Tag Archives: Ireland

Blood Will Have Blood: The Abstainer

22 Monday Mar 2021

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Abstainer, by Ian McGuire
Random House, 2020. 307 pp. $27

When the law hangs three members of the Fenian Brotherhood for killing a policeman in Manchester, England, in 1867, Constable James O’Connor knows the punishment will solve nothing. The Irish revolutionaries will retaliate, and since he’s the copper who has paid informants among them and understands his countrymen better than his English superiors, officialdom should listen. But they don’t. O’Connor’s place of birth condemns him in their eyes; they consider the Irish bloodthirsty, drunken savages, thieves, and heathens. Besides, O’Connor left the Dublin police under circumstances he won’t talk about, but which have something to do with drink.

Now, however, he abstains, and though his sympathetic, more human approach to law enforcement alternately puzzles and enrages his bosses, he speaks the sober truth no one wants to hear. But he does get them to pay attention when he learns that the New York Fenians have sent an assassin to Manchester to plot revenge for the hangings. Unfortunately, it will take more than O’Connor’s say-so to persuade his superiors to follow through in the ways he suggests, partly because they can’t believe that the drastic legal penalties they have just meted out will fail to curb the violence.

O’Connor has an inkling of what he’s up against, but not even he can anticipate the determination of his newest enemy. Stephen Doyle, though born in Ireland, fought for the Union in the Civil War, and he believes that he’s been sent to Manchester to fight another war whose rules are much the same. A colder, more ruthless and capable opponent would be hard to find, and he startles even his Fenian brethren in Manchester by his attitude. You know that he will give no quarter and expect none.

You also know that sooner or later, O’Connor and Doyle will meet, because the constable does his best to think along with the assassin. However, O’Connor has two distinct disadvantages. He can’t command, merely suggest, whereas Doyle dictates what he wants, and the Fenian foot soldiers obey. Secondly, and more important, O’Connor has a heart, and it’s still reeling from the untimely death of his beloved wife in Dublin. Further, a nephew he barely knows shows up from America and demands to play a role in the surveillance operation — a brilliant stroke of McGuire’s that raises the stakes immediately.

Consequently, this thriller has much more to it than the usual cat and mouse. You do want to know whether O’Connor and the police will thwart Doyle or fail to stop him, though it would be fairer to say that the narrative gives you no choice, compelling you to turn the pages. McGuire’s a terrific storyteller, and “no — and furthermore” lives in the very soot-infested air of Manchester. For me, the tension even feels too much, at times.

“Freedom to Ireland,” an 1866 Currier & Ives lithograph. The Fenian Brotherhood began in the United States and was eventually superseded by similar organizations (courtesy Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons; public domain in the U.S.)

On top of that, The Abstainer explores an aspect of good versus evil that belongs to every conflict in which some believe that violence is the best or only solution, while others don’t. Naturally, that division fits Irish history under British rule, so though this story takes place in 1867, the same issues would apply in 1967 or beyond. Accordingly, McGuire’s really asking who has the upper hand: the side with fewer scruples or the one claiming the moral high ground? And is the upper hand the better hand to have, or not?

As befits this heady theme, McGuire deploys lucid, hard-edged prose that conveys deep feeling and the raw atmosphere. Early on in the novel, O’Connor witnesses the hanging — he’d rather not, but he’s supposed to be there — and it makes a terrible impression on him:

O’Connor hears the call of a crow like a dry cork being pulled from a bottle and, from over the river, a clatter of cartwheels and the whinny of a horse. For a long moment, the three men stand side by side beneath the heavy oak crossbeam, separate but conjoined, like rough-hewn caryatids, and then with a startling suddenness they are gone. Instead of their breathing, living bodies, there are only the three taught lines of rope like long vertical scratches on the prison wall. The crowd inhales, then gives a long guttural sigh like a wave slowly pulling back from a beach. O’Connor shudders, swallows, feels a pulse of nausea sweep up from his stomach into his mouth.

With this moment and many others, throughout The Abstainer, you see how thin the line between life and death, good fortune and bad. One false move here, and catastrophe would have resulted; one forgetful lapse there, and it arrives unexpectedly. That’s another theme, what happiness depends on, and how fleeting it can be.

If this story sounds bleak, in many ways, it is. But it’s also quite powerful and rings true; this is a novel to remember, and I highly recommend it.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from bookshop.org, an online retailer that splits its proceeds with independent bookstores.

Sixth Census: Another Blog Birthday

26 Monday Oct 2020

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Today, Novelhistorian is six years old, and as I do every anniversary, I recap my dozen or so favorites from the past twelve months.

Start with Dominicana, by Angie Cruz, which brings you to a time and place seldom seen in mainstream historical fiction, an upper Manhattan barrio in 1965. A child-bride essentially sold off by a scheming mother as the family’s ticket out of Dominican Republic must cope with a strange, hostile city; a tight-fisted, abusive husband; and the knowledge that the country in which she now lives is abusing her homeland too. She’s a compelling heroine of a heart-rending story, but it’s her toughness and ingenuity that raise this immigrant’s narrative several notches.

Isabella Hammad, in The Parisian, tells of a young medical student from Palestine who travels to France for his education in 1914 (and to escape conscription by the Ottoman authorities). Abroad, he loses himself in freedoms he never dreamed of, and his return to Palestine causes shock waves within him, echoing the nationalist politics in which he’s involved. Both he and his country are looking for liberation, but neither knows how to go about it. Hammad tells her story in a florid, languorous style reminiscent of Flaubert and Stendhal in its fixation on small moments and one person’s biography as a window on a time and place. The book nearly founders in its first 150 pages, but stay with it, and you’ll be richly rewarded.

Robert Harris never stops dreaming up new ways to recount history through fiction, and A Second Sleep is no exception. Genre-bending, yet steeped in his bold narrative approach, in spare yet evocative prose, this thriller brings you to what seems like fifteenth-century England. But the struggle between free thought and religious teaching, human frailty and temptation will work in any time period—and if I sound vague, it’s deliberate, because this novel works best if you let it creep up on you, with little foreknowledge. The pages exhale history like a subtle, authoritative scent; prepare to be intoxicated.

Now We Shall Be Entirely Free takes place in 1809, and Andrew Miller’s thriller differs from the ordinary too, but in an unusual way: It’s delicate. Few books in this genre indulge in lush, patient description, yet these pages turn quickly, thanks to Miller’s active prose, brilliant storytelling, and ingenious concept, a manhunt for a man who’s also searching for himself. Inner life matters here, for heroes and villains both, a refreshing change, when cardboard bad guys abound in fiction. The romance between a traumatized soldier with blood on his conscience and a freethinking woman who sees through him but is losing her eyesight will make you marvel, not least because the reader perceives them more clearly than they do one another.

For a different mood entirely, I propose This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams, a love song to the rural Ireland of 1957. The narrative hinges, among other things, on chronic rain stopping for no apparent reason, the arrival of electricity, the character of the new priest in town, and the power of storytelling, all seen through the eyes of a seventeen-year-old who’s just quit the seminary. Warmth, humor, and melodic prose turn a long series of small events into a large story. I almost put this book down several times but always went back—it will seduce you, if you let it. As the narrator observes, “Sometimes the truth can only be reached by exaggeration,” and everyone in town has their own approach to it. Worth the price of admission: a description of a first love, hilarious and painful, practically on a physiological level.

When it comes to First World War fiction, I’m a stickler for accuracy, whether we’re talking about events, attitudes, or characters true to their time. Come the week of Armistice Day, I’ll be writing a column on my all-time faves, but for now, consider The Poppy Wife, by Caroline Scott. She gets everything right, partly a function of her PhD in history but also how she treats that discipline as a living, breathing entity. She offers a superb premise, in which a woman sets out in 1921 to search for a husband presumed dead in battle but never found. Meanwhile, her brother-in-law, who served alongside the missing man, tries not to reveal that he loves her, just as he tried not to let his brother know. Not an ounce of sentimentality taints this narrative, which deploys power and psychological complexity, showing how survivors can be lost as well as the dead, and how perception and memory can twist even what we’re sure of.

Mariah Fredericks captures the upper-crust social world of 1912 New York (and the gritty life of the less fortunate) in Death of a New American. A lady’s maid, enraged by the senseless murder of an Italian immigrant nanny, whose only fault was to love the children she tended, sets her sights on justice. The sleuth’s quest naturally puts her at odds with the posh family she works for, one of the Four Hundred. However, she’s clever and indefatigable, and she’s seen too much of life to be earnest, which is even better. This splendid mystery, which will keep you guessing, deals with xenophobia, gang violence, the disparities of social class, and the workings of the yellow press—Fredericks knows New York of that era inside out. I wish I’d discovered this series sooner.

Hilary Mantel needs no introduction, nor does The Mirror & the Light, the final volume of her trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII’s counselor of common birth. Fiction at its finest, the novel explores the pitfalls and attractions of power while recounting how a gifted politician attempts to keep a childish, make-the-earth-stand-still monarch from destroying himself and his kingdom. There’s plenty of intrigue and backstabbing—we’re talking about Tudor England—but, as usual, Mantel raises the bar. Cromwell’s a master psychologist and political strategist, and, through his eyes, you see a nation grappling with how to escape medieval mayhem and derive a more fitting social template for an increasingly modern age. A timeless story, in other words.

The Yellow Bird Sings an enthralling, heart-breaking song of the Holocaust, and Jennifer Rosner, making an impressive debut here, is an author to watch. The premise is almost a trope by now—in 1941 Poland, a Jewish widow, who has sacrificed so much for her very young daughter just to keep them both alive, faces a terrible choice. She must decide whether to flee alone into the forest, handing her child over to a Catholic orphanage, or to travel with the little girl, who’s too young to have a sense of danger or the stamina to confront it. But Rosner convincingly makes this premise her own; her prose, active descriptions, and sense of her characters’ inner lives make a riveting, moving tale. The little girl possesses no flaws other than those typical of her age, but that idealized portrayal is the only real blemish in a novel that protects no one and whitewashes nothing. Throughout, the author uses music as the means by which the oppressed and hunted may find beauty, though the world at large couldn’t be uglier.

Perhaps the most original novel on this list, which is saying something, To Calais, in Ordinary Time, is James Meek’s plague narrative of fourteenth-century England. His portrayal sounds almost prophetic, published a few months before the pandemic. But that’s just for starters. As one wise character says, “Love is whatever remains once one has made an accommodation with fate”—and accommodation is precisely what nobody’s looking for. The central female character, the daughter of the manor, flees home to escape a forced marriage, seeking her less-than-chivalric lover, whom she expects to behave like the hero of a book she’s read. The central male character, a young peasant, has abandoned the same manor to serve as an archer at Calais, expecting to gain the right to live anywhere he likes—and learns the word freedom, which he’s never heard before. Speaking of words, Meek recounts much of his narrative in archaic language, rhythm, and syntax, with loving artistry and much humor, an impressive re-creation of the period.

A Thread of Grace, Mary Doria Russell’s sprawling Holocaust novel about northwestern Italy from 1943 onward, is a gripping narrative of escape, resistance, and reprisal. The characters, who have known hardship in this hardscrabble region, possess infinite patience and resourcefulness and have learned to expect reversals and the unexpected. My favorite is a former pilot who pickles himself in alcohol and masterminds the local resistance, passing as a German businessman one day, and a tradesman or a priest the next—pretty neat, because he’s Jewish. But many characters win laurels here, and how they manage to live and sometimes love despite terror and hardship will leave a lasting impression. At the same time, Russell pulls no punches—she never does—so this is the war as it really was, not how Hollywood would have it.

Finally, An Instance of the Fingerpost depicts the combat between science and superstition in seventeenth-century England, and what a yarn Iain Pears spins. The same crime visited from several different perspectives, each narrator accusing the others of being unreliable, reveals the punishments inflicted by the self-styled righteous, thanks to their unshakable belief in faulty logic. A brilliant thriller about the nature of truth, this novel has much to say, and says it with insight, high drama, and humor, not least to skewer the disagreeable, smug, hidebound, and cruel behavior rampant in England. As a dead-on satire, the book carries a strongly feminist message, but by demonstration, not soapbox (an approach I wish other authors imitated). In Pears’s world, as in ours, men perceive women through the lens of their own weaknesses, and it’s no secret who suffers most.

I call these books the cream of this year’s harvest. I invite you to the reading feast!

Small Moments, Big As Life: This Is Happiness

13 Monday Apr 2020

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: This Is Happiness, by Niall Williams
Bloomsbury, 2019. 380 pp. $28

Just before Easter, in Faha, a small town in county Clare, two events take place, momentous for rural Ireland in 1957: It stops raining, and Father Coffey announces that electricity is coming. Equally important to seventeen-year-old Noel Crowe, who’s visiting his grandparents from Dublin — fleeing his decision to leave the seminary —Christy McMahon arrives to stay as a boarder. That draws keen interest in Faha, as newcomers do. However, Christy’s a wise, kind-hearted man in his sixties who looks as if he’s been around the world, which impresses Noel even more and offers precisely what he needs, a mentor who has plenty to teach but a diffident manner in imparting it. From this premise comes an unusual coming-of-age novel.

For the first thirty pages, you may think that there’s no story here, even granting Williams his extraordinary prose (pick a page; you’ll find something quotable), so that This Is Happiness promises to be a slog. And I’ll admit, for a while, every time I put the book down, I kept asking myself why I continued reading. Prose alone can’t carry me through a narrative; I don’t care who’s writing it. But every time I picked the book up again, I got lost in the storytelling, and now I feel foolish for having doubted. Plenty happens in this novel, only in small moments. But as our narrator, now grown old, observes of Faha and what he learned there, “Here’s the thing life teaches you: sometimes the truth can only be reached by exaggeration.”

So it is that the uncommon sunshine affects Faha in baroque ways; the erection of poles to string electrical wires creates outlandish drama; and Christy’s arrival to work for the electric company has another, secret motive behind it. Even Father Coffey’s position as the new, young priest in town alters the path of life, though the difference between him and his elder predecessor may seem small, at first. Legions of stories crop up to explain all these mysteries; everyone in town has a different opinion, and therefore a different version to share. Life’s fuller that way.

Poulnabrone dolmen, the Burren, county Clare, Ireland, 2005 (courtesy Steve Ford Elliott, via Wikimedia Commons)

Consequently, This Is Happiness explores the power of storytelling and how a boy receives life lessons from it; in the process, the narrative sings an elegy to life gone by, without making judgments. The advent of the new, as with electricity and a younger man in the pulpit, will change Faha forever. But the alteration isn’t evil, it’s just life.

Noel will change too. He goes by Noe, a nice descriptive touch for a young man who’s not fully formed and well aware of it; he’s also a terrific narrator. He knows everyone’s flaws, including his own — the latter perhaps too much to expect from a seventeen-year-old, even in the confusion of retrospect — but he sees with clear eye, warm heart, and empathy for all. Here, he describes his grandparents’ house during the rainy season, which is to say, most of the time:

It was the smell of bread always baking, the smell of turf-smoke, the smell of onions, of boiling, the green tongue of boiled cabbage, the pink one of bacon with grey scum like sins rising, the smell of rhubarb that grew monstrous at the edge of the dung-heap, the smell of rain in all its iterations, the smell of distant rain, of being about to rain, of recent rain, of long-ago rain, the insipid smell of drizzle, the sweet one of downpour, the living smell of wool, the dead smell of stone, the metallic ghost stench of mackerel that disobeyed the laws of matter and like Jesus outlived itself by three days.

But don’t assume the unhurried pace or repetition of phrases implies that nothing moves in Faha. Things travel great distances, in fact, but in minds and hopes, the thwarting of desires and dreams, the accommodation to that, and in music (another important presence), and laughter, the necessary curative.

To be sure, This Is Happiness follows a rhythm unusual in modern life, partly because Faha isn’t modern, as we’d define it. But if you can accept that rhythm for what it is, you’ll be richly rewarded.

Disclaimer: I received my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Mean Streets: The Devil’s Half Mile

01 Monday Oct 2018

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Devil’s Half Mile, by Paddy Hirsch
Forge, 2018. 300 pp. $25

Justice (Justy) Flanagan, attorney at law, has returned to the Manhattan of his youth from Ireland, following his legal training and participation in the failed rebellion of 1798. He’s come to make his way in the world and to investigate his father’s suicide. But Justy, who found the body hanging from the rafters, has since learned more than most people care to hear about what violent death looks like, and the precise details he remembers from cutting his father down don’t square with his lessons in what we would call forensics. Moreover, given that his father was involved in an extremely risky financial speculation involving men far less scrupulous than himself, Justy reasonably concludes that motives for killing him abounded, as do suspects.

African Burial Ground, late 1700s, just north of Wall Street, Manhattan (courtesy preserveamerica.gov via Wikimedia Commons)

But Hirsch’s Manhattan in 1799 is a mucky, filthy place, and he’s not just talking about the condition of the streets. The language, Irish-American slang that fills a four-page glossary at the back, is pretty raw too. The title refers to Wall Street, a savage entity with no rules save caveat emptor, and where tempers are short, and memories, long. The stock exchange per se doesn’t exist yet, but trading happens in coffee houses, and a new one has risen specifically for that purpose. Hirsch wants you to read this portrayal, full of rich ruffians who detest even the thought of regulation (despite the Ponzi scheme that set off a catastrophic panic in 1792), so that you realize that little has changed.

This is where Hirsch excels. I find his portrayal of the city the most persuasive, gripping part of The Devil’s Half Mile. Whether depicting the racial tension between free blacks and Irish immigrants, the cut-and-thrust of corrupt finance, the gangs that act like private armies, the prostitution, common thievery, and violence that afflict all but the fortunate few, the squalor in which most people live, or the tiny enclaves of great wealth, the novel gives you New York in its gritty self:

Justy nodded farewell to his friend… He pushed his face into the gust of wind that carried the smell of the city down the hill to the docks. Woodsmoke from a thousand hearth fires, urine from the tanners’ shops, horse shit from the streets, sewage from the septic tanks, fresh blood from the abattoirs, rotting meat and produce from the tips. Bad breath, sour beer, raw spirits, stale sweat. It was like a pungent cloud rolling down the Broad Way to the water, a slap in the face of every newcomer who arrived in the city.
Justy smiled.
It was the smell of home.

Despite this vividness, however, the narrative of The Devil’s Half Mile has a mechanical feel that intrudes, though it’s not for want of plot points. There are plenty of twists and turns, right up to the end. Hirsch has apparently followed Raymond Chandler’s dictum that to restore flagging tension, send in a man with a gun. In this case, it’s more likely a corpse discovered or a knife fight, which gets predictable after a while. Even at that, Hirsch’s machinery might not matter, except that our hero, despite his powers of observation, remains remarkably dense about the obvious, such as the probable killers, the nature of the speculation that his father was involved in, or the mastermind behind all his troubles. Is it that he has to remain clueless until enough bodies fall? To his credit, Hirsch does the fight scenes well and is not squeamish about granting them their proper length, so if they’re a device, they’re a carefully polished one. However, like the grisly findings the sleuthing unearths, the spilling of blood requires emotional transitions from Justy — surprise, horror, the pain of treachery, or what have you — which zip past in clichéd language. His gut clenches, or his fist, a phrase announces that he has “raw feelings,” and the narrative moves on.

As such, Justy comes across as more shallow than he should, which is a shame. Hirsch tries to convey the depth to which violent fury possesses his protagonist, and how Justy’s physical skills may be useful in surviving, but not for living a satisfying life. It’s a worthy theme, especially when the author is after even bigger game; he wishes to connect the skill for violence with English prejudice against the Irish as savages fit only for doing dirty deeds or slaving at the docks. In that, The Devil’s Half Mile is a more ambitious book than it seems at first; but unfortunately, it never realizes its potential.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Murder in Troubled Times: Beyond Absolution

27 Monday Nov 2017

Posted by in Reviews and Columns, Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Beyond Absolution, by Cora Harrison
Severn, 2017. 249 pp. $29

Cork, 1923. Father Dominic, a much-loved Capuchin friar, is found dead in the confessional at Holy Trinity Church. Someone has killed him with a weapon thin enough to pass through the grille separating penitent from confessor, and sharp and long enough to penetrate his brain through his listening ear. Reverend Mother Aquinas, who runs a convent school and knows everyone in Cork, grew up friends with Father Dominic and his brother, Lawrence, also in holy orders. Though respectful of Inspector Patrick Cashman, the detective assigned to the case, and aware that solving the murder is his job, the Reverend Mother brings her keen faculties and web of contacts to bear, hoping to aid the overworked inspector.

The first question is whether the late priest had heard too much–and, given how he died, the metaphor is inescapable. But the secrets of the confessional are never divulged, so there was no chance that Father Dominic betrayed a confidence and paid for it. Nevertheless, shortly before his death, he visited an up-and-coming antique shop and saw something there that agitated him. Since he was no collector–couldn’t be, considering his vow of poverty–why he went there raises more questions than it answers. What’s more, the owner of the antique shop, Peter Doyle, has a little explaining to do. Witnesses say they saw him at Holy Trinity at the time of the murder; but he says he wasn’t, and since he’s Protestant, he had no reason to go there.

However, there’s something about him that doesn’t quite square. A theatrical group that he runs, which is preparing Gilbert and Sullivan’s Mikado, contains a raft of people who seem to have plenty of money to spend, no matter what their occupation. What connection that has to the murder is anyone’s guess, but suffice to say that every cast member of the Mikado becomes a suspect. But what motive would they have to kill a much-loved priest?

Then again, no one is entirely beloved, and Father Dominic ventured into prisons to give the sacraments to incarcerated IRA soldiers. The agreement made the previous year to grant Ireland independence, minus the six northern counties, has pleased practically nobody, and the violence continues. Accordingly, the priest’s death becomes a political issue, as do the religious affiliations and family lineages of almost every character in the novel.

Auxiliaries and “Black and Tans” fought the IRA and earned the undying enmity of Irish nationalists (courtesy National Library of Ireland via Wikimedia Commons)

I like this aspect of Beyond Absolution. Harrison re-creates the mutual suspicion and prejudice that crops up in or lies beneath the surface of every human transaction. She betrays the loyalties to client, faith, class, or brand of nationalism and how they seep through life and color how people make decisions. You see divisions within the police, the educational system, and the church. Since the dominant ethic seems to be based on tradition, fear, and suspicion, you get the feeling that the sensitive, forward-thinking characters–the Reverend Mother, Inspector Cashman, and a few others–are trying to hold back the ocean. In another nice touch, the Reverend Mother once taught Cashman, so she has a personal stake in wanting him to succeed; likewise, she can recall how several other characters behaved as students of hers.

Gossip is the grease that makes this world go round, and even the telephone calls may not be private, as the Reverend Mother well knows:

There were, she supposed, other countries where the exchange operators took a number in silence and put you through, preserving an air of total anonymity about the process, but here in the city of Cork, that would have been considered discourteous. In Cork, it was assumed that everyone knew everyone else’s business. And the telephone exchange women did their best to add to that common pool of knowledge. Sensible people, keeping this in mind, spent the first minutes exchanging remarks about the weather and the state of the streets before moving on to matters that were more private.

As for the mystery, Harrison tells her story well and keeps you guessing–at least about most things. It’s a little too easy to tell the good guys and bad guys apart–as with Peter Doyle, the characterizations can be one-sided–and the antique-store crowd are a bad lot, which narrows the field quite a bit. You may not guess the killer’s identity, but the motive quickly becomes obvious. Sometimes, Harrison clumsily introduces facts she wants you to know or character background. At those moments, I felt I was being Told Something Important rather than being allowed to discover it naturally.

Still, I appreciate Harrison’s skill at re-creating an era, and I applaud her decision not to try to clean it up. The Troubles were a very violent time, and she gives a glimpse of why.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Across Generations: The World of Tomorrow

30 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The World of Tomorrow, by Brendan Matthews
Little, Brown, 2017. 549 pp. $28

When we first meet Francis Dempsey, he’s passing himself off as Sir Angus MacFarquhar and doing his best to charm society girl Anisette Bingham and her mother on the Britannic, bound for New York. It’s disconcerting for Francis to pretend to be a Scottish peer when he’s Irish, he’s never been to Scotland, and he doesn’t even know which spoon to use.

But he’s having the time of his life, remarkable since he was in an Irish prison only days before. Using his father’s funeral as a cover, the IRA sprang him and his brother Michael, a seminarian, then unwittingly provided them with a strongbox of cash when a safe house blew up. However, Michael lost both eardrums and his senses in the blast, so in Francis’s scheme, Michael becomes Sir Malcolm, his invalid brother commended to his care. But Michael, in his post-traumatic state, has a companion, the recently deceased William Butler Yeats, who seems to vanish and reappear and lecture Michael about what to do next.

Are you getting all this? Throw in that the Dempseys have another brother in New York, Martin, a jazz musician hoping to make a splash, and that the king and queen of England are visiting the World’s Fair, and — oh, by the way, it’s June 1939.

Frank Buck’s Jungleland, souvenir of the World’s Fair (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Then there are bad guys, and this is where both Francis and The World of Tomorrow get into real trouble. John Gavigan, once a big-time New York hood, has been funneling guns and cash to the IRA for years. Gavigan drags in a former IRA assassin, Tom Cronin, who knew the Dempseys in Ireland, to deal with Francis’s theft of IRA funds.

At its best, The World of Tomorrow is a hilarious romp about fulfilling dreams, the dicey nature of love, and what people have to learn to accept if they wish to be happy. It’s also a love song to the importance of family, and the Dempseys’ tortured, tangled roots make a fine narrative. I also like how Matthews portrays the jazz musician Martin and his long-suffering but devoted wife, Rosemary, the rock of the crazy family she married into.

But it’s hard balancing the deadly serious with the madcap, and though Matthews is a terrific storyteller, pushing his characters to the limit at every turn, the killers don’t fit. The violence that frees Francis and Michael and sets up their escapade feels faceless and comically absurd, like the Binghams’ fascination with the allegedly titled suitor for Anisette. (Who would name their daughter after a liqueur?) But the violence that Tom Cronin’s ordered to execute is neither funny nor absurd, and Tom’s agony over it is real and painful, for he thought he was done with that life years ago, and now he has too much to lose. Then too, unlike those of the other characters, Tom’s reflections travel in circles, as though Matthews’s conception of him runs a little thin.

Matthews means to point out how past deaths condemn the current generation to take up a struggle that shouldn’t be theirs. That’s what happens to the Dempseys, and it’s what Matthews thinks of the IRA: “Some histories you washed off quickly. Others you wallowed in like a sty.” In giving Michael the ghost of Yeats to push against, the author introduces an intellectual version of that Irish ideal, and that this Yeats is selfish, blind to family ties, and no help to Michael tells you all you need to know.

I like this generational theme, but I think Mathews could have achieved it without Cronin or Gavigan, and including them overburdens the novel. I don’t just mean the jarring difference in tone, or the less-than-full villains who drive this subplot, of which there are too many, and their attendant contrivances. The World of Tomorrow is chock-full.

Otherwise, it’s got something. One pleasure is the prose, descriptive, discursive, and rich, as you’d expect in a fizzy, vivacious story. For instance, here’s what Martin feels about his adopted city:

As much as he loved the electric charge that came from moving in a sea of bodies surging from one place to another — crossing a street in the moment the traffic signal changed, a swell of suit-and-tied men and sway-hipped women, each of them racing to get somewhere that seemed so important — there were times when he wanted to call a stop to it, to slow it all down and not be carried along anyone’s tide. This was why the early-morning hours were his favorite. Walking a nearly vacant street, with only a couple slouched against each other in the distance, steam drifting lazily from a manhole, a splash of neon thrown into a puddle, an after hours bar whose last diligent drinkers hunched over their highball glasses — this was the New York he had come seeking. The city in a country hour. A time of deserted lanes and privacy amid the millions.

The World of Tomorrow, though it plays a few jarring notes, is good music for the mind and the heart.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Bloody Pastures: The Black Snow

19 Monday Sep 2016

Posted by in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: The Black Snow, by Paul Lynch
Little, Brown, 2014. 264 pp. $25

It’s 1945, and the Second World War is in its final, convulsive months, but in county Donegal, Irish country folk have their own violent conflicts to think about. The barn belonging to Barnabas Kane, an up-and-coming farmer, has burned, killing forty-three head of cattle and a handyman, Matthew Peoples. The fires have hardly cooled before the whisperings begin: Barnabas sent Matthew into the barn and was therefore responsible for his death. But no charges have been filed, and no one really knows what happened.

Glengesh Pass, county Donegal, northwest Ireland (Courtesy Jon Sullivan via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Glengesh Pass, county Donegal, northwest Ireland (Courtesy Jon Sullivan via Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

Nevertheless, Baba Peoples, the late man’s crazy widow, believes Barnabas killed her husband, and that the Kanes owe her compensation. She even goes so far as to point out that Eskra, Barnabas’s wife, has brought “foreign ways” to the village; Eskra keeps bees, for example. What else would you expect from a woman born in America? For that matter, villagers hostile to the Kanes–which, by now, is most of them–remind one another that Barnabas came from America too, forgetting that he was born in Donegal, emigrated, and returned with Eskra as his bride. It’s a brilliant stroke on Lynch’s part, showing how quickly superstition and prejudice prevent any reasonable assessment of the tragedy and turn it into an occult act perpetrated by evil, so-called outsiders.

Consequently, Lynch gets remarkably far with a deceptively simple premise, and he’s not done. Not only does Barnabas privately wonder whether he did, in fact, send Matthew to his death, he’s quick to notice who among his neighbors failed to help quell the flames and to suspect that the fire resulted from arson. (A diary kept by his teenaged son, Billy, suggests that Barnabas may be right, though not for the reasons he believes.) True or not, however, his paranoid fantasies mirror what the villagers say about him, and his deep, angry depression makes him both impossible to live with and incapable of repairing the barn–for awhile, anyway. So nobody in The Black Snow gets off lightly, even when they deserve sympathy; the novel explores a complex moral problem, with no easy answers.

I also admire the prose, which, at its best, is poetic.

The plough still in the tapered field, poised with the lean of an animal in the moment before attack, its teeth bared waiting to tear at the neck of the earth, but it sat with a dog’s patience through days of raw cold and then rain and he had not the strength to go back to it.

However, though I like this passage, there are others I find self-consciously ornate. Lynch is much too fond of fragments, and though the one above works, they don’t always. Further, as I read phrases like “the damask of puzzlement on her face,” I’m puzzled too, enough to pull me out of the narrative. Or I read “That rain came with a venomous slant to cut a man wide open,” and I’m stopped again, wondering why Lynch needs venom on top of cutting someone apart.

And that’s the problem with The Black Snow–it’s over the top. Barnabas Kane (Cain?) eventually gets out of bed and rebuilds his barn, putting his faith in a fresh start. However, the setbacks come pretty hard afterward, and though I applaud these instances of “no; and furthermore,” I don’t believe them, especially when it comes to further violence from Billy and, of all people, Eskra. It feels strange to write this, for I’m one to criticize characters granted redemption they haven’t earned. In such cases, I’m tempted to ascribe that to a desire to appease the reader, a goal often (but not always) more common to commercial rather than literary fiction. But with The Black Snow, the most literary novel I could imagine, I find myself criticizing a narrative that refuses to grant redemption to characters who’ve plainly earned it, dealing out further punishment that’s frankly incredible. Go figure.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Don’t Trust Him: My Notorious Life

23 Thursday Jun 2016

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: My Notorious Life, by Kate Manning
Scribner, 2013. 435 pp. $27

Early on in this superb, unflinching novel, its protagonist, Ann “Axie” Muldoon, learns never to trust a man who says, “Trust me.” It’s a lesson she has cause to remember many times, not least because she sees what happens to other women who fall for it.

Axie grows up in 1860s New York, in the most squalid tenement imaginable:

. . . the cabbage cooking and the piss in the vestibule, the sloppers emptied right off the stair. Mackerel heads and pigeon bones was all around rotting, and McGloon’s pig rootled below amongst the peels and oyster shells. The fumes mingled with the odors of us hundredsome souls cramped in there like matches in a box, on four floors, six rooms a floor. Do the arithmetic and you will see we didn’t have no space to cross ourselves.

But the one thing she has is her family, which consists of her mother, younger sister, and toddler brother. They’re devoted to one another, proud of their Irish origins, ready to laugh when they may, and careful not to provoke evil sprites through a misstep. But when trouble brings about the family’s dispersal, Axie discovers what real suffering is, and you just know there’ll be no magical ending.

New York City's Broadway in 1860 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

New York City’s Broadway in 1860 (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons)

However, Axie’s not the type to give up, and she finds her feet with a married couple named Evans, both doctors, and their kind-hearted housekeeper, Mrs. Browder. At first, Axie has no idea what kind of medicine her benefactors practice and is content to learn the domestic skills that Mrs. Browder is all too happy to teach her. Gradually, however, her curiosity leads her to the Evans’s library, and to understand the medical texts she finds there, she learns to read better. I like how Manning handles Axie’s discoveries, evident to the reader long before the girl herself figures out that Mrs. Evans is a midwife and sometime abortionist. You sense right away that Axie will learn and practice these skills and that she’ll never turn away an unfortunate woman who seeks her help.

Meanwhile, though, a boy she once knew has crossed her path again–Charlie, an orphan like herself. Daring, charming, born with the gift of gab, Charlie sweet-talks her, urging Axie to trust him. That in itself is a red flag, of course, but Axie can’t always help herself. Their scenes together provide ample evidence of how even women who know better can betray their common sense. Something tells Axie that Charlie may not be a scoundrel after all, but, without giving anything away, let’s just say that he tests that hope.

If you read My Notorious Life, and I heartily recommend that you do, skip the jacket flap until you’ve finished the book. I’ve made that a habit these days, sampling just enough to get the premise, and then only if I haven’t learned it from another source. And in this case especially, I’m glad I skipped it. Scribner’s publicist did Manning a tremendous disservice, telling far too much, and, if you ask me, not always accurately.

For similar reasons, I once again have to ask why an author as talented as she, in such command of voice, character, wit, language, and sheer storytelling, should settle for a prologue and chapters that jump ahead when she could have narrated My Notorious Life in sequential order and done just fine. Most men Axie meets are ignorant hypocrites when it comes to female sexuality, and most women accept their judgments as truth, even if they should know better. So it’s no secret that if Axie persists in her newfound calling, she’ll run into trouble. I see no reason to foreshadow that.

That said, however, I can’t praise My Notorious Life enough.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Uneasy Lies the Head That Wears a Crown: Master and Commander

14 Monday Mar 2016

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: Master and Commander, by Patrick O’Brien

Norton, 1990. 459 pp. $14

I don’t know why or how I avoided reading this novel, the first in a famous series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars, but as a recent convert, I advise you to hie yourself thither. Master and Commander is no ordinary sea story, even if you think one cannonade is much like another, or that you’ve heard all you care to about wooden ships and iron men.

HMS Victory, the most famous British ship of the Napoleonic Wars, if not any era (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

HMS Victory, the most famous British ship of the Napoleonic Wars, if not in all of history (Courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

Rather, O’Brian takes the genre giant steps beyond its normal limits. There’s nothing he doesn’t know about sailing ships, how they functioned, or life (and death) at sea, yet the narrative wears this information lightly. Moreover, he has an extremely perceptive eye for character and mood, revealing the inner lives of the main cast, certainly, and even glimpses of what the minor players dream about, portrayed in vivid, easily flowing prose. I wish he’d given more depth to the two women who appear most frequently; they’re little more than ambitious sex objects. Nevertheless, it’s pretty clear that O’Brian is master and commander of both the English language and psychological observation.

The premise is deceptively simple. Jack Aubrey, a Navy rat in his late twenties, has finally obtained a captaincy over the Sophie, a brig assigned to patrol western Mediterranean waters. His career has suffered severe ups and downs, mostly because he can’t control his feelings about idiotic, narrow-minded superiors who give him idiotic, narrow-minded orders. Since we’ve all felt that way, we can sympathize, though I suspect that most people would display better judgment than Aubrey, who conducts a more or less open affair with his immediate commander’s wife. On the other hand, Aubrey has a friend or two in high places and his excellent seamanship to recommend him. So he’s given the Sophie, which he sees as his chance at redemption and getting out of debt, for the navy rewards its captains for every enemy ship they bring home as a prize of war.

Just before he’s due to sail, he meets Stephen Maturin, a penurious doctor who shares his love of music, among other interests. The captain persuades his new friend to become the Sophie’s surgeon, a real coup, given that most vessels must put up with half-educated sawbones just as likely to kill their patients as cure them. Further, having lived in the western Mediterranean for years, Maturin’s knowledge of the Spanish coast and its languages make him a valuable asset. But Stephen’s greatest task may be to slip gently inside the captain’s blustery, mercurial exterior and understand his rough edges in ways that nobody else does.

This is where Master and Commander excels. Maturin’s presence as a landlubber curious about everything nautical–and his subtly raised eyebrows at customs and traditions that he thinks make no sense–gives life under sail an extra dimension, a view with which the reader identifies. But it’s not just that O’Brian’s characters move fluidly among every rope, spar, and pulley, employing their names and functions so naturally that they have trouble explaining them to Stephen in terms he can understand. It’s that Aubrey, a very social creature who loves good drink and good conversation, and who has dreamed all his life of being master and commander, realizes that his new rank forever separates him from the shipboard society he craves. Dining with the Sophie’s officers brings this sad truth home:

Everyone was unnaturally well behaved: Jack was to give the tone, as he knew very well–it was expected of him, and it was his privilege. But this kind of deference, this attentive listening to every remark of his, required the words he uttered to be worth the attention they excited–a wearing state of affairs for a man accustomed to ordinary human conversation, with its perpetual interruption, contradiction and plain disregard. Here everything he said was right; and presently his spirits began to sink under the burden.

What perplexes Aubrey most is why he can’t seem to break the ice with James Dillon, his extremely capable lieutenant who holds him in guarded contempt. Stephen understands Dillon better, for they’re both Irish-born and became acquainted during the disastrous Rebellion of 1798. Aubrey’s prejudices against “Papists” touch Maturin less, because he’s Protestant, but he deplores the captain’s careless, disparaging remarks about Catholics and Irish rebels, which, naturally, set Dillon’s teeth on edge.

These touchy relationships add tension, but they also underline a central theme, about social rank, power, and their far-reaching effects. Rank and power can swell to a geyser propelling a man upward or a vortex dragging him down, and managing these equal possibilities requires a keen hand on the wheel, day in and day out. Even men of lower rank and prospects face the same problem. The sailing master, a gifted navigator, curries Aubrey’s favor, partly because he’s sexually attracted to the man the crew nickname Goldilocks–but homosexuality is a hanging offense, so he’s careful to make his fawning look like anyone else’s. Another example is an ordinary seaman who clearly has the gift to advance but fears to progress beyond what he thinks is his natural station. The Sophie is an entire world in a short stretch of timber and canvas.

Disclaimer: My son loaned me his copy of this book, which he read long before I did, a mark of his good taste.

What History Is (Or Isn’t): 1916

18 Thursday Feb 2016

Posted by in Reviews and Columns

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Review: 1916: A Global History, by Keith Jeffery
Bloomsbury, 2015. 436 pp. $32

As my regular readers may be tired of hearing by now, I care passionately about the First World War, and, like any historian, I also care about how my favorite subject is portrayed or perceived. I admit to being rabid about this, but I have my reasons, which, I like to think, go beyond the mud pie that I made with my own two hands (meaning my own book).

Rather, as the event that arguably shaped the twentieth century, the First World War still lives within myriad conflicts, as in the Middle East, Northern Ireland, or the former Soviet Union, to name only three. I can’t imagine trying to understand those problems without the proper historical background, so I think historians (and novelists) who choose the First World War have a double duty. Not only should they try to dig past commonly held myths and misperceptions (because otherwise we won’t learn what we desperately need to know), writers should make the people and the era come alive (because otherwise we won’t bother to learn anything).

Sackville Street (now O'Connell Street), Dublin, after the Easter Rebellion (public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Sackville Street (now O’Connell Street), Dublin, after the Easter Rebellion (public domain, courtesy Wikimedia Commons).

To me, 1916 falls short on both counts, though in fairness, it’s a large task. Jeffrey starts with Gallipoli and ends with Rasputin’s assassination, also visiting Africa, Asia, Ireland, and Poland, among others. He covers the iconic battles of 1916 (Verdun, the Somme, Jutland), the Asian laborers recruited to toil in the war zone, and pays overdue homage to the hundreds of thousands of Africans who fought, fetched, or carried during the white man’s war. To get nerdy for three seconds, the author praises Hew Strachan, the Oxford historian whose excellent work has emphasized the war’s global breadth rather than just the Western Front, a focus Jeffery sets out to emulate, with some success. So far, so good.

Even better, Jeffery finds room for a raft of remarkable figures whom I’d never heard of. Frances Farmborough was an English governess in Russia who became a nurse on the Eastern Front; she even took photographs that enrich the historical record. Flora Sandes, born in England of Irish parents, served in Serbia as a nurse and as a soldier. John Henry Patterson, an Anglo-Irish veteran of the Boer War and a big-game hunter, raised, equipped, and (defying orders) armed a Jewish brigade.

Jeffery’s at his best, I think, where he seems most at home, Ireland. (He teaches at Belfast and has written about Ireland before.) I like his thoughtful, persuasive chapter on the Easter Rebellion, which captures the events, heartbreak, and passions, as well as their reach abroad, especially to the United States. He finds something new to say about Gallipoli and its impact on national feelings, no easy feat. And anyone who wants to know what Verdun felt like to the soldiers who rotated in and out every couple weeks will find it here, in horrific detail.

But 1916 is an odd book. If you blink while reading the introduction, you’ll miss the author’s scheme to base each chapter on an event in a given month. (Dating the chapters would have helped some.) Moreover, I’m not sure how you can select a single year, even one so significant, because global reach or iconic battles apply just as well to, say, 1917 or 1918.

Further, the reach is hardly global. The Germans nearly vanish, the French flicker in and out of sight, and the Belgians (my mud pie) might as well be trees. The Dutch never appear, though their neutrality influenced politics, economics, and the North Sea blockade. The chapter on the United States deals rather heavily with British intelligence officers and how they misled the American government–fascinating, but a peculiar emphasis. It’s also typical of 1916, whose voices are almost exclusively English or Irish. Not surprisingly, they usually express concerns and interests common to those nations, so that the worldwide lens has a peculiar, Anglo-Irish slant. Part of that has to do with available sources and what languages they’re written in, but still.

As for the story, 1916 can be hard going. Despite a profusion of facts, the vivid whole seldom materializes. The Anglo-Irish cameos offer a chance to add spark or provoke wonder, but they lack depth or face. Photographs help, but in the text, these men and women are talking heads, collections of statements and attitudes. People make history; that’s why it matters. Yet Jeffery pays little attention to character, even with a singular figure like Rasputin (though we get a blow-by-blow description of how British journalists broke the story of his murder).

One figure whom Jeffrey tries to sketch is Woodrow Wilson, an attempt that illustrates the unfortunate perpetuation of myth. Taking Wilson’s words about his Scotch and Irish heritage at face value–again playing the Irish legacy card–he casts the president as he wanted to be seen, a visionary statesman. Like many myths, this one has a grain of truth. But the larger truth is that Wilson’s less agreeable qualities, which included vain self-righteousness, doomed his vision from the start. Moreover, in that context, Jeffrey plays with another, related myth, that there could have been peace negotiations in 1916, had the Allies only been willing to listen. Again, the larger truth offers a more nuanced picture, and I wish Jeffrey had at least considered it.

Read Hew Strachan’s single-volume history, The First World War. It’s a terrific introduction to the subject but also a fine addition to other books.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.