The Horror, The Horror

I’ve been working away on a new book for the last couple of months, which is always great fun, although in the last few weeks it seems to have run into sand. Not unusual, if my previous experience is anything to go by, and probably not the last time this particular book will find itself in trouble. Anyway, I was reading HEART OF DARKNESS again last week, when this passage, from roughly the halfway point, leapt out at me. Marlow’s steamboat is falling apart for the want of rivets, but he’s fond of it all the same:

“It was a great comfort to turn from that chap to my influential friend, the battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot steamboat. I clambered on board. She rang under my feet like an empty Huntley & Palmers biscuit-tin kicked along a gutter; she was nothing so solid in make, and rather less pretty in shape, but I had expended enough hard work on her to make me love her. No influential friend would have served me better. She had given me a chance to come out a bit – to find out what I could do. No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work, – no man does – but I like what is in the work, – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself, not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never can tell what it really means.”

  It’s hard to believe that the ‘battered, twisted, ruined, tin-pot’ steamboat, at least during this passage, doesn’t represent ‘the work’ of writing the book itself, the opportunity to ‘find out what I could do’. Or maybe I’m reading too much into it, given that I’m up the proverbial creek myself without so much as a paddle or a handful of rivets. Maybe that’s also why this re-read of HEART OF DARKNESS put me in mind of MOBY-DICK, and that ‘the horror, the horror’ is that of the blank page.
  Tune in next week, when I read THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS and reconfigure ‘messing about in boats’ as a cry for help from an author becalmed in the backwater of a first draft, pulled hither and yon by the gentle ripples and eddies of pitiless fate, etc …

Nobody Move, This Is a Review: THE IRON WILL OF SHOESHINE CATS by Hesh Kestin

And now for something almost entirely different. Set in New York in late 1963, THE IRON WILL OF SHOESHINE CATS is narrated by Russell Newhouse, a young Jewish student of English literature. At the age of 22, Russell is an orphan, having lost his mother at a young age, and his father - a well-known hard-bitten Jewish NYPD cop - more recently.
  Russell is also a member of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society, a meeting of which is interrupted by the arrival of Shushan Cats, a notorious gangster and larger-than-life character known to the media as ‘Shoeshine Cats’ and ‘Kid Yid’. The Bhotke Young Men’s Society owns a plot of real estate in the Queens cemetery, and Shushan, whose mother has just died, wishes to join the society so as to avail of a grave for his beloved mother. Russell, as secretary for the society, is given the job of organising the funeral.
  From there, of course, it’s but a short hop, skip and jump before Russell is running a mob empire and fending off FBI investigations into the assassination of JFK.
  First that mob empire: Shushan ‘Shoeshine’ Cats is not Italian, but Jewish, and this is crucially important to the plot and the way the story is told. Kestin frequently refers back to the Holocaust, for example, which has taken place barely two decades before in terms of the novel’s setting:

Of the entire village of Bhotke [in Poland], only one man had survived the initial slaughter in 1939 when an SS battalion had entered the village … Was it any wonder that a Jew who brandished a baseball bat and feared no one, and who was known to fear no one, might become a hero to the Jews who survived?
  To the members of the Bhotke Young Men’s Society, Shushan Cats was no criminal. The criminal statutes held no validity for those to whom the law meant only authorized starvation, torture, death. Everything done to the Jews of Europe … everything done to these had been absolutely legal, sanctioned by legitimate courts whose judges sat in black robes and vetted each and every decree as binding, fair, in the public interest, legal. Under these circumstances, that Shushan Cats was a Jewish gangster not only could not be held against him, but was a matter for celebration. (pg 219)

  The novel is on the one had a mildly absurd and very funny crime novel. Kestin revels in the tropes of the crime novel, and virtually every chapter ends on a cliff-hanger, each one more ridiculous than the last. There are times when the tough-guy patter and dialogue is so hard-boiled as to recall the best of Raymond Chandler, although Kestin does invest his style with directness that can be as disconcerting as it is hilarious: “I thought: Let’s take this bullshit one turd at a time.” (pg 127)
  For the most part, however, style and tone is very much tongue-in-cheek; while the historical detail is neatly detailed, and the story is very much rooted in reality, the central premise - that a bookish-loving student might find himself gifted a gangster’s criminal empire - is ludicrous.
  It’s important, I think, to view that unlikely promotion in context, however; the ludicrous nature of it is very deliberate. How likely would it have been fifty years previously, for example, that a single nation would make it its mission to wipe out the entire Jewish race? How likely was it, on November 20th, 1963, that President John Kennedy would be assassinated on a drive through Dallas, Texas? Could anyone have predicted, ten years previously, that hawks in Moscow and Washington would have lined up enough nuclear warheads to eradicate humanity rather than back down on a matter of principle?
  The early 1960s was a time when the absurd seemed to rule, Kestin reminds us, and the central thrust of his story, as Russell effortlessly replaces Shushan as a mobster, is no more or less absurd than any of history’s more famous lunacies.
  Russell, the first-person narrator, is an immensely likeable character. An honours student in English literature, he is smart, funny, very self-aware and self-deprecating - not only about himself, but his culture and heritage:

While a young and more affluent generation of native-born Jews felt as American as baseball, Frank Sinatra and Chinese food, the foreign-born, most of whom had escaped the Nazi ovens through sheer luck, considered themselves marginal. For their sons the line between newly American and American never existed … but for the so-called greenhorns American was not a noun but a verb: you had to work at it. Even the longtime recording secretary, whose Yiddish was not only perfect but perfectly legible, voted himself out of the job in a flurry of nativism that would have given pause to the Ku Klux Klan. (pg 2)

  This kind of bright, breezy tone, replete with off-colour humour and/or cultural insight, characterises the tone of the novel. Russell’s voice, and his way of seeing the world, which is simultaneously cynical and refreshing, becomes very quickly addictive. Not only is he opening up a world that is something of a novelty to us - even in 1963, the notion of Jewish mobsters was growing archaic - he is doing so in some style, not least because Russell is himself a student of English literature who at his happiest, linguistically speaking, when taking huge liberties with the language.
  It’s also true that, in terms of Russell’s development, Kestin has his cake and eats it too. On one level, Russell’s slightly surreal adventures in New York’s gangland are a spoof on young male fantasies of power, money and (especially) sex; by the same token, Kestin describes Russell’s new-found wealth and power with palpable glee. The result is a character with a real spring in his step, a young, Jewish Tony Soprano revelling in an Alice in Wonderland experience as he steps through the looking-glass and begins to appreciate the extent to which his new world has no limits - or at least, that the limits which apply to normal, law-abiding citizens simply don’t apply to Shushan Cats, Russell Newhouse and their ilk.
  Shushan Cats, meanwhile, is one of the most compelling literary creations of recent years. A self-made and self-educated man, Shushan is on the face of it a typical mobster, a hard man who rules with a fist of iron.
  Kestin gives Cats a number of unexpected dimensions, however. The first is his Jewish heritage, which Kestin links very strongly to the recent Holocaust and to Cats’ ability to survive and thrive in adverse circumstances. Cats is not a conservative or traditional Jew; indeed, this is why he first embraces Russell Newhouse, and brings him into the fold, as he needs the young man to properly organise his mother’s funeral. Nonetheless, Cats observes shiva in the traditional manner, and is appropriately respectful of his ancestors, family and otherwise.
  Another unexpected aspect is the depth and breadth of Cats’ education. An autodidact with a voracious appetite for books, Cats is happy to give the impression of being an ignorant, unlearned gangster, in part because his modus operandi depends on wrong-footing those who underestimate him. At one point, accused of coasting through his university education, and thus wasting it, Russell announces that he could quite easily write a term paper on HUCKLEBERRY FINN without applying himself too seriously to reading it:

  “You could write a paper now?” Shushan said. “On Huckleberry Finn?”
  “Sure.”
  “Could you write it on the seventeen fucking accents and dialects in it, or the place of theatre, or Nigger Jim’s options, or the resolution of sequence, like when …” Shushan stopped. “What’d I do? Russy, shut your mouth a fly will come in.”
  Finally I had to speak. “What is it with you, Shushan? Are you a gangster or what? Every time I look up there’s another literary reference fired off, another allusion … Del, an hour ago this guy was quoting La Rochefoucauld to a couple of gumshoes --”
  “The elder or the son?”
  “Père,” Shushan said. “To my mind, the son was nothing.”

  Of course, there is nothing that is even remotely realistic about Shushan Cats. A benign mobster who is inordinately generous, who is beloved and respected throughout the city, and by cops and criminals alike, he is a fantasy father-figure to the orphaned Russell, who craves not only fatherly affection, but direction in his life, a moral weather-vane to help him make sense of the topsy-turvy times in which he lives. That it’s a gangster who provides this sense of direction and self-worth is just one more of the many delicious ironies that underpin this novel.
  The tone, meanwhile, is a beautifully judged affair. Shushan Cats’ reference to the ‘seventeen fucking accents and dialects’ in Huckleberry Finn is no accident; SHOESHINE CATS is a symphony of accents and dialects that reflects the various immigrant groups’ origins, and reminds us of the extent to which New York was and is a melting pot. But Hesh Kestin isn’t satisfied with that: he strains a variety of accents and dialects through the filter of the classic hard-boiled novel, the dialogue whip-smart and crackling with Chandleresque humour.
  As the Huckleberry Finn reference above suggests, it’s also a novel chock-a-block with literary allusions that run the gamut from ALICE IN WONDERLAND to HEART OF DARKNESS. But Kestin isn’t a cultural snob; in Russell’s world, Dodgers’ pitcher Sandy Koufax is as relevant, and important, as Joseph Conrad or Mark Twain.
  For all of its absurdities and off-kilter sense of humour, however, the novel is very much rooted to its time and place by the event that looms in the background of the story from the very beginning, that of the assassination of John F Kennedy in Dallas. That event doesn’t fully escape the gravitational pull of the novel’s absurd tone - Shushan Cats is a long-time friend of Jack Ruby; at one point, Cats, a former crack marksman with the Marines, is considered a suspect for the assassination - but there is a pervasive sense that the killing of JFK, for all the man’s personal faults (to which Shushan testifies at every opportunity), marks something of a watershed in modern American history; that America took a turn for the worse on that fateful date in November 1963.
  Ultimately, and for all of his idiosyncrasies and fantastical attributes, Shushan Cats excels at realpolitik. Less than two decades after the Holocaust, and with the reader aware that the assassination of JFK is only a matter of days away, the world is the way it is; significantly less than idyllic, certainly, and yet you have no choice but to deal with it on its own terms:

  “So you’re some kind of benevolent despot,” I said, by now wondering if I did indeed have balls of stainless steel. “You think that’s American?”
  “Fuck that,” Shushan said. “You’re going to learn you can’t do everything the right way, because of all the people who are ready to do it the wrong way. You’re just a kid, your nose is in books, and maybe you know a lot, but what you don’t know is that in the real world somebody has to make a decision every minute. Okay, sometimes you get the wrong somebody, and sometimes he doesn’t have the luxury of being democratically elected, but somebody has to step up.” (pg 90)

  Everything a good novel should be and more, THE IRON WILL OF SHOESHINE CATS is by turns hilarious, brutal, irreverent, thought-provoking, vexing and terrific fun. - Declan Burke

Ten Little N-Words

I honestly thought @shanehegarty of the Irish Times was having a laugh when he tweeted about THE N-WORD OF THE NARCISSUS during the week, in the midst of all the furore about NewSouth replacing the word ‘nigger’ with ‘slave’ in their new text of HUCKLEBERRY FINN. Unfortunately, he wasn’t.
  My knee-jerk reaction when I heard about the Huck Finn farrago was that it was political correctness run wild, and a pointlessly belated attempt to sanitise a text for contemporary readers, particularly schoolchildren. Maybe there’s an element of that, but the fact is that while ‘slave’ is a more acceptable word than ‘nigger’ today, it’s equally abhorrent as a concept. Changing a word is one thing, but the tragedy of HUCKLEBERRY FINN is the subjugation of men and women on the basis of their skin colour, not the language used to describe that subjugation.
  Besides, and with all due respect to NewSouth, the new version is only one version; anyone who desperately needs to get their fix of the printed word ‘nigger’ won’t have to go too far to find it.
  One thing that did slightly jar with me was the insistence that the new version is intended for schoolchildren, who are no longer reading HUCKLEBERRY FINN, given the potential for embarrassment in the classroom. It’s a long time since I’ve read either book, but I always thought that TOM SAWYER was a kids’ book in which Huck Finn appears, whereas HUCKLEBERRY FINN was a more serious novel, intended for adults.
  THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS is definitely a novel for adults, and one I feel a little more protective of, because I love Joseph Conrad’s novels. Should it be renamed, and so clumsily? Quoth Professor Ruben Alvarado, who provides the version’s introduction:

“THE N-WORD OF THE NARCISSUS tells the tale of a fateful voyage of a British sailing ship, and on that voyage the ability of a lone black man to take the crew hostage. The ability of this man to manipulate an entire ship’s crew can no longer be seen as a mere exercise in storytelling. Conrad in fact appears to have been the first to highlight the phenomenon of manipulation based in white guilt.”

  Professor Alvarado claims that the title of the novel (novella, really) put him off reading it for many years, and that the inclusion of ‘N-Word’ in the title is an attempt to provide a text that will allow readers to appreciate Conrad’s theme of slavery, subjugation and white guilt. In other words, that it’s a version of white guilt that led to the changing of the title of a novel which trades in white guilt. Which seems to me a tad perverse, not least because the use of the word ‘nigger’ in the title is, in contemporary parlance, something of a grabber, but also because the word ‘nigger’ has been comprehensively reclaimed and subverted by those it was intended to denigrate in the first place, as Sean O’Driscoll’s fine piece in the Irish Times points out.
  The estate of Samuel Beckett aside, few texts are sacred these days, and to be perfectly honest, I’m much more outraged by the raft of Jane Austen zombie novels and their ilk than the changing of a few words in HUCKLEBERRY FINN. That novel is important for Mark Twain’s savage satire on slavery and racism, not for the language used to describe it. Arguing that texts must retain their original language for its own sake is something of a blind alley, in which lurks Agatha Christie’s facetiously insulting title, TEN LITTLE NIGGERS. Is it a good thing that Christie’s novel was retitled AND THEN THERE WERE NONE to reflect the fact that schoolchildren are no longer unthinkingly taught nursery rhymes featuring the word ‘nigger’? I’d argue yes.

The Dark Art of Paranoia

The publication of the paperback edition of Alan Glynn’s WINTERLAND is as good an excuse as any to reprint the interview with him I had published in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times’ Culture section a couple of months ago. To wit:

It started on the late, late shows. While most boys in the early ’70s were trawling the late-night TV channels in the hope of glimpsing some illicit flesh, the teenage Alan Glynn was getting off on a more potent charge: paranoia.
  “I think that the stuff you ingest as a teenager is the stuff that sticks with you for life,” says Glynn. “When I was a teenager in the 1970s, the biggest influence was movies, and especially the conspiracy thrillers. What they call the ‘paranoid style’ in America – Klute, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, Three Days of the Condor, and of course, the great Chinatown. There was a societal thing going on, they were examining the whole paranoia thing in American politics at the time, which seemed exotic to me when I was catching late-night movies on BBC2. It was exotic back then, but now we’ve got it. We’re all paranoid now.”
  ‘Follow the money,’ urged Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. Sage advice for those trying to understand why and how Ireland’s boom went bust; or it might be, were there any money left to follow.
  Written while the economy was still thriving, Glynn’s new novel, Winterland, nevertheless gets under the bricks and mortar of post-boom Ireland. Noel Rafferty is a consultant working on a building development on Dublin’s quays. His nephew, also Noel Rafferty, is a gangland hard man. When both men die on the same night, Gina Rafferty, sister and aunt to the men, suspects there is more to the deaths than mere coincidence. As Gina asks questions of those in authority, however, the novel broadens its remit to investigate the connections between blue-collar criminality and those who inhabit the white-collar worlds of politics and business, the latter with fortunes to lose if their building development fails.
  Is there a danger that there will be little new in Winterland, at least in terms of newspaper headlines, for contemporary readers?
  “There has been a tendency for people to say that this is a very prescient book,” he says. “But none of it was consciously written to be prescient. It’s not an economic polemic, or a political polemic, so the specifics of the story detail and how they run parallel to where we are now aren’t all that important.”
  Established as a paradigm by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, the theme of linking street-level crime to those in positions of authority abusing their power is virtually axiomatic in crime fiction. Glynn, however, is interested in taking that paradigm onto another level (“I haven’t read a lot of it, really,” he says. “I’m not an expert on crime writing.”) In common with such recent Irish novels as Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome, Kevin Power’s Bad Day in Blackrock, or Gene Kerrigan’s Dark Times in the City, Winterland expands beyond crime and punishment to explore those junctures where the personal becomes the political. Fuelled by bad blood and paranoia, the novels investigate the nature of justice itself.
  “Gene Kerrigan is much more knowledgeable about the specifics of this, because of his career in journalism,” says Glynn. “And I think ‘crusade’ would too strong a word, but juxtaposing street crime with the kind of crime that happens in politics or business, I think that highlights on a moral level the question, ‘Where’s the difference?’ Not to be heavy-handed about it, but in Winterland, certain people get away with things in a way that people from a lower economic class wouldn’t get away with.”
  In person amiable and self-deprecating to a fault, Glynn is a far cry from the hard-bitten anti-heroes of ‘the paranoid style’, although he is every bit as single-minded when it comes to following his instincts. Born in Dublin in 1960, and educated locally, he decided very early in life that he had a vocation to write.
  “There was never anything else, ever, on the radar. I have a photograph of myself when I was about seven, sitting at a desk with a pen and a notebook. I only came across it recently, and I was amazed, but it’s completely consistent with what I remember as a kid.”
  He went to Trinity College to read English, where he met his wife Eithne, with whom he has two sons. He then spent five years in Verona teaching English, and then went to New York, returning to Ireland in 1992, when he took the decision to write full-time. His first novel, The Dark Fields, set in New York, was published in 2002.
  “It’s insane,” he says of the writing process, “it’s painfully, painstakingly slow. If I have to write a note to the milkman it’ll take me half-an-hour and three drafts. Not that it’ll be any better in the end, but that’s just the process I have to go through. And that’s a disadvantage in some respects.”
  The main disadvantage is that, as a father of two, and despite working as a full-time writer, Glynn has produced only two published novels in eight years. A third novel, The Paloma Stripe, was rejected in 2005.
  “The reason I was given basically boiled down to ‘likeability’, they had a ‘likeability’ issue with the main character. And that’s a very subjective thing.” It’s also an issue more relevant to commercial fiction, whereas Glynn’s ambitions are more literary. “Look at Humbert Humbert, you wouldn’t call him a likeable character. Or Macbeth.”
  With the publication of Winterland and a Neil Burger-helmed Hollywood adaptation of The Dark Fields due later this year, Glynn’s personal circumstances have hugely improved. His themes, however, remain the same.
  “It’s called Bloodland,” he says of his current work, “and it’s not a sequel to The Dark Fields, but it develops a minor character from that novel and turns on similar themes of power and corruption and the abuse of money and position. The character is an investment banker, and he’s involved in a series of companies which are involved in illegal mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I’m fascinated by this idea that the scramble for Africa, and the plunder of its natural resources, is as big or bigger today as it was when Conrad wrote Heart of Darkness. Then it was ivory and rubber, and the exploitation was on a massive scale. Today it’s coltan, and other precious metals that are used in consumer products, like mobile phones and games consoles and that kind of stuff.”
  Again, the personal meets the political.
  “Well, absolutely. It’s about responsibility – taking responsibility or not taking responsibility, and the broad consequences individual actions can have throughout society.”
  Winterland’s abiding symbol is a tower being built in Dublin’s docklands, proposed to be Europe’s highest building if only those individuals with their hands on the levers of power can apply enough pressure in the right places. Such projects, whether flawed by engineering or overweening ambition, are now considered monuments or mausoleums to the boom years.
  “I was writing this when everything was fine, economically speaking,” says Glynn, “although in saying that, if you looked ahead you knew there had to be something coming down the tracks. People saying, ‘This time it’s different,’ and ‘The Irish model is different.’ We knew then that that was insane. But I was conscious even then that this flaw in the building could symbolise in some sense the hubris that existed, that there was an in-built, invisible fatal flaw in this whole economic boom. Originally the flaw was just a technical issue, an engineering problem, but it quickly became apparent that it was symbolic. I didn’t want to push that too heavily, or be heavy-handed about it, but it was there.
  “Now, in the context of the economic collapse, it makes more sense. It’s clearer to me now than it would have been then. The organic development of those kind of ideas … Sometimes it’s hard, because you’re not quite sure of where it’s bringing you. I think that’s a very important part of writing, to learn to go with that instinctual feel for an idea. You have to trust that.”
  ‘That all is not what it seems’ was once described by the great creative writing teacher John Gardner as the quintessential narrative hook, and it’s an instinctive philosophy that Glynn cleaves to as he gives voice to a distrust of authority that is by no means confined to Ireland.
  “It’s the only sane position to hold,” he says. “This whole idea that we’re being presented with what’s going on, but that behind that again there’s something else happening. Not to be a loopy conspiracy theorist, but just to voice the sense that there’s a disconnect. And we’ve had plenty of evidence of that over the last two decades that things simply were not as we were told they were.”

  This article first appeared in the Irish edition of the Sunday Times’ Culture section.

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Robert Greer

Yep, it’s rubber-hose time, folks: a rapid-fire Q&A for those shifty-looking usual suspects ...

What crime novel would you most like to have written?
THE MALTESE FALCON. Its multi-layered entanglements, its expressed unseediness, its use of the classic femme fatale and Dashiell Hammett’s use of minor characters in ensemble form to produce effective darkness and greed which make this the very best of noir fiction in my judgment.

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Since I am a westerner and own a working cattle ranch, I suspect that the character I most would have wanted to be would have been Shane, the ultimate dark cowboy hero.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I read flash fiction for guilty pleasure. The short short stories entailed in this literary form offer me the ultimate quick and dirty temporary escape from daily life.

Most satisfying writing moment?
Always, when I finish the last sentence of a novel, or come up with the idea for a new one.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I can’t say that I have a favourite Irish crime novel but my favourite Irish literary works are Joseph Conrad’s TYPHOON and THE SHADOW-LINE.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
Any one of Ruth Dudley Edwards’s crime fiction novels; CORRIDORS OF DEATH would be a good place to start.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The best thing about being a writer is the pure satisfaction I get from writing. The worst thing about being a writer is trying to fit the writing in between my day job as a doctor.

The pitch for your next book is …?
My next book is not going to be a mystery at all but instead a love story / memoir. It will be a story about my late wife and me. I won’t have to pitch it since I lived the story and I can tell it word for word by heart.

What are you reading right now?
I am currently reading SHORT STORY MASTERPIECES by Robert Penn Warren and Albert Erskine, largely because short fiction is my favourite form of the art and I don’t read enough British fiction, so this works me away from my standard American recipe of books.

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
I would choose neither; I would choose to think rather than write or read. But if forced to make a choice, I would clearly make the choice to read. It is how I learn.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …
Never the same.

Robert Greer’s BLACKBIRD, FAREWELL is published by North Atlantic Books.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY by John Boyne

At first glance it seems strange that John Boyne should choose to re-tell the well known tale of the mutiny aboard The Bounty for his follow-up to THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS. Those familiar with the tale courtesy of its various film versions will be surprised by what unfolds here, however: as recounted by Captain Bligh’s servant boy, John Jacob Turnstile, the villain of the piece is Fletcher Christian, while Bligh emerges as a brilliant, complex and benevolent character who perhaps erred on the side of caution in his approach to enforcing on-board discipline.
  Boyne includes a bibliography of reference sources to underpin his claim to be telling a story based on historical truth but he wears his learning lightly and the tale is very much an adventure yarn. This is partly due to the irrepressible spirit of its narrator, 14-year-old John Jacob Turnstile, an earthy and occasionally coarse but humorous and thoughtful Jim Hawkins, who, as the captain’s servant, has the perfect excuse to be present at all the crucial moments that lead to the mutiny and beyond. Comparisons to Joseph Conrad and William Golding’s RITES OF PASSAGE trilogy are not outrageous, and Boyne has clearly paid attention to TREASURE ISLAND. Throw in the exotic setting of Otaheite, the mutiny, and one of nautical history’s most impressive feats of endurance, and MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY is well-nigh irresistible.
  It’s not simply a boy’s own adventure, either. Turnstile is as complex a character as his master, a reluctant sailor forced to chose, at the outset, between a year in gaol and taking service aboard The Bounty. Once he comes to terms with seasickness and the rigidly hierarchical system aboard ship, Turnstile finds himself conflicted about the mission, which is to transport breadfruit trees from the island of Otaheite to the West Indies as a cheap food source for plantation slaves.

“‘It’s an adventure of great merit we are engaged in, Turnstile,’ [Captain Bligh] told me then, wagging his finger at me as if I was a babe in arms. ‘Some day, when you are an old man, you will look back and tell your grandchildren of it. Perhaps their own slaves will be fed on breadfruit then too, and you will feel enormous pride at our achievements.’
  I nodded but wasn’t sure that I would.”

  Turnstile, an orphan press-ganged into male prostitution as a young boy, empathises with the slaves rather than his master and peers. Observes the boy:

“He was not the type to follow my line of thinking; he was too well educated and of too high a social class to have respect for the rights of man.”

  The rights of women, too, are important to Turnstile when the shipload of sex-starved sailors finally reach Otaheite. Concerned that the women are only faking their delight, as he himself has had to do so many times, Turnstile is among a minority of two who refrain from indulging in carnal delights, the other being Captain Bligh. That the young boy eventually allows himself to be seduced by a Polynesian beauty in an idyllic glade may seem the stuff of stereotypical male fantasy, but Turnstile’s painfully slow progress towards the point where he finally allows himself to consent to what had been previously been a painful intimacy stands in stark contrast to the posturing and preening of Fletcher Christian’s alpha male, and his physical and emotional fulfilment is well-earned.
  That Christian is caricatured as a self-serving narcissist is this novel’s one real weakness, incidentally, particularly when he is compared to the multi-faceted Bligh; and while Boyne’s ambition to reverse the roles of hero and villain is laudable, it was unnecessary to bludgeon the point home with so blunt an instrument.
  That’s a minor caveat, however, and in truth the real conflict of MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY is not that of Bligh versus Christian, but Turnstile’s instinctive Christian responses to the repressive Christianity of the Empire’s establishment caste (Christ, where His name is invoked, is invariably referred to as ‘Saviour’). God-botherers and Bible-thumpers are given as short a shrift as those who denigrate their island hosts as ‘savages’ and loot their natural resources; Turnstile, the outcast, social pariah and former sex slave, naively and subversively and with no little humour preaches a sermon of equality, tolerance and respect for all, regardless of class, religion or race. It’s a relevant subtext for the contemporary reader, albeit one that’s bound up in a stirring tale of heroism and derring-do, and the result is a truly terrific novel. To paraphrase Robert Louis Stevenson on the publication of TREASURE ISLAND: “If this don’t fetch the kids, then they’ve gone rotten since I knew ’em.”