Review: NIGHT MUSIC by John Connolly

All good fiction incorporates an investigation of one kind or another, which may account in part for the enduring popularity of the crime / mystery novel. John Connolly is best known for his Charlie Parker novels, set in Maine and featuring a private eye who lives in a world tinged by the supernatural. By contrast, Connolly’s short stories – Night Music is his second collection; the first, Nocturnes, was published in 2004 – tend to foreground the supernatural. Night Music (Hodder & Stoughton) borrows liberally from the traditions of the ghost and horror story, the fairy and folktale, and boldly goes into the unknown realms of quantum physics.
  The collection opens with the Edgar Award-winning tale of ‘The Caxton Private Lending Library & Book Depository’, a delightfully absurd story about an institution to which the memorable characters of fiction retire to live for eternity once their creators have shuffled off this mortal coil. The note of whimsy may not set the tone for the rest of the collection, but its theme – the way in which fiction can rewrite reality – certainly does.
  That theme is directly addressed in the collection’s centre-piece, ‘The Fractured Atlas – Five Fragments’. The first fragment finds the Huguenot refugee Couvret in Amsterdam, where he encounters a book “that is like being in contact with a living thing. It pulses, and smells of blood.” Each of the five fragments explores the evil potential of this book: when an investigator searching for Lionel Maulding, the missing owner of the book, mocks the possibility that the book is ‘rewriting the world’, he is told firmly that, “The world is forever being altered by books.”
  In the midst of ‘The Fractured Atlas’ is the collection’s finest moment, the novella-length and M.R. James-influenced ‘The Wanderer in Unknown Realms’, in which the WWI veteran searching for Lionel Maulding might be experiencing the world being redrafted by an evil tome; equally, he might be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder brought on by the horrors he witnessed in the trenches.
  Other elements from Connolly’s fiction resurface during the collection. ‘Razorshins’, set in Maine, is a story that draws upon the folklore of the great North Woods as Connolly resurrects the mythical ‘wendigo’. The fascination with theoretical physics Connolly explores in his young adult novels featuring Samuel Johnson returns in ‘The Wanderer in Unknown Realms’, as the author references William James’ concept of ‘the multiverse’; in ‘The Children of Dr Lyall’, set in London during WWII, Connolly explores an existential kind of horror in a story that blends abortion and quantum physics.
  Elsewhere, ‘The Hollow King’ offers a return to ‘the Universe of The Book of Lost Things’, an offshoot from the standalone novel published in 2006 that goes to the dark heart of the fairytale form to evoke Charles Perrault. ‘On The Anatomization of an Unknown Man (1637) by Frans Mier’ is pure Edgar Allen Poe; ‘Lazarus’ goes back to the New Testament for its inspiration, as the resurrected Lazarus, adrift and zombie-like, fears that “some great wrong has been committed in the name of pity and love.” ‘The Haunting’, meanwhile, is the boldest statement of intent title-wise; in fact, it’s a love story, and one of the most affecting in the collection.
  In a collection crackling with invention and ambition, Connolly saves the best for (almost) last. ‘Holmes on the Range’ is a very funny offshoot from ‘The Caxton Private Lending Library and Book Depository’, in which Sherlock Holmes arrives at the library in the wake of his infamous death at the Reichenbach Falls, only to belatedly discover that his creator, Arthur Conan Doyle (as countless authors have done since), has begun to rewrite his character. Is it conceivable that the immortal Holmes and Watson might – gasp! – be ‘replaced at some future date by alternative versions of themselves’?
  The rest, as they say, is history …

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Pre-Publication: A SONG OF SHADOWS by John Connolly

A new Charlie Parker novel tends to be one of the highlights of my reading year, but John Connolly’s forthcoming A SONG OF SHADOWS (Hodder & Stoughton) promises to deliver even more bang for buck than usual. Quoth the blurb elves:

Grievously wounded private detective Charlie Parker investigates a case that has its origins in a Nazi concentration camp during the Second World War.
  Recovering from a near-fatal shooting, and tormented by memories of a world beyond this one, Parker has retreated to the small Maine town of Boreas to recover. There he befriends a widow named Ruth Winter and her young daughter, Amanda. But Ruth has her secrets. She is hiding from the past, and the forces that threaten her have their origins in the Second World War, in a town called Lubsko and a concentration camp unlike any other. Old atrocities are about to be unearthed, and old sinners will kill to hide their sins. Now Parker is about to risk his life to defend a woman he barely knows, one who fears him almost as much as she fears those who are coming for her.
  His enemies believe him to be vulnerable. Fearful. Isolated.
  But they are wrong. Parker is far from afraid, and far from alone.
  For something is emerging from the shadows ...

  A SONG OF SHADOWS will be published on April 9th.
  Incidentally, the image above is one of a series from Mexican graphic artist Humberto Cadena, who has created a whole gallery of heroes and villains from Charlie Parker’s world. For more, clickety-click here …
  Finally, yet more good news for Connolly fans: John is currently preparing a second volume of NOCTURNES, which will include his Edgar- and Anthony Award-winning short story, ‘The Caxton Lending Library and Book Depository’. The collection should appear in September. For lots more news from John, including a US reissue of the entire Charlie Parker series, clickety-click here …

The Occasional John Connolly Update # 2,035: Hooray For Lollywood.

The answer to the question, “What Irish crime novel would make a great movie?” in our weekly Q&A is frequently, “Anything by John Connolly (right) – providing they get it right.” Well, courtesy of Connolly’s excellent blog, it looks like we’re finally going to find out if ‘they’ got it ‘right’ next year. Quoth John:

“This week, filming began on THE NEW DAUGHTER, with Kevin Costner and Ivana Baquero, based on the short story of the same title in NOCTURNES. For those of you curious to know, principal filming is taking place in McClellanville, South Carolina, under the guiding hand of director Luis Berdejo. I still haven’t read the script, which is a matter of choice (although someone who has read it was very impressed with it) but one interesting snippet of information reveals that a casting call went out for a thin, almost emaciated actor to play a “creature” role in full make-up, suggesting that John Travis, the screenwriter, has stuck to the original story’s central idea of something very nasty indeed hiding in the burial mound on Costner’s property. The film is due to be released in 2009.”

The name Luis Berdejo means nothing to us as of yet, but the good news is that he’s Spanish, and that Spanish-language writers and directors have been in the habit of concocting some superb supernatural tales for some time now, including Open Your Eyes (1997), The Devil’s Backbone (2001), The Others (2001), Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and The Orphanage (2007). Will The New Daughter cut the Spanish mustard? Only time, that notoriously doity rat, will tell.

One Good Nocturnes Deserves Another

John Connolly’s collection of short stories, NOCTURNES, is being re-released with an additional tale tucked inside, and to celebrate he’s been maundering on about being an honorary woman and interesting stuff in locker-rooms over at his interweb thingy. Quoth John:

“To coincide with the publication of the new edition of NOCTURNES in the UK next month, with its lovely Rob Ryan-designed cover, we’ve added a new short story, “The Cycle”, to the ghost stories section of the website, as that’s one of the new additions to the collection, and we don’t want to gouge money from those who bought NOCTURNES when “The Cycle” wasn’t included. “The Cycle” was originally written for a collection entitled MOMENTS, which was published in Ireland to aid tsunami relief. The brief was that all of the stories should be written by women, but the editor asked if I’d like to sneak one in and see if anyone noticed, and then my story could be used to help with publicity. As it happened, the collection sold out, so they didn’t need to reveal the fact that I was one of the authors. Thus I ended up an honorary woman, but without any of the interesting locker-room stuff that my brief deception might otherwise have permitted. Sigh.”

Ladies? Any idea of what kind of ‘interesting’ locker-room ‘stuff’ John might be talking about? We can only presume he means towel-snapping and suchlike …