On Celtic Tigers And Wingéd Elephants

It was bad enough seeing all those pink elephants on Paddy’s Day, but then we started seeing Wingéd Elephants – or one, at least, bearing the welcome news that Gerard Donovan has been beavering away over a hot stove-shaped sheet of paper. Quoth the Wingéd one’s blurb elves:

Gerard Donovan, author of JULIUS WINSOME and SUNLESS, examines the changing face of Ireland in YOUNG IRELANDERS, a stunning and elegiac collection of interrelated stories. In this marvellous volume coming in July 2008, Donovan returns to his home country of Ireland with a passion. The stories in YOUNG IRELANDERS shine a fresh light on the New Ireland and how the Irish are coping with its rewards and pressures: immigration, mid-life crisis, adultery and divorce, a lost sense of place and history, and of course, what to do with all that prosperity.

Erm, not at all well, as it happens, and it’ll be interesting to see how many of Donovan’s stories deal with the explosion in crime that has accompanied the Celtic Tiger. Given that the original Young Irelanders were prone to kicking out the jams once in a while, there’s a strong possibility that Donovan will be preaching some kind of radical social consciousness revolution. There’s also a strong possibility that he won’t. Only time, that notoriously prevaricating doity rat, will tell …

Books Of The Year # 4: JULIUS WINSOME by Gerard Donovan

Being the continuing stooooooory of our ‘2007 Round-Up Of Books Wot My Friends Wrote’ compilation, designed to save us the hassle of buying them actual pressies. To wit:

JULIUS WINSOME by Gerard Donovan
Julius Winsome lives alone in the northern Maine woods, with only his dog Hobbes to keep him company. When Hobbes is shot to death by an unknown hunter, the mild-mannered Julius takes down the rifle his grandfather brought home from the trenches of WWI and sets out to wreak revenge. The simple plot outline, however, is a stark framework upon which Gerard Donovan stretches a compelling tale. Its telling is drum-skin tight and yet layered with a fierce hatred, poignant grief, an almost unbearable loneliness and a powerful desire to restore the cosmic balance that has been tilted imperceptibly out of kilter by the unwarranted killing of Hobbes – a voracious reader, Julius is a connoisseur of arcane Shakespearian phrases, and particularly those that hark back to a more primitive form of mediaeval, and perhaps even primordial, justice. Despite the elegiac tone, this is a real page-turner. Julius Winsome is as fascinating a character as has emerged from mainstream fiction for some time, an entirely realistic borderline psychopath who garners the reader’s sympathy even as he questions his own motives and the extent to which he is prepared to pursue his deranged logic. Donovan’s prose is masterfully controlled, restrained and elegantly simple but devastating in its execution, the overall effect putting this reader in mind of Tom Ripley reimagined by Cormac McCarthy.- Declan Burke

This review is republished with the kind permission of It’s A Crime!

Et Tu, Brute

A hat-tip to Euro Crime for pointing us in the direction of a smashing interview with Gerard Donovan over at The Book Depository, during which the author of JULIUS WINSOME discourses at length on practically every subject under the sun bar his preferred grassy knoll theory. Our favourite snippet, regarding the brutal reality into which the human ‘moral compass’ is set, runneth thusly:

MT: Your character Julius lives in cabin in the Maine woods with only his dog for company: is that an existence that part of you envies?
GD: “I do lead an existence similar to the lead character’s, on a farm in the woods with a dog and books, though not nearly as many. What interests me thematically in the novel is what kind of moral compass we have as humans, or more directly, what kind of moral compass I have. What would people really do if a beloved dog or indeed companion of any kind were shot and they could exact revenge without legal consequences? This is a question that haunts me. The answer is that I don’t have a moral compass aside from the basic agreements regarding normal behaviour I hold with other humans, but, as I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t quite trust fiction that showcases characters who in the end demonstrate what good people they are. Where is the border between grief and revenge? And who stops at that border, and who continues beyond? Julius Winsome continues, using increasingly archaic English as the violence continues. I envy him that, I envy his ability to pursue, I envy his complete preparation to bring violence ruthlessly to those who have practiced it themselves.”

We’re thinking Vin Diesel for the movie. Any other suggestions?

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: JULIUS WINSOME, by Gerard Donovan

How far would you go to avenge the killing of a dog? In Gerard Donovan’s JULIUS WINSOME, the qualification of justice quickly becomes a moot point. Julius, who lives with his dog Hobbes in a book-lined cabin in the remote Maine forests, makes no effort to justify his actions when he picks up a rifle and sets out to hunt down the hunters who shot his dog to death. This is not an eye-for-an-eye revenge tale, in which one life equates with another and the death of a man, or men, theoretically cancels out the death of a dog. In masterfully restrained prose that is both muscular and delicate, Donovan weaves a compelling tale in which a grief-maddened man obeys the dictates of his instincts, in the process unleashing a lethal brand of natural justice that bears no resemblance to its human equivalent. “I was the rifle. I was the bullet, the aim, what a word means when it stands on its own. That is what revenge means even if you write it down.” As bleak and life-affirming as Beckett, JULIUS WINSOME exerts a hypnotic pull that renders Julius, despite his apparently sordid, Quixotic motivation, one of the most sympathetic protagonists in recent memory. That it reads like Cormac McCarthy redrafting Kafka is one of its many joys, the writing clear as a bell despite the effect of the emotional muffling, like the sharp crack of a frost-heavy branch during a heavy fall of snow. Even as the pace accelerates and tension mounts and events spiral out of control towards their inevitable denouement, you will find yourself deliberately applying the brakes, turning the pages slower and slower, the better to wallow in the sheer joy of finding yourself at the mercy of a master storyteller. – Declan Burke

This review was first published on Euro Crime

We Come Not To Bury Julius, But To Praise Him

I THINK I HEARD THE SHOT.
It was a cold afternoon at the end of October, and I was in my chair reading by the wood stove in my cabin. In these woods many men roam with guns, mostly in the stretches away from where people live, and their shots spray like pepper across the sky, especially on the first day of the rifle hunting season when people from Fort Kent and smaller towns bring long guns in their trucks up this way to hunt deer and bear …

If you haven’t yet got your grubby mitts on Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome, we urge you to do so with all due haste. In essence it’s a tale about a man who picks up his gun to avenge the death of his dog, but what makes it special is the voice, a hauntingly compelling tone that verges on the hypnotic, delivered by a character who is the antithesis of that old crime fiction staple, the unreliable narrator. For a shorthand reference, you could do worse than try to imagine Jim Thompson dabbling in the dark arts of literary fiction. If that’s not seductive enough, try a few sample chapters and immerse yourself in the workings of a unique mind …

Donovan But Not Quite Dusted(ovan)

Gerard Donovan, author of the rather superb Julius Winsome, releases Sunless on October 4, an intriguing tale of soulless pill-popping and the malaise that lies at the heart of so much contemporary illness. And if that sounds suspiciously like Donovan’s Doctor Salt from 2004, then – ta-dah! – it is! Well, more or less, according to this excerpt from Jessica Crispin’s interview with Donovan at Book Critics’ Circle, to wit:

Q: Sunless used to be Doctor Salt, which was already released in the UK. Can you explain what caused you to rewrite the book, and how it's different?
A: “As I look now at the final manuscript of Sunless, I realize that it’s the novel I set out to write almost four years ago. I would go so far as to say that Doctor Salt, which was published in 2004 in the UK, was a first draft of Sunless. I wrote it too fast, and the sense I was after just wasn’t in the novel. When Peter Mayer said last year he wanted to release Doctor Salt in the US, I saw the chance to write the real novel, if you like, and this I hope I’ve done in Sunless. Sunless is vastly different from Doctor Salt. Where there were two narrators in the first novel, now there is one. The plot is simpler, a linear line from the young boy who loses his brother to the teenager who begins to experiment with his mother’s tranquilizers, to the criminal who loses his mind to meth. The language changes with the narrator’s state of mind, as if the reader has also taken a pill and is trapped with the results and must sit and watch the novel change. And in Sunless the relationship between politics and the commercial peddling of drugs to Americans is better articulated, or articulated for the first time. The novel suggests how drug companies essentially invent disorders in order to sell drugs to cure them, and how this practice reflects a wider willingness on the part of people to believe what they are told and what they are sold. But in the end it’s a novel of loss and the effects of loss on a human being. That you can’t cure grief with a pill.”

Glad that’s cleared up. Oh, and anyone uttering the words ‘cherry’ ‘bite’ ‘of’ and ‘second’ in a grumbly tone will be summarily lashed to a gurney and sedated until Christmas. You have been warned.

This Week We’re Reading … End Games and Julius Winsome

‘The last Aurelio Zen mystery’ proclaims the cover, dashing the hopes of those bereft Michael Dibdin fans who might have been hoping there was a draft or two stashed away in a desk drawer that might some day be posthumously published. But no – the very fine End Games, prophetically enough, is where Zen finally runs out of time. Ironically, given the way Zen has been ducking and diving and generally cheating Il Grimmo Reapero in recent times, this novel is a far more placid and meditative piece, and one which, in the final analysis, finds Zen fight his conscience to a grinding stalemate. Here’s hoping Dibdin achieved something similar before his far too early shuffle off this mortal coil. RIP, sir. Meanwhile, Gerard Donovan’s Julius Winsome, we’re more than pleased to report, lives up to all the hype, being a gripping first-person narrative of one of the most unusual and sympathetic murderers you’ll ever have the pleasure to meet. It’s difficult to avoid the Jim Thompson / Killer Inside of Me comparisons, so we won’t, but Donovan brings a tough poetry to his deranged hero, who goes – very quietly, but very deliberately – on the warpath when his beloved dog and only companion is cruelly shot to death in the remote woods of northern Maine. All in all, as fine a week’s reading as we can remember.

The Monday Review: It’s Nice To Be Nice, Although It’d Be Nicer To Be In Nice

That stalwart friend of Irish crime writers, Myles McWeeney at the Indo, is back on the case again, this time trawling the mean streets of Arlene Hunt’s latest, Missing Presumed Dead: “A very enjoyable, neatly worked mystery, packed with deft characterisation. Read it on the beach but keep an eye on the kids.” … Over at The Book Bag, Jill Murphy likes Derek Landy’s Skulduggery Pleasant: “It’s pacy, it’s funny, it’s irreverent … a humorous badinage going on that’s reminiscent of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton or even Doctor Who … the plotting is a little bit loose. The villain isn’t really much more than a cardboard cut-out. But the humour, the high-spiritedness and the wonderful interaction between the two main characters more than make up for it.” Mmm, lovely … Not to be outdone, Julia Eccleshare at Love Reading 4 Kids is bigging up the other major current kiddie crime release, Siobhan Dowd’s The London Eye Mystery: “This may only be Siobhan Dowd’s second novel but it’s clear her talent as a superb storyteller is beyond question. Her first novel A Swift Pure Cry was short-listed for nearly all the major awards last year and although this second novel is very different it has that same page-turner feeling to it.” But stay! I hear you cry – what news of Alex Barclay’s The Caller? “Written with a depth of feeling for the characters that is sometimes lacking in the genre from her colleagues … a fast-paced and sometimes ugly serial killer novel. The characters are richly described with a sense of humour at times that makes you smile, and a touch of the cruel and sadistic where needed …” reckon the folks at Woyano … They’re still coming in thick and fast for John Connolly’s The Unquiet: “One of the finest reads of this or any year, from the man with the darkest imagination. I was enthralled and terrified at the same time, but it’s the wit Connolly employs that prevents this dark tale from becoming too malevolent,” says Ali Karim at Books ‘n’ Bytes, while The Observer is no less impressed: “The Unquiet is more contemplative and affecting than some of the earlier novels, but the violence, when it comes, is vicious. Hard to put down, harder to forget.” Just about gorgeous … Staying with The Observer, for The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman’s latest: “Exuberant also describes I Predict a Riot, the latest diverting entertainment from ‘Bateman’ … what follows is sometimes brutal, often blackly humorous and always terrific.” Meanwhile, Neil Dowling at Totally Dublin is middling-to-fairly impressed with The Big O, from inky-fingered urchin Declan Burke: “The Big O is a fairly standard crime caper with some implausible turns in the plot. Burke’s great achievement, however, is to give a typical genre storyline some real flavour through his skilful use of dialogue and imagery.” Neil? The snakebites are on us … Finally, you know you’re in business when the Indo’s arts editor, Sophie Gorman, gives you the hup-ya: “With Julius, [Donovan] has created a man who exists beyond society and a story that magnetically absorbs you with every page turned … You know that you are having one of those special reading experiences when you find yourself rationing the final chapters, in an attempt to prolong the experience for as long as possible,” she says of Julius Winsome, while The Guardian reckons that, “History may judge it to be less than the perfect modern classic it aims to be, but it is a memorable tale, distinguished by masterful prose, an intriguingly peculiar sensibility, and something hard to define that many great works of art have: a kind of dignity. Such books are rarer than publishers’ hype encourages us to believe.” Publishers’ hype? Shurely shome mishtake ...

They Come Not To Bury Julius, But To Praise It

Friends, Romans, countrymen and very probably assorted Martians and Venusians are drooling over Gerard Donovan’s (right) Julius Winsome, which has just been released in paperback. “A lonely man living deep in the woods in northern Maine becomes caught up in a mania of revenge and violence in this expertly paced, frighteningly tense novel by Irish author Gerard Donovan … He endows his novel with a deep understanding of the evils of which men are capable, while remaining sympathetic to Julius’s strange humanity. In this novel, the borders between human and animal, hunter and hunted, are blurred and malleable. It makes for a shocking but deeply affecting story,” says the Sunday Business Post. For once, the SPB and Sunday Independent agree. Quoth the Sindo: “The achievement is magical in this novel. Words are a whispered love token; they are also the icy, flaming burn of the bullet whose gleam darkens as it takes on its coating of rich blood on entering a body.” Further afield, the Kirkus Reviews (via the Overlook Press blog) reckons that, “Donovan’s command of language is astonishingly precise, eerily reflecting Julius’s disarmingly mild-mannered pathology as it ascribes no more importance to the cold-blooded shooting of a hunter than to going into town for groceries … Finely tooled outsider fiction, as chilling as it is ultimately humane,” while Booklist (via Amazon US) cuts to the chase: “If Jim Thompson had written literary fiction, he might have concocted a novel similar to this one.” Finally, the New Yorker offers its two cents: “In past novels, Donovan has resorted to literary effects to make points about man’s capacity for violence; here he settles for the clean punch of language, which he delivers with devastating force. In prose laced with hard-edged Shakespeareanisms … he pursues the nature of human cruelty, the reason that ‘some men must create pain in others to feel less of it themselves.’” Donovan and dusted, baby.

Listowel: Tough On Crime, Tough On The Writers Of Crime

Another Irish literary festival, another who’s-not-who of Irish crime fiction. Yep, it’s the turn of Listowel Writers’ Week to virtually ignore the scruffy cornerboys and assorted low-lives who scribble nasty words on grubby pages, with only Benjamin Black’s Christine Falls (left) representing the nauseatingly popular genre. Nominated alongside Roddy Doyle (Paula Spencer), Gerard Donovan (Julius Winsome), Pat McCabe (Winterwood) and Claire Kilroy (Tenderwire), Black is on the short-list for the Irish Fiction Award 2007, to be decided May 30 – even though his biog on the Writers’ Week site makes no mention of ‘Benjamin’, ‘Black’, ‘Christine’ or ‘Falls’. Odd, that – although yon blurb spoofs on about quite a bit about John Banville, for some bizarre reason. Anyhoo, we’re rooting (metaphorically, sadly) for Claire Kilroy (right), partly because she’s the only gal on the short-list (solidarity, sister) but mainly because she’s the hottest fox since they cremated Basil Brush. Boom-boom, etc. Seriously, though, there’s a €10,000 prize going for the Irish Fiction Award, which isn’t to be sneezed at, even if you do win it for (eeek!) writing a crime novel – eh, John?