“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Monday, January 7, 2013

A Boy And His Bullet

Anthony Quinn, author of DISAPPEARED (Mysterious Press), has a superb essay over at the Mysterious Press blog on his experience of growing up in Northern Ireland at the height of ‘the Troubles’. An excerpt:
“My tenth year was an overwhelming one for me, brought up as a devout Catholic, receiving in my hands something as frightening as a bullet marked for my father, and then something as holy as the consecrated Body of Christ. You would have thought the latter would have negated the former. The good cancelling the bad. The brutal gift of the bullet reversed by the redeeming gift of the Eucharist. However, it didn’t work out like that. One inflamed the other, like throwing raw alcohol on a wound. To this day, I can still feel the imprint of the bullet in my hand.
“The experience left me feeling conflicted in ways that are hard to explain. I became a deeply spiritual teenager with a guilty fascination for IRA violence. I listened obsessively to the daily morning, noon and evening news bulletins, tuning in to the litany of bombings and shootings, which were always delivered by the newsreader in the same monotone voice with which he announced the weather. I was frightened and at the same time thrilled by what I heard, and I wasn’t the only one. Listening to the hourly radio news became a national pastime during the Troubles. Many of my generation were addicted to those little charges of excitement that flow from bad news, swinging from dread to overwhelming relief and satisfaction, and then back to apprehension again, waiting pensively for the day that the news bulletin heralded a personal tragedy. We were the children of the 1970s, and when darkness fell, we brooded on bullets, guns and bombs. The violence terrified us, but, to an extent, it also entertained and diverted us. Many of us became hooked on it.”
  For the rest, clickety-click here

1 comment:

lil Gluckstern said...

The struggle and the impact of that time are painful and important for us here in the U.S. to read. We never really got it although we certainly have prejudice and hatred here. Thank you for writing about this. The U.S. is so insular sometimes.