“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

Wednesday, April 13, 2011

The Bonfire Of The Inanities

As I’ve said before on these pages, I’m not really exercised by book covers, but every now and again one comes along that catches the eye. The UK cover of THE BURNING SOUL - to be published on both sides of the pond on September 1st - comes courtesy of its author, John Connolly, and is definitely one such eye-catcher: at first glance, it put me in mind of both ‘The Children of the Corn’ and ‘The Wicker Man’. Meanwhile, the blurb elves are wittering thusly:
Randall Haight has a secret: when he was a teenager, he and his friend killed a 14-year-old girl. Randall did his time and built a new life in the small Maine town of Pastor’s Bay, but somebody has discovered the truth about Randall. He is being tormented by anonymous messages, haunting reminders of his past crime, and he wants private detective Charlie Parker to make it stop. But another 14-year-old girl has gone missing, this time from Pastor’s Bay, and the missing girl’s family has its own secrets to protect. Now Parker must unravel a web of deceit involving the police, the FBI, a doomed mobster named Tommy Morris, and Randall Haight himself. Because Randall Haight is telling lies …
  Sounds like a cracker. Suddenly September seems a long, long way away …
  Meanwhile, given my well-deserved reputation for reading way too much into far too little, it’s incumbent upon me to posit a theory about THE BURNING SOUL as a metaphor for Ireland’s economic collapse. If we say that Randall Haight represents the banks and their dirty secrets, for example, and the murdered 14-year-old girl the innocent Irish tax-payer, then perhaps our hero Charlie Parker is entering the financial labyrinth (aka the ‘web of deceit’) on our behalf to face down the demons, ultimately to emerge, bloodied but unbowed, to advise the government that the only way to deal with €100 billion debt placed on Ireland’s already buckling shoulders is to burn the soul-sucking bondholders to the floor, aka, the bonfire of the inanities.
  Too much? Erm, yes. But again, at the risk of reading too much into such things, it’s interesting to take a look at the titles of recent and forthcoming Irish crime titles in the context of all that has happened here over the last 12 months or so. To wit: THE BURNING SOUL (John Connolly); THE BURNING (Jane Casey); THE RAGE (Gene Kerrigan); THE FATAL TOUCH (Conor Fitzgerald); FALLING GLASS (Adrian McKinty); PLUGGED (Eoin Colfer); TAKEN (Niamh O’Connor); BLOODLAND (Alan Glynn); STOLEN SOULS (Stuart Neville); BROKEN HARBOUR (Tana French); LITTLE GIRL LOST (Brian McGilloway).
  Now, not all of those novels are even set in Ireland, and to the best of my knowledge, none of them explicitly deal with how Irish people are being punished for the sins of profligate European bankers. Still, there’s a lot of broken, bloody, lost, burning, angry souls in there …

8 comments:

Robert Clear said...

What a great cover. Very pagan-looking!

adrian mckinty said...

Dec

Falling Glass has a strangely similar cover. That stuff happens all the time though.

More importantly the casus belli of the book is the collapse of the Irish housing market...

colin bateman said...

0i! Bateman's 'Nine Inches'. The jacket is up at Amaz0n.

Declan Burke said...

Robert - Indeed it is very pagan-looking - a very suggestive cover.

Adrian - None of your fancy-dan Latin here, squire, if you don't mind. That kind of malarkey could kick off a right shindig - oh.

Colin - Couldn't work out how to incorporate Nine Inches into the sad saga of Ireland's woes - unless you're suggesting that we're all getting a royal shafting?

Cheers, Dec

John said...

Darn it, I wish I was as smart as Declan Burke. That Bateman, eh? He'd muscle in on a child's funeral. 'Nine Inches', Bateman? Are you sure? That can't be right. You'd need special trousers made . . .

Declan Burke said...

Darn it, I wish I had a fraction of John Connolly's sales.

As for having a fraction of Colin Bateman's 'Nine Inches', well ...

Cheers, Dec

@Ruby_Barnes said...

Yes, very Whicker Man. I remember Britt Ekland getting all weird in that. And the man with three wooden heads being, well, wooden.

Feel like I should say something about the 22.5 cm thing - didn't one of Colin's books have the giant watsit refund scam? Which one was that? There's so many.

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