“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

Thursday, February 25, 2016

Review: GULL by Glenn Patterson

Gull (Head of Zeus), Glenn Patterson’s tenth novel, opens in late 1982 with a short chapter recounting the bitter end of John DeLorean’s attempt to establish a car manufacturing empire in Belfast. Edmund Randall, DeLorean’s head of logistics in Belfast, makes a doomed dash to New York with bearer bonds that will allow the Dunmurry manufacturing plant to stay in business, only to discover that DeLorean has left New York for Los Angeles, thus allowing the time limit for the financial rescue package to lapse. Meanwhile, back in Belfast, Liz – a DeLorean factory worker, as we later discover – listens to the news on the radio, then packs her suitcase to leave Belfast for good.
  This brief, pithy chapter introduces the main characters and themes of Gull. The absent, charismatic but ultimately undependable DeLorean, whose dream of creating an affordable, ‘ethical’ sports car resulted the stainless-steel, iconic gull-winged DMC-12; Randall, the faithful servant who was never fully convinced by DeLorean, but who remained dazzled by his promise of better times to the very end; and Liz, the working-class Belfast woman who sacrificed her personal life on the altar of DeLorean’s delusions.
  John DeLorean is the marquee name here, of course, although we are never privy to his thoughts throughout Gull. The story is told for the most part from Randall’s perspective, who is a cub reporter when he first meets DeLorean in 1972, covering the launch of the ’73 Chevrolet Vega, the latest addition to John DeLorean’s glittering CV. DeLorean had long established himself as a star of the American motor manufacturing business, and particularly with the behemoth General Motors; when Randall queried DeLorean’s claims on behalf of the new Chevy Vega, earning himself a rebuke (and a demotion) from his newspaper colleagues, he earns DeLorean’s respect. A few years later, when Randall is working on the real estate beat for his newspaper, he gets a call from DeLorean, who wants Randall to head up the logistics division of his new company: the DeLorean Motor Company (DMC).
  It’s a plum job, but Randall earns his money the hard way. Initially, the plan is to establish the DMC manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico; at the very last minute, however, while Randall is in a meeting with the Governor of Puerto Rico waiting to sign the contracts, DeLorean rings Randall from Belfast to tell him that the plant will be in Ireland.
  By now the tone has been set: DeLorean is a magnetic, successful visionary and businessman, but one given to mercurial changes of mind and mood, and a man whose associates aren’t always entirely savoury. Randall, however, is a believer in DeLorean’s vision; over the coming years, he will repeatedly ignore DeLorean’s failings in order to focus on the big picture. Patterson intends Randall as an Everyman standing in for the public at large, wanting to be convinced that DeLorean has all the answers and mesmerised by his charisma. “DeLorean stepped up to the microphone,” he tells us of one speech, “to the right of the grandstand, as though – Randall had observed it before – he moved through a different medium, or was being shot on a different speed, to everyone around him. […] And as for his jaw, it was his conductor’s baton, his wand, wherever it pointed there was a reaction, a jumping to attention, a rush of colour to the cheeks, an instant abashed smile.”
  The DeLorean portrayed here is a fascinating Pied Piper, but it’s not just the likes of Randall and Liz that he charms. DeLorean arrived in Belfast telling the Labour-led British government that his manufacturing plant wouldn’t simply create jobs in an economically devastated Northern Ireland, it would also save lives. And it’s the impact of the new factory on Belfast that interests Patterson even more than the protean figure of John DeLorean, and particularly his impact on the hopes and aspirations of a generation beaten down by the Troubles. Liz, who applies for a job at the DeLorean factory against the express wishes of her husband, is a woman who has little reason for optimism. “She had long ago given up on politicians in this part of the world – take your pick from old men, angry men, or angry old men – and the ones from across the water always seemed, and not just by virtue of the water, remote.”
  That might sound like a depressingly familiar scenario, but it’s a tribute to Glenn Patterson’s gift for storytelling that even though we’re familiar with much of the broad historical details of DeLorean’s rise and fall, Gull quickly becomes a compelling tale of hubris, a kind of Troubles-set version of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus. Patterson exquisitely evokes both the bleakness and the black humour of Belfast during the worst of the Troubles (“Welcome to Belfast, East Berlin without the laughs.”), but also, as has been the case in his most recent works, the novel The Rest Just Follows (2015) and the screenplay for the movie Good Vibrations (2013), Patterson digs beneath the banner headlines to explore the extent to which Catholic and Protestant communities were capable of bonding together for their common good when opportunities arose.
  Here the working-class people of Belfast have been abandoned by politicians of all hues, left to sink or swim (sink, mostly) into the mire of a war-torn province. IRA prisoners in the H-Block are already engaged in the ‘dirty protest’ as DeLorean breaks ground on his new factory; the hunger strikes will begin shortly after the DMC-12 goes into production. It’s against a background of nihilistic despair that Liz and her co-workers allow themselves to hope that DeLorean is genuine and true, even as the reader, courtesy of the snippets of information Randall manages to glean from his boss, begins to realise that DeLorean might well be the charlatan and fraudster Liz fears him to be.
  Ultimately, the narrative tension that sustains the story is bound up in its title. It refers, of course, to the classic ‘gull-winged’ shape of the DMC-12 when its doors were open, an iconic design which entered Hollywood lore when it featured in 1985’s Back to the Future (too late, alas, for the world-wide promotion to do DeLorean and his thousands of employees any good). A ‘gull’, however, also describes a person who is easy to fool or persuade. And it is perhaps too easy, Gull appears to be saying, to retrospectively pass judgement on John DeLorean for being a conman on a grand scale, and for the people of Belfast for being gullible enough to swallow his spiel. The novel suggests that the truth of the time and place was that Belfast needed John DeLorean, faults and all, just as badly as John DeLorean needed Belfast, warts and all.
  Glenn Patterson has spent much of his career writing about his native city, but Gull is much more than a story about a failed sports car; at its heart it argues for a bittersweet triumph of ravenous hope over grim truth and crushing reality. In that sense, and despite its historical and ostensibly parochial setting, Glenn Patterson has written his most universal story to date. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Tuesday, February 23, 2016

First Look: PIMP by Ken Bruen and Jason Starr

PIMP (Hard Case Crime) is the fourth collaboration between Ken Bruen and Jason Starr, and features what is likely to be the most eye-popping cover of any Irish crime fiction publication this year. To wit:
DEALING ... PRODUCING ... ALL IN A DAY’S WORK FOR A DRUGLORD. OR IN HOLLYWOOD.
  Ruined and on the lam, former drug kingpin Max Fisher stumbles upon the biggest discovery of his crooked life: a designer drug called PIMP that could put him back on top. Meanwhile, a certain femme fatale from his past is pursuing a comeback dream of her own, setting herself up in Hollywood as producer of a series based on her and Max’s life story. But even in La-La Land, happy endings are hard to come by, especially with both the cops and your enemies in the drug trade coming after you ...
  PIMP will be published on March 18th. For more, including a sample chapter, clickety-click here

Sunday, February 21, 2016

Review: DEAD SECRET by Ava McCarthy

Ava McCarthy is best known for her Harry Martinez computer hacker novels, but DEAD SECRET (Harper, €8.99) is a standalone thriller that hits the ground running: its narrator, Jodie Garrett, tells us that she’s packing a gun with nine rounds but will only need two: one for her husband and one for her. The reason? Her husband Ethan, who was always a bully, murdered their daughter Amy when Jodie finally announced she was leaving him.
  The pace is relentless as Jodie joins forces with journalist Matt Novak, who is investigating Ethan’s dodgy real estate dealings. The pair travel from Boston to Belize and on to Oregon in a breathless, contemporary take on an ancient Greek myth, with Jodie an implacable Fury relentlessly hounding Ethan in pursuit of vengeance and the ultimate in justice on behalf of her daughter.
  The pounding pace and rapid-fire revelations means that the story can teeter on the brink of parody at times, but the overall result is a compulsively readable domestic noir. – Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the February crime fiction column in the Irish Times. Other titles reviewed are THE NARROW BED by Sophie Hannah, THE OTHER MRS WALKER by Mary Paulson-Ellis, THE SYMPATHIZER by Viet Thanh Nguyen, and THE GOOD LIAR by Nicholas Searle.