Review: MINDS OF WINTER by Ed O’Loughlin

“Everything is very plain and modern now,” a dying man tells the author Jack London roughly halfway through Minds of Winter (riverrun), warning the writer against the gothic, supernatural excesses of the yarn he is spinning in a hospital ward. The reader may well laugh out loud; Ed O’Loughlin’s fourth novel is an uncompromising throwback to a time when story was king, a spellbinding tale of adventures and explorers, spies and outlaws, of derring-do, self-sacrifice and impossible feats of endurance.
  The story opens with a Prologue provided by a feature published by journalist Maev Kennedy in The Guardian in 2009, in which Kennedy writes about the mystery of how a ‘chronometer which was supposed to have sunk with a ship on the Franklin North-West Passage expedition in 1845 … somehow ended up back in London as a carriage clock.’ The novel then moves forward to the present day, introducing Fay and Nelson, who are 120 miles inside the Canadian Arctic Circle. Strangers to one another, both are searching – although they don’t know it yet – for the elusive chronometer.
  Another chapter, another leap through time and space: we find ourselves in Van Diemen’s Land in 1841, as Sir John Franklin prepares to host a ball on board his ship The Erebus, the ship fated to be lost four years later in the vain search for the North-West Passage. And on the novel goes, gambolling forward and back in time, a Russian doll of a novel in which stories fold into one another, leading on deeper into the mystery via Roald Amundsen’s search for the South Pole, Abwehr spies during WWII and Jack London’s adventures as a spy on the Korea-Manchuria border, all of it underpinned by O’Loughlin’s musings on the direction man might take once the tools of discovery – maps, compasses, chronometers – have fulfilled their promise and charted all there is to be known. “A globe was a globe and you could not fall off it,” observes Morgan, a cartographer. “But a map was a map, a metaphor, full of judgements and choices and victories and regrets; a map was built on hacks and heuristics and mistakes and lies, cracks through which you might, just maybe, someday slip away.”
  It’s a theme O’Loughlin returns to frequently, such as when Amundsen, on the island of Madeira and undecided as to whether to strike out for the North or South Pole, pauses before making his final decision: “He could stay here forever, dissolved in this air. But some tiny flaw in the fabric of the universe, some original sin in space and time, determined that he was doomed to exist, to be one thing or another.”
  It’s a beautifully written novel that blends a kind of pragmatic poetry with a lyrical interpretation of science – the Greenwich observatory, for example, is “a shrine … where time was substantiated from the sky and consecrated in chronometers, then served to the ships that passed down the reach.” O’Loughlin, whose debut novel Not Untrue & Not Unkind was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2009, can knock out a well-turned line with the best of them, even when he is sabotaging his characters’ philosophical musings with a mischievous sense of humour. It’s hard to believe, for example, that the metaphor of the search for the missing chronometer, which relentlessly measures the fictional concept of linear time, is anything more than an old-fashioned McGuffin given the swirling ebb-and-flow nature of the narrative.
  That said, there’s no doubt that Minds of Winter is a serious novel on an important theme. What makes it such an absorbing read is that O’Loughlin doesn’t believe that ‘serious’ and ‘entertaining’ are mutually exclusive concepts. In the sheer brio of its storytelling, it brings to mind Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas – profound, yes, but terrific fun too. ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Review: TWO YEARS, EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS by Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie’s 10th novel opens in Arab Spain in 1195, when disgraced court physician and philosopher Ibn Rushd takes in the mysterious 16-year-old orphan Dunia. Given that the novel’s title adds up to 1,001 nights (aka ‘the number of magic’), it comes as no surprise when Dunia is revealed as the Lightning Princess, a jinnia – or genie – from the Upper World, or Fairyland.
  The many children of the union between this vain but brilliant man and the beautiful, magical princess multiply and spread out all over the world. A thousand years later, as the world faces an ecological disaster that morphs into an existential crisis when the wicked djinn of the Upper World declare war on humanity, Dunia’s children – the Duniazat – rise to the apparently impossible challenge of defeating their immortal foes.
  That’s the plot in a nutshell, but a summary does little justice to the digressive, delightfully fantastical tale of Two Years, Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights. Rushdie draws heavily on the Arabian Nights for his narrative here, but Scheherazade’s stories are only one source of inspiration. The novel blends history, philosophy, myth and legend as Rushdie playfully recounts the cataclysmic events that ushered the novel’s narrators – an anonymous, collective ‘we’ – into humanity’s Golden Age of peace, wisdom and prosperity, 800 hundred years hence.
  Rushdie, the author of The Satanic Verses (1988) and Midnight’s Children (1981), the latter the winner of ‘the Best of the Booker Prize’ in 2008, here revels in silliness and whimsy – indeed, there are times when the shades of Kurt Vonnegut and Douglas Adams battle for dominance with Italo Calvino and Georges Sirtzes. Ibn Rushd may well be a high-minded disciple of Aristotle, and spends eternity locked in a philosophical feud with his bitter rival, the fear-mongering Ghazali, but the novel is peppered with pop culture references that range from Batman to Laurel and Hardy, Harry Potter to Isaac Asmiov.
  It’s also a novel deeply immersed in books and reading as an intrinsically human endeavour. The jinnia, we are told rarely have children – “That would be as if a story mated with its reader to produce another reader.” – but Dunia “produced offspring the way Georges Simenon wrote novels.” Humanity, and particularly the evolved ‘we’ telling us the story, “are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.”
  Rushdie, of course, had a fatwa issued against him in 1989 on the basis that The Satanic Verses was perceived as blasphemous, and while Two Years, Eight Months & Twenty-Eight Nights is on the one hand an exhilarating exercise in the joy of storytelling akin to Rushdie’s own The Enchantress of Florence (2008), it is also a subversive piece of religious satire. The evil djinn – the Ifriti – seduce and subjugate human men to do their wicked bidding in the war against humanity, preying on their weaknesses and base instincts – sex, mainly – and sending them out to kill and die under a black flag. “When lonely, hopeless young men were provided with loving, or at least desirous, at the very least willing sexual partners,” writes Rushdie, “they lost interest in suicide belts, bombs and the virgins of heaven, and preferred to live.”
  Ultimately, this funny, profound and gorgeously readable novel thrives on unresolved tensions between reality and magic, fact and fiction, philosophy and religion. “They’re all make-believe,” the storyteller Blue Yasmeen tells us, “the realist fantasies and the fantastic fantasies are both made up.” It’s our tragedy, she declares, that “our fictions are killing us, but if we didn’t have those fictions, maybe that would kill us too.” ~ Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: MORTALITY by Christopher Hitchens

“Like so many of life’s varieties of experience,” writes Christopher Hitchens in Mortality (Atlantic Books), “the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off.”
  Born in Portsmouth in 1949, author, journalist and essayist Christopher Hitchens was one of his generation’s best known intellectuals. A friend and peer of Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, the British-born Hitchens, who successfully applied for American citizenship in 2007, famously criticised Mother Teresa and Lady Diana, harangued US President George Bush for his policies yet supported the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, and was notorious for the strength of his convictions when it came to opposing religion - his book God is Not Great (2007) sold in excess of half a million copies.
  A regular on TV chat shows and a sought-after presence on the international lecture circuit, Hitchens contributed to a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, among them Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman.
  He seemed a force of nature, but in June 2010 his voracious appetite for alcohol and cigarettes finally caught up with him. “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death,” he says in the opening line of Mortality, with the deadpan humour that pervades even the darkest chapters. “But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as I were actually shackled to my own corpse.”
  Shortly afterwards, the author receives confirmation that he is suffering from oesophageal cancer with complications, and that his life expectancy can be measured in months rather than years. Mortality, which is by turns a heartbreaking and uplifting book, and which first appeared in series form in Vanity Fair, is essentially a memoir of his dying.
  It takes a rare quality of courage to look in the mirror, see death gazing back and not flinch at writing down its starkest details. Hitchens is merciless as he sketches in his own failings - the hair and weight loss, the loss of appetite that in no way diminishes his body’s fondness for vomiting, the occasional moments of existential dread. Even as he writes in his measured and urbane style, he records the increasing difficulties he is having with the physical process of writing. Even worse, for this veteran of lecture and television debate, a man with an actor’s ability to project his personality to the furthest reaches of any chamber or hall, is the prospect of the oesophageal cancer eating away at his voice. “What do I hope for?” he asks. “If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.”
  He remains clear-eyed throughout, determinedly unsentimental, taking full responsibility for the behaviour that has brought him to this pass. “I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction,” he says, acknowledging that he has been ‘knowingly burning the candle at both ends’ for most of his adult life, “and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal it bores even me.” He mocks the temptation to feel sorry for himself. “Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? […] But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.”
  Indeed, despite the physical toll exacted by the cancer and its various treatments, Hitchens remains rigorous in his thought process throughout. When one of the Christian ‘faithful’ posts a website contribution declaring that throat cancer is the perfect way for God to dispatch a man who used his voice to deny God’s existence, and that hellfire awaits, Hitchens calmly responds with a query as to why it wasn’t his thought-generating brain that God chose to destroy. He knows, of course, that he is wasting precious breath. “To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent - a slow-acting suicide-murderer - on a consecrated mission from heaven.”
  Meanwhile, the well-wishers are almost as draining on his emotional reserves. From far and wide, from friend and former foe alike, come heartfelt promises of prayers, prompting Hitchens to wonder why people of such faith would want to see their prayers undo God’s great plan. “A different secular problem also occurs to me,” he adds mischievously. “What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.”
  With his mind still nimble, it’s difficult for the polymathic Hitchens to keep his eye focused on his navel for very long. A comment about his physical appearance will lead on to an extended digression about the nature of prayer in the Old Testament; when he assesses his increasingly remote chances of survival, given the development of cutting-edge techniques, it results in a disquisition on the morality and ethics of using stem-cells in cancer research.
  At 91 pages, Mortality is a short book, and even at that it feels brief - although Hitchens bubbles with such brio that it would probably have felt as such had it been three times its length. But even if it is a slim volume, it exerts a powerful gravity, drawing the reader inexorably into the heart of Hitchens’ plight and making of his own death a universal experience. The last chapter is the most unsettling, a chapter of scribblings and half-written lines and concepts that weren’t fully fleshed out in time to make the body of the book proper, so that it reads like the mental flutterings of a fading consciousness, still randomly generating ideas, memories and emotions as the life-force slips away gently into the ether.
  Harrowing at times, hilarious at others, Mortality is a delicate, profound and surprisingly tender love letter to life at the very moment of its leaving. You will hardly read a more important book this year. - Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

The Gospel According To John

Oh, to have John Connolly’s air-miles. Last week JC (right) turned up at Ireland House, NYU, to give a talk on Irish crime writing. Seamus Scanlon was on hand to make feverish notes on behalf of Crime Always Pays, although he neglected to mention whether or not Irish crime writing’s Noo Yoik guardian angel, aka Joe Long, was in attendance. Mind you, I’m guessing trained polar bears wouldn’t have kept Joe out … Anyway, on with the review:

Last week, John Connolly gave an erudite and scholarly review of Irish crime fiction at NYU’s Glucksman Ireland House. Dr John Waters, Director of the Undergraduate and Graduate Irish Studies Programs at NYU, recounted how John attended a literature workshop at Ireland House a few years ago, and not only were the students impressed but he was himself, much to his surprise - by the level of John Connolly’s insight, intensity, intelligence and literary knowledge.
  Dr Waters acknowledged that crime fiction by Irish writers had been ignored within academe until very recently, and he included himself in this category, but he is impressed by its vivacity and power and stylistic exuberance.
  Dr Waters told an anecdote where, in typical Connolly style, John brought a box of his crime novels to the workshop. In subsequent weeks the faculty was slightly alarmed that students were neglecting prescribed texts and reading John Connolly. Eventually they were able to restore the balance!
  John Connolly then delivered an entertaining and cogent analysis of crime fiction - the essential elements, its history, why it was slow to develop in Ireland, why it flourished in the US, why his own sub-specialty of supernatural crime is marginalized by the crime fiction establishment, while crime fiction itself is marginalized by the mainstream critics and academics.
  Since the literary establishment’s dogma in Ireland even in the late 1990s was that Irish writers needed to engage in the Irish experience (whatever that was), it had no resonance for him – so setting books in Ireland or discussing Irish issues were not on his agenda, and as a result John Connolly was not on the literary radar.
  He picked Maine as the setting for his books because the place had an immediate resonance for him - it reminded him of Ireland in some senses, but it had sharper changes in seasons which he liked, nobody knew him, there was no constraints on subject, it had great landscapes and great bleakness, it was the home of strange characters, it had a long history (it was settled early) and it had a deeply ethereal dimension to it that he did not find elsewhere in the US.
  He outlined how the great crime fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain and Ross Macdonald was so masterful, impeccable and imbued with integrity that their literary credentials cannot be doubted.   He displays great humour but his work ethos and writing ethos are tight and steadfast with an almost blindside to any concerns once he is writing. On tour he is generous with fans and hosts. I saw him warmly greet the NYU bookselling staff on the night as well as warmly embrace Bonnie and Joe the owners of the now defunct Black Orchid bookshop. He even had a warm welcome for me, even though I was wearing sandals (it was balmy October night). He has a hang-up about sandals and cat detectives!
  He argued that crime fiction in the US is very strong because it is a logical extension of the essence of the frontiersman - essentially the Wild West motif. You cannot rely on the establishment to solve your problem – the law won’t rush to your defence – sometimes you have to rely on a lone man (usually flawed himself) to restore equilibrium and make sense of the world.
  As a general rule, the police and courts in the UK and Ireland are regarded as the de facto defenders of the common man – citizens tend to think that eventually the police and courts will do the right thing. This inner mindset (largely propaganda and largely incorrect) creates an inherent inertia which stymied the development of detective fiction in both countries. This mindset is deeper in Ireland. Another mitigating factor was that the rural ethos of Ireland prevented the development of noir or detective fiction because urban precincts are the natural backdrop where human interaction and conflict are a daily reality.
  The natural antipathy of the Irish literary world to those who did not engage in the meaning of Irishness (mentioned above) was also a major constraint.
  All of the above factors are changing. The first scholarly analysis of Irish crime fiction is in preparation and Ireland is morphing from the effects of globalization, urbanization, gangland crime, travel, economic progress and decline, isolation, corruption, clerical abuse and political abuse into a complex, ambiguous moral landscape that provides the flux and tension where crime fiction can develop.
  Although this is the first time I suspect that Maeve Binchy will ever be mentioned in this blog, John acknowledged that she and others demonstrated to UK publishers that Irish authors could sell significant numbers of books. (John and Maeve are probably Ireland’s two biggest selling authors.) But the current growth in Irish crime fiction is endangered because Irish people tend not to buy it (nor do the English) and authors cannot rely on US audiences alone. The number of indigenous readers has to increase to maintain the interest and viability of the genre.
  John’s delivery was animated but serious. He instils loyalty and enthusiasm for crime fiction. His favourite maxim from Salman Rushdie, that a writer is someone who finishes writing a book, is simple, but Connolly takes it seriously. With every book he writes (13 so far, 10 million copies sold in 28 languages) he still always falters between 20 and 40 thousand words, doubting his writing and its impact. He gets through it though, and that is good news for the rest of us.
  Thanks to Dr Eileen Reilly, Associate Director at Glucksman Ireland House, and Dr John Waters and all Ireland House staff, for inviting John to speak and welcoming us. - Seamus Scanlon

Taboo Or Not Taboo, That Is The Question

UNCAGE ME is the follow-up to 2007’s EXPLETIVE DELETED, being a collection of short stories about taboos and the breaking thereof, and edited by the ultra-glam Jen Jordan (right). Among the very fine writers contributing are Scott Phillips, Allan Guthrie, J.D. Rhoades, Simon Kernick, Patrick Bagley, Tim Maleeny, Nick Stone, Martyn Waites and Maxim Jakubowski. It also features a thoughtful piece by John Connolly in its introduction, in which JC muses at length about the history and nature of transgression. To wit:

To paraphrase Cole Porter, in olden days a glimpse of stocking might have been considered shocking, but now, quite frankly, almost anything goes. I say ‘almost’ because, of course, Porter was wrong to conclude that there were no longer any limits on behaviour, although we can forgive him because he was less interested in making an irrefutable statement than in fitting words to a good tune. It’s probably asking a lot to expect him to be more than broadly socially and philosophically accurate as well.
  Boundaries and limits - legal, moral, national, aesthetic, sexual, racial, and physical - still exist, but it is a facet of the modern (or even post-modern) world that they are being challenged at an ever accelerating rate. But those challenges are not entirely negative in their connotations; rather, they can be seen as an effort to establish the nature and extent of those limitations. Thus, acts of transgression should not be viewed as destructive by nature. To approach them in this way is to misunderstand them, for their relationship to the society that gives rise to them is far more complex than might at first appear.
  The word ‘transgression’ enters the English language for the first time in the 16th century, but it comes weighted with negative spiritual meaning. Perhaps the first great act of transgression is the decision by Adam and Eve to eat forbidden fruit, thereby violating their pact with God. Yet with this act comes a certain liberation, albeit at considerable cost. Admittedly, the Church fathers did not see it in this way, and so transgression becomes associated with evil, with St John telling us that ‘Whosoever transgresseth, and abideth not in the doctrine of Christ, hath not God’ (2 John 9).
(It is worth noting, in passing, that Eve bears the primary burden for disobeying God’s will, and subsequently tempting her partner. Here, the seeds are sown for an abiding distrust of women, and the demonic associations that came to be made with feminine qualities. Thus it was that the female body, by the time of the Renaissance, was the subject of constant surveillance, and was regarded as, in a way, grotesque. It was a body which potentially exceeded any boundary or limit, and was thus regarded as transgressive by its very nature. Something of this sense of the threat posed by the feminine mystique survives in the femmes fatales of film noir, who are, in their way, all descendants of the lady Eve.)
  As time progresses, though, some of those earlier spiritual connotations fall away, and ‘to transgress’ becomes more general in its meaning, covering any kind of deviation from the norm, as well as non-physical acts of aggression against the person. Finally, it begins to refer to the crossing of boundaries, whether moral, legal, or, indeed, artistic and aesthetic, which is where we should perhaps locate it for the purposes of this volume.
  In fact, creative and artistic endeavours provide an apt proving ground for notions of transgression. As the writer bell hooks puts it: ‘Art, and most especially painting, was for me a realm where every imposed boundary could be transgressed.’
  The use of the word ‘imposed’ raises an interesting question. Are constraints entirely imposed from the outside? If we transgress, do we do so purely against some external authority, whether human or divine? I would argue that we do not, that there is a personal element in our responses to moral imperatives, an element of subjectivity that brings with it a desire to transgress, even a necessity to do so. Societies find a way to channel and express this desire: mythologies are one such channel, acts of mockery another, or what Bakhtin described as ‘the laughter of the carnival’. Such laughter is collective, universal, and ambivalent, but it is not destructive, and here is where our relationship with the notion of transgression becomes really interesting.
Transgression is both an act of affirmation and denial. It recognizes the existence of a certain limitations or boundaries, even as it seeks to overstep those marks. In fact, it requires the continued existence of such boundaries for its effect. If the act of transgression shatters the boundary entirely, then what is left? As St Paul put it, ‘Where no law is, there is no transgression’ (Romans 4:15).
  Transgression is not the same as disorder. It does not invite chaos. Even Georges Bataille, the 20th-century writer whose work is perhaps most closely associated with the notion of the transgressive, for whom erotic transgression was the archetype, the sine qua non, of all transgression (albeit linked, by violence, to death), understood the necessity of suspending, rather than removing, sexual constraints. A taboo might be violated, but not terminated. ‘The sacred world’, wrote Bataille, ‘depends on limited acts of transgression.’
  One might argue, then, that transgression is not in itself necessarily subversive. It seeks to question boundaries and limitations, not destroy them. It is not an overt challenge to the status quo; it is instead an interrogation, a questioning. In that sense, it is complicit in that which it critiques, but it is not blindly accepting of it. Instead, it recognizes that every limitation contains within it the possibility of its own fracture. The instruction to obey carries with it the potential for disobedience. In cultural terms, it prevents stagnation by forcing us constantly to reassess the rules governing our society, while at the same time reaffirming the necessity of those rules. It may lead to a reordering, but not to the absence of order at all.
  Still, the tension between what may be perceived by one side as legitimate questioning that may possibly lead to change, or even just a different perspective, and by another as a threat to the established order, goes some way towards explaining why the relationship between art and the law is so fractious. It’s worth recalling the furore that initially greeted Howard Brenton’s play The Romans in Britain when it was staged by the National Theatre in London in 1980. Intended, in part, as a commentary on the situation in Northern Ireland at the time, it included a scene of homosexual rape that led a ‘moral guardian’, Mrs Mary Whitehouse, to take a private prosecution against the play’s director for procuring an act of gross indecency. (Mrs Whitehouse declined to view the play herself, fearing corruption of her soul. Sir Horace Cutler, by contrast, who was a board member of the National Theatre, walked out in disgust, informing a journalist that his wife had been forced to “cover her head” during the scene in question, although nobody seemed entirely sure how, precisely, her concealment was achieved.) The trial was eventually halted with both sides claiming victory: the Attorney General was said to have ended the case because it was not in the public interest to proceed, but the judge did rule that the Sexual Offences Act could be applied to events on a stage, and to simulated acts of indecency.
  When the play was revived in 2007, critics reflected nostalgically on the earlier controversy, but no comparable outcry greeted the revival. Time, and the emergence of an even more permissive society, perhaps both played their parts in this, but there was also, I think, a recognition that the law had no further role to play in this discussion.
  The law is rarely successful in its attempts to police art. The tension between law and art is too great. A moralist will argue that art has no special privilege, and art that transgresses against, for example, the laws of decency should be punished. Artists, according to the moralist, have no right to greater licence than any other section of the population. Artists, generally, beg to differ.
  The nature of transgression in art, as in life, is intensely problematical. It has been argued that one of the roles of art is to conquer taboos, which brings with it the assumption that such taboo-breaking is always good, and anyone who objects to it is automatically narrow-minded, misguided, and guilty of oppressing the artistic imagination. Yet not all restrictions are necessarily bad in themselves, just as not every act of transgression is worthy of note simply by the fact of its existence. Bad art does not enlarge the imagination, and an artist or writer who creates it is open to censure. Offensive and transgressive are not the same thing. Similarly, finding a piece of art objectionable is a perfectly valid critical response to it; seeking to suppress it on that basis is not.
  Yet transgression in art is not limited to questions of moral or sexual license, although the subject is most frequently raised in public in such contexts. Literature is subject to certain constraints, some physical and material, others related to the nature of the form. Can we not look at Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and say that, in its questioning of the received notions of storytelling and its steadfast refusal to abide by what was expected of the novel in the middle of the eighteenth century, it is a profoundly transgressive work, a post-modern novel before there was any ‘modern’ to be ‘post’ about? Or what of B.S. Johnson’s 1969 novel The Unfortunates, which was published in a box containing 27 separate chapters, one of which was marked first, one last, with 25 others that could be shuffled around as the reader wished? It is experimental, certainly, but is it not also transgressive in its attempt to overcome the limitations on the formal structure of a printed work? In other words, for the writer, as for any artist, transgression may not merely be a matter of subject, but of form. The transgressive abhors that which is self-enclosed, and rejoices in openness. It rejects the notion of purity, and instead revels in mongrelization. It is the art of the hybrid, of broken things.
  More recently, there was the controversy over Salman Rushdie’s novel, The Satanic Verses, first published in 1988, which led to a fatwa, a sentence of death, being declared on Rushdie by Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini because of the novel’s perceived slighting of Islam (and arguably Islam continues to be the single most significant cultural, religious, and social boundary that artists may transgress, even at peril of their lives). Looking back, what is fascinating about the Rushdie controversy is the variety of responses it provoked from Rushdie’s fellow authors. Their support for him was far from universal, with Roald Dahl and John le Carré being among the loudest of the dissenting voices. Clearly, it seemed, transgression was not something to be defended on principle, even by one’s own peers.
  There is one significant act of transgression that I have deliberately left until the end of this introduction, precisely because it is so relevant to some of the authors that follow, and that is crime. A number of the contributors to this volume are best known as mystery writers, but there are some difficulties in presenting crime as a purely transgressive action. In part, this is because the definition of an act as ‘criminal’ is a matter of law, but at the same time it is difficult to deny the element of choice involved in the commission of certain crimes, or the fascination, even appeal, that criminal behaviour may hold for us. A crime of passion is not necessarily transgressive, even if one might take the view that it breaches the taboo of unjustly taking a human life, because it lacks control, or perhaps planning and intent. It is born out of a rush of blood, an excess of feeling. Similarly, a starving woman who steals a loaf of bread could be considered to have done so out of necessity in a moment of weakness governed by blind appetite, not will.
  But those criminals who chooses to kill, to steal, to break, who, in the words of J. Katz in Seductions of Crime (1988), ‘take pride in a defiant reputation as ‘bad’’, are of a different breed, and their actions resonate with us precisely because they are a dark shadow of the desire that lies within each of us to breach, however occasionally, the constraints imposed upon our behaviour, and glimpse for a moment the possibility of the infinite. To quote Katz again: ‘Perhaps in the end, what we find so repulsive about studying the reality of crime . . . is the piercing reflection we catch when we steady our glance at these evil men.’
  There may be stories in this collection that you find difficult to like, or of which you may actively disapprove. There will be stories that may remind you of your own past acts, and stories dealing with acts that you believe you could never commit. Yet each of them touches upon the basic human urge to transgress, and in this you will find a certain sense of commonality, however uncomfortable it may be. Remember, after all, the words of Terence, which were inscribed upon the ceiling of the great essayist Montaigne: ‘I am a man: nothing human is foreign to me.’

  Taken from UNCAGE ME (ed. Jen Jordan, 2007, Bleak House Books). Republished with the kind permission of Bleak House Books.

39 Steps To … Getting Published

1. Get genius idea for a story.
2. Example: Man gets brain transplant from loopy nun and has visions of Jesus telling him the Holy Grail is in fact Barack Obama’s coffee mug.
3. Write one-page synopsis.
4. Run out of steam around the paragraph mark.
5. Pitch to drunk literary agent anyway.
6. Pitch to 17 more drunk agents.
7. Get genius idea about a serial killer who goes around bumping off literary agents.
8. Discover you are the 731,204th person to pitch that idea this month alone.
9. First literary agent calls back to say, “This famous relative you have – it’s not Brian Cowen, right?”
10. Lie like Nixon. About everything, to everyone.
11. Claim that you are, in fact, the love-child of Richard Nixon and Barbara Cartland.
12. Decide to think about actually writing the novel.
13. Although first you’ll actually read a novel, ‘just to see how they go.’
14. Apply for Arts Council grant.
15. Apply to Inland Revenue for artist’s tax-break.
16. Set up blog.
17. Type ‘Chapter 1’.
18. Establish the novel’s structure by typing ‘Chapter 2’, ‘Chapter 3’, ‘Chapter 4’, etc., until you reach ‘Chapter 32’.
19. Briefly consider the possibility of getting away with claiming that 32 blank pages ‘convey a post-modern non-narrative exploring the existential emptiness of being’.
20. Write a blog post asking readers’ advice on how to overcome writer’s block.
21. Get blocked after typing ‘How Do You Overcome Writer’s Block?’
22. Do a promotional live phone-link with the Gerry Ryan radio show in which you parade up and down Grafton Street with your knickers on your head asking illegal immigrants for a date.
23. Think some more about writing the novel.
24. Get genius idea to ‘emulate’ your heroes by copying out one chapter from each of your 32 favourite novels.
25. Realise you only have two favourite novels, both of which have ‘Pooh’ in the title.
26. Join a creative writing class.
27. Befriend one of the writers, ask if you can help by critiquing her work, then put her in a coma.
28. Inform agent that the loopy nun / brain transplant / Obama / holy grail story is ‘too mainstream’. Instead it’ll be about ‘a thirty-flirty gal who works in PR with fabulous fashion-sense and more gay friends than you could swing a cat at but who can’t get married although it’s not for the want of a wardrobe full of Jimmy Choos and sound relationship advice from all those gay friends who finally reveal how your sister, the bitch, was sleeping with that hunky bisexual cousin you had your eye on all along’.
29. Drop Oprah an email to let her know that April is good for you.
30. Choose the pseudonym ‘Cecilia Nixon-Binchy’ on the off-chance erstwhile friend emerges from coma.
31. Spend a harrowing month adapting her manuscript by changing the heroine’s name from ‘Aggie’ to ‘Abbie’ without using find-and-delete, ‘because that would be cheating’.
32. Send novel to respected Irish publisher.
33. Tell Barry Egan, exclusively, that you wrote the novel on napkins during your ten-minute lunch-break at the Centre for Helping One-Legged Blind Orphans To Hear Better.
34. Drop Salman Rushdie an email, asking if he’d be so kind as to launch your book for you with ‘a few well-chosen words’.
35. Sign contract with respected Irish publisher, revealing exclusively on TV A.M. that it’s ‘a five-book deal for seven figures’.
36. Neglect to mention that all seven figures are zeroes.
37. Refuse to emerge, blinking shyly, into the bright lights of the Late Late Show until Pat Kenny pins you in a half-nelson on the Montrose lawn.
38. Tell Ryan Tubridy ‘It’s nice that a work of art won for a change,’ when novel hits the best-seller list. Neglect to mention that it was your mother who bought all 14 copies.
39. Immediately set up a creative writing workshop – so you can ‘give something back’ to ‘those less fortunate’ – on Grand Bahama.

This feature first appeared in the Evening Herald

The Public Wants What The Public Gets: A Booker Prize Jam

Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but here’s a couple of snippets from items that have popped up in my inbox over the last day or so. First up, John Connolly (right) from the latest post to his rather excellent blog, the remit of which is to keep his readers abreast on the trials and tribulations of whatever novel he happens to be working on:

“I’m also trying to get a handle on what kind of book THE LOVERS is. In a recent interview, I said that each book I write seems to be a reaction to the one that preceded it, and I suppose that’s true of THE LOVERS. Where THE REAPERS was fast and linear, with a very straightforward narrative, THE LOVERS is more complex, more allusive. A lot of it concerns events that have happened in the past, and a large part of the second half is taken up with one character revealing, over the course of a single evening, the truth behind the death of Parker’s father. I want to see if I can retain the reader’s interest by juggling the desire to find out ‘what happens next’ with gradual revelations about what has gone before.”

  I’ve met John Connolly on a few occasions, and heard him speak publicly about books a couple of times. He is, as most of you know, a very fine stylist, a superb storyteller, and a best-seller to boot. And when John Connolly speaks about writing, the conversation tends to quickly narrow down to one thing: WHAT. THE. READER. WANTS.
  I don’t know if the following pair of snippets should be placed in direct contrast to Connolly’s approach, but both of them are just two examples of what seems to be a growing backlash against the Booker Prize. First, from Wednesday, author James Delingpole in The Telegraph:

“I reckon that, too often, what our literary prize panels confuse with proper writing is in fact just overwriting, and that the problem is exacerbated by a salon of smug, sanctimonious, mostly Left-leaning literary-tastemakers (and gullible book groups) who feel a novel isn’t “valid” unless it’s a) a bit hard to read, b) weighed down with purple prose or poetry, c) socially worthy (madness, disability, child abuse, etc.) and d) best of all, imbued with lashings of fashionable, Zadie-Smith-style, melting-pot ethnic exoticism.”

  Then, today, critic Boyd Tonkin in The Independent:

“Behind the storm-in-a-wineglass feuds that surround the Man Booker Prize, a true and even tragic sub-plot may be starting to unfold. To be mass-market blunt rather than literary-novel elliptical: is the British audience for ambitious fiction dying off, losing faith, or just drifting away? […] In the five weeks after the long-list announcement on 29 July, the 13 titles of the “Booker dozen” sold fewer than 14,000 UK copies; on average, barely 1,000 each. This is, frankly, pathetic.”

  Back at the end of July, the Bookseller published a list of the sales of the newly nominated novels:

1. The Enchantress of Florence 15,433
2. Child 44 8,278
3. Sea of Poppies 5,034
4. Netherland 4,023
5. The Clothes on Their Backs 3,592
6. The White Tiger 1,852
7. The Secret Scripture 1,568
8. A Case of Exploding Mangoes 1,000
9. The Northern Clemency 916
10. A Fraction of the Whole 392
11. The Lost Dog 363

  A week later, they were back with this update:

Whilst Salman Rushdie’s THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE (Cape) remains the overall sales leader with an increase in book sales of 56.5% since last week, Linda Grant’s THE CLOTHES ON THEIR BACKS (Virago) has seen the biggest proportional increase. From selling just 13 copies during the week ending 26th July, the book has gone on to sell 144 copies the following week.
  Another notable increase was for Tom Rob Smith’s CHILD 44 (Simon & Schuster), one of the most controversial choices on the longlist. Sales increased by 250% for the thriller that had already shifted over 8,000 copies prior to the longlist announcement.

  CHILD 44, of course, didn’t made the Booker shortlist announced this week. Neither did THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE or Joseph O’Neill’s NETHERLAND, previously the bookies’ favourites with Ladbrokes and William Hill respectively. Sebastian Barry is now the 2/1 favourite with THE SECRET SCRIPTURE.
  I can’t find any weekly sales figures for later than the week ending August 16, but in that week THE SECRET SCRIPTURE had sold less than THE LOST DOG, which had sold 127 copies that week.
  Erm, folks? Y’think the reading public is trying to tell you something?

On Crime Fiction And Respectability

When an author references another writer’s novel twice in one book, it’s fair to presume that he or she is drawing attention and inviting comparisons. In THE KILLING CIRCLE, Andrew Pyper twice refers to THE MAGUS, the John Fowles novel which blends a number of genre staples, among them the thriller, the war novel, the supernatural and quasi-scientific propositions.
  Asked at an advanced age what he would change if he could live his life over again, Kingsley Amis thought for a moment and said, “Well, I wouldn’t read THE MAGUS.” I love it, although I know a lot of people hate it. But the point about THE MAGUS is that it’s a literary novel that has a hell of a lot of fun with mashing up genres.
  THE KILLING CIRCLE also blends genres, most obviously those of crime and horror, although, given that its narrator is an aspiring author who lacks the imagination to create a unique story, it’s also intended as a serious meditation on the writing process. In that context, the references to THE MAGUS are presumably intended as reminders to the reader that Andrew Pyper is engaged in a literary activity, despite the genre staples.
  Which brings me to a comment Adrian McKinty – yep, him again – left on a post further down the page, vis-à-vis the consecration of crime fiction as ‘interesting and important’. To wit:

“One thing though about Banville, Rushdie, Chabon etc. writing crime novels is that they would never have ventured into the territory in the first place had not the zeitgeist begun to see crime books not as disposable pulp fiction but actually as interesting and important. When the Library of America started bringing out Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Highsmith in annotated quality hardbacks, it was a sign that the critical community had embraced those writers and no longer despised them. The rising tide began to float the boats of the whole genre.”

  Writing about the inclusion of Rob Smith’s CHILD 44 on the Booker Prize long-list for the LA Times recently, Sarah Weinman made a similar point:

“And yet, if CHILD 44 -- a serial killer novel that takes place in the last years of Stalin’s Russia -- appears at first glance to be a brash upstart, a closer look suggests that its inclusion might not be so unlikely after all. Indeed, this is the most recent example of the blurring of the line between crime fiction and literature, which raises hope that the so-called genre wars are lurching toward, if not an end, then at least a tentative cease-fire.”

  Yes, yes – but is this actually a good thing? Crime writing has always had stylists as fine as anything the literary world can offer, if only the reader has eyes to see, but the idea that respectability is about to be conferred on the genre seems somehow grotesque, and not least because the respectability is to be conferred by the literary types.
  I write crime fiction, but I’m not a crime fiction nut. As I’ve said elsewhere, crime fiction only accounts for about a quarter of my reading, or maybe as much as a third. I read for all kinds of reasons, although mainly because I’d probably go blind if I didn’t. I can read Salman Rushdie and John McFetridge, say, as I did earlier this year, and be equally impressed by both.
  But when I read crime fiction, I read it for the adrenaline buzz of knowing that it is getting under the skin of the world we live in, broaching taboos and creeping down the dark alleyways that we’d prefer weren’t so dark, or there at all, and doing it with an authenticity and immediacy that makes it utterly believable, even if I’d rather it wasn’t true. And as far as I’m concerned, respectability is far more likely to blunt that edge than hone it. To mangle Groucho Marx, I don’t want to be in any club that’d have me.
  Every writer should aspire to be as good as Rushdie, Chandler, Highsmith and Fowles. But that’s not the same thing as aspiring to write a Booker Prize nominee, or to write a novel worthy of the approval of the self-anointed adjudicators of quality.
  I hope for Rob Smith’s sake that he wins the Booker Prize. But I hope for crime fiction’s sake that he doesn’t.

Yep, It’s Another ‘Dear Genre’ Letter

I got in touch with Adrian McKinty (right) earlier in the week, asking, for the purposes of a newspaper feature, why he believes there’s such an explosion in Irish crime fiction right now. Being McKinty, he answered the question asked, and then followed it up with a mini-essay on why crime fiction whups every other genre’s metaphorical ass. To wit:

“Why is crime fiction so much more interesting than romance, horror, sci-fi and increasingly literary fiction? Here’s my attempt at an answer:

Romance
“When I used to work at Barnes and Noble I was punished for minor infractions of the corporate code by being put on the romance fiction information desk. This is a genre written by women of a certain age for women of a certain age. Most of the books resemble that second division musical Brigadoon: dodgy accents, dodgy historicism, dodgy plots. Once you meet the central characters in a romance novel you know how the book is going to finish. A long tease, a few obstacles, happy (or increasingly) unhappy ending.
  “Romance novels are often written by people who don’t understand that what makes Jane Austen good is her story arcs. There are some romanciers who relish wit and ironic humour but these, alas, are the exceptions rather than the rule – you can usually tell the ironic ones by their brilliantly outlandish covers. (Chick-lit is a sub genre of romance novel, with more sex and worse jokes.)

Horror
“I have never read a horror novel because I don’t like to be scared and also because of their daunting size. I’ve seen cinder blocks with less heft than most horror fiction texts. I’ve read some of Stephen King’s non-horror books, though. Apparently he wrote a lot of them while drunk in the early mornings. I hope that’s the case. I remember one sentence that had more clauses than a Kris Kringle convention.

Sci-Fi
“Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein. When I was about 12 I read everything these guys wrote. Asimov alone published 400 books, so that’s no mean feat. Early science fiction wasn’t interested in multi-dimensional characters or exacting prose. The idea was everything. Nothing wrong with that, but sixty years later, pretty much all the ideas have been used or recycled. JG Ballard, Ursula Le Guin, Philip K. Dick and to some extent William Gibson tried to take science fiction on an inward journey but their path has not been followed by the majority of the genre’s novelists. Space opera, time travel, the future and exoticism still dominate. Character, psychology and prose are not as relevant as the hook, the central premise, the pitch. Sci-Fi today leaves me uninvolved and largely unmoved, but I’d be happy to renew my love if anyone has any suggestions.
  “A sub genre of sci-fi is fantasy. I’m not going to dwell on those books. I grew out of fantasy when I was 13 or 14. The best in the field seems to be Stephen Donaldson, who I worshipped as a kid. My students rave about Robert Jordan and maybe he’s good, I don’t know. If you like that sort of thing good ’elf to ya.

Literary Fiction
“Yeah, don’t get all snooty, you’re a genre too. Lit-fic’s problems are social and philosophical. First the social: there’s a clubby atmosphere in the New York and London literary worlds that pushes depressingly unreadable novels down our throats. Lit-fic people review each other a lot and they all seem to have gone to the same schools, live together in Islington or Brooklyn Heights, and have the same upper-class vaguely lefty view point and tax bracket. They’re all basically nice middle-class white people (although they occasionally let in a dishy foreigner) writing / whingeing about the problems of nice middle class white people.
  Philosophically, literary types are ill at ease. The conventional novel is too dull for them but Joyce already did everything you could with the form, so what can they do? Their books try too hard, shouting “Look at me!” instead of focusing on what the reader wants: good stories and good characters. Their prose is a distillation of what Cyril Connolly called the ‘mandarin style,’: either rip off Henry James or rip off Evelyn Waugh. For me Salman Rushdie, David Mitchell, David Park, Ronan Bennett and Zadie Smith are exceptions to this sweeping and probably completely incorrect generalisation. In the U.S., Cormac McCarthy has kept his distance from Brooklyn and that’s why he’s the best writer in country (after Kansas-dwelling James Ellroy).

Crime Fiction
“So what makes crime fiction so great? Its diversity for one thing. If Peter Rozovsky’s website Detective Beyond Borders is to be believed, every country in the world seems to have a flourishing crime fiction genre. Do you want Icelandic private eyes? We’ve got ’em. Are you after American wheelchair-bound lesbian detectives? We can do that too. Even within the regions crime writing can be your guide. The thinly populated west of Ireland for example: Want to know about Sligo? Declan Burke’s your man. A few miles down the coast to Galway and you’re in Ken Bruen country.
  But it’s not just the diversity; I think something bigger is going on as well. Nineteenth century Russia, Elizabethan London, Periclean Athens – all produced exemplars of high art because the artists had to work within the boundaries of harsh censorship. Drawing inside the box allowed authors to become more creative and more interesting. Obviously repressive censorship is bad too, but greater freedom doesn’t necessarily lead to greater artistic triumphs. In today’s London, New York, Paris etc., you can say whatever you like but little of it is worth listening to. Crime writers work within certain conventions and are allowed to be social commentators, psychological explorers and innovators as long as they stick to the basic rules of the crime or mystery story. The box helps the writer and the reader. You’re not going to get many crime novels that forget that plot is important or that characters have to be real and that dialogue has to sound authentic.
  “Crime writers don’t worry about the views of literary London or New York, they don’t feel they have to conform to any house style or clichéd way of rebellion. Crime fiction cuts at the edge of prose, story telling and character. It is the genre for exploring contemporary mores and, I think, the best literary mode for understanding our crazy mixed up world.
  “So, to sum up: like the young Cassius Clay, crime fiction is the prettiest, nimblest and deftest of the Olympians, easily overpowering the lumbering horror and sci-fi athletes, dodging that lady with the romance handbag, and knocking cold that weepy young fogey from Kensington whose father never told him he loved him. Except nobody’s father told them they loved them. Get over it mate, stop gurning and go read THE COLD SIX THOUSAND instead.” – Adrian McKinty

Around The Web In 80 Seconds*

You lose some, you win some. Hot on the heels of Publishers Weekly dissing THE BIG O on the basis that it’s not as good as Elmore Leonard (oh, the infamy!) comes this dinky little treat courtesy of Amazon’s Listmania, titled “The Crime Writing Kings Of All Time (and a great new guy!)”. Yep, it’s lil’ ol’ EIGHT BALL BOOGIE nestling in there with Chandler, Hammett and Thompson, et al. Joelle Claire Barrios, you are officially our newest VBF …
  Staying on the subject of Elmore Leonard, Adrian McKinty’s THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD gets a nifty big-up from John Dugdale in tomorrow’s Sunday Times, under the heading “Eight new thrillers for holiday readers”. To wit:

“It’s the unlikely pairing of Elmore Leonard and James Joyce that seems to shape Adrian McKinty’s THE BLOOMSDAY DEAD (Serpent’s Tail £10.99), a pacey, violent caper that, like ULYSSES, runs from breakfast time to midnight on a single June day. Belfast gangster queen Bridget Callaghan wants Michael Forsythe dead for killing her fiancé, but when her daughter is abducted, Callaghan decides he’s the only man who can find her. As Forsythe hurtles around the city, McKinty vividly portrays its sleazy, still-menacing underbelly.”

  Hmmm, nice. Upward and onward to the Booker Prize nominations, and while the howls of anguish that greeted CHILD 44’s nomination have abated a tad, Philip Stone at The Bookseller has an interesting piece about the sales figures for the various nominees. Salman Rushdie’s THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE leads the way, having sold 15,433 copies before the nominations were announced, but four of the eleven nominees have sold 1,000 copies or less, with Michelle de Kretser’s THE LOST DOG selling a less-than-whopping 363 books. Now, anyone who has read James Patterson can vouch for the fact that big sales don’t always (koff) equate with quality, so those figures have nothing to say about whether or not the books are entitled to be considered as possible Booker winners. Still, it’d make you wonder about how in tune, or otherwise, the judging panel is with the reading public.
  Meanwhile, Boyd Tonkin at The Independent laments the novels that didn’t make the Booker long-list, among them David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER:

“I will miss several other notable absentees from the later Booker heats. David Park’s wise and moving novel of the search for reconciliation in post-Troubles Belfast, THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, should have caught the judges’ eye.”

  Finally, some groovy news for Eoin Colfer’s legion of fans, courtesy of Sarah Webb’s review of ARTEMIS FOWL AND THE TIME PARADOX in today’s Irish Independent:

“Colfer has certainly been busy. Next year his crime caper, HALF MOON INVESTIGATIONS, will be on television, courtesy of the BBC, pitched as Grange Hill for the Noughties. The film rights to the Artemis books have been sold to Miramax and Tribeca (Robert De Niro’s production company) and the film is in development.”

  And the hell of it all is, it couldn’t happen a nicer guy. Happy days.

* Providing you don’t actually click any of the links, of course

“Some People Call Me The Space Cowboy …”

Last week I posted a review of the new Batman flick, The Dark Knight, in which I said I liked the movie a lot, not least for its use of a comic-book hero to posit some very interesting philosophical questions vis-à-vis the nature of crime and justice. Was Adrian McKinty convinced? Nope. Herewith be his thoughts on why the success of The Dark Knight augers ill for the future of mainstream cinema, to wit:

For all its visual brilliance, special effects and story telling zest, The Dark Knight was like eating an entire box of Cocoa Pops on a Saturday morning. Enjoyable at the time, but later I wondered how I was so easily seduced.
  It’s tough to go up against a movie that has a 90% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Every critic in the world seems to have loved The Dark Knight. A few complained it was too long, but that was about it.
  Its length didn’t bother me, but I did start to get bored with the Joker’s constant ability to outwit everyone in Gotham City, and maybe at some point it would have been nice to see someone get clobbered in the face and see it actually, you know, hurt.
Anyway, Batman has made 300 million dollars in the US alone and will probably gross a billion by the time it’s done. Hollywood will make more make films like Batman because that’s clearly what you people out there want.
  By going to Batman and Wanted and Ironman in droves and staying away from a thriller like Tell No One, your message is loud and clear: don’t worry about giving us a logical plot or realistic situations just make it stylish, loud and fast and we’ll go.
  It’s interesting that as thriller novels get more and more complex, thrillers in the cinema seem to get less so. If you want to pick up a clever thriller in paperback these days it’s very easy. Patrick Anderson, mystery critic of the Washington Post has written a book called THE TRIUMPH OF THE THRILLER examining this trend, and even smart mainstream novelists like Salman Rushdie, Cormac McCarthy and John Banville have jumped into the thriller/mystery genre.
  Funnily enough, in the 1970s the situation was exactly the opposite of today. Intelligent thrillers were nowhere to be found. Airport novels dominated the genre and the really interesting stuff was happening at the movies. Remember when a film like Coppola’s The Conversation could actually get an audience? Movie thrillers back then were funny, clever and tightly plotted. Could today’s studios give us The French Connection or The Taking of Pelham 123 or The Parallax View or even All The President’s Men?
  I’m sceptical. I think the trend will be to make superheroes increasingly conflicted, not to give ordinary people interesting situations and problems. Hollywood follows the money. For every Departed that makes a profit there’s an American Gangster that underperformed. Why should producers take the risk? The failure of every single Iraq movie and the success of almost every comic book movie is not a good sign for those of us who like a bit of politics in their films, for our heroes to hurt when they get hit, and for them to use their heads to solve problems instead of their fists.

  Hmmmm. Meanwhile, over at Confessions of a Film Critic, John Maguire has this to say:

This is a haunted tragedy that recasts the ancient myths of the hero in an ultramodern nihilism, achieving a complexity of feeling that is difficult to achieve in any kind of art, let alone the multi-million dollar studio summer movie.

  The Big, Big Question: who to be more afraid of disagreeing with, McKinty or Maguire? They’re both very scary men …

On The Perils Of Not Being A Genius: A Grand Vizier Writes

‘Read, read, read and write, write, write’ is what experienced writers tend to say when their aspiring brethren ask for advice on how to become a writer, although the Grand Viz (right, in full-on smug-on-holiday mode) is of the opinion that if you need to be told to read a lot and write a lot, you’re probably not a writer by instinct. Anyhoo, the point being: submerge yourself in story, find out how the best do it, and then do what they do, only different and – hopefully, one day – better.
  Solid advice, for sure, and the most fun you can have while dressed to boot.
  But here’s the kicker – is there a danger of absorbing too much story?
  The Grand Viz has always loved books and movies, and over the last two decades has spent his professional life moving to a point where he now pretty much writes about movies, books and theatre for a living. Nice work if you can get it, certainly. But last Monday, for example, the Grand Viz attended two movie screenings (Meet Dave and Savage Grace), read a goodly portion of Benjamin Black’s new novella THE LEMUR, and saw Tom Murphy’s play The Sanctuary Lamp at the Samuel Beckett Centre in Trinity College.
  The movies, for very different reasons, were both poor; THE LEMUR is terrific fun; and the current production of The Sanctuary Lamp, which the Grand Viz had seen years ago, is excellent.
  The rest of the week was a little quieter from a story point of view, although it still involved watching the movies Baby Mama, City of Men and Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging (!), finishing off Fritjof Capra’s THE TAO OF PHYSICS, and reading Liam O’Flaherty’s THE ASSASSIN.
  All of which is wonderful, as the Grand Viz tends to spend most of his week steeped in story, absorbing almost by osmosis the hows and whys of the way others craft narrative, learning from their mistakes, taking note of where they got it right. It seems churlish to complain, especially as there’s a pleasing diversity in terms of story and discipline, and it all generates income for the ever-pressing ‘baby needs new shoes’ fund.
  But is there a danger of saturation? Is there a part of the brain that requires stories in order to be satisfied, and if fully sated, won’t need to create any stories of its own? Is there a danger of becoming imaginatively ham-strung, in the sense that you can begin to second-, third- and fourth-guess yourself, dismissing embryonic ideas as ‘already done’, or not potent enough to rise above the mass of stories clamouring for the public’s attention? And where, once you’ve established that the story you have in mind is fresh, unique and worth another person’s precious time, does the time come from, and enough blank mind-space, to put it all down on paper?
  And all this, of course, is susceptible to the Grand Viz’s sneaking suspicion that no story he could possibly contrive could compete with the interest he has in the narrative of his real life, particularly that of the most recent addition to his family, the endlessly fascinating Princess Lilyput (right).
  The GV does have stories he wants to write and / or redraft, although whether he needs to write them remains to be seen. Matters aren’t helped when he steps out of his reading-for-review routine, as he did last night, and embarks on one of his most self-indulgent pleasures, that of reading a master for the sheer enjoyment of it, in this case Lawrence Durrell’s MONSIEUR, the first of the Avignon ‘quincunx’. It’s at times like these that the Grand Viz begins to wonder if there’s any point in writing anything that doesn’t at least aspire to Durrell’s (for example) quality of writing and scale of ambition. With time so precious – his own time, and everyone else’s – and vast swathes of popular culture engaged in a dizzyingly fast race to the bottom, has the Grand Viz – or anyone else, for that matter – the right to write anything that isn’t, in a word, mind-blowing?
  Of the 41 books the Grand Viz has read so far this year, Cormac McCarthy, John McFetridge, Flann O’Brien, Salman Rushdie, Elmore Leonard, Adrian McKinty and Kurt Vonnegut excited him to the point where he resolved – each time – to abandon reviewing / blogging / his wife (if not his child) in order to get down and dirty with the blank page. Each time, happily enough for his wife, he resisted the temptation. Because he’s saturated, soma-like, with story? Because he simply doesn’t have the time? Or because he’s becoming acutely aware that he’s simply not good enough, and very probably never will be, to match and perhaps even better the stories he most likes to read?
  Questions, questions … Although, the Big Question is, given the outrageously poor time-to-benefit ratio involved in writing novels, at least at the Grand Viz’s level, particularly when said time could be much more profitably spent elsewhere – changing nappies, for example – why bother?
  This month there’s a final edit on the sequel to THE BIG O to polish off, which should be a hugely enjoyable experience, but once that’s out of the way, answers will have to be delivered. One thing is for sure – something’s gotta give, folks, and it won’t be Mrs Viz and Princess Lilyput. Stay tuned …

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE by Salman Rushdie

The early reviews of THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE have suggested, with no little glee, that Salman Rushdie’s latest novel is the worst he has ever written. This, of course, is akin to saying that Diana’s Temple at Ephesus was the least of the Seven Wonders of the World. THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE is a tour-de-force in storytelling, and if there is a more enjoyable novel published this year, then it will have been a very good year indeed.
  Niccolo Vespucci, aka Mogor dell’Amore and sundry other aliases, arrives at the court of the Akbar the Great, ‘the Great Great One’, descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane and emperor of the Mughal empire that encompasses vast swathes of 15th century India. Vespucci, a Florentine, has a story to tell that only the emperor can hear, as it concerns the fate of his relative, the Princess Angelica of legendary beauty, and the adventures that befell her when she abandoned the subcontinent for the western world of the Near East and Europe, all for the love of the indomitable warrior Argalia. And so begins a series of inter-linked narratives that trace the histories of the Mughal court, the political and religious intrigues of the Italian – and particularly the Florentine – renaissance, and all historical, geographical and quasi-mythical points in between.
  Rushdie includes a six-page bibliography, citing a host of historical references he consulted in creating his story, but this novel is the antithesis of the conventional historical tome. It is, first and foremost, an exercise in imagination, an artful and irrepressibly playful cornucopia of tales, myths, digressions and narrative non sequiturs. The sheer delight Rushdie takes in spinning yarns provides the subtext to every page:

“In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life.”

  Rushdie has always been fascinated by the notion of migration and cross-cultural pollination, and here he blends the tales of the Arabian Nights (a sultan’s palace has 1,001 gardeners), Marco Polo’s travels, the fabulous constructions of Italo Calvino’s INVISIBLE CITIES and Machiavelli’s THE PRINCE (Machiavelli being one of the historical figures who makes a fleeting appearance). Even the peripheries of the story teem with vibrant, larger-than-life characters straight from myth: Venetian buccaneer-princes; perfidious Turks; Jodha, the imaginary queen dreamed into life by the Emperor Akbar; a quartet of warriors akin to the Three Musketeers; artists who paint themselves into their canvases and disappear. The prose, as befits a post-modern fairytale, is simple and direct: “His hair was long and black as evil and his lips were full and red as blood …” […] “When life got too complicated for the men of the Mughal court they turned to the old women for answers.”
  It’s a sumptuous read, fabulous in both senses of the word, with Rushdie tossing off mini-biographies that most other writers would be happy to write an entire novel around. Embracing mythology and history, legend and fact, fictional characters and historical figures, magic, illusion and self-delusion, the novel fully deserves the accolade of tapestry, so finely woven and dazzling are its constituent parts. The prose, of course, is beautifully detailed, but Rushdie leavens the erudition with coarse dialogue that is at times hilariously profane and blasphemous.
  “Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough,” declares Niccolo Vespucci early in the tale, and while that is certainly true of poetry, it is not enough to fully satisfy in a novel. THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE is a page-turner, a deliciously light and flowing read, but it lacks the profundity of MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN (the ‘Booker’s Booker) or SHALIMAR THE CLOWN, instead substituting playful craft for heft and depth. Perhaps the issue is preconceived notions, or that Rushdie’s every novel arrives with increasingly weighty expectations. Either way, by the time the final page turns, there is a faint sense of disappointment, of dissipation and evaporation, although that might simply be an echo of the feeling that comes with awakening from a dream into the reality of day.
  Nonetheless, Salman Rushdie has long ago earned the privilege of writing the novel he wishes to write. The deceptively simple art of storytelling may have fallen out of favour among self-consciously literary writers, but Rushdie is determined that we should not forget its pure joys entirely. As the Great Great One, Akbar the Great, declares, whilst riding through his city amidst his cowed and subservient subjects: “Make as much racket as you like, people! Noise is life, and an excess of noise is a sign that life is good. There will be a time for us all to be quiet when we are safely dead.” – Declan Burke

This review was first published in the Sunday Business Post

Funky Friday’s Freaky-Deak

Quoth the Grand Vizier: It’s been a funny old week for ‘Project Grand Vizier’, people. The biggest news came from Hollywood, where the team of monkey-elves that go under the collective name ‘Gavin Burke’ had a movie script under consideration with a rather interesting producer, said script being an adaptation of THE BIG O, yours truly’s humble offering. Now, the producers said “No thanks,” and for reasons far too depressing to get into here. Nonetheless, the GV is quietly pleased that the book – published, lest we forget, on a budget of two elastic bands and a bent paper-clip – has penetrated so far so quickly, and particularly as it won’t even be published in the U.S. for another five months.
  Besides, as Mrs Vizier said after we heard the news, this is probably the best time to hear it, what with Baby Vizier still on course for his or her arrival on Friday 14. Like, who could really give a rat’s fundament about a movie with a Baby Vizier in the offing? An empire waits with bated breath, after all.
  In other THE BIG O-related news, we’ve seen some proposed covers for the U.S. release, and they’re hotter’n the barrel of a two-dollar gun. Meanwhile, Spinetingler Magazine has generously offered to host an excerpt from the novel in the near future, for which we are fawningly grateful.
  In blog-related matters, Crime Always Pays lost out in last week’s Irish Blog Awards to The Voyage in the ‘Best Specialist Blog’, and deservedly so. Sail on, you crazy diamonds. The Grand Vizier attended the awards ceremony with The Panjandrum, aka Chico ‘Chicovich’ Morientes, who was diplomacy personified in his role as Minister for Foreign Affairs & Bi-Lingual Trysts. An abstemious and polite night’s entertainment followed, although the Grand Vizier, who was incognito, was unfortunately set upon by an entire troupe of booze monkeys (headiccus rex) at the end of the evening, which precipitated a lemming-like plummet into rí rá agus ruile buile. Still, it can’t be Mills & Boon every night, right?
  On the books front, Cora Harrison’s MICHAELMAS TRIBUTE arrived this week, the novel being the sequel to MY LADY JUDGE, which was the first in a proposed series about the Brehon judge, Mara. Quoth the blurb elves:

Mara, Brehon of the Burren returns in another wonderful historical tale of murder and intrigue. The Michaelmas Fair is a time for the people of the Burren to gather together, buy and sell their wares, and give tribute to the lord of their clans. This year there’s an undercurrent of anger –the new lord of the MacNamara clan has raised the tribute and his greedy steward, Ragnall MacNamara, is not making himself a popular man. When his body is found in the churchyard, Mara has is called to investigate. Was it revenge, greed or something more sinister? Then another body is discovered, apparently a suicide. But Mara is not convinced and it’s up to her, as the judge and lawgiver, to uncover who the killer is before they strike again ...

MICHAELMAS TRIBUTE is published by Macmillan on May 2nd. As soon as we know more, you’ll be the first to hear.
  Meanwhile, on our travels around the blogosphere, we came across this interesting post at Even A Pencil Has Fear To. After being very complimentary indeed about Tana French’s IN THE WOODS, the postee considers its general reception, to wit:

“To my great surprise, most people found the novel good, but found the ending quite unsatisfying. After thinking about their comments, I decided this feeling of disappointment, of having untied threads, was largely due to the fact the novel was frequently presented as a mystery. Naturally, one of the main conventions of a mystery is that everything is tied up neatly – essentially, we know ‘who done it.’ My copy of the novel, checked out from my local library, was located in the mystery section; it even had a special mystery sticker on it. Yet, the cover jacket clearly denotes the book as a novel, which carries a different set of expectations for the reader.”

Really? What different expectations might they be? That most of the various threads will go untied?
  Anyhoo, one novel that hasn’t a hope in hell of tying up all its threads is Salman Rushdie’s THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE, which is fabulous read that blends Marco Polo’s travels, the Arabian Nights and Italo Calvino’s IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT A TRAVELLER and / or INVISIBLE CITIES. If there is a better novel published this year, the Grand Vizier will eat his turban.
  Finally, those of you who will be in Dublin tomorrow (Sunday, March 8th) and want to know how Dublin’s mean streets got so blummin’ mean, there’s a discussion on true Irish crime writing at the Rotunda as part of the Dublin Book Festival that features crime reporters-cum-authors Barry Cummins, Niamh O’Connor, Paul Williams and Eamon Dillon. Beautiful people one and all, just trying to make sense of a crazy, mixed-up world …