This week's books; Banville, Minchin, Finn and Morgan, Child and Harris
It’s a mixed bag this week, including fiction, history, a bit of inspiration and whatever you’re having yourself.
The Drowned, John Banville, Faber, €15.99
Ever since Banville opted for a life of crime, at first using a pseudonym but we weren’t fooled, he has been guilty of runaway success. He has raised the bar so high in the crime/ noir / thriller genre he’s virtually untouchable. Here, he again pairs off his Irish Protestant Garda Detective St John Strafford and his pathologist Quirke, in 1950s Ireland, to solve the mystery of a missing woman in Wicklow whose husband’s distress rings rather hollow. Armitage, the husband (we encountered him in a previous novel), seeks the help of Wymes, a recluse who lives in a caravan on the coast. Armitage’s wife has apparently driven her Mercedes SL to a nearby clifftop, alighted and, wasting no time, chucked herself off and into the sea. Except there’s no body to be found and anyway, Wymes is reluctant to help with Armitage’s ‘trouble’, being a child molester recently released from prison and attempting to live anonymously. Strafford and Quirke end up working together here and the local garda sergeant – a thick, drunken mule of a man – is no help to these big fellas sent down from Dublin. And then there’s the thorny problem of Strafford’s relationship with Quirke’s young daughter. Evocative, wryly funny at times yet black as jet, it’s another, yet another, Banville masterpiece.
You Don’t Have to Have a Dream, Tim Minchin, Ebury Press, €20.99
I was fortunate to discover Minchin years before the musical Matilda, at a time when he was filling theatres, mostly in the UK, with his mix of wit and music. He was a unique comic talent, with most of the laughs conveyed in song; a kind of thinking man’s or woman’s Victoria Wood, and he was truly marvellous. Matilda brought him worldwide adulation and some of the stuff he’s done since has been hit-and-miss, in my ‘umble, but this book – taken from speeches he delivered for three different university commencement ceremonies – is a little capsule of Minchin wisdom. Those speeches are on YouTube and have garnered more than 100 million hits. Mindful of his young audience, Minchin fosters encouragement, compassion, common sense and joie-de-vivre. There’s none of his previous world-weary cynicism here. It’s a perfect dipper and beautifully presented. A little bit of Minchin daily would certainly get the cogs in motion, even old and rusty cogs. It’s a perfect gift.
The Irish in the Resistance, Clodagh Finn and John Morgan, Gill,€19.99
Most people know about Samuel Beckett’s involvement in the French Resistance. And thanks to Joe O’Connor, those of us who didn’t know about Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty’s brave work in the Vatican during the war, certainly know about it now, through his excellent novel My Father’s House. O’Flaherty was assisted by Delia Murphy, renowned Irish singer and wife of an Irish diplomat in Rome. But there were other Irish citizens, unsung and largely forgotten, who risked their lives for the freedom of others during WWII and this book tells their stories. For example, there’s Katherine Anne McCarthy, a nursing sister from Cork who got 200 Allied soldiers, all wounded, to safety before she herself was arrested. There’s Fr Kenneth Monaghan from Sligo who used St Joseph’s church on Avenue Hoche in Paris to funnel fugitives out of the city. And there are plenty more. Thanks to Finn and Morgan, these men and women are no longer forgotten. It’s an impeccably written and important slice of Irish history.
Safe Enough, Lee Child, Bantam Press,€16.99
Lee Child can do no wrong, apparently. He’s a vastly successful novelist and creator of the Jack Reacher crime series. This book is a departure of sorts, 20 short stories, all thrillers, and something we don’t see much of this side of the pond. Short story anthologies here and in the UK tend to be only in the literary fiction genre (if there’s even such a genre). But that wasn’t always the case and remains not so in the US, where there are slews of crime short stories published in oodles of crime anthologies and journals. Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are all short. Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell wrote short stories too. So why shouldn’t Lee Child? With an introduction that’s interesting and more than a little self-effacing, he writes of his stories: “Fabergé eggs they ain’t. There’s a mysterious short-story thing the great writers do. I never figured it out. Mine are very, very, very short novels.” And if you’re a Lee Child fan, they are very, very, very good.
Precipice, Robert Harris, Hutchinson Heinemann, €18
Robert Harris’s way with historical fiction has positioned him, for years now, head and shoulders above his contemporaries and this latest novel keeps him there. This is the story of the relationship between British Prime Minister HH Asquith and a young (very young) British aristocrat, Venetia Stanley, in 1914-1915, as the outbreak of WWI took Britain to the precipice of catastrophe. Asquith was 61 and married, Stanley was 26 and bored. And before we yell ‘predator’, that does not seem to be the case. Asquith was genuinely besotted with Stanley. In a relationship that was largely epistolary, he wrote her more than 500 letters, sometimes three a day. While he destroyed her letters to him, his letters to her survived. Harris was given access to them and has woven this beautifully nuanced story around them, against the backdrop of the Great War. It is, of course, an account of doomed love, told with profound finesse.
Footnotes
The Jonathan Swift Festival runs in Dublin on November 22-27, celebrating the great writer in a range of events including lectures, performances, and guided walks that explore his influence on literature and satire. Programme and info available from jonathanswiftfestival.ie.
Mullingar Library is hosting ‘A Swift Evening’, a talk on swifts (the feathered kind rather than the authorial) tomorrow evening, Thursday 14th. Admission is free but ticketed through Eventbrite.
MoLI (Museum of Literature Ireland) has a production of Joyce’s The Dead running from November 22 to January 12. Audience numbers are limited to just 75 and – be warned – it’s an immersive production. Info and booking from thedead.ie.