Books: The Colour of Blood by Declan Hughes

I read this Ed Loy crime thriller for the following reasons:
1. I recall a trendy acquaintance going to see 'Digging for Fire', a play by the author, back in the early 90's. The title was taken from a Pixies song; the aura of cool has for me clung to Hughes ever since.
2. I like Hughes' contributions on 'The View' on RTE- he usually has something more considered to say than the other panellists.
3. The Irish Times carries a round up of crime fiction almost every week and even the 'great' John Banville has stooped to get in on the action. I was curious as to what all the fuss was about.
4. At €5.95 in Tesco it really was a bargain.
In the event, while still retaining respect for Hughes, 'The Colour of Blood' is an absurd book that left me at times utterly confused as to what the hell was going on. If about half the plot twists were excised, there was more of a focus on the vaguely Ballardian protagonist, and somehow the temptation to explain everything that happens in Ireland by reference to child abuse was avoided, then perhaps this novel would be more significant.

Books: On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan

At a public interview in Vicar Street a few years ago, Ian McEwan said that he liked the idea that his fiction could be read in one, maybe two, sittings. Although the novel, Atonement, he was publicising at that time might be harder to digest so summarily, it is no doubt true that most of his other books are capable of being read in a couple of hours. McEwan's skill is to hit the ground running - the balloon falling to earth in 'Enduring Love', the kidnapping at the supermarket in 'The Child in Time' - establishing a pace to the narrative that holds the reader's interest until the close. But it's a sort of confidence trick because once you think more deeply about them, the books often seem contrived (I know it is fiction) and, well, ridiculous. 'On Chesil Beach' isn't any different: it's 166 pages long and opens with the proposition that it was impossible for young couples to discuss sex in England of the early 1960's, an idea based on the Philip Larkin poem about sex beginning sometime between the DH Lawrence trial and the first Beatles LP. From this starting point, the novel relates the disastrous wedding night of Edward and Florence, a pair of twenty-two year old university graduates who seem blessed with all the good fortune McEwan likes to give to his younger protagonists - think of the preternaturally gifted children of Henry Perowne in 'Saturday'. The problem centres on Edward's desire to fuck Florence and her wish to abstain. But what is intimated to be a sensitive rendering of the difficulties that the pre-hippy generation had with sex, is in reality a fairly crude clash between Nature and Culture. For how else could you account for Edward's unusual penchant for acts of casual violence, his love for the orgiastic sounds of Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones, his interest in the crazed millenarian cults that Norman Cohn wrote about in 'Roots of the Millennium' and his rather upfront behaviour in the cinema when he tries to put Florence's hand on his erect knob? And what of Florence? How are we to reconcile her hatred of the sexual act with an all-consuming passion for classical music and the reverence with which she treats Wigmore Hall, scene of her most heightened engagements with the great composers? She's Culture, calcifying, deadening and ultimately as Gide wrote in 'The Immoralist', a 'suffocating second skin'. When Edward provides her with an actual second skin - the drying semen he spurts over her stomach - the marriage finishes.
'On Chesil Beach' feels at times slightly deranged but McEwan, with his attention to detail, manages to keep these wilder aspects from capsizing the story at least for the duration of its reading and there are a few touching passages towards the end as an older Edward returns to his father's home but in the longer term, I can't help thinking this will be regarded as one of McEwan's more bizarre books.

Books: Utterly Monkey by Nick Laird

'Utterly Monkey' is too long by about one hundred fifty pages, reads at times like Laird took pages out of his diary and reworked them into fiction (a Nordie solicitor working in a big London firm who decides to ditch the law for literature and falls in love with a beautiful coloured girl) and is politically so unlikely - a loyalist plot to blow up the Bank of England, which in the book happens exactly almost a year before the real terrorist attacks of 7th July 2005 - that I wondered what the point of it all was. No doubt Laird can write and I retained some 'local interest' because I have met similar types in college and work but it was slight. And completely lacking in humour.

Books: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

The only part of 'The Inheritance of Loss' by Kiran Desai that I liked or is likely to remain in the memory is the section when one of the characters, Biju, works for a time in a bakery on La Salle and Broadway on the upper west side of Manhattan, a place I went to a couple of times when I visited New York for a summer ten years ago. The bakery was just about to close when I was there but Desai, whose story is set in the mid-80's, describes it accurately, even down to the detail of its speciality apricot pastries, a delicacy I recall indulging in with pleasure. Another memory of that summer was coming out of the apartment late one Saturday evening to be told by our neighbours that 'Your Queen is dead' and then hearing on the taxi radio as we headed down to the Scratcher bar in the East Village the news that Diana Spencer had been killed in Paris. She wasn't our Queen but she was dead.

Book finds in Trinity

I picked up a few curious books at the otherwise disappointing annual Trinity book sale last night. Despite being populated by the usual slightly aggressive, musty, mainly male crowd, there was no doubt a more limited range of books on offer this year than on previous occasions. Given that the organisers are dependent on donations, quality can never be guaranteed but it was hard work finding anything of great interest among the stacks of post- WWII macroeconomic textbooks or C.P. Snow novels. Pushed to categorise my buys (by of course a wholly imaginary entity - it's not a question I think I will have to field anytime in the near future), I would place 'Goodbye to the Hill' by Lee Dunne in the bawdy (this book also is a rare example of Irish erotic fiction, a genre whose history perhaps deserves more analysis if only to ask why there is so little of it), the letters of Simone Weil(above) the religious, S.J. Perleman essays the comic, 'The Man of Feelings' by Henry MacKenzie the sentimental and 'An Evil Cradling' by Brian Keenan the true.

Books: House of Meetings by Martin Amis

House of Meetings, the latest novel by Martin Amis is definitely a return to form after the depressingly shit Yellow Dog, where it felt as if the author was fulfilling a hated contractual obligation rather than actually trying to write a memorable or enjoyable book. The lazy borrowing from his own journalism - an article he wrote on the porn scene in LA re-appears barely disguised - and the work of others - a biography of 'Mad Frankie Fraser'- highlighted the lack of interest Amis appeared to have in his own novel. Plot or character are never paramount in his work because the prose is so good but Yellow Dog was characterised by an enervated style that suggested a writer who had lost any sense of purpose.
Such lassitude was not in evidence a year before when 'Koba the Dread' was published. Both a wild, short survey of the crimes of Stalin and a series of reflections on his father and friend Christopher Hitchens' supposed fellow travelling, the book had many faults - comparing the cries of one of his children to the screams heard from the Butyrki prison in Moscow was one- but there was an undeniable energy in the prose and an engagement with the subject hardly seen in 'Yellow Dog'.
It is probably not a surprise then that Amis has returned to this terrain in 'House of Meetings', which relates the story of two brothers' love for the same woman as they try to survive life in a Siberian gulag. Framed as a letter to his American step-daughter long after these events have occurred, the unnamed narrator is now an old man who is making a final journey to the region where he and his brother were incarcerated. On the way, he not only reflects about life inside but also about Russia before the Second World War and the country now as it recovers from the Beslan school massacre but faces a seeming terminal decline in its population.
John Banville has written a comprehensive review of the novel in the New York Review of Books but he does leave out discussion of what I thought was a striking deficiency and that was the recurring references to English literature that are supposed to offer insights into the Russian experience. The narrator explains this away by mentioning a relationship with an English woman that caused him to develop a pedantic anglophilia - he says at one point 'I prefer the droller cultures, and the wizened ironists, to be found on the north western fringe of the Eurasian plain'- but I kept on thinking wouldn't a Russian use Pushkin or Tolstoy rather than Marvell? Perhaps I'm being parochial but I think it suggests that Amis, not a separate fictional narrator, is telling this story. When he writes about Beslan or other contemporary atrocities, you sense the same outrage witnessed in 'Koba the Dread'. But then what saves 'House of Meetings' from being another tirade is the prose, alive again and not palely loitering.
When the aged narrator arrives in Dudinka, 'the tannoy erupts, and my hangover and I edge down the gangway to the humphing and oomphing of a military march. And that's what the port looks like - a mad brass band, with its funnels and curved spouts, its hooters and foghorns, and in the middle distance the kettle-drum of the storage vats.' Or when his brother Lev is beaten in the prison camp, he lie on bed recovering with 'two worms of bloody phlegm coiling out of his head.' Or to the Russian experience;: 'the frequency of the total. The total state - the masterpiece of misery.'
There are many more such examples of fine prose in the novel and it is these rather than the subject matter, which somehow still doesn't convince, that make House of Meetings worth reading.

Book finds at the Hodges Figges Sale

Hodges Figgis always has a deadly sale in January but so far, because am utterly skint after the excesses of Christmas and am trying to spend fuck all even to the point that I tried to haggle with a vacant checkout assistant in BT2 over the price of a pair of jeans, I have not been able to pick anything up. There is a fine selection of books on offer, putting both Easons and Waterstones( even though it is owned by the same company) to shame. Anyway I succumbed to temptation yesterday evening after a particularly bleak day and bought Journey to the Orient by Gerard de Nerval and Les Onze Mille Verges by Guillaume Apollinaire. The latter title is untranslatable because 'verges' refers both to the male member and virgins. The English alternative cheerfully offered by publisher Peter Owen Modern Classics is 'The Amorous Adventures of Prince Mony Vibescu', which goes some way to catching the mood of this carry-on style pornographic romp from I would have thought the most unlikely of sources, a celebrated avant-garde poet. Written when Apollinaire was like me stony broke, the novel, if you can call it that, amounts to one improbable, comical sex scene after another as our hero, Prince Vibescu has his wicked way with the ladies of Paris while not forgetting in turn to be serviced by many of its male denizens. The repetitive task of describing shag after shag clearly got to Apollinaire because with each vignette the action becomes more fantastical, the sheer accumulation of bodies and positions a ruse to hide the mundane purpose of the exercise.
Meanwhile, de Nerval's book is about a trip he took to Cairo, Beirut and Constantinople in 1844 in search of hashish and Eastern women. Published five years later, it was only translated into English in the late 1990's but clearly pre-dates Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson similar narcotic inspired odysseys by a century. That's Apollinaire looking grumpy in the above image.

Book finds in Madrid

I did more than buy books in Madrid - it was wholly incidental to a rather enjoyable week - but the Pooter in me dictates that the purchase of these libros should be recorded. So in a cluttered second-hand bookshop in the La Latina neighbourhood, I came across three old Oxford University Press paperbacks all formerly owned by one Andres Ramiro, who bought them in 1971, probably in Lisbon. 'Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies' and 'Five Elizabeathan Tragedies' caught my eye because they contained some of the first plays I studied in the rather ambiguously titled and long since defunct 'Drama to Marlowe' course in Trinity. 'Ralph Roister Doister', 'Gammer Gurton's Needle', 'The Spanish Tragedy' and 'Arden of Faversham', which is reputed to be the first work of detective fiction in English literature, evoke a particular moment -namely the winter of 1993- even though I barely understood them at the time and would no doubt struggle with them again now. They do furnish a room though. As will 'The Italian' by Gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe, picture above, whose 'Romance of the Forest' was featured in a course I studied on literary responses to the French Revolution.

Book finds on Wicklow Street

I picked up three deadly second-hand books at the weekend in the Secret Book and Record Store on Wicklow Street. First up was a hardback copy of the second volume of Richard J. Evan's history of the Third Reich, which he is writing as a consequence of his involvement with the Deborah Lipstadt and David Irving libel trial, an experience he describes in Telling Lies about Hitler. I read the first installment last year and look forward to getting stuck into this one even though it weighs in at over seven hundred pages. Next was 'English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit 1850-1980' by Martin J. Wiener, which argues the disdain writers displayed for commerce in the period mentioned stymied British economic development. Written in the early 80's and clearly influenced by Thatcherism, it is something of a historical curiosity. Finally 'Aspects of the Novel' by EM Forster (pictured above), a collection of lectures the author gave in Cambridge in the late 1920's. The book was the subject of one of the first lectures I went to in Trinity, in which Forster's famous definition of the form as 'a prose fiction of a certain length' was held up as proof that trying to define a 'novel' is a fruitless task. I notice today the London Independent use a quote from the book as its thought for the day: "History develops, art stands still".