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The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone
"'Face facts, will you,' she kept telling me... 'What happens here means nothing and never will.'"
Cornelius Conlon has been forever growing old. Born at the turn of the 20th century, he has lived through a lifetime of madness, and now must witness his towns demise. He preaches, writes, loves and obsesses – of the darkness of the tunnels, of the dangers of the Folly, of the weather – but few pay heed. Deeply frustrated, his daughter, Lily, worries for him, but to many in Poulnabrone, he is simply, Con 'The Loon,' the man who stands on his soap box by the church, his face a cloud of beard and prognostication, his cane pointing as he delivers a sermon.
Lily Conlon clings to her mourning. The cracks in the walls of her home run through her heart. Caring for her father brings both comfort and angst, but it is her daughter, Tara, that exercises her, so that she rails at her modern notions and pagan ways. Free spirited, Tara knows what she loves. She's a striking girl, and everyone is drawn to her, for it is as though she has "appeared from the earth and remained speckled, splashed with the freckles of mud that produced her variegated complexion, her colours yet to blend with the work of the summer sun." The drawstrings of her heart bind her, bringing both joy and misery and nightmares that come "too concrete, too sudden". She listens to her grandfather, and sees that the town's troubles are intimately woven in the lives of its inhabitants.
Known variously as "The Leaning Town of Poulnabrone" and "Ireland's answer to Pisa", Poulnabrone is falling asunder. Its walls are riven with cracks and mould, its streets punctured and torn. Like Cornelius, young Malachy understands, but his mind is as fractured as the streets of the town, and greater forces are at play. Vain, and with eyes both "vacant and diffuse", Malachy doesn't know how to feel. His parents tell him he's "had the luxury to be born twice", but he feels he's yet to be born. Overwhelmed by an arbitrary moment of violence, he turns inwards and ultimately on the town itself. The bonds of history are the walls of a river, fraying and broken, loose beneath the earth; an absurd demise beckons.
At once both melancholic and magical, The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone is the debut novel of author Liam Howley. Part comedy, part elegy, and often hallucinatory, it is both a humorous meditation and a dark rendering of a tragic story. Beautifully crafted and with stunning prose, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the predicaments of our times.
Cornelius Conlon has been forever growing old. Born at the turn of the 20th century, he has lived through a lifetime of madness, and now must witness his towns demise. He preaches, writes, loves and obsesses – of the darkness of the tunnels, of the dangers of the Folly, of the weather – but few pay heed. Deeply frustrated, his daughter, Lily, worries for him, but to many in Poulnabrone, he is simply, Con 'The Loon,' the man who stands on his soap box by the church, his face a cloud of beard and prognostication, his cane pointing as he delivers a sermon.
Lily Conlon clings to her mourning. The cracks in the walls of her home run through her heart. Caring for her father brings both comfort and angst, but it is her daughter, Tara, that exercises her, so that she rails at her modern notions and pagan ways. Free spirited, Tara knows what she loves. She's a striking girl, and everyone is drawn to her, for it is as though she has "appeared from the earth and remained speckled, splashed with the freckles of mud that produced her variegated complexion, her colours yet to blend with the work of the summer sun." The drawstrings of her heart bind her, bringing both joy and misery and nightmares that come "too concrete, too sudden". She listens to her grandfather, and sees that the town's troubles are intimately woven in the lives of its inhabitants.
Known variously as "The Leaning Town of Poulnabrone" and "Ireland's answer to Pisa", Poulnabrone is falling asunder. Its walls are riven with cracks and mould, its streets punctured and torn. Like Cornelius, young Malachy understands, but his mind is as fractured as the streets of the town, and greater forces are at play. Vain, and with eyes both "vacant and diffuse", Malachy doesn't know how to feel. His parents tell him he's "had the luxury to be born twice", but he feels he's yet to be born. Overwhelmed by an arbitrary moment of violence, he turns inwards and ultimately on the town itself. The bonds of history are the walls of a river, fraying and broken, loose beneath the earth; an absurd demise beckons.
At once both melancholic and magical, The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone is the debut novel of author Liam Howley. Part comedy, part elegy, and often hallucinatory, it is both a humorous meditation and a dark rendering of a tragic story. Beautifully crafted and with stunning prose, it is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the predicaments of our times.
346 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2013
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621 people want to read
About the author
Liam Howley
1 book15 followersLiam Howley was born in 1977. Upon receiving a bachelor's degree in Forestry from University College Dublin, he disappeared into the sea of green that is Amazonian Peru. Emerging with the first leaves of The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone in hand, he returned to his native city of Dublin, where he lives with his wife and daughter.
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March 17, 2015Reviewed in 2014
Cornelius Conlon. Con Conlon. What a name! The people in the town of Poulnabrone call him Con the Loon because he likes to preach at street corners. But Con is far from crazy, he is perhaps the sanest man in the district. Con is like a wise man from another age, a fili from the Ireland of long ago, someone who feels the layers of time trapped in the earth beneath his feet, someone who can foretell the future because he understands the past. He is a marvellous creation.
Tara is his granddaughter. Tara’s name recalls the Hill of Tara, the home of the High Kings of ancient Ireland. Tara is young but she is ancient too. At one point in her story, she seems to metamorphose into a river and become a symbol of the circular nature of all things. But most of the time, Tara is simply a young woman trying to get on with her life just as the author has to get on with his story.
There is a lot of history and geography, meteorology and philosophy in Liam Howley’s* story. His writing is teeming with ideas and originality and once we get hooked, we are carried along by the unstoppable flow of words. We are constantly aware of birth and decay and death, of water overground and under, how it finds its way to the sea in spite of obstacles, how it is absorbed by the clouds and falls as rain to swell the lakes and rivers which bear it seawards once again in the cycle of nature that helps shape the earth.
But nature isn’t the only power in this story. There is also fracture and decay and death caused by man’s interference with geography so that the course of history and meteorology become changed forever echoing the environmental issues throughout the entire world.
Those are the larger currents of this book but there are lesser ones too. Just as river water sometimes stagnates in backwaters, Con and Tara, for all their transcendent abilities, have to grub down and interact with a shoal of bottom feeders on a day to day basis, and the author, who clearly loves to ponder the bigger picture, has to knuckle down and write the everyday too: people going about their daily tasks, people working, people shopping, people cooking, people gossiping, people fucking, people praying, people living, people dying. People, people, people.
It seems to me that the challenge Liam has set himself is to merge these two types of story, the flowing meditative one and the stagnant murky one.
It’s amazing how much energy can be produced when you trap two such streams behind a concrete dam. Sparks can fly.
*Liam is a goodreads friend who writes excellent reviews. I dipped into this book via a link on his page but then I decided to dive straight in. The water was fine.
Cornelius Conlon. Con Conlon. What a name! The people in the town of Poulnabrone call him Con the Loon because he likes to preach at street corners. But Con is far from crazy, he is perhaps the sanest man in the district. Con is like a wise man from another age, a fili from the Ireland of long ago, someone who feels the layers of time trapped in the earth beneath his feet, someone who can foretell the future because he understands the past. He is a marvellous creation.
Tara is his granddaughter. Tara’s name recalls the Hill of Tara, the home of the High Kings of ancient Ireland. Tara is young but she is ancient too. At one point in her story, she seems to metamorphose into a river and become a symbol of the circular nature of all things. But most of the time, Tara is simply a young woman trying to get on with her life just as the author has to get on with his story.
There is a lot of history and geography, meteorology and philosophy in Liam Howley’s* story. His writing is teeming with ideas and originality and once we get hooked, we are carried along by the unstoppable flow of words. We are constantly aware of birth and decay and death, of water overground and under, how it finds its way to the sea in spite of obstacles, how it is absorbed by the clouds and falls as rain to swell the lakes and rivers which bear it seawards once again in the cycle of nature that helps shape the earth.
But nature isn’t the only power in this story. There is also fracture and decay and death caused by man’s interference with geography so that the course of history and meteorology become changed forever echoing the environmental issues throughout the entire world.
Those are the larger currents of this book but there are lesser ones too. Just as river water sometimes stagnates in backwaters, Con and Tara, for all their transcendent abilities, have to grub down and interact with a shoal of bottom feeders on a day to day basis, and the author, who clearly loves to ponder the bigger picture, has to knuckle down and write the everyday too: people going about their daily tasks, people working, people shopping, people cooking, people gossiping, people fucking, people praying, people living, people dying. People, people, people.
It seems to me that the challenge Liam has set himself is to merge these two types of story, the flowing meditative one and the stagnant murky one.
It’s amazing how much energy can be produced when you trap two such streams behind a concrete dam. Sparks can fly.
*Liam is a goodreads friend who writes excellent reviews. I dipped into this book via a link on his page but then I decided to dive straight in. The water was fine.
October 1, 2014
Liam Howley's debut novel is as Irish as they come and yet, as Barth, quoting Aristotle in his famous essay About Aboutness, says: "the true subject of literature is not the events of history or the features of a particular place, but "the experience of human life, its happiness and its misery."" In other words, Liam's book is an imaginative reclaiming of his roots, a hybrid of history-fiction, of realism-surrealism but more of the latter, we are reading fiction after all!
I'll explain this– In his Invisible Cities,Calvino writes about cities of the imagination, cities that transcend their temporal dimensions & as pure abstraction become cities of the mind– that's how a place remains rooted in its history & at the same time becomes universal. How else does a Peruvian rainforest get superimposed on an Irish village? How else could reading about Poulnabrone remind me of the Narmada dam controversy in India? And the whole issue of the affected villagers' displacement & the thorny negotiations of compensation & rehabilitation, also the resentment of the tribals in the hinterlands of India who see their mineral-rich territories increasingly being encroached upon by the multinational companies, all in the name of progress & development. Progress, yes, but at what cost? Cornelius Conlon's dire warnings & despair become very much our own:
The extent of the changes amazed him. There were more to come, he knew. Shops and schools to be built. A church. Community and clubhouses. Amongst the clamour, an order. One street different from another and three bedrooms less than four. He was stunned. What had for centuries been farms were now submerged beneath a thin film of concrete.
TADoP is about the passage of Time & the changes implicit in it, both good and bad– about the loss of a town's essential character & history, its residents scrambling to cut their losses, make a fast buck & run.
Ostensibily, it is also about the disintegration of a town owing to its peculiar topography, or is it? For the residents in Poulnabrone are just as damaged, esp.the women– not a single happy woman– Poulnabrone "a great hole of sorrow." The fissures in the home walls symptomatic of their damaged psyches or is it the other way round? The men bear their life time of accumulated disappointments stoically but the women lash out– Cassandra, Mary, Debra, Molly – they've had enough. So much unhappiness that one seeks a back-to-nature Pagan release from it all.
People are indecisive– like trees they have spread roots here but some lucky ones like Tara, flow like a river & are able to merge in the ocean of living & being– the life being formed in the amniotic fluid of the womb as an analogue of the ecosystems of Mother Earth; a fitting coda to the everlasting cycles of death and rebirth, destruction and regeneration.
One could read this book as a curious juxtaposition of heredity & environment.
Speak of the Irish & can religion be far behind! The Catholic church's paradoxical pull & stranglehold at the same time, the question of Irish identity latent in their colonial past– the tunnels & the agricultural fields, the memories of wars standing as mute testimony of yesteryears & you sense the weight of history that the Celtic people carry. Two of this book's most powerful scenes take place in a church.
If you love your Dostoevsky; you'll warm up to this book. I cannot give it a higher praise than that.
Howley's impressionistic, poetic prose, & the smooth temporal shifts of the narrative, firmly place this book in the modernist tradition- Malachy could've stepped out of a Faulkner novel. For a first book, TADoP is definitely impressive though not perfect but then I recall the lines:
From the eye of a creator, nothing is perfect, ever. A thing must contain flaws, or it’s a dead thing, something that cannot even be abandoned. It’s finished, devoid of purpose, not even possible. (P. 9)
Liam has written about what he has known & experienced in life & yet his writing conveys a sense of wonder,a magic of imagined worlds & transcends the self in fiction.
I think as GR's Resident Nature Hater, Geoff Wilt would find a great challenger in Liam Howley! Imagine Wilty's song Down the Valley being played on loop constantly for days on end, reading Poulnabrone is something like that. Within TADoP's endless nature descriptions, I felt as if I've stumbled into a rainforest on the National Geographic Channel!
I think a village that has an abundant variety of wild flowers thriving through the cracked earth & emerald green carpets of moss everywhere,would still be a very picturesque place– Poulnabrone is one up on Macondo there! And the *yellow butterflies*...! They are a winner.
* * *
Ps. I had earlier wanted to approach this book via a Fun review using various GR reviewing formats. Here's the draft: my apologies to anyone who chooses to take offence.
* * *
Some Quotes:
"But there is no fight nor battle or war nor prayers to be answered or wagers won when a nation starves, and everything changes utterly. And all things lost linger, like some memory of a time before that banished into earth without name or marking burrows and tunnels and cleaves its way through the imagination like some spectre denied recognition. “Into the tunnel they passed,” he’d said, to her confusion. “Buried, nameless, together, in that great hole of sorrow.”(P.197)
"What space for wildness in this sped up world? Entrances and exits and everything hyper in-between. Never lost and nowhere found. Just self: scattered, spread wide and mobile; virtual in this paradise of disregard, of strangers and hawkers and tobacco and beer, and pastiche, with neither sun nor moon nor clouds; a world of aloneness and aloneness being all that world offered. This road carved through history, through a defiled valley. An invitation to journey. To where? Where mattered?"(P.212)
"There is no chaos. There is no order. They’re just labels we place on absolutes, when absolutes exist nowhere. Look at chaos long enough and you’ll see patterns, fluid movements. It’s how the weather works, how the world works: the drop of rain that forms an ocean; a single bullet, the opening shot to a world war; a rod across the knuckles casting a young man’s fate...
"this is what life is, its utter unpredictability. It’s afterwards that we look back and see the probability, but fail to see that anything can send a path astray."(P.137)
From Liam Howley's blog post Leaving Eden:
" We have been here before. Upton Sinclair in writing of the meat industry in Chicago in the late 1800′s called his work, The Jungle. I had yet to read The Jungle at the time, but I was reading of ecological theories of community succession, and then later walking on a trail, not far from the lodge, when that phrase, the economic jungle, leapt to mind. Words used in economic theory suddenly gained a significance that they had not before. We call factories, plants. We speak of liquidity. Savings are called deposits. We speak of market porosity and depth as though they are soils. These words sprang at me from the page. I realised that economics is nothing but human ecology. It is the means through which we order our societies. Equally, however, it is a construct of the mind and a set of power relations.
As the name suggests water is the predominant force in the rainforest. It is the medium of life. Living near a river bank not far from the Andes allowed me to see a river like I never had before. It is dramatic. Shallow streams in the dry season that run down through gravel beds can become immense bodies of water in the wet season. The rivers swell and rise and rise, and run over the floodplain, that riparian stretch of forest so diverse in species of plants and animals. It seeps into the soils which soak it up like a sponge. And then the water subsides. Until I had witnessed such an event I thought the river carved the forest, but that is not how it works at all. It bites at it, grips it at the roots and tears it away as it is leaving. It eats the soil in this manner. The trees fall shortly after."
April 25, 2014
Welcome to the small Irish village of Poulnabrone, a rustic town where everyone knows one another but no one quite knows what's wrong. But something definitely is.
One of the most enchanting things about this book--clear early on--is its easy mingling of wackiness and earnestness, the former sneaking up on you when it slips out from under the generally overriding latter: setting is central and the power of place works its effects upon its inhabitants; for instance we see how age and neglect can leave a house to list to one side from uneven settling, forcing its tenants to ever so slightly compensate as they walk its subtley inclined floor. The house leaves its mark on them in an altered gait that brings with it the unanticipated advantages of a more steady stance, back pain relief, and an improved ability to waltz.
Of course these positive effects are quickly outweighed by undesirable ones: "Being the consummate opportunist, Nature spared no time planting thistles and dandelions within the fissures created by their tectonic misfortune." These cute notices are soon followed by ones quite more grave.
But this is just the beginning, and it isn't just one house. The Irish micro-burg of Poulnabrone has problems--physical, psychical, and political (even geo-political, in a new sense)--that no amount of quaint charm can obscure. The expert craftiness of this book is in its sensitive oscillation between the personal and the public: our sense of Poulnabrone is felt mainly through our sympathy with its individuals; the town's travails are never narrated objectively distanced from the experience of its inhabitants. We know how it looks from the eyes and actions of the characters, each offering a particularly tinted lens on the whole. It has been a long damn time since I read a book that so smoothly welded setting to character, especially in a way that never seems wholly healthy. As a small town it sports all the expected sores: dark secrets, petty rivalries, neighbors who know way too damn much about one another, close personal ties troubled by not knowing one another well enough, a quaintness that chokes, nature that isn't, and a general befuddlement about whether it's best to solve all the small problems one at a time or go for a grand plan to solve the big one, once it's decided what that is.
This book does not deliver a simple message even as it sets tradition and comfort against modernization and change. It does not romanticize or simplify even as pagan weeds come up through cracks in the Christian concrete that always gains more ground than it resigns, especially once religion and capitalism bow toward one another in mutual collusion and compromise. But resistance is everywhere in soil and in people but nowhere in the conflict is a clear answer; there is only the passage of time.
This is felt acutely by the protagonist (or one of them) Cornelius Conlon, a crotchety old fart who is most sensitive to the subtle seismic signals being sent by troubled soil, but few believe him. It doesn't help that he's occasionally gripped by the need to preach on street corners, he habitually nature-hikes a specific circuit through the town's shifting margins while mumbling to himself, and takes up with someone in a shockingly ill-advised relationship. His view of the present is a translucent scrim over the past, scenes from which blur into his days and make much sense of his madness, for he's no more crazy than any of the other characters whose ties to the town are followed through scenes ranging from brutal to bucolic, crisply lucid to almost hallucinatory, and deeply subjective to fatally factual.
I recommend this book heartily but I fear that for different types of readers it may disappoint: for those wanting a clear-cut narrative arc that follows cleanly the path of expectations set at the outset, they might find this book wandering and muddled in parts; for those who would most enjoy the book's discursiveness, uncertainties, and its refusal to lock onto one character for a central guiding mind, they might find Poulnabrone's disorder a little too orderly, as it never pulls its roots all the way up into full-blown modernism, much less PoMo. I'd never damn a book for not properly fulfilling the demands of a pre-fab niche, but I'll sure as hell praise one for frustrating such.
I received a gratis copy from the author without being asked to review it.
One of the most enchanting things about this book--clear early on--is its easy mingling of wackiness and earnestness, the former sneaking up on you when it slips out from under the generally overriding latter: setting is central and the power of place works its effects upon its inhabitants; for instance we see how age and neglect can leave a house to list to one side from uneven settling, forcing its tenants to ever so slightly compensate as they walk its subtley inclined floor. The house leaves its mark on them in an altered gait that brings with it the unanticipated advantages of a more steady stance, back pain relief, and an improved ability to waltz.
Of course these positive effects are quickly outweighed by undesirable ones: "Being the consummate opportunist, Nature spared no time planting thistles and dandelions within the fissures created by their tectonic misfortune." These cute notices are soon followed by ones quite more grave.
But this is just the beginning, and it isn't just one house. The Irish micro-burg of Poulnabrone has problems--physical, psychical, and political (even geo-political, in a new sense)--that no amount of quaint charm can obscure. The expert craftiness of this book is in its sensitive oscillation between the personal and the public: our sense of Poulnabrone is felt mainly through our sympathy with its individuals; the town's travails are never narrated objectively distanced from the experience of its inhabitants. We know how it looks from the eyes and actions of the characters, each offering a particularly tinted lens on the whole. It has been a long damn time since I read a book that so smoothly welded setting to character, especially in a way that never seems wholly healthy. As a small town it sports all the expected sores: dark secrets, petty rivalries, neighbors who know way too damn much about one another, close personal ties troubled by not knowing one another well enough, a quaintness that chokes, nature that isn't, and a general befuddlement about whether it's best to solve all the small problems one at a time or go for a grand plan to solve the big one, once it's decided what that is.
This book does not deliver a simple message even as it sets tradition and comfort against modernization and change. It does not romanticize or simplify even as pagan weeds come up through cracks in the Christian concrete that always gains more ground than it resigns, especially once religion and capitalism bow toward one another in mutual collusion and compromise. But resistance is everywhere in soil and in people but nowhere in the conflict is a clear answer; there is only the passage of time.
This is felt acutely by the protagonist (or one of them) Cornelius Conlon, a crotchety old fart who is most sensitive to the subtle seismic signals being sent by troubled soil, but few believe him. It doesn't help that he's occasionally gripped by the need to preach on street corners, he habitually nature-hikes a specific circuit through the town's shifting margins while mumbling to himself, and takes up with someone in a shockingly ill-advised relationship. His view of the present is a translucent scrim over the past, scenes from which blur into his days and make much sense of his madness, for he's no more crazy than any of the other characters whose ties to the town are followed through scenes ranging from brutal to bucolic, crisply lucid to almost hallucinatory, and deeply subjective to fatally factual.
I recommend this book heartily but I fear that for different types of readers it may disappoint: for those wanting a clear-cut narrative arc that follows cleanly the path of expectations set at the outset, they might find this book wandering and muddled in parts; for those who would most enjoy the book's discursiveness, uncertainties, and its refusal to lock onto one character for a central guiding mind, they might find Poulnabrone's disorder a little too orderly, as it never pulls its roots all the way up into full-blown modernism, much less PoMo. I'd never damn a book for not properly fulfilling the demands of a pre-fab niche, but I'll sure as hell praise one for frustrating such.
I received a gratis copy from the author without being asked to review it.
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August 19, 2014Let’s begin with the fact that The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone is a most excellent title. The second thing is that Poulnabrone is not quite my kind of thing. The gap represented by that ‘not quite’ is, I suspect, not a large gap. But it is there and I felt it. I’ll try to describe or at least point to its nature. Because it really is a rather good novel. Not being my kind of thing isn’t what really matters.
But, if I try to spell out why it’s not quite (small gap) my kind of thing I’d have to start talking about what is known as ‘literary fiction’, a fine thing, but the kind of thing I say that I don’t really read. I like to say that what I read is fiction simpliciter ; or if you like, put a capital F on it. Or call it innovative or experimental fiction. What it comes down to is that I’m a formalist. What counts (for me for me) is close attention paid to form, to formal constraints, to formal possibilities. Prose of course is as important as is the quality of straw used to make bricks, but what really gets my stuff flowing is a novel performance of the form of the novel ; which is in fact no form but that of pure universality. Never mind.
Because Liam Howley can write a sentence. I mean he really can. And some stuff that takes serious flight. He’s got all the stuff that makes literary fiction something important for readers to pursue ;; that thing about making words make stuff, the discovery of characters, the setting down of a reader into a locale (something about Poulnabrone, despite its inevitable demise, felt like home like I felt at home in some other small-town books like Evan Dara’s or like Schmidt’s), the presentation of thinking and ruminating and musing (which sometimes gets pulled off and sometimes sinks a novel), and he’s got what is perhaps as important as anything, not holding the reader’s hand.
But there’s that stuff which made me twitch (the negative) which I’m going to just sketch briefly that rather did not work for me (for me) :: to my ear ‘whilst’ just is not a word ; there were (mostly in the earlier sections) too many clauses (randomly, from p31 “...she said, her tone quiet but matter of fact” arriving from who knows where (ie, this omniscient narrator is overreaching -- and it might just be my disposal against this kind of omniscience like my disposal against much first=person pov) ; and there’s that one verbal tense built with ‘would’ which gets a bit much at times, filling in back story and the like ; and there are three religio-theological disquisitions, two placed in the mouth of a character exhorting a second character and the third in a dialogue between priest and apostate, which, for my formalist orientation, just don’t get pulled off in the sense that, I reader of Moby-Dick, would have preferred to have had set down as essays, just slipped in there. Okay so those are the kinds of things which made the novel ‘not quite’ my kind of thing. Merely.
Look, the fact is that not every book has been written by Christine Brooke-Rose and I guarantee that you won’t be wasting your time with Poulnabrone. That ‘not quite’ gap which makes this not quite my thing is really quite small and probably irrelevant for most readers. Readers of literary fiction, quality fiction, just plain damn’d fine fiction should be reading Poulnabrone.
Two more things to close :: First, Howley’s made available here on gr the First Chapter of Poulnabrone. Read it. But I’d suggest, if you can, going straight into chapter 17 (for a taste) which made my mind do that thing that I like it to do when I read the kinds of things I really like.
Second and final. Liam Howley is a gr author. gr authors could learn a thing or two from Howley about how to interact with and among readers in an electronic forum. My anti-gr=author prejudice began almost as soon as I joined gr. I’ve softened on that front because of writers with the generosity of Howley.
That generosity -- Disclosure Statement -- of Howley’s provided me with my reading copy. Many thanks!
But, if I try to spell out why it’s not quite (small gap) my kind of thing I’d have to start talking about what is known as ‘literary fiction’, a fine thing, but the kind of thing I say that I don’t really read. I like to say that what I read is fiction simpliciter ; or if you like, put a capital F on it. Or call it innovative or experimental fiction. What it comes down to is that I’m a formalist. What counts (for me for me) is close attention paid to form, to formal constraints, to formal possibilities. Prose of course is as important as is the quality of straw used to make bricks, but what really gets my stuff flowing is a novel performance of the form of the novel ; which is in fact no form but that of pure universality. Never mind.
Because Liam Howley can write a sentence. I mean he really can. And some stuff that takes serious flight. He’s got all the stuff that makes literary fiction something important for readers to pursue ;; that thing about making words make stuff, the discovery of characters, the setting down of a reader into a locale (something about Poulnabrone, despite its inevitable demise, felt like home like I felt at home in some other small-town books like Evan Dara’s or like Schmidt’s), the presentation of thinking and ruminating and musing (which sometimes gets pulled off and sometimes sinks a novel), and he’s got what is perhaps as important as anything, not holding the reader’s hand.
But there’s that stuff which made me twitch (the negative) which I’m going to just sketch briefly that rather did not work for me (for me) :: to my ear ‘whilst’ just is not a word ; there were (mostly in the earlier sections) too many clauses (randomly, from p31 “...she said, her tone quiet but matter of fact” arriving from who knows where (ie, this omniscient narrator is overreaching -- and it might just be my disposal against this kind of omniscience like my disposal against much first=person pov) ; and there’s that one verbal tense built with ‘would’ which gets a bit much at times, filling in back story and the like ; and there are three religio-theological disquisitions, two placed in the mouth of a character exhorting a second character and the third in a dialogue between priest and apostate, which, for my formalist orientation, just don’t get pulled off in the sense that, I reader of Moby-Dick, would have preferred to have had set down as essays, just slipped in there. Okay so those are the kinds of things which made the novel ‘not quite’ my kind of thing. Merely.
Look, the fact is that not every book has been written by Christine Brooke-Rose and I guarantee that you won’t be wasting your time with Poulnabrone. That ‘not quite’ gap which makes this not quite my thing is really quite small and probably irrelevant for most readers. Readers of literary fiction, quality fiction, just plain damn’d fine fiction should be reading Poulnabrone.
Two more things to close :: First, Howley’s made available here on gr the First Chapter of Poulnabrone. Read it. But I’d suggest, if you can, going straight into chapter 17 (for a taste) which made my mind do that thing that I like it to do when I read the kinds of things I really like.
Second and final. Liam Howley is a gr author. gr authors could learn a thing or two from Howley about how to interact with and among readers in an electronic forum. My anti-gr=author prejudice began almost as soon as I joined gr. I’ve softened on that front because of writers with the generosity of Howley.
That generosity -- Disclosure Statement -- of Howley’s provided me with my reading copy. Many thanks!
September 9, 2014
The author provided a copy of this book for review.
I was very impressed by the depth and quality of the writing in this first novel by Liam Howley. He published this book himself, but clearly went above and beyond the slap-dash-smash methods of most SPAs marketing their 99-cent masterpieces. He worked with an editor and produced a high-quality paperback that looks great and feels great in your hands - so much more pleasing than an ebook...
Poulnabrone is a town in decay, sitting on a series of tunnels, many of which are beginning to fail, one by one, literally causing homes and buildings to tilt toward the unseen abyss. A road passes through the town that takes travelers north to Dublin with most drivers barely noting the town. The Irish Sea is a short walk to the east, and the aptly named Folly River goes to ground under the town.
Cornelius Conlon, a sometimes-addled WWI vet, preaches outside the church to anyone who will listen, but few do. "Con the loon" is filled with fears and fevered dreams of the trenches, haunted by the flooding of his hometown after a dam is built, his hard life after settling in Poulnabrone, his loss of wife and children, dark memories of tunnels - and maybe his biggest obsession, the weather.
The author brings in a convincing cast of characters, each with their own troubles and anxieties, each feeling the stress of impending destruction that only Con seems willing to speak of out loud. Death, madness, murder, and crippling despair make their appearances, but somehow Howley writes about these things in a light enough and understated enough way to make the story engaging without being morbid or depressing. The characters are simply human, going through their days as best they can, much as we all do, and this is perhaps the strength of this book.
In terms of style, Howley avoids the pomo formal flourishes found in house-of-leaves type books, and instead looks farther back to the high modernism of Faulkner, Joyce, and Thomas Wolfe. The time period of the book is post-WWII, but the atmosphere feels older and deeper. Their are philosophical passages, which stand out a bit more than I'd like, but the content of these abstract passages are quite good and have a kind of metaphysical pleading-to-the-gods feeling which many contemporary writers have abandoned in favor of snarky-hipster-posturing.
I won't go into specifics, but in this mixture of the real, the surreal, and the dementia of advanced age, Howley gives us space to contemplate progress, change, entropy, greed, and denial, among other things. For a first novel, Howley has attempted a lot and I think he's done a great job.
A recommended read.
I was very impressed by the depth and quality of the writing in this first novel by Liam Howley. He published this book himself, but clearly went above and beyond the slap-dash-smash methods of most SPAs marketing their 99-cent masterpieces. He worked with an editor and produced a high-quality paperback that looks great and feels great in your hands - so much more pleasing than an ebook...
Poulnabrone is a town in decay, sitting on a series of tunnels, many of which are beginning to fail, one by one, literally causing homes and buildings to tilt toward the unseen abyss. A road passes through the town that takes travelers north to Dublin with most drivers barely noting the town. The Irish Sea is a short walk to the east, and the aptly named Folly River goes to ground under the town.
Cornelius Conlon, a sometimes-addled WWI vet, preaches outside the church to anyone who will listen, but few do. "Con the loon" is filled with fears and fevered dreams of the trenches, haunted by the flooding of his hometown after a dam is built, his hard life after settling in Poulnabrone, his loss of wife and children, dark memories of tunnels - and maybe his biggest obsession, the weather.
The author brings in a convincing cast of characters, each with their own troubles and anxieties, each feeling the stress of impending destruction that only Con seems willing to speak of out loud. Death, madness, murder, and crippling despair make their appearances, but somehow Howley writes about these things in a light enough and understated enough way to make the story engaging without being morbid or depressing. The characters are simply human, going through their days as best they can, much as we all do, and this is perhaps the strength of this book.
In terms of style, Howley avoids the pomo formal flourishes found in house-of-leaves type books, and instead looks farther back to the high modernism of Faulkner, Joyce, and Thomas Wolfe. The time period of the book is post-WWII, but the atmosphere feels older and deeper. Their are philosophical passages, which stand out a bit more than I'd like, but the content of these abstract passages are quite good and have a kind of metaphysical pleading-to-the-gods feeling which many contemporary writers have abandoned in favor of snarky-hipster-posturing.
I won't go into specifics, but in this mixture of the real, the surreal, and the dementia of advanced age, Howley gives us space to contemplate progress, change, entropy, greed, and denial, among other things. For a first novel, Howley has attempted a lot and I think he's done a great job.
A recommended read.
April 1, 2014
Dream-like, dark and abstract at times, I couldn't tear myself away from this beautifully written novel which details the decay and fall of a town. So much more than that, it invites the reader - no holds barred- to experience the pain, frustrations, apathy and some of the joy to be had from the occupants of the ill fated Poulnabrone.
This is a tale of secrets, lies, dark desires and despair, explored with depth and compelling sincerity. it is clear that the author is painfully aware of the human condition with all its variances as well as the changing shape of the Irish socio-economic conditions during the last century.
This is a tale of secrets, lies, dark desires and despair, explored with depth and compelling sincerity. it is clear that the author is painfully aware of the human condition with all its variances as well as the changing shape of the Irish socio-economic conditions during the last century.
April 28, 2014
I won this book from goodreads as a first reads edition.
This book. Wow. You know the comfort you get from sitting on a porch listening to a grandparents stories about "back in my day"? That is this book. It's not all necessarily good things, or easy to follow, but there is such a raw beauty involved in the stories and style of writing. Some of the metaphors literally made me stop reading just to soak them in because they were so beautiful. "I was stuck in the madness of autumn watching the leaves fall, but her world had frozen." Really? So glorious. This book was hypnotic, so much so that I felt like they could have been my dreams, not completely laid out, but so woven together that you're sucked down the whirlpool and can't get out. Definitely worth your time to read this book!
This book. Wow. You know the comfort you get from sitting on a porch listening to a grandparents stories about "back in my day"? That is this book. It's not all necessarily good things, or easy to follow, but there is such a raw beauty involved in the stories and style of writing. Some of the metaphors literally made me stop reading just to soak them in because they were so beautiful. "I was stuck in the madness of autumn watching the leaves fall, but her world had frozen." Really? So glorious. This book was hypnotic, so much so that I felt like they could have been my dreams, not completely laid out, but so woven together that you're sucked down the whirlpool and can't get out. Definitely worth your time to read this book!
April 29, 2014
Abstract and dark, this is one contemporary work that reads like a classic. I'm glad I received this in goodreads giveaway, autographed by the author Mr. Howley. The depiction of a decaying town, Poulnabrone, is tied in beautifully with its eccentric inhabitant Cornelius and all the other characters...All of them well developed and whose fate is woven neatly with a subsiding town in Ireland. I was amused by 'daylight savings time' explanation by one of the characters. This is a carefully crafted, deeply moving read.
September 1, 2015
I received this book from the author for a honest review.
The first part was really interesting, in particular for the character of Conlon and the story between him and Cassandra; moreover, the setting was really well developed. But then, aside from some sections in the second part, I just grew bored with the narration, and lost all the interest in the characters, in particular in Tara, whose actions I wasn't able to understand anymore.
I feel sorry for it, because at the beginning I was really enjoying the novel, and I think that the author has a good writing style.
The first part was really interesting, in particular for the character of Conlon and the story between him and Cassandra; moreover, the setting was really well developed. But then, aside from some sections in the second part, I just grew bored with the narration, and lost all the interest in the characters, in particular in Tara, whose actions I wasn't able to understand anymore.
I feel sorry for it, because at the beginning I was really enjoying the novel, and I think that the author has a good writing style.
Read
March 10, 2015The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone reads like the Irish pendant to One Hundred Years of Solitude.
Believe me, I tried really, really hard to resist the temptation to write the above sentence, but in the end, there is no way around it: it’s what best sums up Liam Howley’s debut novel. It takes place for the most part in a provincial village that represents the country if not the world and humanity at large in a nutshell, follows several generations of the same family and some inhabitants of the village, is basically realistic but with the occasional excursion into the territory of the fantastic and is told in an image-rich language that is not afraid of the occasional tinge of purple.
Which, if you think about it, is not really that much of a surprise – with their legendary penchant for tall tales and larger-than-life stories, the Irish practically invented magical realism (and I think there could be made a case that the “Cyclops” chapter from Joyce’s Ulysses is the first piece of magical realism in modern literature) and if there is anything to wonder about than it is that there are not more magical realists among contemporary writers.
In any case, The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone, even while wearing its influences on its sleeve, does not simply imitate Garcia Marquez’ novel – it might be obvious which direction Liam Howley is coming from, but the way he is taking from there is distinctly his own. His novel is markedly more focused than One Hundred Years of Solitude, both in content and in form.
Content-wise, The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone mostly follows the vicissitudes of a single family over four generations, only occasionally straying from that genealogy, and it even has something like a main character, Cornelius Conlon, who is already old when the novel starts, given to preaching on street corners and long solitary walk in the countryside and obsessed by chronicling the weather down to its minutest changes. Poulnabrone, the village he lives in, lies next to a river, constantly threatening floods, and sits on top of a vast system of tunnels, dug over decades for weapon smuggling and other clandestine activities. The tunnels and the river are slowly eroding Poulnabrone to the point where buildings are beginning to slide and its inhabitants live in slanted houses (from which Howley strikes some very funny sparks), something they seem strangely indifferent to, even as more and more cracks appear in the walls of their homes. The author is not subtle about Poulnabrone being an image for contemporary Ireland but this works well for the novel, and allows him to insert some trenchant satire, in particular towards the end when Poulnabrone briefly becomes a tourist attraction and the village’s inhabitants conserve the cracks and decay of their houses in order to draw in more visitors. In fact, this is possibly another distinction between One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone – the latter is considerably funnier than the former.
Which is not to say that Liam Howley’s novel was chiefly a comedy, or that its imagery was confined to making Poulnabrone mirror Ireland. This, in fact, brings us to the second area where The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone turns out to be more focused than Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel – while that is sprawling both in its story and its symbolism, Howley keeps his imagery much tighter; clustering it around three motifs: the underground tunnels / earth (which are tight, constricted and determined), the river / water (which is flowing, ever-changing and chaotic) and the weather / air (which appears chaotic but works according to complex rules, whose order is so complex that it is almost indistinguishable from accident). The episodic plot of the novel is held together by those thematic clusters which branch out and interconnect in a variety of ways, and Cornelius Conlon, his daughter Lily, her daughter Tara, and her unnamed child move among images as much as they do among real landscapes. This is accomplished by prose that is as dense as it is beautiful and by a deliberate (if occasionally somewhat awkward – but then, this is a debut novel) structure which slowly fragments as the village Poulnabrone increasingly deteriorates. The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone is very, very impressive for a first novel and judging by it, there is hope for great things to come from Liam Howley.
Believe me, I tried really, really hard to resist the temptation to write the above sentence, but in the end, there is no way around it: it’s what best sums up Liam Howley’s debut novel. It takes place for the most part in a provincial village that represents the country if not the world and humanity at large in a nutshell, follows several generations of the same family and some inhabitants of the village, is basically realistic but with the occasional excursion into the territory of the fantastic and is told in an image-rich language that is not afraid of the occasional tinge of purple.
Which, if you think about it, is not really that much of a surprise – with their legendary penchant for tall tales and larger-than-life stories, the Irish practically invented magical realism (and I think there could be made a case that the “Cyclops” chapter from Joyce’s Ulysses is the first piece of magical realism in modern literature) and if there is anything to wonder about than it is that there are not more magical realists among contemporary writers.
In any case, The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone, even while wearing its influences on its sleeve, does not simply imitate Garcia Marquez’ novel – it might be obvious which direction Liam Howley is coming from, but the way he is taking from there is distinctly his own. His novel is markedly more focused than One Hundred Years of Solitude, both in content and in form.
Content-wise, The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone mostly follows the vicissitudes of a single family over four generations, only occasionally straying from that genealogy, and it even has something like a main character, Cornelius Conlon, who is already old when the novel starts, given to preaching on street corners and long solitary walk in the countryside and obsessed by chronicling the weather down to its minutest changes. Poulnabrone, the village he lives in, lies next to a river, constantly threatening floods, and sits on top of a vast system of tunnels, dug over decades for weapon smuggling and other clandestine activities. The tunnels and the river are slowly eroding Poulnabrone to the point where buildings are beginning to slide and its inhabitants live in slanted houses (from which Howley strikes some very funny sparks), something they seem strangely indifferent to, even as more and more cracks appear in the walls of their homes. The author is not subtle about Poulnabrone being an image for contemporary Ireland but this works well for the novel, and allows him to insert some trenchant satire, in particular towards the end when Poulnabrone briefly becomes a tourist attraction and the village’s inhabitants conserve the cracks and decay of their houses in order to draw in more visitors. In fact, this is possibly another distinction between One Hundred Years of Solitude and The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone – the latter is considerably funnier than the former.
Which is not to say that Liam Howley’s novel was chiefly a comedy, or that its imagery was confined to making Poulnabrone mirror Ireland. This, in fact, brings us to the second area where The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone turns out to be more focused than Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ novel – while that is sprawling both in its story and its symbolism, Howley keeps his imagery much tighter; clustering it around three motifs: the underground tunnels / earth (which are tight, constricted and determined), the river / water (which is flowing, ever-changing and chaotic) and the weather / air (which appears chaotic but works according to complex rules, whose order is so complex that it is almost indistinguishable from accident). The episodic plot of the novel is held together by those thematic clusters which branch out and interconnect in a variety of ways, and Cornelius Conlon, his daughter Lily, her daughter Tara, and her unnamed child move among images as much as they do among real landscapes. This is accomplished by prose that is as dense as it is beautiful and by a deliberate (if occasionally somewhat awkward – but then, this is a debut novel) structure which slowly fragments as the village Poulnabrone increasingly deteriorates. The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone is very, very impressive for a first novel and judging by it, there is hope for great things to come from Liam Howley.
August 30, 2016
GOODREADS GIVEAWAY WIN.
Assured in tone (though let down by some simple spelling errors), it's 100 Years of Solitude via Ireland, with objective correlatives as far as the eye can see - a close-knit and insular community, richly imagined.
Assured in tone (though let down by some simple spelling errors), it's 100 Years of Solitude via Ireland, with objective correlatives as far as the eye can see - a close-knit and insular community, richly imagined.
June 28, 2017
An Irish town known for the invention of the Time Zone is slowly sinking beneath the earth. Is this a metaphor for something intangible that has been lost in the steady march of Progress?
Clearly, though what has been lost, and when, and how, is largely left up to the reader. There is some garble towards the end about drugs and drunken teenagers and vandalism and crime, and not having been mentioned earlier in the novel they must be perceived as the result of some malign foreign influence upon the town, rather than enduring aspects of society which rise and fall by circumstance.
The writing is often compelling, but just as often not so. There's a tendency towards grandiose description which then gets bogged down in monotonous paragraph structure ("And then there's the X. And then there's the Y. And then there's the Z.") The jokes aren't funny, but that may be an attempt at realism rather than an authorial failing: I've heard it said that the English have wit but no sense of humor, while the Irish are the exact opposite, and thus they can never come to terms.
Still, an enjoyable enough novel, without too many of the usual debut novel failings. Worth checking out if you want something a bit different.
Clearly, though what has been lost, and when, and how, is largely left up to the reader. There is some garble towards the end about drugs and drunken teenagers and vandalism and crime, and not having been mentioned earlier in the novel they must be perceived as the result of some malign foreign influence upon the town, rather than enduring aspects of society which rise and fall by circumstance.
The writing is often compelling, but just as often not so. There's a tendency towards grandiose description which then gets bogged down in monotonous paragraph structure ("And then there's the X. And then there's the Y. And then there's the Z.") The jokes aren't funny, but that may be an attempt at realism rather than an authorial failing: I've heard it said that the English have wit but no sense of humor, while the Irish are the exact opposite, and thus they can never come to terms.
Still, an enjoyable enough novel, without too many of the usual debut novel failings. Worth checking out if you want something a bit different.
March 25, 2019
I enjoyed this book; although it took me a while to pick it up, it was so worth it. Read it!
May 20, 2014
Before I enter into the review I would love to mention the amazing use of descriptives I enjoyed within this story. The crisp cunch of grass beneath feet as you walk, rasp of gravel playing under you shoe to the kerplunk of buildings and roads surrendering life to delapidation - signs of an extremely talented author.
The story is set in the quaint Irish village of Poulnabrone which has seen better and happier days but is now succumbing to the ravages of time and decaying from busier earlier days.
The townfolk have to decide whether to solve each problem singularly or tackle them all in a barrage of repair and toil. Nature constantly rears her defiance in the form of "pagan weeds" and the appearance of alien craters in the roads - helped by people who are fairly blind to the whole dilemma.
The one person who sees the problems for what they are is Cornelius Conlon a rather cantankerous individual who is also in in touch with what is occuring in a very astute and sensitive manner. He is adamant that it is his chore to inform all of what is occuring regardless of the approach and delicacies warranted. This story is a great foray in the quirky side of people mixed with a dire problem which faces many places in today's world
If you are a person who loves a good clean-cut narrative then Iam afraid this story may not be to your liking and may find it often confused and drawn out in places.
The story is set in the quaint Irish village of Poulnabrone which has seen better and happier days but is now succumbing to the ravages of time and decaying from busier earlier days.
The townfolk have to decide whether to solve each problem singularly or tackle them all in a barrage of repair and toil. Nature constantly rears her defiance in the form of "pagan weeds" and the appearance of alien craters in the roads - helped by people who are fairly blind to the whole dilemma.
The one person who sees the problems for what they are is Cornelius Conlon a rather cantankerous individual who is also in in touch with what is occuring in a very astute and sensitive manner. He is adamant that it is his chore to inform all of what is occuring regardless of the approach and delicacies warranted. This story is a great foray in the quirky side of people mixed with a dire problem which faces many places in today's world
If you are a person who loves a good clean-cut narrative then Iam afraid this story may not be to your liking and may find it often confused and drawn out in places.
February 8, 2015
Thank you to the author and Goodreads for providing me with a complimentary signed copy of this wonderful book!
A somewhat dark, mysterious story line taking place in a small Irish village called Poulnabrone that kept me riveted from beginning to end. The story was told with a touch of comedy and was somewhat magical and dreamlike. The author's style of writing was very different from anything I have ever read, but I enjoyed the story immensely. I look forward to reading more from this talented author!
A somewhat dark, mysterious story line taking place in a small Irish village called Poulnabrone that kept me riveted from beginning to end. The story was told with a touch of comedy and was somewhat magical and dreamlike. The author's style of writing was very different from anything I have ever read, but I enjoyed the story immensely. I look forward to reading more from this talented author!
May 24, 2014
This very imaginative book offers beautifully written prose and cultural intrigue. I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone.
....A month later
Upon further mulling over this engaging tale, I can say that there is movement of plot and characters. However, the greatest strength of the book remains the writing. I found this worth careful reading. I continue to feel grateful to have run across such a worthy book, and I enjoyed the unraveling and transformation which I perceived in the homestretch of The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone.
....A month later
Upon further mulling over this engaging tale, I can say that there is movement of plot and characters. However, the greatest strength of the book remains the writing. I found this worth careful reading. I continue to feel grateful to have run across such a worthy book, and I enjoyed the unraveling and transformation which I perceived in the homestretch of The Absurd Demise of Poulnabrone.
July 20, 2014
A vigilantly crafted, profoundly heart-rending interpret this fairy-tale is laid down in the old-fashioned Irish village of Poulnabrone which has seen better and happier years other than is at the present giving way to the depredation of time and mouldering as of eventful past years and is a great incursion in the idiosyncratic face of populace muddled up with a calamitous predicament which countenance a lot of consigns in today's world coupled in magnificently in the midst of its oddball resident Cornelius and all the other characters.
June 3, 2014
I received this book from Goodreads, autographed by the author Mr. Howley.
Thank you.
This was a lovely read. Beautifully written.
Poulnabrone is falling and Cornelius knows it. Everyone else just thinks he's crazy except for Malachy.
This is a tale of secrets, lies, dark desires and despair, explored with depth and compelling sincerity.
I loved the story and the characters.
Hope to read Mr.Liam's next novel.
Congratulations...
Thank you.
This was a lovely read. Beautifully written.
Poulnabrone is falling and Cornelius knows it. Everyone else just thinks he's crazy except for Malachy.
This is a tale of secrets, lies, dark desires and despair, explored with depth and compelling sincerity.
I loved the story and the characters.
Hope to read Mr.Liam's next novel.
Congratulations...
June 15, 2017
I really like the author's writing. He succeeded in capturing every little detail and I could almost feel like I was in Poulnabrone with Cornelius. I felt like I lived every adventure that he did. I am really impressed with this book and I am glad that I did not let this one slip through my hands because it was magical.
October 23, 2014
The explanation and descriptions were perfect, though it’s too much at times. Things are portrayed in such a way that you can actually imagine them in front of your eyes. There are some sequences which will bind the readers.
Read full review here:
http://mayankkashyap.blogspot.com/201...
Read full review here:
http://mayankkashyap.blogspot.com/201...
April 12, 2014
couldn't tear myself away from this beautifully written novel which details the decay and fall of a town
Want to read
November 27, 2014i'm so sorry, this book is written in such a complicated english (for an italian girl), i'm not able to read that, maybe between few years. so so sorry, maybe i'm just nescient.
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