Poet and Flann O’Brien biographer’s second (and final) novel is a very messy, rambling tale of a Baron seeking to retrieve a box of fabricated lettersPoet and Flann O’Brien biographer’s second (and final) novel is a very messy, rambling tale of a Baron seeking to retrieve a box of fabricated letters in order to avoid a prison sentence (for reasons too torturous to explain). The writing is crisp and witty, although the incoherence and meandering nature of the story makes completion a chore and solely the prerogative of forgotten book obsessives. Cronin’s prose often reaches for the dry absurdism of Flann O’Brien and falls short of the mark, and some of the sexual humour here is cringeworthy and strikes a seriously bum note. Cronin’s strengths lie in the digressions and ruminations that overwhelm the novel, showing his abilities were more suited to the essay and biography form....more
A droll portrait of 1950s literary Dublin with waspish reminiscences of Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan, with additional forays into thA droll portrait of 1950s literary Dublin with waspish reminiscences of Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O’Brien, Brendan Behan, with additional forays into the worlds of lesser-known writers and artists Julian Maclaren-Ross, Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. The most entertaining yarns here are those with the rumbustious Brendan Behan, especially the story about smuggling the author into the coal scuttle of a French ship to try and return home, and the slapstick moment during the first Bloomsday celebration where Kavanaugh and O’Brien come to blows following a poorly executed shimmy up a wall. For those who want a fairly unforgiving insight into literary Dublin in this fruitful period, Cronin’s memoir is essential reading. The BBC documentary ‘Arena: Three Irish Writers� made by Cronin in the 1990s on the period is worth watching too, and is up in its entirety on YouTube. ...more
The final installment in neglected Irish satirist Eimar O’Duffy’s trilogy is more scattershot than the pin-sharp satire of King Goshawk and the BirdsThe final installment in neglected Irish satirist Eimar O’Duffy’s trilogy is more scattershot than the pin-sharp satire of King Goshawk and the Birds and the utopian parody of Spacious Adventures. The last novel (available only from Irish small press John Carpenter Publishing) is a scabrous satire on capitalism and the economic systems that are still painfully prevalent today (neoliberalism, trickle-down), with O’Duffy turning his ire on the economists, bankers, politicians, and economic theorists who bend over backwards to explain why the poor starving is merely part of their brilliant and fair system. These early sections are hilarious, Swiftian takedowns of the warped logic of vulture capitalists, and the satire has a stinging resonance nearly one hundred years on, as we’ve learned very little in that time about economics and morality. The latter half of the novel veers more into a mix of historical/science-fictional adventure story with the benign demigod Cuanduine cutting down King Goshawk, and the various digressions that ensue have less of the satiric sting that makes the first half of the novel burn brightly. O’Duffy’s trilogy is a sublime satiric triumph, worthy of ascension into the Irish canon, currently languishing in badly typeset Dalkey Archive reprints and small Irish presses....more
Author of seminal biographies on Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett, as well as a classic memoir of the 1950s Irish literary scene, Dead as Doornails, AAuthor of seminal biographies on Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett, as well as a classic memoir of the 1950s Irish literary scene, Dead as Doornails, Anthony Cronin also published two novels, the other being Identity Papers. This novel owes much to Flann O’Brien in the deadpan, elaborately limned narration, following the titular Riley on his anti-picaresque trip from apathetic assistant to the secretary to pub beggar to promising journalist to London slum-dweller to victim of the vicious therapy of an overbearing, monied spinster. The Life of Riley is an unusual comic novel, not always wringing much drollery from the frequently long-winded descriptions, but all the same a charmingly strange portrait of a postwar literary drifter singularly unimpressed by life....more
McCabe’s 1992 classic is a sublime masterclass of menacing, dislocated narration that inhabits the skin of the titular butcher boy Francie Brady with McCabe’s 1992 classic is a sublime masterclass of menacing, dislocated narration that inhabits the skin of the titular butcher boy Francie Brady with astonishing skill and humour across a rollicking, blacker-than-#000000 comedy wrapped in a Ken Loach movie from hell. One of the most brutal and moving modern Irish novels....more
An ambitious, breathless rush of a novel, written in one sentence with line breaks standing in for punctuation, capturing the petty, humdrum, and luckAn ambitious, breathless rush of a novel, written in one sentence with line breaks standing in for punctuation, capturing the petty, humdrum, and lucky life of an engineer in a sequence of poetic and exhilarating set-pieces that range from the funny and the chatty to the overblown and pseudo-profound. A tremendous exercise in mesmeric autofiction with the star the rhythm of the writer’s sentences, capturing the speed of thought with the same skill as Foster Wallace or Bernhard or other masters of the interior world. ...more
First novel from the author of the excellent A Very Strange Man: A Memoir of Aidan Higgins, a light-hearted autofiction exploring the romantic and proFirst novel from the author of the excellent A Very Strange Man: A Memoir of Aidan Higgins, a light-hearted autofiction exploring the romantic and professional travails of a footloose Irish writer-for-hire. The novel flirts with an unusual structure, embeds long quotations from ye olde travel writers between sections, and namechecks the likes of B.S. Johnson and Aidan Higgins (!!!), elements that sit awkwardly around the fairly conventional story of a frequently humorous and bland protagonist, whose babbling dear-diary antics the narrator considers far more fascinating than the reader....more
One of Ireland’s most celebrated writers, Healy’s first novel still seems to elude critical fanfare or reappraisal, in spite of a lavish 2014 reissue One of Ireland’s most celebrated writers, Healy’s first novel still seems to elude critical fanfare or reappraisal, in spite of a lavish 2014 reissue from Dalkey Archive. A highly poeticised family epic centring around the murder of a patriarch, Healy’s narrative freely wanders into the interior of its personnel in brilliant exploratory chapters of strange majesty and perspicacity, pulling the reader into a harrowing, difficult saga untethered to conventional narrative norms. The novel’s plotless, drifting feel might account for its unpopularity, however anyone with a passing appreciation for the heavyweights of post-Joycean Irish literature should manoeuvre themselves in front of this maddening, mercurial novel pronto. ...more
Overshadowed by his remarkable autobiography (composed in the author’s very early twenties) My Left Foot, Christy Brown’s first autofictional novel DoOvershadowed by his remarkable autobiography (composed in the author’s very early twenties) My Left Foot, Christy Brown’s first autofictional novel Down All the Days is a magnum opus and one of the most raucous and vividly descriptive books of wartime and postwar Dublin in the canon of modern Irish classics. A BBC interviewer in 1972 rather bluntly asked Brown whether readers may rate his works as exemplary for “someone in his condition� (suffering from cerebral palsy and only able to type with his toes), as the patronisingly well-intentioned tend to receive art from disabled creators. There’s no escaping the fact that Brown’s felicity for language easily has him hobnobbing chez Joyce et al—his sentences wildly prolix, drunkenly musical, and fizzing over with lexical abandon, his ear for the crudity and cruelty of the hard-bitten Irish tongue is sublime, and his seemingly eidetic skill for descriptive detail puts the reader at the nucleus of every character and set-piece. A stonkingly underappreciated novel, a hilarious, joyous, painful, and inventive tribute to the lunacy of life....more
A very striking polyphonic novel written in fragments of travelogue, baroquely descriptive sentences of photostatic recall, and autofictional encounteA very striking polyphonic novel written in fragments of travelogue, baroquely descriptive sentences of photostatic recall, and autofictional encounters with past travelling companions, lovers, and friends. The result is a marvellous tapestry of wanderlust, a struggle for acceptance, and the shedding of traumas in a shapeshifting Europe in the last leg of the 20th century, composed with a poetic exactitude and a quietly haunting despair—in the same wheelhouse as W.G. Sebald and Aidan Higgins....more
In 1987, novelist/journalist Alannah Hopkin and modernist titan Aidan Higgins settled into their home in the town of Kinsale on the southern coast of In 1987, novelist/journalist Alannah Hopkin and modernist titan Aidan Higgins settled into their home in the town of Kinsale on the southern coast of Ireland, having struck up their romance the winter before c/o the matchmaking skills of poet Derek Mahon. Their home at slight remove from the sea was to become their main residence for the rest of Higgins’s stint in this realm. Here, he completed one story collection, a book of travel pieces, one novel, a three-volume memoir on his childhood and life’s loves, and a short book on the perils of blindness. Hopkin, twenty-two years younger, chose to concentrate on journalism to help support them.
A lucid memoir of two writers with fierce personalities cohabiting, Hopkin presents an iridescent insight into the crankiness, kindliness, and candour of a writer whose fiction was a form of baroque autobiography, whether the loss of grandeur in Langrishe, Go Down (based on the Higgins clan’s sliding social status), the epic European sprawl of wanderlust in Balcony of Europe (informed by Higgins’s wide travels), or the epistolary exchange of love-missives in Bornholm Night-Ferry (drawn from his relationship with a Danish poet). Hopkins creates an intimate portrait of a writer prone to acidic outbursts (his comments on Hopkin’s own writing are a mix of helpful and offensive—she would publish no fiction until after his death), uninterested in modern culture (no TV in the house, niche musical tastes), a cool raconteur prone to social gaffes, and a mild-mannered and loving man content in his cocoon of literary eccentricity, frequently furious at the marginalisation of his talents by a predictably unreceptive public.
Higgins’s medical decline is a catalogue of calamities, from partial blindness, vascular dementia, self-harm episodes, various strokes, and breathing problems. Hopkin is upfront on her own exasperation at this terrifying period, at the frustration at the depth and time of the pain suffered and her own role as beleaguered nurse (he would receive round-the-clock care in a nursing home in his last three years), watching her husband deteriorate over a decade and a half. As a statement of independence as a writer, free to come into her own while penning a tribute to the curious genius who nurtured her fiction-writing chops, this is a superb memoir, a snapshot of the Irish illuminati (count the famous cameos) at the fag end of literature’s cultural status, an unsentimental peep at one verbivoracious man committed to the world within the word, free from fawning (Hopkin was never fond of his fiction, preferring the memoirs) and steeped in the lush landscape of rural Eire. An essential read for Irish lit enthusiasts from here to Malin Head. ...more
Published in 1939, this novel presents British colonialism through the lens of an exceedingly chipper Nigerian clerk, trapped in limbo between the rulPublished in 1939, this novel presents British colonialism through the lens of an exceedingly chipper Nigerian clerk, trapped in limbo between the ruling English and the noneducated natives. Cary was fiercely passionate about ending colonial rule in Africa, and although this novel is too comical to serve a scathing punch to The Empire’s snarling face, the way Mister Johnson is half-educated and exploited at the hands of hypocrite exploiters is pretty apparent as our hero’s fortunes run foul. The reviewers calling the novel racist have swallowed a sickly bowl of missing-the-point, as depictions of racism are not inherently racist, and Cary’s recreation of Johnson’s dialect is coming from a place of empathy and consideration, putting him in pole position as far as anti-colonialist literature of the 1930s is concerned. The novel was Hollywoodified in 1990, with Maynard Eziashi in the titular role, and Pierce Brosnan as the semi-vile officer Harry Rudbeck....more
Aidan Higgins’s fourth novel is a trial run for the three volumes of lauded autobiography he would publish in the �90s and �00s, a fictional whirlwindAidan Higgins’s fourth novel is a trial run for the three volumes of lauded autobiography he would publish in the �90s and �00s, a fictional whirlwind through memory, reinventing and reconstructing pivotal scenes from childhood and young adulthood in a blitz of flouncily descriptive staccato sentences, like a series of extremely literary brain-farts coming in sequence of furious recall. The act of autobiography, as Christine Brooke-Rose ably punned, is more like the act of autobifography, as the memory is an utterly unreliable, seriously disreputable narrator, making novels like this a more honest effort at truth than a straightforward memoir. The stylistic swagger and erudition of the novel is impressive, although the tone is clinically removed from the various family miseries that befall the narrator-author....more
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