Book Review. A Talented Man by Henrietta McKervey

Hachette €16.99

The year is 1938 and Ellis Spender is on his uppers. The only son of a once-prosperous family, he now exists on his mother’s meagre allowance, one that wouldn’t exist if his mother hadn’t taken in lodgers at their decaying old house off Hampstead Heath.  Regular work is beneath Ellis, and anyway, he’s on course to be a great novelist, although there’s precious little written evidence to support his ambition. But written evidence – faked by his own hand – will become very important to Ellis as he takes to forgery to make his fortune.

He starts small, signing W.S. Gilbert’s name on a Gilbert and Sullivan libretto he finds among his uncle Freddie’s possessions, left behind while Freddie (another cad) is busy “making it big” as a theatre producer in the States. But some letters among Freddie’s possessions between Bram Stoker and his wife Florrie, who had been a friend of Ellis’ mother and is recently deceased, spark Ellis into writing a sequel to Dracula. A sequel which will, of course, have been written by Bram Stoker himself! Ellis’s forgery is being produced with the help of his accomplice Janey, a lodger in his mother’s home and a young woman with secrets of her own. But Janey doesn’t trust Ellis and, as it turns out, her misgivings are entirely with foundation.

Bram Stoker is enjoying an extended literary moment or two lately with Joseph O’Connor’s Shadowplay winning the An Post novel of the year last year, and now Henrietta McKervey’s fourth novel involving more than a nod in Stoker’s direction. Shadowplay is based on Stoker’s life, while A Talented Man concerns itself more with a con artist intent on using Stoker’s style and reputation.

A Talented Man is original, funny, genuinely thrilling and gorgeously written, capturing the mood of pre-war London beautifully. In the background Hitler is on the rise in Germany, while Britain is witnessing a rapid decline in its aristocratic classes. Meanwhile, Ellis Spender is a bit like Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov. He manipulates the reader into having some dregs of sympathy for him and you’re never sure if you want him to get caught. But he’s a lot more fun.

Book Review. Gaelic Spirit by Gerard Siggins

O’Brien Press €8.99

In this novel, which is I think the 7^th Eoin Madden book (but my first!) Eoin returns to his first love, which is Gaelic sports. On summer holidays from his rugby school, Eoin joins the local GAA club and proves to be a valuable asset. Assets of another kind – liquid ones – are on Eoin’s mind and with the help of his grandfather and his friends he forms a little company of garden labourers and finds work fast. When the lawnmower goes missing, however, Eoin suspects the local gang of ne’er-do-wells, headed up by Rocky Ryan. Rocky’s father is a Garda and therefore Rocky, a real bad egg, feels he’s invincible. And he is, for a while…

Eoin sees ghosts. Although they’re friendly ghosts, they only appear when something bad is going to happen. A new ghost, Mick Hogan, who was killed in Croke Park on Bloody Sunday in 1920, and whom the Hogan Stand is named after, appears to Eoin. And as Eoin is intending to visit Croker for the national final, he’s a little perturbed. But he doesn’t let his worries get in the way of enjoying his summer, his time with his friends, playing with the local GAA team and some hard graft in neighbours’ gardens along the way. But on the day of the national final in Croke Park, there’s danger looming for Eoin. He knows something will happen, but what?  

This is a great book for any kid aged 9-12, and not just for the sports fans. The story is broad enough to include the importance of friendship and family, Eoin’s psychic tendencies, the solving of a mystery and the snaring of a juvenile delinquent, so kids who are into ballet or ponies or indeed anything at all would enjoy it as much as those who are into their sports. There’s some history snuck in there, too. Delightful.

Book Review – My Pear-Shaped Life in Yesterday’s Sunday Independent

https://www.independent.ie/life/a-novel-that-begins-well-but-goespear-shaped-towards-the-end-39247323.html

A Sabbatical in Leipzig

Adrian Duncan

Lilliput Press €15.00

Good books tend to remind me of other good books and, although they’re very different in almost every respect, A Sabbatical in Leipzig reminded me of two Julian Barnes books, both Flaubert’s Parrot and Levels of Life.  The first Barnes book explores, among other things, obsession and grief and the second explores…well…obsession and grief. They are very different books and Duncan’s Sabbatical is different again, but the themes of obsession and grief stamp almost every page of Duncan’s novel, as his protagonist Michael is left completely alone after the death of Catherine, his partner of over forty years.  

In Flaubert’s Parrot, Barnes writes about grief: “And you do come out of it, that’s true. After a year, after five. But you don’t come out of it like a train coming out of a tunnel, bursting through the downs into sunshine and that swift, rattling descent to the Channel; you come out of it as a gull comes out of an oil-slick. You are tarred and feathered for life.” In Sabbatical, Duncan’s protagonist Michael says: “This is all I want from the city: that it allow me to forget. I don’t want to die in my apartment circling myself; I want to fall over here in the city, slump to the ground, expire among the shivering trees and be carried away by strangers.”

In Levels of Life, written some thirty or so years after Flaubert’s Parrot and writing about losing his own wife, Barnes writes: “When might you expect to be ‘over it’? The griefstruck themselves can hardly tell, since time is now so less measurable than it used to be.” In Sabbatical Duncan writes: “I thought that if I could put away the type of thinking I had employed before Catherine’s death I might then make room in my person for a type of thinking to help usher me beyond – and perhaps help me forget – the moment of her dying.”

Both writers instill their obsessions into their protagonists; Barnes with all things French, with Flaubert and other French writers, with French painters, and Duncan with all things German, with the German writer Robert Walser, with modern sculpture and, being an engineer, with the beauty and functionality of bridges. Barnes’ protagonist Geoffrey Braithwaite sets off in search of a stuffed parrot, said to have inspired Flaubert to write A Simple Heart, only to discover that there are fifty or so stuffed parrots, all apparently ‘the one’. Duncan’s protagonist Michael buys a second record player to match the one he already has, so he can play two very different interpretations of Schubert’s Trout Quintet ‘in synch’, as it were, only to find it’s not possible. Defeat – for Braithwaite and for Michael – is inevitable, it seems.

Michael’s story takes place in the hour between his early morning coffee and his venturing out into the streets of Bilbao, perhaps to drink coffee with a local he has half-befriended who cannot speak, or maybe not. His sense of abandonment is a solid thing, as solid as anything he has ever designed or constructed, and one cannot penetrate solid things. He recalls his childhood in the Irish midlands with fondness, although he never returned to live in Ireland after graduating. Now, with most of his family dead, “the systematic thinning-out of a church pew”, his only souvenirs of Ireland are a single photograph and, curiously, his father’s desk. His ‘sabbatical’ in Leipzig was, we discover as the story unfurls backwards, a kind of breakdown through which his beloved Catherine sustained him. After five years in Leipzig he became productive again. Now in Bilbao, without Catherine or a single other living soul, he faces his final days alone.  

This short book is a haunted and haunting essay on loneliness. Michael’s meditations on engineering, art and (some) German literature and music fill just a single hour of his unrelenting day. But it’s a memorable hour for the reader. The excruciating solitude of this character lingers long after the last few harrowing pages.

The Motion of the Body Through Space by Lionel Shriver

My review in yesterday’s Sunday Independent

https://www.independent.ie/life/shrivers-scalpel-sharp-pen-hilariously-cuts-through-woke-critics-39229175.html

Book Review

The Gone Book

Helena Close

Little Island €9.99

It’s difficult not to fall for a book which opens with the line: “Dutch Gold tastes like piss.” Other truths in this novel, narrated from the perspective of 15-year-old protagonist, Matt, are not always quite so funny. It’s not funny, for instance, that Matt is so damaged by his mother leaving home five years previously that he keeps a secret journal,  the ‘Gone Book’ of the title, in which he writes to his mother regularly, telling her exactly what he thinks of her. Caught between missing her profoundly and hating her for leaving, Matt is a confused, wounded teenager. But he figures he’s not as messed up as his older brother Jamie, or his ever-tearful younger brother Conor.

All three brothers live with their father in an apartment in central Limerick where they watch over the city ‘like God’ from a height, loving its beauty but unfortunately getting caught up in its ugliness too. Matt’s best friend Mikey provides much of the humour and Mikey’s mother offers Matt a kind of practical maternal succour. His father is doing his best, he’s given up drinking, but he’s now addicted to AA meetings and half-marathons and forcing little Conor into punishing swim training schedules. When Matt discovers his mother is back in Limerick, he decides has to see her. He needs to know why she left and why she’s never been in touch since. The initial encounters between mother and son are so authentic in their awkwardness, they’re just breathtaking. Limerick is no Hollywood and teenage boys are not renowned for their emotional eloquence, and Close plays a blinder in her construction of these scenes in particular. Her characters are utterly authentic, full of human failings and she captures the sheer pain of growing up, of being left behind, of having to keep stumbling on, with utter accuracy and verve. Gritty and funny, but also tragic, it’s a fast and furious ride.

Book Review

handiwork by Sara Baume

Sara Baume’s first non-fiction book is a slim little volume about the making of art. It’s also about grief and about the daily minutiae of living and creating, about writing and crafting, about work and responsibility. And it’s about holding ourselves accountable for the time we have been gifted. It’s small and sometimes stark and unfalteringly beautiful.

“I have always felt caught between two languages, though I can only speak in one” she writes. “The one I can speak goes down on paper and into my laptop, in the hours before noon. The one I cannot speak does down in small painted objects, in the hours after.

“The more I need to explain, the longer the documents become, the larger the assemblages.”

She writes exquisitely about the everyday routine, from the morning’s unrolling of socks to the nights’s rolling them up again, and of the work which fills the hours in between. “Every day, I complete a single carved plaster object, and every day each completed object comes to precisely the breadth and limits of my patience.” On the following page she writes: “I have felt a terrible responsibility for time.” And there she expresses, in a single line, what so many artists feel about time spent making and remaking in a constant striving for better. Work which fails in some way is ‘contaminated’.

Her father, who died a year or so before she commenced this memoir, is a significant presence and returns throughout like a welcome leitmotif. Her grief is evident but it’s delicately treated, like something fragile, to be handled with care. Her many passages on birds, those she crafts and paints herself and those airborne outside her window, bring to mind Jonathan Franzen’s essays on similar themes, one from which she quotes directly.

This remarkable little book will prompt you to return to it in quiet moments and to reflect with the author on what it means to be alive, to love and lose and to simply go on, “doggedly, diligently, interminably…”

Tramp Press €13.00

Book Review

How to be Good with Money

Eoin McGee

Gill €16.99

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that those of us who most need to mind our pennies are often the most clueless about how to do it. And with this book, a spinoff from the TV series, being published immediately before lockdown, I initially approached it as if it were something of slight irrelevance – we’re all financially doomed anyway, so what’s the point?  Turns out there is a point, lots of point, actually, as we face possibly the worst economic depression in history. Most of us have less money than we did in March. Learning to be more careful in our spending is far from an irrelevance; it has become an absolute, urgent imperative.

But who wants to wade through budgets and forecasts and all that Satanic stuff? Virtually nobody is who, but Eoin McGee is well aware of that. So he doesn’t bore us the ugly, niggly minutiae. On the contrary, he has written an extremely readable money guide for the ornery human bean and offers us something which has become almost extinct; common sense. Yes, I admit that towards the end of the book there’s some stuff about pensions, investments, stock markets and all, but the bulk of the book is aimed at people who are not wealthy.  

It’s written in easy, conversational and informal style, very much like McGee himself presents on TV, with a minimum of accountant-spiel. And he has crunched some really gruesome numbers on things like the annual cost of a daily latte, or – god help us – the daily pack of cigarettes. Sobering stuff but the more I got into this book the more sense it made. As we brace ourselves for some very tough times to come, we could all do with McGee’s sound advice. Step by step, he takes the mystery out of being fiscally sensible and makes it understandable, even for the likes of me.

Book Review

This Lovely City by Louise Hare

HQ €17.99

The story opens in 1950, introducing young Lawrie Matthews, a postman by day and a clarinet player in a swing band by night. Lawrie is one of the so-called Windrush Generation, originally from Jamaica but now living in London. Britain’s acute labour shortage after WWII led to their seeking Commonwealth subjects, many from Jamaica, to migrate to the UK in 1948. Lawrie was one of the first to answer the call, although throughout this novel he has moments when he regrets ever landing on British soil. “Almost five years now since VE Day, almost two years since Lawrie had landed at Tilbury, and the city was still too poor to clean itself up. Austerity they called it, as if giving it a name made it more acceptable to those struggling to make ends meet.”

Lawrie’s girlfriend Evie Coleridge is mixed race and lives with her mother Agnes next door to Lawrie’s boarding house in Brixton. Evie is the only child of a lone parent and although Agnes is white, Evie knows what it is to feel the slap of prejudice, against both black people and single mothers. But she has been educated, has completed secretarial college and works as a typist in a large London office. Evie and Lawrie have plans to marry and settle down someday.

Lawrie is wrongly accused of murdering a baby he finds dead on the banks of Eagle Pond in Clapham Common. The baby is black. And the scenes in the police station following his arrest leave the reader in no doubt about the bigotry suffered by those very people who answered Britain’s invitation to come live and work there. The case detective has this to say in the course of Lawrie’s first of many harrowing interrogations: “Between you and me, I don’t give two shits about some dead nigger baby. Too many of you around here already, but the law is the law.”

What follows is part crime thriller, part love story, part potted history of people haunted by their secrets, but it’s also a potted social history of the appalling racism encountered by the Windrush Generation right from the start. Hare’s depiction of a post-war grimy London, bombed-out and pea-souped, with everyone still living on ration books, is really impeccable. This is an accomplished debut, stylish and evocative, with enough plot twists to keep the reader guessing right to the end.