city and its various vice activities and maintaining a wary peace. Hartnett’s authority though is coming under challenge from within his family and the Fancy, and from the families on the Rises and a returning nemesis. To maintain his position requires all his cunning and savage skills as various feuds play out in a post-apocalyptic landscape.

Kevin Barry is well known for his short stories. He has a vivid imagination and is an excellent wordsmith, crafting some lovely, expressive prose. City of Bohane has received high praise from some of Ireland’s literary stars such as Roddy Doyle, Joseph O’Connor and Hugo Hamilton. I therefore had high expectations for Barry’s first novel. With the exception of the prose and some of the characterisation, for me, it failed to deliver. For the most part, the characters are difficult to identify with and I couldn’t have cared less what happened to them; they're a bunch of scoundrels hooked on vice and violence. The tale has no back story. We’re forty years into the future, Ireland seems to have slipped backwards a couple of hundred years minus the colonial rule, and we have no idea as to why this occurred or the general wider socio-political landscape of Ireland or Europe. Rather we’re isolated in a fictional city, with the sea on one side and surrounded by bog otherwise, and all we have is a nostalgia for a ‘lost-time’ that’s never explained. The plot is wafer thin and is largely feuding clans seeking to remain in charge of the city. My sense when I got to the end was, ‘yes, and?’ Given the literary plaudits, I was expecting a lot more and yet there is no great sociological, political or economic unveiling, no sense of philosophical or theological reflection, no feeling that story served any purpose. Barry does manage to create some sense of place, but the city is very simply structured into five zones, lacking the complexity of a real place and it’s really not clear how large a town it actually is. It felt quite small town to me, certainly not a large city. There is also a first person narrator who drifts in very occasionally and seemingly with no purpose. Barry rightly deserves the plaudits for his ability as a wordsmith, and there are some very nice passages in City of Bohane, but as a novel length story for me it fell short of what it could have been.

Sunday Service

I've just finished reading Kevin Barry's City of Bohane. It is adorned in cover quotes by literary stars who all say that it's a masterpiece. Roddy Doyle states it's 'brilliant.' Joseph O'Connor waxes that it is 'an unforgettably wonderful novel ... an electrifying masterpiece.' Niall Griffiths argues that it 'beautifully illustrates, the mad glory of the human imagination. It should be met with parties and parades and pyrotechnics.' Hugo Hamilton says it is 'an extreme adventure in pure language and fictional daring.' Irvine Welsh thinks Barry is 'the most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years.' I've just finished writing my review. Suffice to say, I'm at odds with the literary greats. My view is more in line with that I've just found in the Independent - 'City of Bohane, for all its surface brilliance, turns out to be such a letdown.' Which is a real shame as I so wanted to like it more than I did. Barry is undoubtedly a very fine wordsmith, but much more is needed for a satisying novel than a great turn of phrase. I'll post my review tomorrow. In the meantime, are there any books you've read where your opinion of the book radically differed to the cover quotes? It seems to be happening to me quite a bit these days.

My posts this week
Review of Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke
Demolishing unfinished estates
Fiction based on real crimes
Review of Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott
Putting apprehensions to one side
Blood pumping quick

Drabble: Blood Pumping Quick

Cold. Wet. Dark except for the flickering dance of honeyed light. Clinging to the lee of a ditch, covered in mud and god knows what. The shuffle of boots on the tarmac above. Waiting. Waiting. Praying. Whispered voices, a distant shout, feet running. Count to ten, a deep breath, glancing left and right, silhouetted figures disappearing round a bend. Up and across the road, over a barbed wire fence, trousers snagging, ripping, blood beading. Into a stand of old birch trees, glancing back. The flames reach up for the stars. What was home is gone. Shouting. Shots. Blood pumping quick.


A drabble is a story of exactly 100 words.

Putting apprehensions to one side

I've been meaning to read Alan Glynn's Winterland for a while. First, I put it to one side because I was writing my own novel concerning property corruption in Ireland. Then, I left it there because I didn't want to do any comparisons that might set my heart sinking, especially since all the reviews I've seen of it are very positive. I've decided to bite the bullet and move it to the top of the pile, in part because it's the first in a trilogy and I'm interested in the second book in the series, Bloodland, which is just about to be released (Sept 1st).

Here's the backcover blurb for Bloodland:

A tabloid star is killed in a helicopter crash and three years later a young journalist is warned off the story. A private security contractor loses it in the Congo, with deadly consequences. In Ireland an ex-prime minister struggles to contain a dark secret from his time in office. A dramatic news story breaks in Paris just as a US senator begins his campaign to run for office. With echoes of John Le Carré, 24 and James Ellroy, Alan Glynn’s follow-up to Winterland is another crime novel of and for our times – a ferocious, paranoid thriller that moves from Dublin to New York via Central Africa, and thrillingly explores the legacy of corruption in big business, the West’s fear of China, the role of back room political players and the question of who controls what we know.

Review of Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott (Pocket Books, 2009)

Marion Seeley is married to an older man, a doctor with a morphine addiction. Struck off from practising, her husband has abandoned her in Phoenix and headed to Mexico to work for a mining company. Living in a guest house, Marion finds work in a medical clinic where she meets Louise, a woman who lives on the edge and by her wits. Louise invites the lonely Marion to the parties that she and her housemate, the sickly Ginny, host in which they entertain some of town’s most powerful men. The three of them quickly become friends, Marion spending ever more time at their house. At one of the parties Marion meets Joe Lanigan, a well connected businessman and womaniser, and falls for his charms. Unable to resist, she takes ever more risks that puts her on a murderous collision course with her friends, who rely on Lanigan to stay above the breadline.

Bury Me Deep is inspired by the notorious 1931 ‘trunk murders’ crime. It follows certain factual aspects of that story to frame the narrative, but the story itself is fiction and the ending is substantially different. There is plenty to like about the book, but the real strengths for me are the prose, the pace, the character development, and the plotting. Abbott is clearly something of a wordsmith and the prose is very nicely written. The pace is even and relenting, where it could have been rushed. This I think allows the story and characters to develop and the rationale for the crime that occurs about three fifths into the story to become clear. The characters are all well penned, especially the three lead women and their developing relationship, and the plot is well constructed with a good sense of historical detail. The only thing that seemed to be missing for me was a strong sense of place and geography. I had to keep reminding myself that it was set in Phoenix. I just got no real sense of the town or its landscape or indeed its social organisation and people beyond there being a group of important men that ran the place. As a result, the book felt a little decontextualized, reduced to the relationships between the four main characters and the distant Dr Seeley. Nevertheless, this is superior crime fiction and is well worth checking out.

Fiction based on real crimes

I finished Megan Abbott's excellent Bury Me Deep last night. As with Eoin McNamee's Orchid Blue, which I posted about earlier in the year, I'm still not sure what I think about fiction that's based on real crimes. Bury Me Deep makes it very clear that whilst some elements of the book are true to the crime in terms of what was reported at the time and in subsequent true crime books, a lot of it is imagined and the ending is completely different. Funnily, I have much less trouble with biographical films, except where they radically alter the history. Bury Me Deep is a kind of alternative history crime novel. Very good, but for whatever reason the fact that it was so strongly based on the infamous 'trunk murders' I found somewhat unsettling. I think it's something to do with family and living legacies. I don't know; it just seems unnerving somehow. Maybe I shouldn't have looked at the author notes at the back of the book until I'd finished reading the novel. Funny what unsettles one's comfort zone. Review tomorrow hopefully.

Review of Absolute Zero Cool by Declan Burke (Liberties Press, 2011)

Declan Burke is working on a new novel when Billy Karlsson appears in his back garden. Karlsson claims to be a character in one of Burke’s previously unpublished novels, a hospital porter with a sideline in euthanasia taking part in a did he/didn’t he kill his girlfriend plot. Burke’s initial response is that this is some kind of weird piece of performance art – that the supposed Karlsson has somehow got his hands on a version of the abandoned novel. What Karlsson wants is for Burke to re-draft the novel with his help; to make it out of the purgatory of a manuscript left languishing in a drawer and to become published. Playing along with Karlsson’s performance, Burke helps Billy rework the manuscript. If euthanasia isn’t enough to get the work accepted then Karlsson is going to blow up an entire hospital.

On the jacket cover, John Banville states that Absolute Zero Cool is a cross between Flann O’Brien and Raymond Chandler. I think it’s more a cross between Flann O’Brien (the Irish satirist) and Declan Burke, author of Eight Ball Boogie, The Big O and Crime Always Pays – satire and high art meets screwball noir. The nearest comparison for the existential, literary plot-play I can think of is Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next and Nursery Crimes novels. Whereas Fforde plays with literary theory and intertextuality, Burke uses Greek mythology, theology and philosophy to deconstruct and satirise the life of a writer, the crime novel and contemporary society, especially the Irish health system. The result is a very clever book, that’s at once fun and challenging. The prose and plot has been honed within an inch of its life, full of lovely turns of phrases, philosophical depth and keen observational insight. I wouldn’t classify Absolute Zero Cool as a page turner – it’s far too cerebral for that – and the middle of the book is a little ponderous as various pieces are moved into place, but it does have a coherent plot that tugs the reader to the somewhat inevitable end. That’s no mean feat given how postmodern the tale is, but does reveal that the book is, as Burke insists in the text itself, a crime novel and not simply a literary conceit. Absolute Zero Cool takes the crime genre and its many tropes and stereotypes and throws them out the window. It’s a genuinely unique tale. It certainly won’t be for everybody, but for those crime readers who like to be pushed and challenged this is well worth a look. Five stars all the way for me.

Lazy Sunday Service

You know you've asked an academic to take a look at a piece of your fiction when their first comment is: 'I think you need to flesh out in more detail the main character's ontological crisis in finding a dead body.' So that's what I've been doing this morning. Examining the ontological crisis of waking up next to a dead body. The questioning of one's self, one's mortality, and one's relationship to the world. At least, that's what I'm assuming he meant. So, here's a scenario for you: You wake to find the dead body of someone you've never met before in the bed next to you. How do you react?

My posts this week
Book sources
Review of Sweet Money by Ernesto Mallo
Crime fiction, but not as we know it
Review of The Whispers of Nemesis by Anne Zouroudi
Infinity and beyond