Publication: DUBLIN SEVEN by Frankie Gaffney

Were an unsuspecting reader to pick up Frankie Gaffney’s debut novel DUBLIN SEVEN (Liberties Press), he or she might believe the story – young Dubliner Shane Laochra gets involved in coke-dealing during the Celtic Tiger boom, with the expected consequences – to be a crime novel written in the vernacular style, a la Roddy Doyle.
  A recent Irish Times feature, however, suggests that Frankie Gaffney may not have had ‘crime novel’ at the top of his list of priorities when he sat down to write DUBLIN SEVEN. Here he is, for example, on the novel’s structure:

“I was inspired in this regard by James Joyce’s “Linati schema” for Ulysses. Joyce’s masterpiece is organised around a grid, allocating each episode a Homeric parallel, an organ of the body, an academic discipline, and so forth. I wanted to do something similar on a more modest and intelligible scale. Each chapter of Dublin Seven has one each of the seven deadly sins, seven holy gifts, seven Biblical plagues, the seven Egyptian souls (as imagined in the famous William S Burroughs poem some might remember from the montage at the start of the final season of The Sopranos), the seven traditional colours of the spectrum, and the seven ancient vedic deities/planets (that gave their names to our days of the week).”

  For more, clickety-click here …