John J. Gaynard's Blog, page 10

Review of a Frenchman's "Voyage to the Land of the Irish Traveler"

Before I start my review of Guillaume Thouroude's book, "Voyage au pays des travellers (Irlande, début du XXIème Siècle)" which came out a few weeks ago, I have to confess that my novel The Imitation of Patsy Burke (*) does nothing, on the face of it, to enhance the reputation of Irish travelers.




Guillaume Thouroude is a fascinating person in his own right. In some of the French comments on his book there is as much about his own history as about what he has written. His first job was as a chimney sweep and he has recently been working on his doctoral thesis at Queen's University Belfast, the subject being a generic approach to French-language travel writing. His popular blog, aptly titled "The Wise Man's Precarity" can be found at: http://laprecaritedusage.blog.lemonde.fr/. I read in one of his latest posts that he handed in his thesis a few days ago.




I am not a wide reader of travel writing, apart from the work of V.S. Naipaul, the odd book by Paul Theroux or Tobias Smollett's Travels Through France and Italy, so I don't know if the way Guillaume Thouroude places himself inside the story is original. However, I did find it refreshing, even when he describes the problems of digesting a very full Irish breakfast, while wondering whether the Traveller pub in which he had eaten it had chosen to poison him to stop him from asking more questions.



The title of Guillaume Thouroude's book can be interpreted in more ways than one. The voyage is one to the land of the Travelers, but to a land which the travelers can no longer call their own, where bona fide Irish nomads hide from "civilization" as if they were native peoples going deeper into the Amazon rain forest to avoid contact with the settled people, their opinion of whom hasn't changed much since Patricia McCarthy, a social worker with the Dublin Committee of the Traveling People, said (***) that settled people were viewed as "...cold and hard-hearted, (people who) murder their wives and enemies with impunity, have an inordinate amount of wealth and barely conceal homicidal tendencies towards Travelers".




The book is organised as a piece of "Candide-style" research, with field trips to places like Smithfield Market or Dunsink Lane in Dublin, to well-off Travelers who have converted to Protestantism in the North and to Rathkeale, a village in County Limerick that has a large Irish Traveler population. Wherever he went, Thouroude documents his attempts to talk to the travellers and the disappointing outcomes: the polite, but eery, silence or paranoia he encountered. Today's Irish travelers are so traumatized by the way they're  depicted every week of the year in Ireland's local newspapers, the Sun newspaper in England, or on television programs such as My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding in the UK, that they now refuse to have contact with any person remotely similar to a journalist or who is carrying a camera.



Thouroude describes Traveler reactions to Eamon Dillon's 2006 book, "The Outsiders--Exposing the Secretive World of Ireland's Travelers', which was overtly hostile to them and went into sensational detail only about the very criminal element among them. Dillon's book is described as an extension of the hatchet he regularly takes to the Travelers in that fine example of the Irish gutter press, The Sunday World. Thouroude mentions that even the Irish Times's comments about the Traveler's are nearly always biased.



Thouroude sets his quest to encounter and understand the travellers in the whole academic domain of travel writing. His insightful comments on nomadism in other parts of the world, and how it has been studied, show both why people cling to the travelling way of life, that settled people find crazy or  criminal, and how little has been done in Ireland by way of academic study of its own peoples.



Thouroude starts, as any good travel writer would, by seeking out the academic literature. He found very little of it. Studies of the Travelers in the South of the island are done differently to studies of Travelers in the North, which respect English ethnographic practice.  Probably the most complete academic resource for study of the Traveling People in Ireland is The Irish Travelling People Collection at the University of Ulster, Jordanstown. While expressing thanks for being able to use it, Thouroude points out that since Aileen L'Amie retired from the University of Ulster in 1998, very little has been done to organise recent material received into subject categories or to mine the material for what it is really worth.





By sharing with the reader his doubts and fears, and the prejudices of his university educated Irish friends against the Travelers, Thouroude probably tells us as much about the troubles of the travellers as if he had been able to talk to core travelers, not just the people at the edges of the community, who have sometimes dipped their toes into the way of life of the settled community before deciding on a half-way house sort of life paid for by the State. Some of the people who make a living from the Irish government by running centres that are supposed to help travellers, Thouroude also found to be very reticent about sharing information that would help an outsider to understand them better. Many times in the book, you see him wondering if he has been given an important piece of knowledge about the Travellers or it is just another example of obfuscation.



We see Thouroude's reactions to the lack of even the most basic knowledge about the travellers. Where do they come from? Why have idle suppositions about the languages and dialects they speak not been challenged? Are Gammon and Cant really two different languages, or two dialects of the same language, and is it true that travellers who speak Gammon and Cant live at opposite ends of a halting site, when they have to camp together, and totally refuse intermarriage? My feeling when I closed the book was, "OK, Thouroude has done a fine and attaching piece of work, now there is another book waiting to be written, based on the pointers he has given."



Thouroude hides none of his misgivings about his capacity as an outsider to get inside the world of the Travelers, or even to understand the significance of anything happening under his nose. He doesn't hide the fear he often felt as he observed or tried to approach people in Dunsink Lane, in Dublin, where they set up camp as a result of being ousted from places where they traditionally congregated in Dublin, before the time of the Celtic Tiger, in the Docks area of Dublin or when he found some very hostile reactions to his questions in Rathkeale.


Ireland is not alone in Northern Europe in having indigenous nomads, distinct from the Gypsies or the Roms who have settled in Hungary, Romania or in the Czech Republic. As Sharon Gmelch pointed out (**), Sweden has its Resande people, the Norwegians have the Taters, the Dutch the Woonwagenbewoners and the Scottish also have their Travellers.  





As I read Thouroude's books, the words of Nan, the Irish traveling woman(**) who was spurned by her daughter came back to me, 'Our Lord traveled before we ever travelled, and He wasn't ashamed of his mother.'



When Nan traveled the roads in the 60s and the 70s, some of her worst moments were in Galway, where a gang of stone throwing youths killed one of her children and brain-damaged another. But she also found many kind people in the West, a great percentage of them even poorer than the travelers themselves. In those days traveling, getting odd jobs, selling pots and pans from door to door, made more economic sense than slaving on the land and not being able to feed your children. Nan told of times when travelers took pity on poor day laborers tied to a farm or farmer, and gave them fish they had caught or other food they had begged. Nan also describes how, when Travelers turned up in a village, some cute settled people decided it was the right time to rob the wealthier farmers who looked down on them. It was the Travelers who got blamed for ripping more weight of carrots or potatoes out of fields than they'd ever have been able to carry, never mind eat.



Nan's and Guillaume Thouroude's stories show that the Kingdom of the Traveling People in Ireland has many rooms. While some of them are part of the core group, nomads who have been indigenous to Ireland for probably at least a couple of thousand years, there are others, who don't speak Gammon or Cant and who probably took to the roads after Cromwell's destruction in the late 1640s and the Great Famine between 1845 and 1852. 




As Ireland got richer, many types of traveler flocked to the cities and towns, in a way similar to how former nomads today flock to the slums of Nairobi, Lagos or New Delhi. When their traditional livelihoods disappeared, they found it was possible to make a living there out of recycling the stuff that richer people threw away. 




In 1981, in the Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies(***), Maev-Ann Wrench wrote, in a an article titled, "The Travelling People--Racialism in Ireland", 'When Irish society was predominantly rural the travellers, while they might have been viewed with suspicion, had a definite and useful role. As itinerant tinsmiths, chimney sweeps, horse dealers and casual laborers they were an accepted part of rural Ireland. At the end of WWII, there were fewer than fifteen travelling families in the Dublin area. Now, there are hundreds.'



Those hundreds have now become thousands and, as Guillaume Thouroude shows in his excellent book,  they are still no better tolerated, understood or respected.




(*) The Imitation of Patsy Burke tells the story of the violent recent years of a sculptor whose Irish traveler parents moved to England and settled down. Through that combined miracle of the English educational system known as the 11-plus and the Grammar School cum boarding school, Burke acquired a veneer of civilization that allowed him to "pass" as a well-educated Englishman. He went to art school in London and met a young Jewish woman, who had been at the same school, but who had never come out as Jewish. Burke falls in love with her, goes to art school, becomes an up and coming member of the Britart movement, and then, when he is spurned by the woman he loves, he goes to live in Paris where he quickly becomes successful.




In Paris, Patsy Burke move too far away from the basic traveller philosophy: never get into a fight based on ideology or ideals or any other thing that’s not solid enough to help you get a square meal for yourself and your children. As a protest agains the way the Catholic Church protected the paedophiles in its breast, Burke sculpts an obscene Jesus Statue, that quickly becomes infamous. But the way the statue is used by paedophile priests in the Catholic Church rebounds on him and the deeply religious, even mystic ideals he'd imbibed as a member of the traveling community.




Irish travelers are made up of some of the most interesting and nicest people you'll ever meet, but Patsy Burke reverts to the ways of the worst knackers Ireland has ever seen: drinking, fighting, capable of killing a man for the slightest affront. As a famous artist, the French establishment indulges him too far. Eventually Burke’s drinking to excess, womanising and intemperate outbursts whenever he is drunk, and his tendency to turn himself into a raging, bare knuckle-fighting bull in the most dangerous bars in Paris and consort with the worst type of prostitute tries the patience of all the good people who try to save him from himself. He finds himself all but alone to struggle with his demons and he gets involved in a murder. 




(**) See Sharon Gmelch's "Nan: The Life of an Irish Travelling Woman"

(***) The article was published as part of The Crane Bag, volume 5, no. 1, 1981 and collected in "The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies," (1982), Dublin, Blackwater press. Patricia McCarthy's comment was included in that article.

Pierre Assouline on Georges Simenon's "Novels of Fate"

Pierre Assouline is a monument of French literature. I could also have written that, "Pierre Assouline is a monument TO French Literature". He runs one of France's best literary blogs, La République des livres. He writes novels in his own right. He is an expert on subjects as wide apart as the travails of French writers who collaborated with the Germans during WWII, or the legendary photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson. And he is, with no doubt in my mind, the world's foremost expert on the father of Maigret, Georges Simenon. His definitive biography of Simenon was translated into English as Simenon: A Biography
back in 1997.




There has been a revival of interest in Simenon over the past year. The Le Monde newspaper brought out a 30-volume (three novels per volume) edition of his Maigret novels, edited and with forewords by Assouline. Now, an Omnibus Edition of "Simenon's Romans durs - Simenon's "hard novels" (often known in English as his "psychological novels") is being produced, in six volumes*, with about one thousand pages per flexible volume. I am a sucker for anything to to with Simenon. I read through the French original of Assouline's one-thousand page biography during a rainy weekend in Normandy, many years ago. I will probably buy all six volumes of the "romans durs" and add them to Le Monde's editions of the Maigret novels, there to join in my shelves all the other Simenon collections I've acquired down the years.




In this morning's edition of Le Journal du Dimanche, Marie-Laure Delorme has an excellent interview with Pierre Assouline, to coincide with the publication of the "romans durs", in which Assouline says, "Simenon never talked of himself as a writer, only as a novelist because, like Beckett, that's all he was any good for (bon qu'à ça). I admire in Simenon the fact that he knew his limits. He knew the point to which he could go beyond his limits. He never tried to do what he couldn't do. That's what he called "excavating his furrow" (creuser son sillon)."




If anybody can think of a better English translation of "creuser son sillon", in this context, I'll be glad to hear from you.




Here are some more excerpts:




Marie-Laure Delorme (MLD): Have the Maigret novels eclipsed the rest of Simenon's oeuvre?




Pierre Assouline (PA): The Maigret novels still eclipse the rest of his work, but not as much as they used to. For many people, Simenon is only an author of police procedurals. He wrote four hundred books. 70 of them are Maigret novels, but while some of them contain a murder investigation, in others there is very little police work. Simenon didn't have a lot of respect for his Maigret novels. He referred to the time he spent writing them as a way of getting his breath back (note from John Gaynard: between the writing of his more serious novels) . But Simenon liked reading crime novels. He read Hammett, Chandler and McBain.




MLD: What is meant by the term "hard novels"?




PA: What are known as "the hard novels" or "novels of fate", are all the non-Maigret novels. Zola's Rougon-Macquart series, Proust's Remembrance of Things Past and Jules Romains' Men Of Good Will are all high peaks of fiction (montagnes romanesques). The "hard novels" of Simenon could be sold under the label "The Human Comedy". To recommend one of Simenon's hard novels to a person, you have to know that person well. Everything can be found in Simenon. It is black (noir) from beginning to end. Simenon's oeuvre is one of tragedy, where redemption is difficult to find. He had a special place in his heart for The Little Saint, because it was the only optimistic book he ever wrote...










MLD: What is it that made Simenon a great writer?




PA: A literary masterpiece (chef d'oeuvre) explains what is happening to you better than you can do yourself. Simenon's genius is that he can talk to you without ever calling you into question. He helps you to accede immediately to what is universal. You can find that in Proust, but with him it's more difficult: you need to go beyond what many readers interpret as snobbery. There's no fat in Simenon. You're immediately gnawing at the bone. What does he write about? Love, hate, envy, jealousy, shame... His novels are all structured in the same way, like a Greek tragedy. In my opinion, you can find everything in the Bible. We've invented nothing new. What you can't find in the Bible you can find in Shakespeare's plays. Anything else is a bonus, and the "anything else" is Simenon. I love Proust and Virginia Woolf with a passion. But, with the Bible, Shakespeare and Simenon you have access to the whole palette of human feelings.




* There may be some confusion in my understanding of the number of volumes eventually published. The Friends of Georges Simenon website, Les amis de Georges Simenon, mentions eight volumes,  

Franco-Irish Literary Festival 2012 in Dublin, 20-22 April 2012

Oh, to be in Dublin, now that April's here!





I just received the most recent edition of Courant d'Eire, the electronic newsletter associated with the Paris-based Irish Eyes Magazine. I saw some news in there that will bring joy to the heart of any and every person interested in French and Irish literature: the above mentioned festival. I followed the link from Courant d'Eire to the Alliance Française site in Ireland and I excerpted from it (including the heavy use of bold type) all you'll need to know to attend the festival. Here it is:

Now a significant date in Dublin’s annual literary calendar, The Franco-Irish Literary Festival is ready for its 13th edition, enriching the tradition that led to Dublin’s nomination as a UNESCO City of Literature. Who could have predicted such longevity for the original modest gathering of authors from two different cultures but sharing the same love of literature? 

The event will take place in the Coach House in Dublin Castle on the 20th and 21st and in the   Alliance Française on 22nd of April 2012. 

The festival’s round-table discussions have in the past proved to be interesting and engaging events where, in an informal setting, writers from different cultures with different languages can exchange experiences and ideas. Public interviews of individual writers and cafés littérairesalso help us to become more familiar with the invited writers. There are also readings to complete the experience. The popular Literary Brunch will take place once again in the Alliance Française on Sunday morning to close the festival. 

On this occasion, we will host Irish and French writers and also one each from Canada (Québec) and Germany. Authors include Salim Bachi (France), Kevin Barry (Ireland), Marie-Claire Blais (Québec), Pat Boran (Ireland), René de Ceccatty (France), Colette Fellous (France), Cécile Guilbert (France), Seamus Heaney (Ireland), Jennifer Johnston (Ireland), Claire Keegan (Ireland), Michael Kleeberg (Germany), Mathieu Lindon (France), Siobhán Mannion (Ireland), Thomas McCarthy (Ireland), Belinda McKeon (Ireland), Darach Ó Scolaí (Ireland), Chantal Thomas (France), Sabine Wespieser (France). 

Review of The Strange Michael Folmer Affair

The Strange Michael Folmer Affair opens in 2003 in the sordid back streets and poor pubs around London's infamous King's Cross railway station, and with the murder of a prostitute who was down on her luck even before she met the man who would kill her. Her body is found in the same street as Jack the Ripper’s first murder victim back in 1888. The autopsy shows that the woman was murdered and defiled in a way nearly identical to the way the Ripper treated his first victim. The killing of this prostitute is followed by a mocking letter to the London police force. Eight fingerprints are found on the letter and they all correspond to the prints of a man who had been hanged in 1958, for committing at least one copycat Jack the Ripper slaying, and possibly more.



After a second grisly murder, which takes place on the same day of the calendar year as the original Jack the Ripper’s second crime, the team of detectives under Detective Chief Inspector Michael Gregory finds itself faced with a race against time. They know that the new Ripper will kill on the same days as the man he is copying, and leave the bodies in the same London streets, but in spite of the way they manage to lock down London on the dates in question they can’t stop the 2003 Ripper from dropping the bodies wherever he wishes. While investigating three threads to the dilemma--the original Ripper murders, the alias and previous form of the man who killed between the end of WWII and his execution in 1958, and the murders that are happening nearly in front of their eye--they have to deal with a rumor-mongering press that could stymie the investigation. Two of their biggest challenges are to overcome their own skepticism about repeat crimes and the foolproofness of scientific evidence.



The author of The Strange Michael Folmer Affair is John Rigbey, a retired London CID officer. This novel was first published in 2008. The area around King’s Cross and Saint Pancras railway stations has now been redeveloped and bears no resemblance to what it was in 2003, but as soon as I began to read Rigbey’s book I found the sights and smells of King’s Cross as I first saw the broken-down area in the 1970s. Rigbey does the same job of description for London in 1888, where the pubs, the drunken prostitutes, the destitute working men and their cheap lodging houses nearly jump out of the pages at you.




Some of Rigbey’s descriptions of London in the late 19th century reminded me of Patrick Suskind’s rendering of medieval Paris in his 1985 novel Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, where you are torn between how well the odors of poverty in the City are described and your own revulsion at what is being described. The plotting of the novel is never less than sure-footed and the storytelling is powerful. Rigbey’s experience as a London policeman is evident throughout, both in his description of the policemen and women caught up in the investigation, while trying to exercise a modicum of control over their own lives, and his sympathy for the hapless people who are both the victims and perpetrators of crime. There were still a few typos in the Kindle version I read, but don’t let them put you off this masterful novel.

A Matter of Principle: The Lettuce

Jim had recently retired from his job as a fireman.  He'd gotten out just in time.  His shoulders and his knees were playing up
and he was no longer lithe enough to climb ladders or carry people on his shoulders.
Firefighting is the most dangerous job in the world, after deep sea fishing.  He often expressed his thanks to the Lord, in
the hearing of his wife, Sandra, that he'd gotten out while he was still alive.

As a firefighter he had been useful to society and he'd been
rewarded for it.  He'd had a good salary,
he now had a good pension, and a nice house with a large garden and a few rabbits. 
His children had done well in school and were happily married. He was enjoying the pleasures of grandchildren. 
He wanted to continue to give something back.  He volunteered to work at the food bank three
days a week, five hours a day.  Most of
the time he worked at unloading trucks and stacking shelves, so that the poorer
members of his community could easily access what they needed.

At the end of every day volunteers looked at the 'best before...'
dates on all the food they had to hand out to see if it could be distributed
the following day.  If food would pass
the sell-by date before tomorrow at midday, the volunteers could take it home
with them.  But they had to pledge that
they wouldn't eat it.  This was because
some of the volunteers in the past had gamed the system by hiding
food away in the big refrigerator and taking it out at the last minute. They'd then said, 'This looks as if it's passed the 'best before' date. But it still looks good and it would be a
shame to waste it.  Does anybody mind if
I take it home with me?'

So now volunteers had to pledge that they wouldn't personally eat any food they took home with
them.

Jim arrived home with two large cellophane wrapped heads of iceberg
lettuce.  His 82 year old mother in law
was staying with them.  Every year she
came up from the country for three months and she brought her cat with her.

'That lettuce looks beautiful,' she said.  'Do you want me to wash it for dinner?'

'It's not for human consumption. 
It's for the rabbits,' said Jim.

'For the rabbits?' she said. 
'Why do you want to feed it to the rabbits?'

'It's a matter of principle,' said Jim.  'A few of the volunteers were cheating the
system. They were hiding stuff until it nearly passed its sell-by date so that
they could take it home with them and eat it themselves.  Not only does that deprive the poor in the
community of good food, it constitutes an abuse of a volunteer's position. So we all
pledged that if we did take home food we wouldn't eat it ourselves.  We'd just feed it to pets.'

'This country is going to the dogs.' She said to her daughter, 'Sandra
why don't you try and talk some sense into him?'

'Jim has to live by his principles,' said Sandra.

Sandra had been expecting this moment.  Every year her mother came to stay with them. The first month was always perfect, and then there always arose some incident
that sent her into a two-month long sulk or a sudden onset of ill-health.  Perhaps this was the incident.

'This is nonsense, Sandra. That lettuce is perfectly good. There are people in this country dying of
starvation and Jim says he's going to feed two perfectly good heads of lettuce
to the rabbits.  To my mind that's
nothing short of criminal.'

'That's where you're wrong,' said Jim. 'What would be criminal is if
I consumed that lettuce.'

'Explain to me why,' said his mother-in-law.

'Because I pledged not to eat it, or to let anybody else eat it,'
said Jim.

'Who's going to know if we eat it or not?'

'I'm going to know,' said Jim. 'As far as I'm concerned, that's the
end of the conversation.'

'No, that is not the end of
the conversation, young man.  If your
late mother realized how you are letting silly procedures rule your head, instead of your good sense, she would turn in her grave.  I refuse to spend another day in a house that
behaves in this wasteful way.

'No, Mum. Don't go yet!' said Sandra.  'You told me only this morning how much you
were enjoying yourself.  You and Jim were
getting on so well for a change.'

'Sandra I want you to drive me to the train station as soon as I've
packed my suitcase."

Sandra's mother left the room in a huff.

'Can't you see the damage you're doing with your principles? She's growing old, Jim.  She doesn't understand these new ways where
people prefer to give good food to animals rather than eat it themselves.  Why can't we just eat the damned lettuce?'

'I have to remain true to the principles I signed up to,' said Jim.

'Why don't you drive her to the train station?' asked Sandra.  'You could try to make it up to her on the
way there.'

'I'm not going to make anything up to her. In my opinion her daughter should drive her
to the train station. We don't even know
what time the next train is. My knees and my shoulder are hurting me and I don't
want to be hanging around for too long in the cold.'

'I'm not asking you to perform a duty, Jim.  I'm asking you to try to make amends to her.'

'What did I do wrong?'

'You sprung the story of the lettuce on her. You should have known
she would be shocked, at her age.'

'It's a matter of principle,' said Jim.

'What about if I nipped down to the store and bought a couple of heads
of lettuce? She'd be able to wash them, we could eat them, you could still feed
the other lettuce from the food bank to the rabbits, and she wouldn't be any
the wiser.'

'I can't play that sort of trick,' said Jim.

'Why not? Is it just because you don't want to give her the
impression that she's won?'

"No. It's because I don't want to give her the impression that she
can break the law and get away with it.'

'What are we talking about here, Jim?'

'We're talking about me being able to live with myself and sleep at
night.'

Sandra's mother came stumping down the stairs with her
suitcase.  She didn't come into the
living room.  Sandra and Jim heard her
dragging her suitcase and the cat basket to the front door.

'I'll drive you to the station, Mother!' shouted Sandra.

'And I'll go and feed the rabbits,' said Jim.

He heard the front door slam and the car motor start. He went into the kitchen and he tore the cellophane away from the
heads of lettuce.






©John J. Gaynard (2012)

How to Understand Crime Writing by Irish Academics in the Context of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays blog sets out to educate the reader both about Irish Crime Fiction and his own work, the most recent examples of which are Absolute Zero Cool and Crime Always Pays. Along the way, the blog can show up gaping holes in the reader's philosophical and religious knowledge that may persuade him/her to buy a book miles removed from Irish crime writing. I have an example from today.




Declan Burke's post about Matt McGuire's debut novel, Dark Dawn - Killing in Cold Light, revealed that this author is in the employ of the University of Western Sydney. The post drew an implicit comparison with Rob Kitchin, the author of  The Rule Book, which I enjoyed reading a few weeks ago. Rob Kitchin runs the excellent Crime Fiction blog The View from the Blue House, and also works at the University of Maynooth in Ireland.




Declan's beginning to the end of his blog post was, "So there you have it. Yet more academic professor-types writing Irish crime fiction. Which is, surely, the literary equivalent of the second horse of the apocalypse."




That comment brought home to me the unwelcome truth that, although I've had the occasional brush with academia, I knew next to nothing about the second horse of the Apocalypse and its rider and why the author of Absolute Zero Cool drew that comparison.  In the effort to educate myself, my first port of call was Wikipedia, where I learned the second horse is often associated with "civil war". So that neatly explained its use in the context of the wider academic community. However, most of the rest of my education about the Book of Revelations comes entirely from listening to Johnny Cash's song When the Man Comes Around and Johnny never went into any depth about the four horses.




If I wished to continue reading blogs about Irish academics writing Crime Fiction I would need to brush up on my knowledge of the New Testament.




Luckily, I had a copy of the New York Review of Books on my lap (under the laptop), open at the review of Elaine Pagels' Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation[image error]. Here's the excerpt that gave me the insight Elaine Pagels' book could provide me with the appropriate level of Apocalyptic knowledge:

"Just about the only chronological indicator in Revelation on which most interpreters agree is the mystic number of the beast that appears from the earth in succession to a fearful creature from the sea with seven heads and ten crowned horns. Both beasts represent the enemies of John and his religion. The seven heads represent seven kings, "of whom five have fallen, one is living, and the other has not yet come." The second beast, "that was and is not," stands for an eighth king who will remain for only a little while, and he is explicitly described as one of the seven kings. He is named by the number 666. When this number is converted into Hebrew letters, each of which can carry a numerical value, the name of the emperor Nero emerges. This is perhaps the only gloss on the text of Revelation for which there is a substantial scholarly consensus. John's description of seven kings, of whom five have fallen, fits perfectly the five emperors from Augustus to Nero. The one who is living and the other yet to come point in turn to Galba, who reigned for six months, and to his successor Otho."

In an interview with ExpressNight, It Isn't the End of The World  I found a very nice photograph of Elaine Pagels and an interview with her that put a seal on my decision to buy the book:

"Primarily, I say this book is an indictment of the Roman Empire by a prophet [John of Patmos] who's living in a dangerous time," says Pagels. "[Disciples] Peter was crucified, Paul was beheaded — the leaders of this movement are being killed by representatives of the Roman Empire. So John writes a prophetic denunciation of Rome saturated with the language of classical prophets."

That language, though, has made Revelation wide open to interpretation. "The language is vivid, but not specific," says Pagels. "Because it's written in visionary language, it can be read in many ways. The plot is 'evil forces have taken over the world, and God is going to return and His justice will be served.' If you're having a conflict with people you see as being opposed to you, you can read yourself into that story." 

And people have read themselves into that story since the time it was written. "You can read it in the 11th century, and it was against the 'infidels' and it justified the First Crusade. You can read it in the 14th and 15th centuries, and Protestants read it against Catholics and Catholics read it against Protestants." In the American Civil War, the Northern "Battle Hymn of the Republic" used imagery from the Book of Revelation: A winepress that would squish the "grapes of wrath" and a sword both appear in Revelation, and the allusions get even more pronounced in later verses. And during WWII, Dr. Seuss himself drew political cartoons depicting Hitler as the Great Beast mentioned in the book. 

Taking John of Patmos' images and bending them for social or political meanings doesn't bother Pagels. "That's how the book survived," she says. "Many people living in oppression saw it as a book about God's justice. The openness of the symbols lends it to that. I'm not shocked that they do that."

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

Very few men have made a lasting impression on me. One of them is Bruno Latour, who's not only one of the greatest speakers in France today, but an iconoclast with an aversion to iconoclasm and probably one of the most difficult 21st century sociologist-philosophers to read. Latour is a practicing Catholic who can make such illuminating comments as the one that it is wrong to spend time wondering whether the Virgin Mary, when the angel Gabriel saluted her, was a virgin or if she was being impregnated by spermatic rays. It's probably under the unknowing influence of Latour that my novel The Imitation of Patsy Burke took the strange turn it did, as Patsy plunged from the modern belief in the all-saving power of art to the old-time practice of prophecy.




In the March 8 edition of the London Review of Books there was an excellent review of Latour's latest book to be translated into English: On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. The review, titled Dolls, Demons and DNA was by Barbara Herrnstein Smith. Below is an excerpt from it that will give you an idea of where Latour is coming from.

"...In some quarters Latour's ideas have proved unsettling, not to say infuriating. His statements, often in garbled versions, were targets of choice for science warriors throughout the 1990s and continue to be cited (and garbled) in popular writings as examples of 'postmodernist' thought at its wildest. But significant and no less unsettling alternatives to prevailing accounts of scientific knowledge had been developed earlier by other historians, sociologists and philosophers of science, notably Paul Feyerabend, Ludwik Fleck, Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault and David Bloor. If Latour's work has caused particular distress, it is at least in part because of his flagrantly cosmopolitan style: witty, imaginative, literate and unrelentingly ironic. For some, all this spells something manifestly frivolous and naturally suspect. Others, including many not ordinarily drawn to treatises on science and technology, are attracted by Latour's style into engaging with ideas they find illuminating and a mode of analysis they can use... 

In his second chapter, 'What Is Iconoclash?', Latour extends his analysis to art. Science, art and religion are all modes of image-making, he observes, but each involves 'different patterns of belief, rage, enthusiasm, admiration, diffidence, fascination and suspicion' with respect to representation. Scientific images, such as models, diagrams and satellite photographs, are representations of atoms, light and galaxies, but they are taken for the world itself. 'And yet … it slowly becomes clearer that without huge and costly instruments, large groups of scientists, vast amounts of money, and long training, nothing would be visible in such images. It is because of so many mediations that they are able to be so objectively true.' Contemporary art seeks to complicate our reaction to representations and make us aware of images' status as images. This art is, at the same time, iconoclastic, smashing every traditional aspect of art: image, canvas, paint, colour, patron, museum and indeed our understanding of what it is to be an artist. Yet 'the more art has become a synonym for the destruction of art, the more art has been produced, evaluated, talked about, bought and sold, and, yes, worshipped."

My Fiction Reviewing Policy

I don't make a living from reviewing books, but my respect for professional reviewers has grown by leaps and bounds ever since I started this blog. Professional reviewers, if they want to keep the wolf from the door, have to review a book whether they like it or not, whereas I only write reviews for the books I like; the ones to which I can easily give a four- or five-star review on Amazon or Goodreads. Even writing a complimentary book review can take a couple of hours, so I can't imagine the amount of effort professional reviewers put into writing half a balanced page about a book they haven't appreciated.




I don't write reviews for the books that I find average. This is because I have an over-riding tendency to be pleasant (although not everybody would agree with that statement!) and I'd probably waste at least an hour trying to invent a compliment for the book, just not to feel guilty. Literature I find average will find other readers who think it excellent. The overall weight of the crowdsourced reviews on Amazon or Goodreads will help readers to find what they want, without my two cents of satisficing.




I don't write reviews for books I haven't liked, for two reasons. Number one: I have already wasted enough time on the book. Number two: I don't see what I can gain from slagging off an author who, whatever my opinion, has put a lot of time and sweat into his or her writing. This is the area in which I'd find it very difficult to be a professional reviewer. 




The most recent book I could have slagged was Emile Zola's The Downfall which was his highest-selling title when he was alive, but which has now probably become the least known. The reason I read it was to learn more about the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. The reason French readers wanted to read it during Zola's lifetime was also to try to suss out what the hell happened. How could the strongest army in the world, i.e. the French one, have collapsed in such fashion? The amount of mind-numbing detail, one identical scene after another as the French Army refused to engage with the Prussians, and continually got lost in France (the only maps the French Generals had handed out were of Germany, so confident were they of over-running the Prussians), finally made the book fall from my hands. What an incredible difference in quality between Zola's war book and Tolstoy's War and Peace? I'm going to finish The Downfall one of these days, because I know there are some scenes in there, towards the end, about the Paris Commune. Let me add the fact that I found The Downfall very poor doesn't mean that I won't re-read with pleasure other Zola books like Germinal or The Belly of Paris.




What sorts of fiction do I read? Literally anything. I have very eclectic tastes. I read Alphonse Boudard's books because I wondered how in the hell the French Army in 1940, supposedly the strongest army in the world (again!) managed to collapse during the few weeks of what the French call the "weird war", and how the working class people in Paris reacted. I read Anya Lipska's Where the Devil Can't Go because I have many fond associations with Poland, and the Polish community in London, and I found the book excellent. I began to read Alain Mabanckou (who now teaches French literature) at UCLA because I saw he was a Congolese writer and I'd spent some time working in the Congo. I then sought out his other books because they are truly excellent. I even just made some corrections to his Wikipedia page (though more needs to be done)




With regard to very contemporary writers, since publishing my own novels I've discovered the worlds of Indie and Kindle publishing and the blogosphere. This has led me to come across novels I would never have even known existed a couple of years ago. Knowledge about modern Irish crime writing has come from reading blogs like Rob Kitchin's The View from the Blue House and Declan Burke's Crime Always Pays or from being on Twitter. Both of the writers I've just mentioned are mavens (see the next couple of paragraphs down), as I am myself (although not yet at their altruistic level). I prefer to spend more time writing or talking about other people's books than I do my own.



If I find a book excellent I want to let everybody know about it, and that ties in what what I once heard about "funny arithmetic": "If you share your pain with other people, you divide it, and if you share your joy or pleasure with other people you multiply it." The only pain I don't want to share on a comforting shoulder is the sort of stuff I would put into a very critical book review, but I feel compelled to share my pleasure about good books, in the hope that it will multiply.




As established writers are usually backed up by their Prussian army of publishers' marketing and sales departments in the scramble to get reviews, I prefer to give reviews to good books which get less press,  that are slightly unusual (if it's already been done, why do it again?) and in which the writer puts him or herself out there to the point where what's been done (or written) can't be undone (or unwritten).  My review of Raymond Embrack's Steez or Russell Bittner's Trompe-l'Oeil will, I hope draw attention, to a couple of writers who are putting themselves out there in weird and wonderful ways.




In The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell posited "the law of the few", which describes how certain types of people--Connectors, Mavens or Salesmen-- can introduce that little difference that makes all the difference between failure and success; which turns, say, a book with no readers into a book with readers. Here is how a "maven" is described on The Tipping Point's Wikipedia page: 

Mavens are "information specialists", or "people we rely upon to connect us with new information." They accumulate knowledge, especially about the marketplace, and know how to share it with others. Gladwell cites Mark Alpert as a prototypical Maven who is "almost pathologically helpful", further adding, "he can't help himself". In this vein, Alpert himself concedes, "A Maven is someone who wants to solve other people's problems, generally by solving his own". According to Gladwell, Mavens start "word-of-mouth epidemics" due to their knowledge, social skills, and ability to communicate. As Gladwell states, "Mavens are really information brokers, sharing and trading what they know".

As I'm drawn naturally to mavens, I have developed a preference for reading novels written by them.  Blogs or Twitter accounts used almost entirely to peddle one writer's wares tend to turn me off, and thus I never get around to reading the books they push to the exclusion of all other writing.




My attitude to other writers' work is that, when it comes to living ones, I have a tendency to read books written by people who have similar tastes to mine. If I find the book good, I will give it a good review. If I find it not so good, I won't mention it on my blog. Established writers usually have their books read in manuscript, by other established writers, who will furnish suitable blurbs, but Indie writers need to band together to spread the word after the book has been published. I have described this sort of activity, in another post on this blog, making a comparison with the French Gallimard publishing house at the beginning of the 20th century: Gallimard, Gide, Léautaud...



That's all for today, Folks! When I have a little more time I'll get around to writing a good review of Gerard Brennan's Wee Rockets and showing the parallels between it and child soldiers in Africa.

Review of The Point by Gerard Brennan, a man with the true comic spirit

I decided to read this novella on my Kindle because, after a couple of excellent legacy-published five-hundred pagers consumed in the previous two days, I wanted a good, short read to bring the evening before yesterday to a pleasant close. I remembered badass writer Raymond Embrack's Twitter recommendation to read it. Ever since Embrack's comment about my novel, The Imitation of Patsy Burke, that "this is airport reading only if you are flying to Sodom", I've had immense respect for his literary acumen. 




Before I was five pages
into The Point, James Joyce's comment about Flann O'Brien came to mind: "This
is a man with the true comic spirit".










The brothers Morgan,
Brian and Paul are both Belfast born and bred. Hard-drinking womanizers, they
emerge daily from the after effects of gallons of cheap cider and junk food to make a kind of living out of burglary and other ways of living off the community. Although they sometimes manage to pick up a "skank", a drunken woman in a pub, they don't often get the anticipated enjoyment from their conquest. They are so pissed themselves at the moment of
intercourse, that the exploit is only vaguely
remembered, if indeed it ever happened. Had Brian managed to get it up at all last night before
he woke up this morning to find himself in the woman of the house's bath tub? That's about the limit of their philosophical inquiry. Brian's occasional tendency to treat women like human beings--he has his humane moments, is cynically dismissed by Paul.








Paul, the elder brother, is fairly tall and
thin, Brian is short and stout. Paul is a sort of superficially intelligent
and charming predator, but the truth is that his gnat-brain never cops on to the fact that the hand he bites, immediately after it has helped him, or given him a gun, will
boomerslap back into his face or nuts. Brian is a quick thinker,
handy in times of trouble, but more risk-averse than Paul. Free of his brother's influence, he could be easily tempted into getting
a good labouring job and going straight. Brian's cross in life is his loyalty
to Paul, and his willingness to go along with his harebrained,
get-a-few-pounds-quick schemes, such as breaking into a student's digs and ferreting through her underwear while seeing if she has
left her dinner money behind her in the house.  








When Paul makes an attempt to move into the
comparative big time, he double crosses Mad Mickey, a forty-year old
hippy Rastafarian crook with a mean streak. Mad Mickey lives in the back of a carpeted
van, illuminated by black light and lava lamps. Paul is given a beating by Mad Mickey's caveman sidekick. Once
he has handed back the money he stole, he receives an ultimatum of one week to get out of the
city. Paul convinces Brian, without telling him why, that it would be a
good idea for them to leave Belfast for a small seaside town called
Warrenpoint, also known as the Point, where they will be able to use their big
city smarts to outwit the local yokels and make some easy pickings. To convey them to their new
destination, Paul decides to literally steal Mad Mickey's van out from under his ass.








Paul's plans get off to a good start, but do not come to fruition in the way he'd anticipated. Brian revels in the provincial calm and falls for a beautiful young woman who
was not afraid to burn the teat off a two-timing lover with a car
cigarette lighter. Reassured that the younger brother Morgan is truly smitten,
she introduces him to the delights of near-sober coupling. Paul, eventually gets to meet the local big man, who has a taste for torturing gamblers who welsh on their debts and, of course, tries to hoodwink him with his urban intelligence. But, as any boy from
Belfast soon discovers when he wanders out of his built-up comfort zone, it
never pays to under-estimate the importance of provincial know-how, know-where and know-when, or Mad Mickey's desire for revenge.








To go back to my first
sentence, this is a novel that is pervaded and carried along by Gerard Brennan's congenital comic spirit. Brennan has a way of using plain language that systematically has you either laughing or chortling. "How in the the hell
did he manage to do that?" you ask yourself after every laugh. You go back a
couple of pages, to try to analyze what happened, and you discover that the skill is very subtle: the meanings
of common phrases are thrown slightly out of skew; moments of
tension are hilariously squashed under absurd stonewall replies; and characters "intelligently" deny ridiculous truths that Brennan has already let the reader
into. Underlying those sleights of the writing hand is a Woody Allen-like sense of
priming and timing. By now you'll have understood that my recommendation is to read The Point.

My Review of Anya Lipska's Where The Devil Can't Go

Anya Lipska's Where the Devil Can't Gobegins on a building site in London, where an incompetent young Polish builder and decorator gets strong-armed by the hero, Janusz Kiszka, for late payment of a sum of money he owes. The first few chapters develop the backdrop of East London and the fast money, back of a lorry, gambits to be enjoyed in the erection of sub-standard buildings for the Olympic Games.



Janusz's troubled character slowly comes into focus. A devout but doubting Catholic, a large man whose face carries every trace of worry and wear it has picked up since his twenties, unsuccessful in love, he is fairly well off due to the increase in the value of his apartment. He makes his day to day money from intimidation and other small time activities he would never have envisaged when he was a young science student in Poland.




A mistake Janusz made in Poland, at the time of Solidarity, cut him off from a potential, respectable career as a scientist. Now, he has become a sort of go-to man in the Polish working class community in London, partnering often with a loveable but obnoxious loudmouth named Oskar. Janusz navigates uneasily between the working-class Polish community and his priest, who takes him to meetings and events in respectable institutions, such as the Catholic Church and the Polish Embassy, that still smack of the old, aristocratic Poland. 




Janusz is asked to find a missing Polish girl in London. At the same time, the second major character of the novel, Detective Constable Natalie Kershaw, begins to investigate the case of a dead body found in the Thames. Then a second dead body appears, and Natalie discovers that they are both Polish. In alternate chapters, the reader follows Janusz on a physical journey from London to Gdansk (and its area) and then back again, on his quest for Weronika, while Natalie seeks out evidence to find out how the two young women died. At one point they cross each others pasts and if, at that moment, Janusz had dropped his guard and shared information Natalie's case would have been been quickly solved. But Janusz's distrust of the police, based to some extent on his experience in Poland, and the mistake he made, prevents him from talking.




On his physical journey to discover the truth, Janusz also engages in a historical journey (which illustrates why the novel is titled, « Where the Devil Can't Go »), that gives the reader an interesting resume of the the Solidarity movement, the struggle to throw off Communism, the way in which informers were used by the Polish secret police to rat on their fellow citizens, and how all that is still influencing the behaviours of a few present-day Polish politicians.




Janusz is also very aware of the difference between the Polish generations, the old generation that is glad (for the most part) to have said goodbye to Communism, but that is still suffering from the wounds totalitarianism inflicted on the Polish psyche, and the younger generation, which works hard in England but whose main hedonic pursuits seem to be ego-centric, superficial and dismissive of anything older people wish to tell them about the past.  On his physical and historical trip, at every step of which he is unknowingly spied upon and led where others want him to go, Janusz, who has worked in London for more than twenty years, comes to the realization that he no longer speaks the language of the place where he was born. He has become one of those Poles who has been away too long. He will never go back home.




Janusz and Natalie both discover towards the end of the novel that all the initial assumptions they had made about their respective investigations were wrong. Natalie finds out why the two young Polishwomen died. In the process of discovering what has become of Weronika, Janusz unearths a sordid tale of collusion with communism and that, in his quest to find the young girl, he had been less of a hunter than the prey.




The novel is well plotted, with many surprising twists, and it's very well written. The book ends in a very satisfying display of fireworks, in which Janusz and Natalie finally come face to face with the bad guys. But that's all I'll say about that. I don't want to spoil the novel for everyone of you whom I encourage to read it.




I bought the book because of its Polish theme and I was not disappointed. Anya Lipska's description of the surprise Janusz felt when he goes back to his home town of Gdansk, which no longer resembles the colourless, joyless town he left behind, reminded me of the gap between the miserable cities of Warsaw or Toruń I first saw in 1990 and the illuminated, sophisticated and trendy places they had turned into only 10 years later, after they'd had a few years to reconnect with their sophisticated, pre-Communist past. 




Although most of the comments about the book I have seen so far tend to concentrate on Janusz Kiszka, I was just as delighted to read the chapters featuring Detective Constable Natalie Kershaw, a young Londoner, who is determined to show her wise, big-hearted Sergeant, « Streaky » Bacon that she is a good detective, while resisting the barrack-room humour  of her male colleagues, as she tries to resist falling in love with a fellow cop. I hope that Anya Lipska will be able to develop both Janusz and Natalie in future novels. I will certainly be among the first to buy them.