It is a typical Harry Rent moment. The protagonist of Mark Sarvas’s well crafted novel Harry Revised is trapped - almost Bloom like - by indecision, in a bookshop where his task seems relatively simple: to buy the novel that will be his reference book for a much needed re-birth, Dumas’ The Count of Monte [...]
Imagine a 12 year old genius living on a ranch in Montana. He is a scientist and makes maps of everything from entymology to how to shake hands with God. As you might expect, he is, therefore, predictably weird and socially dysfunctional. Keeping his maps in rigorously colour-coded notebooks, Tecumseh Sparrow (yes this kid is [...]
Coming off the back of reading more than my fair share of European crime-fiction (culminating with Stieg Larsson’s posthumuous sales-phenomenon The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo) - a genre where plot, reasonably enough, is tight and pragmatic, where the reader must above all else understand what’s happening - it was a palate-cleansing delight to dive [...]
When I first saw the candy crusted bunny leering at me from a shelf in a bookshop, I thought ‘ah…another post- modern whatever self-absorbed ramble from a worthy author’s jadedness’. I have a particular weakness for being both attracted to and repelled by such narcissism which is why my eye wandered up to ‘The Death [...]
Should the laws of physics apply to a novel? There are readers who, not without reason, demand that yes, the laws of gravity, and thermodynamics must apply at all times if the work is to be taken seriously.
For example, if a character is to cross a room, they should do so - with or without [...]
‘Tragic’ was always one of those easy-to-reach for words used to describe Northern Ireland’s ‘troubles’. It managed to avoid picking sides, and recognised that things were more complicated on the ground than the simple catholic vs protestant / irish vs british equations. Not such a bad thing, but more often than not it was also [...]
It’s refreshing to hear an author declare in no uncertain terms that they don’t like the cover of their novel. M.J. Hyland did exactly that on a recent radio interview when asked about her latest novel This is How. Not, presumably because there’s anything wrong with the cover per se - it’s an elegant and [...]
There was virtually nothing I liked about Jim Dodge’s Fup when it arrived at my door. A blurb from the Independent on Sunday telling me ‘You’ll love it’, coupled with the sub-title ‘A modern fable’, had me close to shredding it with extreme prejudice.
Three things stopped me, though - the peculiarly grumpy looking duck on [...]
Novelist and short-story writer Michel Faber, in his three monkeys interview, commented “I think it’s juvenile and arrogant when literary writers compulsively remind their readers that the characters aren’t real. People know that already. The challenge is to make an intelligent reader suspend disbelief, to seduce them into the reality of a narrative.” This is [...]
A medieval Irish monastery under siege by the forces of darkness, who find their breach in the cell of the unfortunate brother Fursey, a monk blessed with a stammer who thus can’t adequately perform the rites of exorcism required to keep the monastery safe.
The premise alone, regardless of the excellent execution, should be enough to [...]
This blog has often focussed on great openings to novels, interested particularly in that magical moment where you, the reader, accept an opening contract from the author. What makes us choose one book over another is an area where the ending doesn’t come into play.
A handy approach that also spares us the risk of ruining [...]
It seems like a good year and a half since I’ve read a novel that didn’t involve a writer writing a novel, so I started Domenico Starnone’s First Execution wearily, almost out of duty - despite the fact that the original Italian version of the book comes highly recommended.
It has though, thus far (I’m half [...]
“If the general climate is bad, all will be affected by it. Men and women of letters are not expected to do more than they can, as they express this bad situation in their literary production. With respect to the question of the appeal of a particular work, the whole thing depends on whether the [...]
Sometimes I wish that, when buying a book in a book store, you were automatically given a complimentary title - that is to say, a book that will help you read the one you’ve just bought, as opposed to the ‘like this? you’ll love that’ recommendation.
For example, with Paul Auster’s Man in the Dark, you’d [...]
Though suffering a major nervous breakdown, Mark Haddon’s 57 year old protagonist George, in the novel A spot of bother has plenty of pragmatic insights. For example, casually while trying to fight off panic he finishes reading a novel (Sharpe’s Enemy by Bernard Cornwell), but chooses to turn on the t.v rather than start a [...]
The first story in John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet, is set in Lisbon. The narrator, John, by chance meets his mother while walking the streets of the city. There are two peculiar things about this meeting - the first is that his mother has been dead for fifteen years, and the second is that [...]
Derek Raymond, the English noir writer whom Interpol knew better as Robin Cook, could spell in at least two languages, as his dystopian novel A State of Denmark proves. Leave aside comparisons to Orwell, with the novel’s imagined totalitarian England run by a media-backed dictator called Jobling, and instead concentrate on the words frazione, presa, [...]
You probably wouldn’t pick one of Northern Ireland’s best known poets, academic - and traditional music enthusiast to boot - to be the novelist to have translated the spirit of the internet into book form. In Shamrock Tea (2001) though Ciaran Carson has, in my humble view, done exactly that - and there’s not a hint [...]
My new year’s resolution for 2009 is to not recommend any book until I’ve finished it. That gives me a couple of weeks to indulge my particular blogging vice, and there’s no better place to start than Abraham B. Yehoshua’s wonderful A Woman in Jerusalem, which I can’t recommend highly enough even though I’m only [...]
The Cellist of Sarajevo is Canadian novelist Steven Galloway’s third novel, but only the first to be published in the UK & Ireland. I picked up the novel enthusiastically (it’s beautifully put together, from the elegant cover through to the paging and paper-weight) but also with the slight apprehension that always accompanies a novel that [...]
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