They Say It’s The Hope That Kills You In The End …

… although, in this case, it’s the HOPE Foundation that’s saving lives. Vanessa O’Loughlin and Hazel Larkin curate THE BIG BOOK OF HOPE, an anthology of short stories, memoirs and non-fiction which was launched last week with the aim of raising funds for the HOPE Foundation. To wit:

This book will save lives. To live without hope is the ultimate deprivation. The HOPE Foundation reaches out to the street children of Kolkata, India, on a daily basis: rescuing sick and abandoned children; delivering food and clean water to the slums; providing crèches where destitute and slum-dwelling mothers can safely leave their children while they do what they can to earn money; running its health-care programme, including its new hospital; fighting child labour and child-trafficking; breaking the cycle of poverty through education in its many coaching centres. This extraordinary collection celebrates The HOPE Foundation and hopefully will play a significant role in publicizing and supporting its courageous work. A potent blend of fiction, memoir and non-fiction, the contributions explore the theme of 'hope' and its vital presence in all our lives. With its astonishing range of bestselling authors, political figures, business people and media celebrities, THE BIG BOOK OF HOPE has something for everyone. Alex Barclay, Maeve Binchy, Claudia Carroll, Don Conroy, Brian Crowley, Evelyn Cusack, Derek Foley, Anne Gildea, Brian Keenan, Sinead Moriarty, Denis O’Brien, Joseph O’Connor and over thirty other unlikely bedfellows rub shoulders in this unique anthology the only common denominator being their considerable talent. Buy this remarkable book and help to break the cycle of poverty for the street children of Kolkata. Buy this book and help save lives.

  Declaration of Interest: yours truly has a short story in the anthology, but please don’t let that put you off buying a copy …

The Deceptively Simple Art Of Murder

There’s been a lot of talk recently about whether Irish writers are engaging with modern Ireland, a conversation begun by Julian Gough and continued in the Irish Times recently by Eileen Battersby and Joseph O’Connor. Despite the fact that most Irish crime writers tend to be as contemporary in terms of storyline and setting as the business of publishing will allow, said writers are noticeably absent from the conversation. Caroline Walsh, the Literary Editor at the Irish Times, was good enough to suggest that I write a piece rectifying that state of affairs, and the piece is published today, with the opening following below.
  I honestly think there’s something important at stake here. It’s not simply an issue of relevance in terms of writing about contemporary subject matter, as I say in the piece; it’s about the relevance of literature itself, and the function of a body of literature in relation to the culture it springs from. At the risk of sounding a complete plank in quoting myself, I have this to say: “Making a distinction between crime and literary fiction in Ireland today is … redundant, unless it’s to suggest that contemporary Irish crime authors are producing a canon of work that’s equally important as that of their literary counterparts.” To paraphrase Raymond Chandler from The Simple Art of Murder, crime writers are taking the Irish novel out of the drawing room and dropping it in the alley, where it belongs.
  Have on, James, and spare not the horses …

We always take great pride in our writers – except for our crime writers, who, despite being feted abroad, get little recognition here. Strange, given that they seem to be the ones tackling the burning issues, writes DECLAN BURKE

THE ASSASSINATION in 1986 of the Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme sent shockwaves through Sweden in particular and Scandinavia in general. One consequence was the emergence of an indigenous crime fiction, a phenomenon taken very seriously by cultural commentators in Sweden and Norway. Today, writers such as Henning Mankell, Stieg Larsson and Jo Nesbø are household names across the world.
  The then Irish minister for justice, Kevin O’Higgins, was assassinated on his way to Mass in July, 1927. In 1928, Liam O’Flaherty published The Assassin, a political thriller set in Dublin about the murder of a prominent politician. Its staccato rhythms, spare style and bleak tone, the psychological study of a disturbed criminal mind, was practically a blueprint for the hard-boiled crime writing produced in the following years by American writers Dashiell Hammett and James M Cain, yet Ireland has had to wait until the past decade for a comparable outpouring of crime writing ...

  For the rest, clickety-click here …

“Ya Wanna Do It Here Or Down The Station, Punk?”: Geraldine McMenamin

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?
I can’t honestly say that I read a lot of crime novels so this is a difficult question for me to answer. I watch a bit of crime on TV but mostly I can tell where the plot is going and it gets a little predictable. The last crime novel I read was a Harlan Coben one, TELL NO ONE, but I thought it had a disappointing and not very plausible ending. I didn’t particularly intend for THE SAME CLOTH to be a crime novel, it just came out that way. I think it’s more of a ‘journey’ novel but not in the travel journey sense. Is that a genre?

What fictional character would you most like to have been?
Will in THE SUBTLE KNIFE (Philip Pullman). I love the notion of being able to enter a parallel universe. The idea that one small detail can change your whole destiny absolutely fascinates me and the concept of being able to switch between one reality and another at will is, to me, a true adventure.

Who do you read for guilty pleasures?
I don’t think any reading is guilty but some publications are just a sheer waste of time. Irish Property supplements did take up a lot of my ‘pleasurable’ reading but unfortunately they are now rather thin in terms of content. Occasionally I read ‘Buy and Sell’ which is absolutely fascinating and sometimes hilarious when you get to the small pieces of junk that people try and sell. More of that this year no doubt!

Most satisfying writing moment?
Definitely when I finished THE SAME CLOTH. I had no idea how I was going to tie all the subplots in together and the narrative is quite complex so I was very pleased when it all worked out to a plausible finale.

The best Irish crime novel is …?
I am trying to be diplomatic here so it would have to be THE BIG O.

What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?
I’m not trying to be diplomatic here so I will say mine. Most people who have read THE SAME CLOTH say ‘that would make a great movie’ without any prompting and it does rely largely on a visual element. I think the fact that I have worked in property for a number of years and have been able to accurately enmesh houses into people’s lives has somehow struck a chord that would work very well on film.

Worst / best thing about being a writer?
The worst thing about being a writer is isolation. You have to motivate yourself constantly to keep going and this is okay when you get some sort of recognition but very difficult when you don’t. I have found it, so far, to be a very tough business to crack. I know that it can be a different experience for everyone but this has been mine to date. The best thing is the sense of achievement you get when you write something that you truly believe is good and flows well, although, in truth, this is short-lived satisfaction. Looking back on my work, particularly writing that I did some time ago, I always want to adjust/edit/improve it. To me, a piece is never finished, perfection is elusive, flawlessness is indefinable and writing so subjective that ultimately faultlessness is intangible. I am not sure if there is much of a ‘choice’ element when it comes to writing. If you are a writer then you need to write. It’s a creative part of you that will not go away. There is something indescribable that happens to you when that creative element of your personality is expressed. It’s a release, a freeing, an intellectual deliverance that is completely personal, your own and unshareable. That’s the good bit!

The pitch for your next book is …?
It is a mystery again, this time told with two voices, which I think will give me more scope than THE SAME CLOTH, which is told in the first person, present tense. The subject matter concerns a rich property fund manager and his dodgy past. I think it will be topical!

Who are you reading right now?
REDEMPTION FALLS by Joseph O’Connor and THE BIG O. I usually read two books at the same time and then read nothing but newspapers in-between!

God appears and says you can only write OR read. Which would it be?
Write for sure. I have probably covered this answer in the ‘best thing’ about writing above.

The three best words to describe your own writing are …?
Succinct, gripping, reflective.

THE SAME CLOTH is Geraldine McMenamin’s debut novel.

No Country For Grand Men

Crumbs! No sooner had the dust settled on the entirely unnecessary ‘Great Post-Troubles Norn Iron Novel’ baloohaha than Joseph O’Connor, in the context of reviewing Gerard Donovan’s collection of short stories COUNTRY OF THE GRAND, starts banging on about the ‘Great Post-Celtic Tiger Novel’ over at The Guardian, to wit:

“Some of Ireland’s wisest literary commentators have been troubled in recent times by a reticence they perceive among the country’s writers of fiction on the matter of the new prosperity. The novelists have told us nothing – thus runs the argument. An Irish Amis has proved reluctant to appear.
  “Like most debating stances, it obscures as much as it reveals, but its assumptions are more enlightening than its conclusions. Mass-market fiction, the historical novel, the thriller, the crime novel and other incarnations of genre-based storytelling have not been judged worthy of critical notice, no matter their level of engagement with the now deceased Celtic Tiger. Where is our Bret Easton Ellis? Our BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES?”

  In the prevailing spirit of self-biggery-uppery, as modelled by Master Bateman when he voted for I PREDICT A RIOT during the halcyon days of the GTPNIN debate, I’m going to say that blowing up a hospital is a metaphor for deconstructing the Celtic Tiger, and in particular the way Ireland shot its economic boom in the foot (or paw, if you will), because that’s the kind of malarkey the literary types who decide these things seem to like, although I may not be entirely serious in doing so on the basis that novels lauded as ‘the Great [Insert Your Own Pet Obsession Here] Novel’ generally tend to be anything but because they’re too busy trying to disguise the self-aggrandizing promotion of half-baked theories therein. Or is it just me?