Reading Ireland Month

“Admit that you deserve forgiveness.” (Niamh Mulvey, The Amendments)

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This is my final post for Reading Ireland Month, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books. I’ve really enjoyed my reading for the event with so many strong, memorable voices, and this choice was no exception.

I heard about The Amendments by Niamh Mulvey (2024) through Susan’s review.  It was so appealing I decided it would be my indie bookshop purchase of the month (I need to stop saying I have a resolution to buy one book a month from an indie bookshop or publisher, because it’s never just one 😀 ) and it was a great choice.

There are three main timelines throughout the novel. In London, 2018 Nell’s partner Adrienne is pregnant with their first child and Nell is spiralling with anxiety and ambivalence.

“Adrienne, unfortunately, was not just an object, not just a saviour, not just a happy ending. Adrienne, it turned out, was a person with her own dreams and needs and desires. And those were: more life, more love, which was to say, which is to say – a baby.”

In Ireland, 1982 Nell’s mother Dolores has left home and moved to Dublin, where she becomes involved in a feminist group campaigning for pro-choice reproduction rights (one of the amendments of the title, the other taking place in 2018).

“‘The biggest problem in this country is that people are so scared of asking questions. I don’t know why we’re all so afraid of each other.’

Mary laughed suddenly as if she had only just realised this. She looked at Dolores, as if they were both sharing in this joke, this realisation, together, and Dolores laughed too, though she was uncertain, she felt there was so much she did not yet see.”

In Ireland 2001, studious Nell is struggling with her sexuality and has joined an all-female religious organisation hoping for answers:

“She returned to school that September feeling as if the things she used to count on were all changing in ways she did not at all approve of and this disapproval extended to include her own feelings.”

It is the escalation of events at this time which drive the novel. Nell is so confused, so full of feelings she doesn’t know what to do with, and this builds to a tragedy truly awful and very believable.

Loving Adrienne and recognising that her unresolved feelings from this time threaten her present, Nell agrees to couples therapy. But in order to be entirely honest with both herself and Adrienne, Nell needs to return home to Dolores.

Dolores has deep regrets from her past too, as well as her contemporary worries about Nell. What Mulvey demonstrates so clearly is how much can go unsaid even in relationships grounded in a deep love, and how damaging this can be.

“Dolores wakes up every day of her life with a feeling of worry around Nell, the pain is like a muscle that aches with overuse.”

In exploring the characters’ past and moving them towards a more hopeful future, Mulvey juggles the timelines and the themes with great subtlety. Multiple timelines are always tricky but these were finely balanced throughout and each enhanced the understanding of the other.

The healing that occurs felt hopeful without being sentimental. Nell achieves self-acceptance, if not quite self-forgiveness; resolution if not redemption.

I thought The Amendments was hugely accomplished and very readable. The various female characters were all well-realised and the plotting tight. Mulvey treats her characters with such humane compassion and I was rooting for them to be able to do the same.

“She looks at herself in the mirror and she reflects that all living things want to survive. And it is such a relief to include herself in that humble category of all living things.”

To end, an interesting interview with the author expanding on the societal context of The Amendments:

“People were capable of being many things at once.” (Sarah Gilmartin, Service)

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I was a bit wary approaching Service by Sarah Gilmartin (2023) as I’d not long finished an issue-driven novel which I thought never quite managed to create characters who existed believably beyond the issue itself. Service has been described as a #MeToo novel, looking as it does at sexual assault and the structures that enable predators to not only get away with it, but thrive. However, when I saw it in my much-beloved charity bookshop during Cathy’s Reading Ireland Month it seemed perfect timing, and I also remembered that Susan had rated it.

The story is told from the point of view of three characters in alternating chapters.

Hannah, now in her thirties and selling her home as she and her husband divorce, looking back on time when she was a student and a waitress at T, a swanky restaurant reaping the rewards of boomtime Dublin;

“And there was Daniel, of course, we all loved Daniel. The skill, the swagger, the hair, even the naff red bandana that he sometimes wore during prep. We were in awe of him, of the fact that he didn’t seem to care about anything except the food. Serious cooking and good times, that was the dream we sold at T, over and over again.”

Daniel, the celebrity chef who oversaw T, now accused on Facebook of rape by an employee and facing criminal trial;

“Tomorrow the farce begins in earnest. Tomorrow I’ll see that ungrateful wench in person for the first time since she sat at her computer and pressed destroy.”

And his wife Julie, there throughout it all and trying to keep a home running for their teenage sons.

“I knew that you were not the kind of man who would come in the door of an evening and ask about your family. You were too full of your own stories, your voice set to megaphone inside your head, while the rest of us whispered asides. I knew this and I still said yes.”

This isn’t a he said/she said thriller – the way the stories and voices are presented it’s clear that Daniel did it. I thought this was a clever decision, as it frees Gilmartin instead to really focus on the characters’ lives within the various systems of enablement surrounding Daniel. He doesn’t see himself as a predator: why would he, when he is venerated – his toxic, controlling behaviour lauded?

“In that long, hot room that was fuelled by aggression and banter and occasional lines of speed, everything was sexualized.”

Daniel’s narrative is unreliable of course, and Gilmartin cleverly presents it in a way that the reader isn’t sure if he believes it himself. Is he consciously lying, or does he not recognise his actions as rape? He’s deluded enough to think all women want him really, and whether they say ‘no’ to him is a matter of indifference – like everything else they say. In a misogynistic culture where women are commodified and discardable the minute they reach thirty, their careers in front-of-house dependent not on skills or talent but on the approval of the straight-male gaze, where his own wife refers to ‘sluts’, he probably sees what he does as his entitlement.

I’ve seen some readers saying they vacillated with regard to the characters, but this wasn’t my experience with Hannah or Daniel. Where I did change somewhat was with Julie. I found her internalised misogyny infuriating, along with her astounding naivete that somehow a man who has plenty of women willing to sleep with him would therefore not assault anyone.

“How did I not know my husband was a predator? Somehow, I have no answer, beyond some ferocious thought, that all these years have meant nothing, marriage to mirage.”

“How do you weigh up the infinite exhibits of a decades-long marriage?”

But ultimately I saw her as a victim in the situation too, and it is Julie who pinpoints a fundamental societal attitude, so long ingrained, which silences women:

“I always had that ability, learned at such a young age – not to make a scene, not to dramatise, not to look for attention. Only the wrong kind of girls looked for attention.”

There is real tension in Hannah’s narrative as you know what is going to happen while desperately wishing it wouldn’t, and I thought the scene was handled sensitively and entirely non-gratuitously. The immediate fallout and enduring trauma are both believably portrayed.

When I initially read Service, I wondered if a limitation was the voices not being overly distinct from one another, but now, a few days on, I find Daniel’s voice has really stayed with me, the insidious toad (except I quite like toads). So unfortunately through not being able to shake him off I’ve realised my mini-criticism was mistaken!

The ending offered some hope while not being entirely unrealistic which I appreciated, not needing unrelenting bleak narratives right now. In an Author’s Note, Gilmartin explains that the barriers in the current legal system mean that the trial in the book would be unlikely to even occur in real life.

“A girl like you.

It could be said in many different ways.”

“We cannot know from whose mouths the echoes of our lives will chime.” (Doireann Ní Ghríofa, A Ghost in the Throat)

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I felt quite intimidated approaching A Ghost in the Throat by Doireann Ní Ghríofa (2020) for Cathy’s Reading Ireland Month. A piece of auto-fiction woven around a 18th century Irish-language lament, it sounded quite a challenge. Well, I picked it up and absolutely whizzed through it, finding it so compelling and intensely readable.

“When we first met, I was a child, and she had been dead for centuries.”

At the start of the book, Doireann Ní Ghríofa has three small children and is in the relentless, hazy, exhausting world of trying to keep a home for her family. She captures brilliantly the physical and emotional demands – particularly on women and on women’s bodies – of parenting. I’ve never had children and her visceral (but not shocking or gratuitous) portrait felt very real and immersive.

She loves motherhood and she finds pleasures in the domestic day to day, despite the pressures and demands of both:

“I coax many small joys from my world: clean sheets snapping on the line, laughing myself breathless in the arms of my husband, a garden slide bought for a song from the classifieds, a picnic on the beach, three small heads of hair washed to a shine, shopping list after  completed shopping list – tick tick tick – all my miniscule victories.”

But we are in no doubt that Ní Ghríofa’s life is not easy. She needs support, female support, and she finds it with eighteenth-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill and her lament for husband – Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire (The Keen for Art Ó Laoghaire) – who was killed by the British.

As Doireann Ní Ghríofa reads and re-reads the poem she has loved since childhood, she despairs at the limited translations and lack of information about the author:

“How swiftly the academic gaze places her in a masculine shadow.”

As an Irish-language poet herself, Ní Ghríofa has translated her own poems and so she begins to translate the lament. It becomes something of an obsession, or at least a preoccupation, haunting her sleep-deprived life:

“between the twin forces of milk and text, weeks that soon pour into months, and then into years.”

She also juggles the demands of her own writing:

“I watched poems hurrying towards me through the dark. The city had lit something in me, something that pulsed, vulnerable as a fontanelle, something that trembled, as I did, between bliss and exhaustion.”

Ní Ghríofa brilliantly weaves in aspects of the lament alongside her own life. We learn of the difficulties she experienced in the past, as well as the challenges of her life now. There is a repeated refrain “this is a female text” as she explores how women’s lives have been obscured and disregarded throughout the centuries, and particularly women’s narratives:

“literature composed by women was not stored in books but in female bodies, living repositories of poetry and song.”

One of my favourite examples was this one:

“A family calendar scrawled with biro and pencil marks, each in the same hand – this is a female text.”

Ní Ghríofa writes about her family while keeping them obscured, respecting their privacy. This echoes her attempts to piece together Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill’s life, existing as it did in spaces between the records of the men in her family. Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill remains obscure and Ní Ghríofa has to use her imagination to fill in the considerable gaps.

Another echo is that Ní Ghríofa clearly adores her husband and children, and at one point rues the fact that she can’t write poetry for her husband the way Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill does for hers. But actually I thought these very simply expressed sentences were a lovely tribute to him:

“With him, at last, I began to laugh. He entered my life with neither fanfare nor glamour. There was no elopement. He simply fell into step by my side, with his easy smile, his old t-shirts, his worn jeans, and his steady footfall.”

Although time is never specified, there is a sense of Ní Ghríofa’s family growing older and her work on the translation nearing an end, despite the frustrations:

“Such dedication, if nothing else, has permitted me to grow in slow intimacy with the poet herself, to discover the particular swerve of her thoughts and the pulse of her language.”

The translation is given at the end of the book.

I thought A Ghost in the Throat was incredibly accomplished. It manages to simultaneously convey the horrors witnessed by Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill for English-speaking readers; the challenges of twenty-first century motherhood and female artistry; and the broader themes of women’s voices, lives and creativity being marginalised, with such a light touch. The writing is poetic but never overwritten and Ní Ghríofa’s voice so warm, honest and engaging.

“I have held her and held her, only to find that she holds me too, close as ink on paper and steady as a pulse.”

To end, the author reading from her work while sat in her car:

“Waiting for something to happen in the deathly, unhappy silence.” (Edna O’Brien, The Country Girls)

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This is the first of what I hope will be a few posts for Cathy’s annual Reading Ireland Month aka The Begorrathon.

I really enjoyed August is a Wicked Month by Edna O’Brien when I read it a few years ago, and resolved to read The Country Girls trilogy. Admittedly it’s taken me a while but I have finally picked up the first in the trilogy, and O’Brien’s debut novel, The Country Girls (1960). Cathy and Kim are also hosting A Year with Edna O’Brien throughout 2025 so I’m joining in with that too 🙂

The girls of the title are Cait and Baba, growing up in 1950s rural Ireland, and the tale is told by Cait. Once again, I found O’Brien so intensely readable. She is great at small details that illuminate so much, without overwriting:

“Slowly I slid onto the floor and the linoleum was cold on the soles of my feet. My toes curled up instinctively. I owned slippers but Mama made me save them for when I was visiting my aunts and cousins; and we had rugs but they were rolled up and kept in drawers until visitors came in the summer-time from Dublin.”

Cait lives with her parents and man-of-all-work Hickey, on their farm which is hanging on by a thread, not helped by her father going on frequent alcohol benders. Her mother is loving but they all live in fear of her father’s return and the violence he brings.

“Her right shoulder sloped more than her left from carrying buckets. She was dragged down from heavy work, working to keep the place going, and at night-time making lampshades and fire-screens to make the house prettier.”

Baba’s family is better off financially, but they have their own sadnesses including her mother also self-medicating with alcohol. Baba can be a spiteful bully, but Cait experiences a growing awareness of how much Baba needs her too.

“Coy, pretty, malicious Baba was my friend and the person whom I feared most after my father.”

Village life is not idyllic in O’Brien’s world. There is a lot of poverty, there is violence, deep unhappiness and gossip. The girls are subject to the sexual attentions of much older men, even as they are at school.

Cait is academic and wins a scholarship to a convent school. Baba’s family pay for her to have a place too, and so the girls leave their village for the first time.

Baba despises the school with her whole being:

“Jesus, tis hell. I won’t stick it for a week. I’ll drink Lysol or any damn thing to get out of here. I’d rather be a Protestant.”

O’Brien brilliantly creates the cold, the disgusting food, the boredom and the oppressive rules laid down by the nuns.

“The whole dormitory was crying. You could hear the sobbing and choking under the covers. Smothered crying.

The head of my bed backed onto the head of another girl’s bed; and in the dark a hand came through the rungs and put a bun on my pillow.”

Eventually Baba engineers a way for her and Cait to leave, which to my twenty-first century eyes was very funny, but perhaps contributed to the banning of the book in Ireland and the burning of it by a priest when it was first published.

So in disgrace, the girls make their way to Dublin and all the seductions of city life, which Baba in particular is keen to embrace.

“Forever more I would be restless for crowds and lights and noise.”

The scandal The Country Girls created in 1960 seems very dated now. The only part I found concerning was a relationship that Cait begins with Mr Gentleman, a married man much older than she is, when she is still at school. This continues throughout the novel; it remains unconsummated but is wholly inappropriate and what we would now call grooming.

Apparently O’Brien wrote this in three weeks which is just extraordinary. Her evocations of environment and people, her ear for dialogue and her fluidity of style are all so well observed.

The novel ends on an anti-climax which initially I found an odd decision, but reflecting on it I think it is one of its strengths. It emphasises O’Brien’s choice to write about the realities of life for young women at that time, the life she knew. It insists on its truth, more than overly dramatic scenes, to engage the reader.

I’m looking forward to catching up with Cait and Baba in The Lonely Girl – hopefully it won’t take me another two years!

“I was not sorry to be leaving the old village. It was dead and tired and old and crumbling and falling down. The shops needed paint and there seemed to be fewer geraniums in the upstairs windows than there had been when I was a child.”

To end, a great interview with the author from the time of her memoir being published. She discusses The Country Girls around 11 minutes in:

“Ireland is a great country to die or be married in.” (Elizabeth Bowen)

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Firstly, in breaking news (in the sense that it’s not news and of zero interest or urgency) I’ve finally joined the cool kids over at twitter so please validate my fragile sense of self and join me @madame_bibi. More importantly, I’ve tried to follow as many of my bloggy friends as possible but if I’ve missed you please let me know & I will rectify the situation forthwith 🙂

On with the post! This is my second contribution to Reading Ireland 2017 aka the Begorrathon, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Niall at Raging Fluff. I’m hoping to just get this posted in time, as I was sick for a week and while this meant I could finally watch the entire series of Taboo that I had stacked up, I was incapable of reading the printed word  (my capacity for dribbling over Tom Hardy remained unaffected).  If I’m too late, I hereby proclaim that there are at least 32 days in March 😉

So, its Elizabeth Bowen all round as I look at two of her novels, simply because I was lucky enough to find these lovely hardbacks in my favourite charity bookshop a wee while ago:

Firstly, The Death of the Heart (1938), which I pounced on as soon as I saw it, remembering Jacqui’s wonderful review.  Portia, a sixteen year old orphan, moves to London following a transitory life in hotels with her parents, to live with her half-brother and his wife who she barely knows. Wiki quotes Bowen as describing the novel thusly:

“a novel which reflects the time , the pre-war time with its high tension, its increasing anxieties, and this great stress on individualism. People were so conscious of themselves, and of each other, and of their personal relationships because they thought that everything of that time might soon end.”

Certainly the individuals in the novel are self-conscious, but they’re not really aware of one another. Poor Portia finds herself part of a society of selfish individuals who don’t know what they want and so end up tormenting each other while they try and work it out. Portia’s step-mother Anna is unhappy, as is her brother, but neither are sure it is the marriage to one another that is making them miserable. A rejected lover of Anna’s, Eddie, seduces Portia to alleviate his boredom, not realising that to do so to a naïve and loving 16 year old is cruel and damaging. There is an all-round lack of intimacy:

“But something that should have been going on had not gone on: something had not happened. They had sat round a painted, not a burning, fire, at which you tried in vain to warm your hands.”

Portia is temporarily packed off to the seaside to stay with a family that the London set look down as being a bit common, but they are at least lively:

“Mrs Heccomb took off her hat for tea and Portia saw that her hair, like part of an artichoke, seemed to have an upgrowing tendency…This, for some reason, added to Mrs Heccomb’s expression of surprise.”

However, while the Heccombs see Eddie for the cad and bounder he is, they are neither able to convey this adequately to Portia, nor is she willing to listen.  What emerges as Portia tries to find her place in the world and warm relationships within it, is how deeply inadequate human beings can be at communicating with one another. Bowen is interested in the fantasies that are constructed in lieu of real understanding and how these can be sustaining but ultimately empty.

“Not for nothing do we invest so much of ourselves in other people’s lives – or even in momentary pictures of people we do not know. It cuts both ways: the happy group inside the lighted window, the figure in the long grass in the orchard seen from the train stay and support us in our dark hours.”

The novel lacks any sentimentality and is a sharply observed portrait of interwar society.  What stops it from being depressing is Bowen’s glorious prose, her dry sense of humour (I don’t think we are supposed to take the characters as seriously as they take themselves) and the sense that love – imperfect and in many different guises – is there to be found, sometimes in the oddest of places.

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Apparently hair like an artichoke was an actual thing, although I think Bowen had something more flamboyant in mind…

Image from here

Secondly, A World of Love (1955), which I thought absolutely stunning. Bowen has matured between these two novels and is telling less, showing more, to once again explore the complexities of human relationships with great subtlety. Lilia owns Montefort, a country house in County Cork, and her dead cousin Guy’s fiancé Antonia, lives there with her husband Fred, an illegitimate member of the family, who runs the estate so they live rent-free.

“Of this arrangement it had not yet been decided whether it worked or did not work, still less if it equitable or, if not so, at whose expense.”

Over the course of a few claustrophobically hot days in summer, Antonia and Fred’s daughter, Jane, finds love letters written by Guy to an unnamed woman which is assumed to be Antonia. This will act as a catalyst to bring the unspoken tensions between the adults into sharp relief:

“Almost no experience, other than Guy and their own dissonance, could they be said to have had in common; and yet it was what they had had in common which riveted them. For worse or better, they were in each other’s hands. Such a relationship is lifelong.”

Meanwhile, Jane is on the edge of burgeoning adulthood:

 “Not a straw stirred, or was there to stir, in the kennel; and above her something other than clouds was missing from the uninhabited sky.  Nothing was to be known. One was on the verge, however, possibly, of more.”

I really adored this novel. Again, it was sharply observed, psychologically astute, and with a wonderful undercurrent of dry humour. Bowen minutely dissects human relationships and exposes all their contradictions and conflict, but also how compromise and understanding can be reached. A World of Love felt tighter than The Death of the Heart, the containment of a few days in pretty much one place effectively conveying the claustrophobia that exists for the characters in their various ways, even as they roam a huge estate. Yet Bowen is almost baroque at times, her descriptions rich and layered and filled with meaning:

“No part of the night was not breathless breathing, no part of the quickened stillness not running feet. A call or calling, now nearby, now from behind the skyline, was unlocatable as a corncrakes in the uncut grass. Arising this was, on the part of the two who like hundreds, seemed to be teeming over the land, carrying all before them. The night, ridden by pure excitement, was seized by hope. .. All they had ever touched still now physically held its charge – everything that had been stepped on, scaled up, crept under, brushed against or leaped from now gave out, touched by so much as air, a tingling continuous sweet shock, which the air suffered as though it were half laughing, as was Antonia.”

I realise I may have lost some of you there. But if you don’t mind that sort of prose at times, especially when it’s surrounded by an astute unblinking eye for human foibles and a compassion for our frailties, please do given Bowen a try!

So that’s the end of a very hurriedly written post, please excuse all typos and general incoherence! Now to end with an Irish musician and a blatant grovel to my mother (as he is one of her favourites and I failed on Mother’s Day last weekend):

“If you have the words, there’s always a chance that you’ll find the way.” (Seamus Heaney)

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This is a contribution to Reading Ireland 2017 aka the Begorrathon, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books and Niall at Raging Fluff – do join in!

I’ve decided to make debut novels featuring a crime the theme of the post (the first choice isn’t quite a crime novel, hence that rather cumbersome explanation). It was with regret that I decided the following quote – so thematically apt – was too long to pick as a title:

“There are three states of legality in Irish law. There is all this stuff here under “That’s grand”; then it moves into “Ah, now, don’t push it”; and finally to “Right! You’re taking the piss.” And that’s where the police sweep in.” (Dara O’Briain)

Firstly, The Glorious Heresies, Lisa McInerney’s debut novel which won the Bailey’s Prize in 2016 (the 2017 longlist was announced yesterday). Set in Cork, it tells the story of Robbie O’Donvan’s death – an almost homeless drug addict who theoretically could disappear with few people noticing – and the fractures that radiate out across the city from this one act.

McInerney is interested in the members of society who are simultaneously vilified and ignored. So the people affected by Robbie’s death include a teenage drug dealer, his alcoholic father, their paedophile neighbour, Robbie’s prostitute girlfriend. If this sounds depressing, it really isn’t due to McInerney’s comic voice and eye for beauty where there should be none.

“The rain cleared off in the evening, Tony walked down to the off-licence and stood outside it like a child with tuppence to his name outside the toy shop. If he pressed his nose to the glass, he may well have been able to smell it. The heady warmth of the thought seeped through his hell and into his bones and lifted his onto his toes and rose off him like holy water off the devil’s shoulders.”

She doesn’t shy away from the reality of the situation, but presents it in a complex way, so Tony’s alcoholism is seen through his own eyes as self-medication for the pressures he is under, and we also shown the catastrophic impact this has on his son, Ryan. All the people in the novel are self-aware enough to know the damage they are doing to themselves and others but they are powerless to stop it:

“How could you be two people in five years? How could you undergo such a metamorphosis – whore to saint – and paint the slattern back over the scar tissue only a few short years later?”

McInerney manages to covey insight without ever sitting in judgement on her characters. This moment stood out for me as the tragedy of people who are in so much pain, yet unable to articulate to themselves or others:

“And for the beat before he wordlessly left her she grasped something of what he was trying to say, And that it might have been nice to have someone like him, someone who got it, someone who might have stood by her and bawled her out of it when she stepped out of line.”

The city of Cork is an additional, pervasive character in the novel, surrounding, influencing and directing all the other characters:

“Jimmy had watched the city long enough to know that it would right itself, sooner or later, and that the silence following Robbie O’Donovan’s death was just a long, caught breath”

“The city runs on macro, but what’s that, except the breathing, beating, swallowing, sweating agonies and ecstasies of a hundred thousand little lives?”

I haven’t mentioned much plot-wise regarding The Glorious Heresies, because to me this was the least interesting part of the novel (but still excellent).  How Robbie O’Donovan’s death is dealt with in practical terms is the bare bones of what McInerney is writing about. As a series of characters studies of people and their city, The Glorious Heresies is warm, affectionate, brutal, bleak and incisive.

Secondly, In the Woods by Tana French (2007), the first of her Dublin Murder Squad series, focussing on detectives Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox as they investigate the murder of 12 year old Katy Devlin. I’m not a great one for crime novels but I was persuaded by Lady Fancifull to give French a try. I’m glad I did, but first I had to make it through an appallingly overwritten prologue; I have no idea what French’s editors were thinking, letting her start with a passage which includes a description of a forest thus:

“It’s silence is a pointillist conspiracy of a million tiny noises”

Having waded through such pretentious nonsense, I was rewarded with an accomplished debut crime novel. Rob Ryan is asked to investigate the murder of a child in his home town just outside Dublin, his superiors unaware that when he was twelve, he was found in the same woods as the victim, bloodied and amnesiac, with his two best friends lost forever. If this sounds a bit clichéd, French has fun with it:

“And I suppose, if I’m being honest, it appealed to both my ego and to my sense of the picturesque, the idea of carrying this strange charged secret through the case unsuspected. I suppose it felt, at the time, like the kind of thing that enigmatic Central Casting maverick would have done.”

Maverick coppery 101

As Rob and his partner Cassie investigate Katy’s murder, they discover family secrets and political conspiracies, but did these lead to the death of a twelve year old girl, excited to be going to ballet school?

“All these private, parallel dimensions, underlying such an innocuous little estate; all these self-contained worlds layered onto the same space. I thought of the dark strata of archaeology underfoot; of the fox outside my window, calling out to a city that barely overlapped with mine.”

In the Woods was a good read and filled with believable characters, which bodes well for the rest of the Dublin Murder Squad novels as French focusses on a different person each time. Some quibbles: it was too long and (I feel like I say this all the time) could have done with a heavier-handed edit. The voice of Rob Ryan sometimes felt distinctly feminine but at least he wasn’t an alpha-male detective type. This aside, French’s talent is evident and I’m sure she’s gone from strength to strength in her subsequent novels.

To end, the cop with the least convincing Irish accent of all time, but the performance still won an Oscar, because it’s Lord High Commander Sir Sean Connery 😀

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACAdVvO1KMw

 

“Students, eh? Love ’em or hate ’em, you can’t hit them with a shovel!” (Terry Pratchett, Making Money)

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Despite being woefully slow in my blogging, I’ve managed a second post for Reading Ireland Month hosted by Cathy at 746 books and Niall at Raging Fluff. Sláinte!

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I’ve picked two novels linked by undergraduate protagonists – one a classic of Irish literature which is on Cathy’s 100 Irish Novels list, the other a little-known first novel by an author who has gone on to huge success.

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Ah, those heady student days…

Image from here

Firstly, the classic At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O’Brien (1939). The unnamed narrator is in many ways a typical student:

“Whether in or out, I always kept the door of my bedroom locked. This made my movements a matter of some secrecy and enabled me to spend an inclement day in bed without disturbing my uncle’s assumption that I had gone to the College to attend to my studies.  A contemplative life has always been suitable to my disposition.”

His dissolution is perhaps a bit more extreme than most students however:

“It was in the New Year, in February, I think, that I discovered my person was verminous.”

Yuck. Gradually clues emerge that this student may be more literate than he first appears, such as how he describes his friend offering to buy him a drink:

“I rejoined that if his finances warranted such generosity, I would raise no objection, but that I (for my part) was no Rockefeller, thus utilising a figure of speech to convey the poverty of my circumstances.

Name of figure of speech: Synedoche (or Autonomasia)

The three of us walked slowly down to Grogan’s…”

The splintering of the narrative with the definition also hints at what is to come, as soon the story begins to be invaded by other stories the student is writing: about a devil Pooka and a fairy in his pocket; about Furriskey, born a fully grown man; a Western; versions of Irish folklore.  All the narratives start to reflect and echo each other, eventually they overlap and boundaries break down.  In other words, this is classic modernist brilliance, layering up myth and meta-narratives to create something astonishing. If you want to read Ulysses but you’re not sure you’re up to the task, At Swim-Two-Birds could be a good gateway novel 🙂 As Dylan Thomas said:

“This is just the book to give your sister if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl.”

In other words, if she’s a student.

Secondly, Stir Fry by Emma Donoghue (1994), who would go on to have enormous success with Room sixteen years later. This is the sort of first novel that doesn’t seem to be published as much now – perfectly decent efforts of thinly disguised biography whereby an author gets to grip with their craft. I’ve no actual facts to back up my theory, but it seems that while more and more books are published, first novels now have to have a huge wow factor – not necessarily a bad thing, but there’s an awful lot of truly dreadful writing being published because it will make money, while these better written but modest efforts flounder. I hope potentially good novelists are not being put off: hang in there budding writers!

Anyway, back to Stir Fry. Maria is seventeen and leaves her rural home to start university in Dublin.

“Dirty blue clouds were scudding over slate roofs. A good cold smell in the air and the whiff of turf smoke as she turned the corner made her think of home. The dusk lasted much longer in the country; nothing to get in the way she supposed. In Dublin there was only half an hour of grey, then the street lamps blinked on and all the shoppers hustled home in the dark.”

She is remarkably naïve, even given her young age, and takes forever to realise that her two flatmates are in a same-sex relationship:

“Now suddenly here were two friends of hers kissing on the table she ate at every night. Rapt faces and library books and garlic, how bizarre.”

She considers moving out, which may seem ridiculous, but Maria’s world sees discussions like this occur in all earnestness:

“‘Look, they’re both very nice. And they wear skirts sometimes too.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Yvonne wisely, ‘but they’d have to, wouldn’t they, as cover?’”

What follows is a sweet story of Maria coming to realise who she is and what she wants. The characters are all very believable and they and Dublin are drawn with real affection. Stir Fry is a quick read, a bildungsroman in which nothing and everything happens. It doesn’t contain the brilliance Donoghue displayed with Room, but it still made me think it’s a pity we don’t see these types of first novels much anymore.

To end, an Irish band that first came to prominence when I was student – this song was played at many a sticky-floored student club back in my day:

“Being Irish, I always had this love of words.” (Kenneth Branagh)

/ madamebibilophile / 20 Comments

Happy St Patrick’s Day! To celebrate this day, and to participate in Reading Ireland Month hosted by Cathy at 746 books and Niall at Raging Fluff , I’ve picked one novel from my TBR mountain which was also on Cathy’s 100 Irish Novels list and a poem by one of my favourite contemporary Irish poets . This will also be one more stop on my Around the World in 80 Books Reading Challenge, hosted by Hard Book Habit.

ireland-month

Firstly, The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch which won the Booker in 1978. This was recommended to me by my sixth form English tutor, which means it’s been on my TBR for *cough* 20 years *cough*.  Oh dear. I got there eventually.  Charles Arrowby, theatre director, decides to retire to the coast:

“The sea is golden, speckled with white points of light, lapping with a sort of mechanical self-satisfaction under a pale green sky. How huge it is, how empty, this great space for which I have been longing all my life.”

Arrowby is vain, arrogant, solipsistic, self-aggrandizing… He views himself as some sort of Prospero figure:

Caspar_David_Friedrich_-_Wanderer_above_the_sea_of_fog

Image from here

But of course he isn’t a magician, he has no more power than anyone else.  The titular force of nature that surrounds him acts as a reminder of this, indifferent and formidable.

 “the sea was a glassy slightly heaving plain, moving slowly past me, and as if it were shrugging reflectively as it absent-mindedly supported its devotee”

It isn’t long before his self-induced exile starts to unravel. He starts to have hallucinations about sea monsters and within this unstable psychology is the constant background obsession with his teenage love, Hartley. By odd coincidence, she now lives in the same village with her husband, and all of Arrowby’s delusions become focused on her, as he is unable to conceive of anything that won’t fit in with his own needs:

 “I reviewed the evidence and I had very little doubt about what it pointed to. Hartley loved me and had long regretted losing me. How could she not?”

The Sea, The Sea is an extremely clever novel, carefully balancing Arrowby’s delusions on a precipice between comedy and terror:

“ ‘There’s an eternal bond between us, you know there is, it’s the clearest thing in the world, clearer than Jesus. I want you to be my wife at last, I want you to rest in me. I want to look out for you forever, until I drop dead.’

‘I wish I could drop dead.’

‘Oh shut up –‘ “

I was never sure which way it would go, how violently it would all unravel, or whether it would resolve in a subdued, sad way. Arrowby’s quiet, introspective (possible spy) cousin is the voice of reason, resolutely ignored:

“You’ve built a cage of needs and installed her in an empty space in the middle. The strong feelings are all around her – vanity, jealousy, revenge, your love for your youth – they aren’t focused on her, they don’t touch her. She seems to be their prisoner, but really you don’t harm her at all. You are using her image, a doll, a simulacrum, it’s an exorcism.”

The Sea, The Sea is a novel that tackles major themes: the nature of love, the meanings we attach to our lives, how we decide what is real when we can only view from our own perspective, how we recognise what really matters. Arrowby’s narcissism is contemptible, but the skill of Murdoch’s writing shows him as an everyman (despite his belief in his own extraordinariness) and places us in a position where to judge him harshly is to judge ourselves:

“Time, like the sea, unties all knots.  Judgements on people are never final, they emerge from summings up which at once suggest the need for reconsideration. Human arrangements are nothing but loose ends and hazy reckoning, whatever art may pretend in order to console us.”

Iris Murdoch
Paul Muldoon

Images from here and here

Secondly, Why Brownlee Left by Paul Muldoon, the titular poem from his 1980 collection.  Muldoon’s poems can be difficult to comprehend and contain head-scratchingly obscure references, but he is also humorous and playful, and takes such clear joy in language that I think any new collection from him is cause for excitement. The poem I’ve chosen is one of his most accessible but still leaves plenty of space for the reader to decide on meaning; it contains Muldoon’s gentle humour, and it’s all tied together with expert use of rhythm and echoing half-rhyme – I hope you like it 🙂

Why Brownlee left, and where he went,

Is a mystery even now.

For if a man should have been content

It was him; two acres of barley,

One of potatoes, four bullocks,

A milker, a slated farmhouse.

He was last seen going out to plough

On a March morning, bright and early.

 

By noon Brownlee was famous;

They had found all abandoned, with

The last rig unbroken, his pair of black

Horses, like man and wife,

Shifting their weight from foot to

Foot, and gazing into the future.

Do join in with Reading Ireland month aka the Begorrathon, and if you’re not a Luddite like me you can also check out their Facebook page 🙂

To end, as I read a review of a new Phil Lynott biography over the weekend, here are Thin Lizzy singing their version of a traditional Irish song: