Heatseeker Reviews

On the bus

2012-01-28T20:28:00.000Z

Up at the front of th 16A two women were having an intense chat about cleaning products. I tuned in and out, only interrupted by the tooth-chattering vibration every time the driver put his foot on the clutch at stops, instead of putting it into neutral.
Power sprays are the best for showers, apparently, but you shouldn't use them on tiles - too harsh.
Tuned in again, and they were talking about the ad in the back of The Irish Times. "That film The Artist. Have you seen it?"
"Saw the ad; I was saying to Ciaran, but he said: 'I don't know; there's no dialogue. An hour and a half without talking?'
"'Well, that's nothing new to me,' I said. He laughed."

How to make sure your kids won't be nearsighted

2012-01-26T07:51:00.000Z

OUT you go, dear, into the fresh air. Better still, out to the mountains with you and walk. Breathe! Air like wine! Look! The rolling hills of Ireland! Sorry to sound like a scoutmaster, but shocking research has apparently discovered the reason for a growing proportion of the world’s kids growing up into specky-four-eyes.

Those types who said kids who stayed indoors with their nose in a book were right. Not about the nose in a book - about being indoors.

There’s a worldwide epidemic of short-sightedness (or near-sightedness, as the Americans call it). Myopes are everywhere. A study by Susan Vitale of America’s National Eye Institute found that myopia had risen from 25pc of the US population in the early 1970s to 41.6pc in the early 1990s.

By 2020, it’s estimated that 2.2 billion people worldwide will be myopic. It’s in your genes - but not really. Humans are naturally slightly long-sighted - handy for spotting those gazelles on the ancient plains - but lifestyle has crippled our eyesight.

Kathryn Rose of the University of Sydney made a monster study of 2,300 Australian 12-year-olds, and found the answer: it’s light. If you’re outdoors, your eyes are unlikely to become crippled by short sight.

Her research was backed up by a study of 1,250 Singapore teenagers by Seang-Mei Saw of the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine.

Dr Rose continued her work with an even larger sample. “In 2005 we concluded a study of 4,000 schoolchildren,” she told me on a dodgy mobile phone line from Australia. We were looking at eye health in Australian children on a population basis sample, but we were also very interested in the development of myopia.

“Myopia had increased very dramatically over a period of decades - especially in East Asian countries - which implied that there were environmental factors.”

The obvious culprit was close work - take your nose out of that computer, you - but studies hadn’t borne out the link. Some scientists were now suggesting that it was the lack of outdoor exercise that caused the eyes to freeze in place, and lose their ability to change focus - the basic problem with myopia. Kathryn wanted to test this theory.

“We did a very complicated study, looking at a range of environmental factors. What we were able to demonstrate was that time spent outside was in fact protective against developing myopia.

“Crucially, because we’d asked our questions in such detail, we were also able to show that it wasn’t related to activity itself.

“It was actually related to the hours spent outside.”

The scientists, fascinated, started doing what scientists do best: hypothesising.

Could it be retinal dopamine, they wondered. It’s been well known for some time that retinal dopamine is an inhibitor of eye growth and is released in response to light.

“The jury’s still out on whether it’s retinal dopamine, but the jury’s not out on the effect of light,” says Kathryn.

“What I’ve really enjoyed from this is the fact that now parents are telling their children to go outside and play.”

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18294691

Feelthy feelthy feelthy

2012-01-20T21:50:00.000Z

DIRTY hospitals are making patients sick. The superbugs are waiting in badly-cleaned wards and private rooms.

C difficile causes reaming diarrhoea. MRSA (Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus) eats away at open wounds and develops into pus-filled boils. VRA (vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus) bugs don’t just make you sick, they can also pass on their antibiotic-resistant genes to other bacteria.

All these breed on unwashed bedrails, gowns, buttons and machinery in hospitals.

But Professor of Clinical Medicine in Boston University School of Medicine Philip Carling’s sneaky study of just how clean hospitals were has already started to revolutionise hospital hygiene.

In the 12 hospitals of the Kaiser group in southern California, staff are using his methods and sharing their cleaning results - and have doubled their hygiene standards.

Professor Carling’s study of cleaning in 82 hospitals was demonically simple. He mixed up a fluorescent marker with detergent and a flour-and-water glue. “It makes a solution that’s hard to see after it dries, but it can be picked up with a fluorescent light,” he says.

This solution is easy to wash off - even plain water will wipe it away, never mind detergent or disinfectant.

His team marked the ‘high touch objects’, the 14 things patients and staff touch most. “We let a few patients cycle through the room to be sure the cleaning was adequately evaluated.”

To their shock, they found that a lot of things that should have been cleaned, weren’t, in most hospitals.

About half of what should be scrubbed was actually being cleaned. (What should be cleaned in hospitals: about 14 ‘high-touch’ surfaces, like bedrails, call buttons, tray tables, phones, handles, and also the controls and medical gadgets that nurses handle all the time.)

So they went and talked to the people in the hospitals. “We worked on the problem through education as well as through repeated feedback”.

The researchers kept testing, using the invisible marker - and the thoroughness of cleaning improved from 50pc to 80pc, 90pc and even close to 100pc of the touch surfaces.

Cleaning is vital in hospital, where very sick people can be at risk from deadly superbugs. “For each improvement of 10pc in thoroughness of cleaning, there’s probably going to be a 10pc decrease in acquisition of those pathogens by patients that occupy that room,” says Philip.

But cleaners are often terrified to wash the controls on ventilators, or the touchscreens and keyboards of monitors, for fear of changing a setting and endangering a patient.

“Nurses touch these all the time, then touch the patients,” says Prof Carling. So medical staff need to do some cleaning too, as well as keeping their own hands and clothes spotless.

Kaiser have succeeded because they’re sharing their results and benchmarking - with their names listed on their results.

Cleaning the right things, and cleaning them well, can save the health service money, as well as saving people’s lives, Prof Carling says. An average C diff infection costs from €5,000 to €7,000 to the health service. Soap and water and dedicated, benchmarked cleaning could save thousands of euros - if the hospitals want to tackle it.

The Ministry of Special Cases

2011-12-29T13:33:00.001Z

Nathan Englander's debut novel The Ministry of Special Cases is set in Argentina, and deeper, in the Jewish community of Buenos Aires, and deeper still, in a family of outcasts of that community. Kaddish Poznan, a man with the sometimes irritating feyness of the traditional Yiddish hero, is the son of a prostitute, a girl who sold herself in Odessa to save her family, and transshipped to be part of the stable of the Jewish pimps 'and alfonses' (still wondering what an alfonse is) who take care of the appetites of Argentina.

Kaddish, a name redolent with death, and Lillian, his disappointed wife, have a squabblesome love fuelled by his only work: chipping the names of the dead - at least those with currently wealthy descendants - from the gravestones in the Jewish graveyard's own ghetto, the place where these whores and pimps were laid to rest; names like Talmud Harry and Bryna the Vagina.

Lillian's own job in an insurance firm is giving her an exceptional insight into the Argentina of the 1970s, because everyone wants the life insured now, even the general and his wife who turn up with a new baby that's obviously not theirs.

Englander has used the Yiddish tradition, and a sophisticated sense of plot and character, to open the graves of the Disappeared. Just as babies are appearing in unlikely families, other families' children are disappearing, and nobody says a word.

As Kaddish and Lillian try to protect their 19-year-old son, Pato Poznan, a university student at a time when sociology lecturers and scientists and girls of 16 are seen one day and never seen again the next, Englander brings them and his quivering reader on a tour of murder. Every word of his book is based on what actually happened in Argentina, and throughout South and Central America, in those years: the murder-complicit priest taking bribes, supposedly to find out what happened to the desperate parents' child; the drugged children thrown from planes into the river ("like hitting a brick wall" from that height), the torture with electricity, the babies of murdered people given to the families of their murderers and of the directors of their murders.

Englander tries for the black Yiddish humour - Lillian and Kaddish 'cut off their nose to spite their face', accepting erased noses in payment for an erased name; this makes them suddenly handsome; a last desperate kidnap attempt fails because the kidnapper has not factored in the coldness of heart of the ransom source; bureaucracy is at the root of everything, because if they're frightened of nothing else, the forces of law and order are always afraid of a paper trail.

Englander's incisive eye is merciless: no government can succeed in anything without the complicity of the majority, he points out (a point that could well be noted in Ireland today).

His dialogue is heartrending; at one point a wealthy military couple explain that there are no disappearences, it's merely a question of lax discipline - all over South America undisciplined youngsters are taking off to go and sun themselves on the beaches of neighbouring countries.

At last, the most memorable character isn't Kaddish or Lillian, or the tousle-haired, rebellious Pato, the crooked plastic surgeon or the smooth insurance man, but the broken man whose job it was to push the children from the planes, sleeping children.

Fostering happiness

2011-12-18T12:20:00.000Z

DANA Johnson’s research on Romanian orphans was picked up by astonished reporters all over the world. The paediatrics professor studied 136 toddlers in six Bucharest orphanages. When half of the children were sent into foster care, the difference between them and those left in orphanages was stunning.

The children had been underweight and undersized. Now, with loving care from dedicated parents, they shot up in height and weight.

Amazingly, their intelligence also skyrocketed, with their ability to learn and remember improving in line with their sturdiness.

“Each incremental increase of 1 in standardised height scores between baseline and 42 months was associated with a mean increase of 12.6 points in verbal IQ,” the study says. “Growth and IQ in low-birth-weight children are particularly vulnerable to social deprivation,” Dr Johnson’s study found.

Deirdre McTeague, director of services of the Irish Foster Carers Association, wholeheartedly agrees. She has seen a child of 12 arrive into foster care taking size 5 shoes, and within three months he grew two shoe sizes and was taking size 7 - with a simultaneous cognitive boost. He’s now a successful professional who took time to come home last year to mind his ill father.

Over 5,500 children in Ireland are in foster care, in roughly 3,500 foster families.

Deirdre moved from social work into fostering in the 1970s, when nearly 90 per cent of children in care were in institutions. Gradually the giant institutions were replaced by smaller group homes. “Now we’ve moved almost full circle, and 90 per cent are in foster care,” she says.

Foster kids - who typically come from troubled homes - can have a hard time with their self-image, says Deirdre. They may feel rejected by their birth families, and conflicted about where they belong - who they should be loving, where their loyalties lie.

The trend today is to try to foster children within their own extended family, so that it is as if the wider family has opened its arms to accept them.

This has its own problems, though, since legally - and quite rightly - children can only be assigned to people with Garda clearance and references, through a court order or voluntary care order.

And foster parents don’t have the same rights as birth parents. Until children have been with you for four or five years, for instance, you can’t apply for a passport for them without a social worker’s ok.

Since there is a long queue for services, some foster families just don’t go abroad on holidays.

There can be huge delays in speech and language therapy, occupational therapy, psychological services for children - even where there are excellent services, like the Mater and Castleknock child guidance service clinics.

Some foster parents, desperate for help for a child they love, have simply - and this is not acceptable - paid for private services.

“They’re living with the child, and living through the difficulties the young person has,” Deirdre says. “You get very attached to the child. You can see the blossoming, and the reward of that is great.”

The best foster parents are down-to-earth people who don’t have specific expectations of a child. “Salt of the earth types, who can absorb a child with its own needs and its own quirky nature - the old kind of family who’d say ‘That’s Sean, he likes to play football, and that’s Tom, he likes to read’.”

Irish Foster Care Association: http://www.ifca.ie

TimeWise fostering for teenagers: http://www.timewisefostering.ie

Sign's on it: the craft still lives

2011-12-15T17:06:00.002Z

THE LYF so short, the crafte so long to lerne, as Chaucer had it - and so, all over Dublin, tacky vinyl signs are replacing the beautiful hand-lettered shop signs that once beckoned customers in.
But not everywhere. There are a few signmakers still left, like the Painted Signs crew at http://paintedsigns.ie/
You see them working, changing and restoring the lovely old gold leaf signs that were the pride of Dublin, bringing them back to their glory. And in the case of the Welcome sign on McCormack's Celtic Jewellery in Grafton Street, producing a glorious piece of fantasy.
In the multilingual welcomes, there's a curly fada over the 'Fáilte', and a 'kickout' - a dropping decorative serif on the 'N' of 'Benvenuto' that leads the eye into the centre line. The use of English and Irish in a larger face in the centre, and the longer welcoming words on the top and bottom line framing them, gives an impression of many more welcomes than the six there.
There are a few streets the vinyl bandits haven't got to yet, and there are a few shops that are searching out true signpainters who can give their premises signs of timeless beauty and lasting quality.
In a city that has abandoned the beautiful green street names with their white cló Gaelach and English lettering surrounded by a delicate curled line, and replaced them with a slamming industrial blue with misspelled, non-standard names in Irish, it's a real pleasure to see that someone keeps the faith yet.

Bad dentistry will mean bad health

2011-12-06T15:57:00.001Z

“A YOUNG farmer came to me to have his teeth cleaned, and I looked into his mouth and saw something on the side of his cheek.” Wicklow dentist Dr James Turner says: “I didn’t like the look of it, so I sent him to a specialist. He had early stage dysplasia - a cancer in his mouth - which is completely curable, if it’s caught in time. The man has three young kids!”

But the changes in dental treatment for medical card holders mean that many people won’t be going for routine teeth cleaning. It’s no longer covered for anyone over 16 on a medical card.

If you’ve lost your job and you’re trying to support your family on the dole, and you’re looking at that €50 note, what are you going to choose to spend it on? Getting your teeth cleaned, or buying food for your kids?

A fortnight ago [in May 2010], anyone with a full medical card had access to a range of dental care: examination, cleaning, fillings, extractions, dentures, front tooth root treatments. But last week the HSE decided that these people could only attend a dentist if they have an emergency - and then they can have one tooth out, or one filling.

“The mouth is the mirror of your body,” says James. “When we look in the mouth as dentists, people assume we’re there for the teeth, but we’re not, actually - we have to examine for all manner of conditions and the risks they present.”

There is a known link between bacteria in the mouth and cardiovascular disease - heart attacks and strokes. And expectant mothers who have periodontitis - a gum disease - are in danger of having underweight or overweight babies.

“Complications of diabetes will present in the mouth,” says James. “Therefore, dentists can be the first people to refer a patient to a GP or a specialist to have these symptoms checked out.”

Osteoporosis is obvious in your mouth: the terrible thinning and weakening of older bones that can end in a broken hip and ruined life.

So is bulimia. “Sometimes we get young people - girls mostly - who show a striking pattern of erosion on the insides of their teeth where they eat too much and force themselves to get sick,” James says. “The acid in the vomit wears away the enamel.

“We can have a discreet word with the parents - and a disease that could destroy the young person is picked up early, and they can get help.”

And there are gum diseases. “If people have swollen or bleeding gums, that affects their physical health, because they can’t eat properly, and their mental health, because they’re dealing with long-term pain.”

James has been in private practice for just eight years, and has already saved three patients with early stage cancer. But he’s heard the stories of older dentists, about the bad old days when people could only afford emergency treatment: “People in lines in their waiting rooms, with swollen faces, lots of kids in terrible bad condition with lots of pain, and they spent most of their days just extracting and trying to deal with emergency care.”

This changed with the introduction of preventative dentistry. “Since 1994, people’s dental health has improved immeasurably - the Government has got great bang for its buck. We were winning the battle,” he says.

“Those huge gains are going to go. We’re picking up approximately three oral cancers every week in Ireland. By not allowing people these visits, all these oral cancers - the third biggest killer in the cancer ranking - will not be caught until a very late stage.”

Evening Herald, May 2010

Inequality: a social pollutant

2011-12-05T19:23:00.001Z

DO YOU trust your neighbours? Do you lock your doors and windows up tight? Do you think you’re likely to be robbed on the street? If someone asked you whether you agreed with the statement ‘most people can be trusted’, how would you answer?

Don’t start. I know you’re going to go on about modern life and how kids can’t play in the road any more.

It’s true - but not everywhere. In some countries, people answer those questions “I feel safe. I trust my neighbours. I’m unlikely to be robbed.” And they’re right, and not just about crime. They also have better health, higher education and longer lives.

Those countries may surprise you: Sweden, Norway, Finland, Japan. All wealthy, but that’s not the reason they’re safe, according to two academics whose theory may change our attitude to wealth.

Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett say the difference is how much more money a country’s rich have than that country’s poor. The countries that do badly are often surprising: the US, Portugal, Singapore.

You wouldn’t imagine that a study collating years of figures from the WHO, the UN, the OECD and other alphabetical luminaries would be entertaining, but Wilkinson and Pickett’s book Spirit Level has sold and sold.

Wilkinson, a public health expert for almost 40 years, and University of York academic Pickett collated information from some 200 sources.

Inequality - they say - affects everything from the number of people in prison to how long people live, to obesity, mental illness, teen births, drug use and violence. Countries where the richest are only a bit richer than the poorest do well. Countries where the rich have 300 times more than the poor are in big trouble.

Ireland is fairly near the middle of the countries studied in total income - but just the wrong side of the middle in income distribution, Wilkinson told me. “Ireland has substantially lower life expectancy than we’d expect,” he says. “So your health is less good than we’d expect it to be.

“Infant deaths are substantially higher - that might account for the low life expectancy. Only USA, Portugal and New Zealand have infant mortality as high or higher.”

Mind you, these figures are old - they’re from the early to mid 2000s. And the professors don’t have last year’s CSO figures - our infant mortality rate halved between 2000 and 2009. But as the gap between rich and poor widens in Ireland, our health care is likely to decline, our crime rise, and our educational standards fall - if the two academics’ figures hold true.

The weirdest thing Wilkinson and Pickett found was that bad outcomes in unequal nations hit the rich as well as the poor. Rich guys in countries with huge gaps between rich and poor live less long than rich guys in countries where everyone’s wealth is relatively level.

“Some colleagues at Harvard called inequality a ‘general social pollutant’, because it seemed to lead to worse health amongst the whole population, not just the poor,” said Wilkinson.

If he’s right, someone had better call the water board, because as Ireland’s rich get richer and our poor get poorer, the social sewers are about to overflow.

Evening Herald, May 2010

Descriptions in fiction

2011-12-04T15:43:00.001Z

Describing characters and scenes in fiction is the heartland - it's where you draw your readers in - but it's one of the trickiest things to do.
The big beginner's mistake is to ladle on description by the potload:

The tax inspector, Grindle, was a small, dark-skinned man with a huge nose on which perched a tiny pair of rimless glasses. His wavy grey hair failed to conceal enormous ears that flapped on either side of his head like a warning system for a nuclear winter.

He wore a tweed suit, the kind of suit you'd imagine worn by the first Ministers in the Free State parliament, devoted to buying Irish produce and heroically bearing the heinous scratching of their inner thighs by the hardy produce of mountainy looms.

His shoes had the mellow shine produced by daily saddle-soaping of the undyed pigskin; somehow Ferber imagined that he could see remnants of the soap caught in the patterned holes on the brogues' toes.

He had the scent of a subtle, expensive but not too expensive aftershave balm.

Even his briefcase glowed.

When he spoke, it was with a preliminary throat-clearing. "Mr Ferber?" he said, in a voice that rubbed its hands with every syllable.

About halfway through the second line of this stuff - all useful stuff, by the way - the reader is already mentally moistening a thumb, ready to turn the page, while the unconscious mind is jumping up and down pulling at the reader's sleeve and screaming, "WHERE'S THE STORY????"
And this is the important thing for every writer to remember. That's the question that every line must answer: where's the story, and what's going to happen next.
This kind of massive infodump doesn't move the story along at all.
Another basic mistake in the wodge above: whatever you do, be cautious of adjectives of size. Every time you use big, small, large, wide, minuscule, loud, soft, and all their evil friends, remember that the concept you reach for first may not be the strongest one.
If you want to get across the fact that Mr Grindle is small, for instance, the most powerful way to do it is through action:

Ferber looked down at Grindle. Grindle stepped back and looked him up and down, as if to say that anyone over six foot was a lumbering boor.

This brings us to subtext; every statement ever made has at least two meanings: the overt one, and the one that carries the action. Here, you've got Ferber trying not to irritate Grindle by towering over him, and Grindle making a power play. And you've described the size of both, and given an impression of neat little Grindle and big awkward Ferber.
Dialogue is a shocking temptation for fiction writers. It's a nice easy way to carry the action, and you can go on for pages at a time. If you don't want readers, that is.
The thing to remember about dialogue is that less is more. A good - short - dialogue is like a close-up, where the reader's vision moves right in to see the characters with every open pore in clear view.

Grindle pulled a gun. "Gimme the cheque," he rasped.

"The cheque?" said Ferber.

"Yeah, the cheque. I've got a private jet booked for the Bahamas," he snarled. "And I'm running late."

"But... but..." protested Ferber.

Writers often think they're raising the stakes by having conflict rise through a run of dialogue. Usually not. Usually, dialogue works best when it's short, terse, characteristic (Grindle should talk like a tax man, Ferber like whatever he is, without exaggerating it too much).
It's important in the commentary ("he said", "she whispered") to avoid allowing these phrases to take over the dialogue. If you find they are becoming intrusive, it's usually a sign that your line of dialogue is too long.
Young writers have been taught a passionate hatred of adverbs. There used to be a happy game called Tom Swift, which consisted of fitting horridly apposite adverbs to a statement:

"Gotta run," said Tom swiftly.
"I could eat a cow," said Tom hungrily.
"Is that a violin?" asked Tom musically.

...and so on, mocking an early 20th-century usage. Nowadays adverbs are regarded with such delicate horror that apparently some (probably second-class) agents simply do a global search of any submitted manuscript for words ending in 'ly', and if they come into thousands, the agent takes the manuscript in finger and thumb, drops it delicately, carefully, distastefully into an envelope and immediately writes a rejection letter redolent of horrified refusal like a country virgin of 40 who's met the Devil at the crossroads outside the graveyard.
(Which reminds me of such a story in which the Devil made a shocking suggestion involving oral pleasures to such a virgin, who was on her way to Midnight Mass; "Oh no, I couldn't," she said, "I'm receiving.")

Is your home a deathtrap for children?

2011-12-02T17:06:00.001Z

EIGHT months pregnant and crawling around the floor - not a good image. And way too late - you should baby-proof your home the very second you know you’re going to have a child living with you.

The first five years of our lives are when the real dangers lie. Delicious poisons under the sink and in the drinks cabinet, just begging to be tasted. Exciting games to be played near a stove bubbling with boiling soups and porridge.

If you come from a family with a horrified addiction to scéal mór an úafás, you’ll have heard about the toddler that rocked itself in its high chair to the window of a tall Georgian house in Harcourt Street, and plunged to its death, chair and all. That’s why Victorian nurseries had bars on the windows.

Accidents are just waiting to happen. But you can make your home safe, if you think carefully about what the dangers are.

Child-proofing your home is a matter of common sense, says Galway doctor Sinead Murphy. “Look at everything from the chemicals under the sink to the sharp knives that might be in the top drawer, but still within reach,” she says.

“Look for boiling kettles where the flex is trailing - and the same with other electrical equipment.”

Pad sharp corners and edges - little children racing unsteadily around can get a real crack on the temple.

Tie up the cords of blinds and curtains out of the reach of children to remove any risk of strangling.

Paddling pools need to be treated sensibly. Dr Murphy warns that you should never leave the pool full of water when it’s not in use. “And if you’re out in the garden with children playing in a paddling pool, if you have to answer the phone, bring the children with you - or else don’t answer it.”

If you have a garden pond, cover it, or fill it with pebbles until the children are old enough to be safe with water, when you can gradually take the pebbles out.

And lock away the medicines, even those innocent headache pills, says Dr Murphy. Ibuprofen, aspirin, paracetamol and codeine are among the commonest poisons for children. Liquid medicines are also dangerously tempting for toddlers.

Surprisingly, these are not the most deadly poison. More insidious, more permanently harmful, is something far less obvious.

“People won’t think of it as a major hazard, but probably the most serious problem in the home, and the one children are most commonly exposed to, is cigarette smoke,” says Dr Murphy.

“Depending on the amount of exposure, in some children it can make them prone to respiratory conditions, asthma and recurrent respiratory infections, as well as failure to thrive.”

Dr Murphy also warns against keeping alcohol in unlocked cupboards - a long drink of vodka will do a toddler no good at all.

Always be on hand, and always be watchful, she says. “It’s when you’re off your guard that children are going to do something ridiculous.”

Where to Get Help:

The Poisons Information Centre of Ireland, based in Beaumont Hospital - http://poisons.ie - has very good seasonal information about everything from jellyfish stings to alcohol hand gels.

An American site with an excellent child-proofing list: http://pediatrics.about.com/c/ht/01/01/How_Childproof_Home0978663936.htm

Published in the Evening Herald in August 2010

French health care: vive la difference!

2011-11-28T07:10:00.001Z

IT’S the best in the world; France’s healthcare system is held up as a model of good practice. It’s where you want to be if you get sick.

But when you look at how the system works, it’s not unlike what Mary Harney wants for Ireland. Except for one thing.

“What’s important is to make sure that the private sector would not be like a poker player and only interested in the money, and to ensure that they stay focused on the main topic which is healthcare,” says Gabriel Ko.

Dr Ko has worked in Ireland and in France - he is a biopathologist, formerly the leader of the French junior doctors, and now works for Claymon-Biominis and for the French government.

He admits: “When I saw the salaries of the Irish doctors, I said: ‘Oh my God, I should definitely live in Ireland!’”

French doctors earn, on average, from €50,000 to €100,000 a year. Not a fortune - but a solid income.

From the patient’s point of view, it’s a great system. Everyone over the age of 16 has a ‘treating doctor’ - usually people choose a GP - who coordinates any medical treatment the person needs.

A visit to the doctor costs €23. If your doctor sends you to a specialist, that visit will cost you €25.

There are three ‘sectors’ of doctors - Sector 1, in which most GPs are; and sectors 2 and 3. Sector 2 docs charge more, with part of your payment covered by social security and part reimbursed by medical insurance. Sector 3 is tiny - about 1.5 per cent of French doctors - and more absolutely private. This includes a lot of alternative medicine practitioners.

“Sector two means that you will be allowed to charge whatever you want to charge a patient, but you have to do it with a certain measure,” says Gabriel.

“You have to ask the patient if he’s got any private insurance, or any kind of money to pay that.

“Roughly, to give you an idea, in Paris for a gynaecologist in the private sector, the average charge for consultation would be €60 or €70.

“But out of that up to €25 will be reimbursed from Social Security, and the difference between €25 and €70 would be more or less reimbursed by your private insurance.”

You can also choose a specialist not recommended by your doctor - but then you’ll have to pay out of your own pocket.

Hospital is different too. “With regards to hospitals: we don’t have such a definition of consultants like in Ireland,” says Gabriel.

“What we would have is senior doctors. and the majority of the senior doctors are not allowed to ask anything more than the hospital will ask of the patient.

“If you’re going to the cardiology department or going to the pathology department you would have a consultation or even full hospitalisation, and then you will be charged directly by the hospital.

“The doctor would charge you exactly the same as any other doctor: this is the price that is fixed by Social Security.”

Professors or heads of service are allowed to work privately within the hospital - but this is limited to around two-and-a-half days a week.

“But at the end of the year the public service look at how much they asked to the patient in this private activity,” says Gabriel.

“So if you are making €1 million as a doctor working in the private sector, well that’s something that will not be tolerated.”

If you’re in an accident or taken suddenly ill, you call for help - but what arrives isn’t an ambulance. It’s the SAMU (Service d'Aide Médicale Urgente).

This is a specialist team, led by a doctor, which may include doctors, nurses and a driver, and is qualified to give emergency treatment on the scene or transfer patients to hospital as needed.

“For the French patient I think the system is quite good,” says Gabriel.

Published in the Evening Herald, Dublin, Ireland, in June 2010

2011-11-26T18:33:00.001Z

'TIS in Kilkenny, it is reported, the marble hearts are as black as ink - in JJ Toner's noir thriller St Patrick's Day Special, the ancient city is where a gangster tout is being hidden away from his former friends.
At the beginning of this tense story, DI Ben Jordan of the Garda Síochána is on his way to take over babysitting the tout. But when he arrives, there's nothing left to babysit: the supergrass and Jordan's colleague have been wiped out, seemingly by a murderous pizza deliveryman.
Jordan, obsessed as he is by Ireland's most vicious gang leader, Lafferty, is determined that Lafferty will go down for this: it's obviously his handiwork.
Which leads us into an intricate story involving Jordan's troubled daughter and her beaux, his unhelpful bosses in the Gardaí, his own disintegrating personality, his dicey marriage and new life in a seafront mansion in Dublin 4, and myriad twists and turns.
In a dark vision of drug-ridden post-Celtic-Tiger Ireland, Toner's Ben Jordan makes the first appearance; we're going to see more of him.

Image systems

2011-11-24T19:23:00.001Z

Having slept through the TV showing of Forbrydelsen 2 (the Danish original of The Killing, season 2), I went back to watch the first episode again, and was pleased to see that they've got a big image system thing going.

Image systems, for those not familiar with the minutiae of fiction, are used, often unconsciously by writers, more often as a conscious part of the storytelling by filmmakers, to hint at secrets, and to express the theme and to make a coherent emotional whole of the story.
Hitchcock was the boy for image systems - if you look at his Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, etc, each one has its own image system - dank in Psycho, vertiginous in Vertigo, sneaky in Rear Window. The Psycho image system is cogged to some extent from Henri-Georges Clouzot's spectacularly nasty Les Diaboliques, in which the plan to murder a woman gradually seeps up through the chinks in the audience's subconscious through the use of endless watery images: a dripping tap, an emptying swimming pool, a murderous bath.
But probably the most famous image system is that in Casablanca, which Robert McKee uses as his illustration in his useful seminar Story. Casablanca is riddled with subtext, both in the text and in the visuals: it's full of arches, the costumes of the lovers Rick and Ilsa grow closer in design as they grow closer to each other; a conversation about clothes in the market is a coded love scene.
Time is also a constant image - even the theme of the song is As Time Goes By. Ratcheting up the tension of the fast-approaching Nazi victory (as it seems in the film), an adorable old couple who are supposed to leave for America the next day explain that they are speaking only English now, to practise. "Sweetness heart, what watch?" the gentleman asks, and the lady answers: "Ten watch." "Such much!" he exclaims. Knowing as we do that these, as with millions of their like, are more likely to be murdered, the conversation has an extraordinary bittersweet horror.

And when the Germans in Rick's Café Americain strike up a pugnaciously anti-French Die Wacht am Rhein, and having stood it for long enough, Ilse's Resistance hero husband tells the band to strike up the Marsellaise and every liberty-lover in the café sings along - even, in the end, the girl who's getting off with the Nazis - you'd need a heart of stone not to be moved.

So it's pleasing to see that Forbrydelsen II is riddled with an image system whose meaning will become clearer as the episodes go on. So far, it involves a particularly bloody colour of red, in curtains, in heroine Sara Lund's blood-red jumper, on the walls, in hints of the blood-red Danish flag with its Crusader's cross, in a disturbing spiral staircase filmed from above, and in the curtains of rooms, in rectangles or squares in the background of many scenes.

The rain pours and pours down out of the heavens - or rather, it seems as if the world is just full of rain without it actually coming from anywhere. No one wears a hat or a hood or puts a newspaper over their head, they just stand stoically in it like cows in a field. (Why don't cows get shelters in fields, by the way? Surely they're just as miserable as the rest of us in the fleeping rain?)

There's also another dominant image: big wedge-shaped buildings, seen first from the outside, then entered to find that some organisation is leaning down on a fragile human; or big wedge-shaped tunnels down which the heroes must venture. And there's another rectangle that joins both systems: the military dogtags, sheared in half so that the numerals on them echo the slit windows of those buildings.

It's also full of roads, bridges, railways, slick with rain, dividing one part of the story from another.

And last, there's a forest glade with brutally broken-off stumps: we see it first at the very beginning, with the corpse of the first victim tied to one of these stumps, in a memorial garden - to Resistance fighters, the underground army that fought the Nazis who occupied Denmark, a powerful image, since the Danish army and its deployment in Afghanistan is already making itself clear as a large part of the story. This glade is echoed in the visiting room of the prison, where a psychologically scarred ex-soldier has, first, a conjugal visit with his wife, then a visit with a friend who is fleeing back to Helmand to escape whatever's going on; in that innocent-looking room with its mural of forest trees, he tells Raben - the ex-soldier that "it's not over". But soon he will be dangling like a blood sacrifice too.

There are the books, like the cowboy novel by Stetson Cody slapped on the desk by the pudgy but hardass new justice minister; the Chagall coffee-table book, the meaningful (I assume) Danish titles briefly lingered on in the bookshelves of various characters.

Then there are the pictures: the new Minister for Justice's office is decked with black-and-white photos of his predecessors; his greeting present from his party is a framed photo; he finds in a briefing document the police stills of the murdered woman in the memorial park. It turns out that her killer has videotaped her. The strong and fierce and solitary Raben, alone in his cell, has covered the wall with his little son's pictures of dragons, strong and fierce, blu-tacked on the cement.

What do the images mean? Already the heart knows; as you watch, your heartbeat speeds up when certain colours or shapes appear, your mood sinks at others. Ten episodes to the end of this series; the story will have borne out the warning of the images.

Fucked-up folks

2011-11-22T05:59:00.001Z

Raymond Chandler and his buddies gave us a dark model of the crime investigator: impoverished, silent outsiders whose knowledge that the world is a corrupt place allows them to speed straight to the centre of the ill doing they've been hired, ostensibly to probe, in reality to cover up and obfuscate.
Philip Marlowe (the hero Chandler (left) called after a house in Dulwich College in London, which he attended at the same time as PG Wodehouse) is a pulp fiction detective, but like Wodehouse's Bertie Wooster, is a wisecracker; you'd have to assume that both honed their knives of wit under the tutelage of a master, the headmaster AH Gilkes, known for his "quality of merciless chaff". It is his savage wit that distinguishes Chandler's Marlowe from the creations of his mentors, Dashiell Hammett and the other writers of the literary detective story magazine Black Mask, in whose pages the genre came to maturity.
The detectives of this mid-century version of the genre are fucked-up folks, but they are working-class heroes, alone with their honour and taking arms against vicious upper-class criminals protected by the law that the criminals have bought and paid for.
In a series of these formal tilts, which spread from books into films, battle is joined between the cynically honest working detective and the cruel and wealthy: The Big Sleep, The Maltese Falcon and the ultimate iteration, Chinatown.
It's part of the understanding with the readers that the brave representative of the working classes fights the rich, but never wins. The basset-faced Humphrey Bogart played both Chandler's Marlowe and Hammett's Sam Spade with sepulchral decency; keeping to the contract, he's beaten down by the rich swines, but wins out morally, keeping the rotten contract between wealth and exploitation with all the indignant sorrow of the beaten wife who stays with her abusive husband.
Chinatown is the ultimate because not only is the rich swine about to become a multi-bulti-hulti-smulti-gazillionaire by cheating poor farmers out of their water rights to supply the new town of Los Angeles, but he is a child rapist who fathered a child on his own daughter. At the end of the book the old moneybags is preparing to repeat history as he takes control of this child, now an attractive teenager.
Is it - was it - a sign of a changed world when Donna Leon produced a very different type of detective. Commisario Guido Brunetti of the Venice police also investigates the crimes of the rich. But he is no sole trader in decency.
Brunetti is a policeman, for a start: he is within the system, and he has allies - good people, all prepared to bend the rules - within that system. Elettra, the beautifully named hacker, arrives first as PA to Brunetti's ambitious and vicious boss, Vice-Quaestore Patta, a Sicilian who is quite obviously destined for great political power. Elettra finds her way into every computer system with the innocent amorality of a visiting angel; she is a creature of glamour (in both the old sense of illusion and the new sense of being a fashionista), sitting in her office surrounded by expensive flowers and dressed in the loveliest garments the Italian couturiers can provide. Her formal amorality is a coating on absolute morality: she will come to the rescue of any oppressed creature.
His loyal constable, Vianello, is Brunetti's reflection, a decent man in an indecent world. Yet in Leon's hands, he is not a cut-out; somehow his baffled honesty deepens the picture.
Brunetti walks home for lunch and dinner, described mouthwateringly; his wife, Paola, is a university lecturer in English (Leon's own second trade), and the daughter of immensely rich aristocrats with a pedigree stretching back to ancient Rome, people Brunetti regards with deep caution. Their two children, typical teenagers, add to the deliciously uxorious vision of a happy home.
Brunetti's world, although there are corrupt wealthy people here too, and they act with the same cavalier spitting upon the rights of anyone not richer or more influential than themselves, is a world where there is an approach to equality.
I think that it's a vision that comes out of a brief blossoming of egalitarian values - values which swiftly gave way to the idea now gaining currency that only those who can express their greed and gather all the gold to themselves are worthy.
The times are changing, and the next generation of investigators will, I suspect, return to the bleak cynicism of Chandler and Hammet, as the food queues grow and the wealthy jet in to gift buildings to universities starved of municipal cash. We can look forward to a new Marlowe, and forget about Brunetti.

The Killing II

2011-11-20T19:13:00.001Z

For some reason, my ability to stay awake, even for the most gripping and heartrending drama, has suddenly lessened. So my understanding of the start of the second series of the Danish thriller The Killing is... well, gappy.
Sarah Lund, detective extraordinaire, miseryguts supreme, is out of her Icelandic gansey. Now she's arrayed in a new jumper, so deep red that it appears blood-soaked. Sarah has lost her nice job investigating brutal murders. Now she's doing some, um, kind of...
Sorry. Fell asleep there. I think Sarah's a kind of security guard or something now, having failed so tragically in her last investigation, the one in the first series of Forbryselden.
Anyaway. Whatsisname, the granite-faced investigator now investigating an orrible murder of a woman found stabbed a zillion times (one fatally) and tied to a pole in a park, comes to Sarah, well known for her spooky insight into murders and murderers, and lures her into the investigation. They reckon it's the woman's husband (why am I not married, remind me?) but they want to check with Sarah's instincts.
Sarah is just sitting there thinkin', and listening to the zeitgeist, when it is revealed that the husband has confessed. So Sarah goes back to boringland, and...
I'm joking. Of course Sarah has realised that it's not the husband.
At least... in the first series everyone became a suspect at some stage, and like others watching I suspected every character, to the point where I couldn't go to Superquinn without suspecting the checkout clerk, and never mind Lidl.
Last time, an unnervingly sexy clean-cut politician on the broad road from idealist to sleazebag was chief suspect. This time he's been replaced by a stocky new justice minister who is facing down the right-wing anti-immigration party's demands for banning of specific groups - a thing which has never been done in the history of the staunchly fair and egalitarian Denmark. No doubt the minister is soon to be implicated in at least one murder.
For the moment (as far as I understood between helpless snoozes - this isn't because of the writing; it's incredibly gripping, I just can't help it; once 8pm comes I'm out cold - the main suspects are a secret group within the Danish armed forces. A second body has immediately been found: Vyg (Myg? Smyg? Styg?) - who was about to be 'deployed' to Helmand.
But as soon as you start to suspect him, Vyg (?) is found hanging upside down, dead as a cabbage, with half a dogtag dripping with his draining blood.
Somewhere in there is a handsome, sad man in jail and longing for his wife and child, but involved with all this Afghanistan stuff. He seems to be a damaged man, perhaps suffering post-traumatic disorder caused by killing plenty of Afghanis.
Oh, and the woman who was stabbed a zillion times: a video has turned up with her giving some kind of Islamic anti-Danish message. In Danish, of course, which sounds as if she's speaking through a mouthful of turnip.
I'm dying to watch the second, or maybe third episode. I just wish they'd sell it on DVD now so I could actually go back and check what really happened.
Oh, and the acting and writing and direction are great. And the sets, with their moody, dark vision of Denmark, itself a character: an honest country under attack by the forces of corruption.

Act of Union

2011-11-17T08:05:00.001Z

I'm very afraid we're about to repeat the worst mistake Ireland ever made. In 1800 the Irish House of Commons voted by a narrow majority to dissolve itself and centre government in London.
This Irish parliament was barred to Catholics and dissenters, open only to Church of Ireland members, and it was famous worldwide for its corruption. The vote was achieved by enormous bribes, which enriched the members, and would impoverish the majority of Irish people.
Almost immediately on its passing, the money left Ireland, as the centre of power went to London. Landlords (the real strongmen then) abandoned their Irish mansions and took London houses, leaving agents to manage their land in the years running up to the coming famine.
Dublin had been a thriving city; it descended rapidly into a mass of slums and a gigantic barracks for British soldiers who were warehoused there. Prosperity declined catastrophically, as virtually all business and manufacture drained away and resited itself in England.
Angela Merkel wants to centre power in Europe now; she wants the Irish people to vote in a referendum that would give this our consent. If we did so, the same would happen; history would repeat itself. Our politicians would move to Brussels, their focus and their values would swiftly become those of Brussels, and they would function only as lobbyists and as constituency patrons, as happened to the Anglo-Irish and Irish-Irish politicians of the British Parliament in the years before independence.
You have only to look at the blogs and tweets of those famous Irish people who have moved to England for work if you'd like an illustration: they write about politics (British politics) and news (British news) and 'celebs' (British TV personalities). They become subsumed into the place where they live. And nothing wrong with that, unless it's of central economic and cultural importance to our country, as is our parliamentary representation.
The bosses in Europe are offering the false bargain of a dual choice. There is never only a choice between two; there are always other options than the two offered. They are pointing to the stupidity of the capitalists and the greedy troika of developers, politicians and bankers, and saying that a centralised power in Europe will prevent this happening again.
They could have prevented it before - not by putting the lámh láidir on the banks, but simply by speaking out about the danger that existed, by speaking out loudly and pointing to the countries whose housing market was not a Ponzi scheme, like Denmark, which legislated that rezoned land could not increase in price; or like Iceland, which has now legislated that no mortgage-holder must pay anything over 110% of the current value of their homes.
They could act for the people who elected them, rather than the businesses that are the most influential lobbies on the continent.
I hope that European politicians will grow bigger than they are now, more creative with their solutions, looking for an alliance of like-minded nations, not a Reich directed from the centre. But if it comes to a vote for their current dream, I'm out to shatter that dream and hold on to an independent Ireland that can achieve President Michael D's promise: "to move past the assumptions which have failed us and to work together for such a different set of values as will enable us to build a sustainable social economy and a society which is profoundly ethical and inclusive".
Michael D - before he was President, a creative politician who founded the best TV station in the country, the Irish-language broadcaster TG4, and who revived a dying film industry when he was Minister for the Arts - called for us "to build together an active, inclusive citizenship; based on participation, equality, respect for all and the flowering of creativity in all its forms".
We're at a turning-point. If we resist the attempt to centralise power in Europe, we can become the nation our founders dreamed of. We can never do that as a peripheral province of an empire.

First person narrators

2011-11-13T11:24:00.001Z

Gabriel Rosenstock was on Miriam Meets this morning. This Sunday morning meditation is an interview with two people who are connected by love or friendship or family relationship, or, often, all three.
They talked about how the family came to be - a German doctor met a Galway woman in Jersey when he was in the Wehrmacht; his friends broke his arm to save him from being posted to the Russian front; they returned to Ireland where he set up a practice allied with a chemist's shop so he could import pharmaceuticals from Germany - funny enough, the same plan my grandfather had for my father, then a medical student, and his brother, a plan nuked when my father had a highly-praised student production of Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and took to the stage.
They talked about the family poker games, played for real money, money that was lost and won and kept by the winner, even when the loser was 13-year-old Mario, losing £90 of the £130 he'd won the night before, a good lesson for a young gambler.
And then Gabriel started talking about reality. In a particularly hideous twist of fate, his uncle had been drowned while a schoolboy in Clongowes, and then his brother was drowned at 17 in Glendalough - it's possible, apparently, that his friends dared him to swim across one of the lakes, which look so narrow between their steep mountain sides, but are so horribly wide and cold.
Curiously, Marian did not ask him about the horror of the two successive drownings of athletic boys in two generations of the family. What she did ask him, from her own pain at the loss of her sister, was about the effect. Gabriel was dismissive of any idea of division from his brother - he was 10 when his brother died, and the death broke his parents' marriage. You are not born, he explained, and so you do not die. His brother - the essence of him, not his age or sex or nationality or intelligence or anything that we consider makes a person himself, but rather the essential core of that person - is still here, he said.
Marian said, in a voice that sounded so bereft: "But you can't touch him", and she leaned to touch Gabriel's hand. All the people living all alone now turned their faces from the radio.
When you write in the first person, you're mining the essential core that Gabriel Rosenstock was talking about. Your character (for some writers always a version of themselves - come to think of it, Jungians would say that for all writers each character is a version of themselves, because they are its creator) may be an observer, like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, who sees the action played out from the sidelines, while her growing-up is a subplot reflecting that main action. Or they may be the centre of the story, like Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye, whose disillusionment and rejection of his upper-class American world is the story.
But in every case, narration in the first person is heavy in subtext. Everything the narrator says has two purposes: to tell the story, and to tell the reader about the person who's telling the story. When Scout observes her father Atticus take off his glasses, draw a measured bead, and shoot dead the rabid dog, she does so from the viewpoint of a thrilled child discovering that her dull old dad is a hero. She's also prefiguring the later action when Atticus shows himself as a true hero, defending humanity. And the lemony regret that underlies her telling is a taste of the failure of that decency, because the man and the values her father defends will die at the end of the book.
In Holden's anger at the phoniness of his society, there is another subtext: Holden has only one spoilt choice in the end - no matter what he does, he is going to become part of his class, the class he hates and derides.
All this sounds mechanical; but a lot of the time a writer is bumbling along telling the story, becoming that core - whatever Gabriel says, we are all myriad people - and knowing nothing about the subtext that's writing itself without the writer realising.

Radio review - the day of the general election

2011-11-10T13:49:00.001Z

This was my last radio review, the day after the general election that swept Fianna Fáil and the Greens away and brought in the Fine Gael and Labour coalition last March.
Wonder what the Greeks are saying now, when they go out to riot: "We're not the Irish. We're not like that. We don't use democracy."Democracy in Ireland, though, is different. The politicians stalked the streets like exiled princes in the days before the poll. On the day, white-faced - or unbelieving and delighted - they stood in the count centres while the radio journalists feasted on them. There was a palpable air of schadenfreude as the interviewees - or in some cases, anticipatory schadenfreude, for who knows what the future will bring. Will it be premature coalition, or coalition interruptus, ending in tears and slaps?High points on the day the cleamhnas was set up were Newstalk's breathless early reporting - "Envision the picture: Taoiseach Enda Kenny, and in the seat directly opposite him (pause) Arise, Baron Gerry Adams" - Ivan Yates with a chuckle in his voice at 10am. I don't know who said it, but I choked on my tea, at home in the Dublin South Central Soviet, at "The blue bloods of Dun Laoghaire have turned blue for Fine Gael, while working-class Dublin South Central is red for Labour."By mid-morning Radio 1 was as avid as a cat looking at a bird and making that unnerving chattering noise with its teeth. The noon news reported: "Every Fianna Fail seat in Dublin is in danger.... the Greens are in a fight for their political lives".The most unconsciously telling statement for the fallen princes was from Sinn Fein's Dessie Ellis. Revealing how Fianna Fail's fortunes have changed, he said: "We're not going to be like the three main parties - and I include Fianna Fail in that."Radio 1's was a master feat of reporting, going on through the day, relentlessly circling from constituency to constituency, and Rachael English and Sean O'Rourke finally staggered off to bed at 4am, leaving those last few centres still counting, counting. It's all a dream - could it really be the end of the Tammany Hall fixing that has been the curse of Irish politics since the 18th century?By midweek, Fine Gael and Labour have their match well on the way, and the two stations were reporting Enda, spurning the Enda-pendants for the fine reliable farm of Labour, murmuring "D'you want to be buried with my people?"* A made match can work better, sometimes, than a mating in the full heat of passion; as the Indians say, in a love-match the kettle is boiling and is only going to cool; in a made match the kettle is cold when it's put on the fire and keeps getting hotter. Labour and Fine Gael, though, will have to have the same careful trust that goes into any marriage. They may get help from the book Little White Whys - about why men lie. Brian O'Connell gave David Harvey the skinny on it, having talked to author Ish Major. Everything you want to know about a man is in first three conversations, said Brian. He gave some helpful questions to ask a man if you're interviewing: Have you any legal problems? If you hear "Not that I care to discuss" or "Nothing that affects me now", run a mile. The texters were speaking tough love. "Little white lies will lead to big black eyes," texted Dave. Texter M was indignant: "I don't think that writer's going to have many male friends." David pointed out: "Giving away trade secrets."Listener Marie said bitterly: "Men are animals but some make better pets." And her ideal match, Noel: "Women's place in kitchen cooking - and they shouldn't be allowed on the road."PANEL:Election coverage, Newstalk, SaturdayElection coverage, Radio 1, SaturdayDavid Harvey, 4fm, weekdays

The Melting Pot

2011-07-01T22:23:00.005+01:00

I'm watching The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. This is the mid-century vision of America as the New World.There are homely Swedish men and women running a café pub at the far frontier; there's the educated lawyer from the Deep South - played by James Stewart; there are the second-generation Irish like the hero played by John Wayne; there are the schoolkids, a mix of Mexican and Irish and Swedish.
It was the 1940s and 1950s in Hollywood, the time when America was 'assimilating' a horde of the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. Some - maybe most - of these films were propaganda. "If de big shots in Vashington don't do like we vant, den we don't vote for dem no more, by golly by gosh", as one of the children says in Liberty Valance.
Jimmy Stewart's character, a down-home lawyer, is trying to explain to local people that "if big ranchers north of the Picketwire River win their fight to keep this territory in open reign, then all your truck farms and your corn, the small shopkeepers and everything, your kids' future, it will all be all over, be gone".
The villain is Liberty Valance, "a no-good, gun-packing, murdering thief" (in an early scene, the interestingly-named Liberty wins the"dead man's hand" in poker with two pair, aces over eights". He is a right bollocks: whipping nice Jimmy Stewart almost to death in an early scene where he (Liberty, that is) robs a stage coach.
But everyone including the fat caricature of a town marshal, is afraid to tackle him. In an iconic scene, Ransom Stoddard wipes out the headline he's been using to teach literacy to the children and adults of the frontier town, "Education is the basis of law and order".
All this idealism is all in my eye when you look at 'Pompey', the one black character in the film - the name is typical of the Greek and Roman names given to slaves, in much the way that we name our dogs - who is referred to by John Wayne (the erect penis of the movie, as 'Tom Doniphon', obviously Tom Donovan, a standard Irish name - as "my boy, Pompey".
Pompey is superbly played by Woody Strode; his presence is a silence that draws the eyes. His dark presence subverts the obvious messages of the film, about the 'melting pot' that was a standard trope of American education in the 20th century.
Because this 'melting pot' included the Irish - who came from near slavery in their own country to America, armed only by their ability to use networking to gain political power; the Scandinavians - whose sheer hard work won them modest wealth; the Mexicans, whose position was that of the Irish in Ireland, to be mocked, to be powerless.
So much for the caricatures; the French were sweaty-faced seducers, cowardly at the last; the English were pompous asses; the Germans were wholesome. (In Casablanca, an elderly German Jewish couple discuss the time as they wait to emigrate to the Promised Land of America, practising their English on each other: "What watch, liebchen?" "Two watch." "Such much?")
The Spanish were proud aristocrats. The eastern Europeans were honest but sly peasants. The Chinese were smiling eccentrics. The Italians loved their mamas, but would knife you in a moment.
The exception to the Melting Pot was the Americans who had been there longer than most of the other immigrants; the unintending immigrants from the shores of west Africa who fuelled the enrichment of 18th- and 19th-century America, the black slaves and their descendants.
The screenwriters of the 20th century, leftists to a man, somehow failed to see these people as part of the melting pot. It was silently agreed that black people weren't really, umm, sort of, umm, human.
Wikipedia's piece on the former football star and decathlete Strode raises the eyebrows. He was "close to" director John Ford, it claims; in fact, he spent four months sleeping on the director's floor as his caretaker.
The tone in which characters address 'Pompey' in Liberty Valance is educative for the viewer; Goddard's attitude is stern and scolding as Pompey stammers his way through a text, where he has lovingly helped others who strove for literacy.
Pompey's character is almost an extra, but the effect of his silent appearance is like a paper cut on a sore: a running cut that is scarcely there, but by its force draws blood.
At the end of the film, as the golden lawyer walks off with the girl, Wayne as 'Doniphon' insists that Pompey be served at the bar, and teetotal Pompey refuses and brings Doniphon home, Doniphon throws the oil lamp into the wooden wall of his home in a tantrum, and Pompey runs in to carry him out and then rushes to save the farm stock, the horses corralled near the fire.
Some time later, "founder, owner, editor - and I also sweep out the place" - like a modern blogger - Dutton Peabody (played by Edmond O'Brien, born Eamon Joseph O'Brien) is nominating Goddard to represent the territory in Congress while Doniphon, now a pathetic drunk like the editor and the marshal in the earlier incarnation of the film,lurks at the door.
As the lawyer walks out, Doniphon stops him and retells the story - to save the woman he loved: "You taught her to read and write - now give her something to read and write about".
We see the lawyer and the gunman squaring off, and behind them Doniphon calling on Pompey, who throws the shotgun into his hands, and Doniphon shoots and kills Liberty Valance.
In the film, an aged Jimmy Stewart (hair powdered white) tells the story to journos, who throw away their notes, saying: "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend".
He pets the arm of an aged Pompey - whose white side-hair now makes him seem all Uncle Remus - and goes on to leave politics, leaving Pompey behind, echoing like a sore tooth in the conscience of the white audience.
And what for the black audience? I can't speak for them.

Three Stations by Martin Cruz Smith: Pan

2011-06-21T17:53:00.003+01:00

Arkady Renko returns in Martin Cruz Smith’s latest Russian thriller, Three Stations. Renko, the Platonic ideal of the noir cop, is a Russian of the post-Soviet era, afloat in a corrupt force, constantly suspended or under threat of suspension, unloved, unwanted, a good man swimming in a sewer.
Arkady rescues his colleague in misery, Sgt Victor Orlov, from the drunk tank, and so becomes involved when a young prostitute is found dead - apparently of natural causes - in a workers’ trailer in the area officially called Komsomol Square but known to all Muscovites as Three Stations.
Here, at the conjunction of two Metro lines, ten lanes of traffic and the Leningrad, Kazansky and Yaroslavl train stations, feral children live off the unwary adults passing through. Some children are more innocent: Maya, a child prostitute who has escaped with her baby, only to have the baby stolen by the babushka who befriended her; Zhenko, Arkady’s adopted son, who plays chess for money and nests in an abandoned casino.
As Arkady investigates, more bodies turn up, each posed in one of the basic ballet positions. He follows the trail through the underworld of the poor, and that of the wealthy where a circus entertains millionaires donating money to help street kids, and through the home of every eccentric in Moscow.
Three Stations is a great page-turner. It’s fast, it’s constantly coming up with great turnarounds, it’s full of fabulous characters (the retired pathologist like a woolly mammoth in a white coat, the dog-loving street child and her guard dog Tito, the aged anthropologist devoured by curiosity).
It’s full of abstruse arcana (prison tattoos are a code: each barb on a length of barbed wire is a prison sentence cats show a career as a burglar, a web denotes addiction, a Madonna and Child means the criminal was born into a criminal family, not to the bourgeoisie; each teardrop is a murder victim.
These prison tats are done with a hook and a urine-soot mix. But the tattoo of a butterfly - denoting whoredom - on the first murder victim is clearly a professional job from a tattoo parlour, masquerading as the real thing.
All this should make the perfect thriller. And Martin Cruz Smith has written the perfect thriller before: the superb Tokyo Station, set in Japan in the five days before Pearl Harbour, with a protagonist who is a trickster and a player and a hero.
Here, though, everything’s too complicated. The story is awash with characters, many of them - like the aged anthropologist and the choreographer at the billionaire’s casino; and the mother who’s lost her child and the dog-loving street kid; and the billionaire Sergey and the former ballet star Sasha - too alike. It’s confusing. It’s hard to keep hold of the story when you don’t know the characters.
And Cruz Smith brings in a deus ex machina, in the form of a sudden influx of Tajik drug dealers, to solve a sticky plot point. And we never really discover how the original ballet girl died - only how she was knocked out.
So, if you want a gripping yarn to bring on the train and ferry, this is it. If you want a story that’ll rip your heart out the way Tokyo Station did, not so much. Not yet.
But it's gripping, it's fast-moving, at times it's even funny, and it's well worth buying for that tense train journey.

Ovolution by JJ Toner

2011-06-19T16:43:00.002+01:00

If you liked those yellow Gollanz Science Fiction of the Year collections that brightened the middle of the 20th century, you'll love JJ Toner's Ovolution.
This collection of 10 stories brings us back to the world fondly evoked by Mad Men: a world of suited men who are still boyish, with short-back-and-sides haircuts - a world where mad scientists design the perfect woman, and aliens lurk.
Toner's edgy sense of humour lightens this world. In the best of the stories - Short Back and Sides, in which a barber describes an encounter with DNA-hungry aliens; the title story, Ovolution, in which a suburban wife absconds with her newborn egg - reality teeters on an edge of dry wit.
Dancing is great exercise, the sprightly barber tells his customer, not that you need it of course, lovely figure, very Brad Pitt if I may say so. He chats on about the bus journey, his colleague's varicose veins, and of course his abduction by aliens and release. Somehow, it's all horribly believable, and horribly funny.
The warmongers of the army - whose army? doesn't matter - rejig a dead scientist to turn him into a killing machine, but the machine turns out to have more morals than its makers, in Bartlett Rebooted.
In Ooze, humans scouting a new planet and aliens are uncertain about each other, each wondering: are they intelligent? Are they good to eat?
In Scouting Party the shoe is on the other tentacle; the aliens are scouting Earth, but a hideous confluence of golf, tape recording technology and American driving is set to foil their plan for world domination.
A Smashwords collection to while away a rainy day - while keeping a nervy eye out the window for silver spaceships.

MABS and the crisis

2011-06-11T08:49:00.003+01:00

So the cousin's in trouble. He lost his job, couldn't meet the mortgage, got a loan from a moneylender, then a bigger loan. Now they're battering on the door looking for their money back.
"Look at all that expensive tech stuff you have," they say, peering over his shoulder. "You could sell that computer. What about those carpentry tools?"
"But I need them to run my life! I can't make a proper living without my tools, and the computer and internet connection get me customers!"
"Tough. Nobody forced you to borrow. Now it's time to pay us back."
This is the position Ireland is in with the IMF and the ECB: the moneylenders are peering past us into the hallway, looking for things we can sell to pay them back: our land (they want us to sell off the forest land that is 7% of the country's territory); our utilities (we already, disastrously, sold the phone company - now they want the electricity and gas, and even the water we drink, to be sold to private operators, greedy grinders for profit).
If the cousin came to you for advice, what would you suggest? Not selling the computer, I suspect. You'd take him to MABS, the money advice and budgeting service (not yet privatised itself...), and the MABS advisers would sit down with him and make out a budget plan to help him to order his money affairs.
They would tell him to talk to his lenders and make an arrangement to pay off his debts more slowly. The lenders will accept this, MABS would say, because they know it's more reliable.
Work is what is going to get you out of this problem, MABS would say. Take anything you can - a nixer painting the neighbour's house, a quick programming job setting up a database for your local school's scheduling of classes.
Grow your own vegetables: it won't get you an immediate result, but it will give you relaxing exercise, a way to think things through without being panicky, and then in the height of summer it will cut your food bills, and you can actually give something back to the friends who are helping you, with gifts of home-grown stuff.
If you have a skill, you can offer night classes to the same local schools and share your skill with others.
What MABS wouldn't say is "sell your tools to pay the moneylenders".
The European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund are also telling the government to cut wages at the bottom - to make our poorer people even poorer - but to maintain salaries at the top.
This is a disastrous plan for the country.
I loved the Celtic Tiger - oh, sure, the arrogance of a small country that has suddenly got rich was embarrassing, but that would have passed. But I spent the Tiger years doing interviews for business magazines, mostly talking to tech entrepreneurs.
I loved it when someone running a company said "My dad was a trucker, my mam cleaned houses. But when the free education came in I was able to stay in school, and I turned out to have a real gift for programming and management."
This is something that was seldom heard in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s or 1980s. Then, if your family was poor, you stayed poor. Because poverty smothers creativity. Poor people don't have the leisure or sense of relaxation - or the sense of ultimate possibility - that allows their children to dream, and to have the facilities to fulfil their dream.
I was in a suburb last night, an area that used to be dodgy when I was growing up. During the Tiger, it was gentrified, and the remains of this still show, in some beleaguered streets with gardens of penstemons and ceanothus and irises. But the sense of terror has returned. Turn a corner and the next street is filthy, with a group of teenagers jeering at the bus stop, a line of takeaways, and - I jumped to one side to avoid it - a syringe with blood clotted in the mouth lying on the street.
A wide division in salaries creates resentment and a dull anger that stops people working. "If that talentless swine is paid €300,000 a year and I'm paid €80 a shift, why should I bother working," people think. Even if they do work hard, out of pride in their trade, their simmering fury poisons the workplace.
(Even in the Celtic Tiger years, exploitation was rife, and not always at the bottom: for instance, one newspaper bare-facedly paid its casual sub-editors as "suppliers" to avoid PRSI and tax.)
In societies where incomes are relatively equal, there is not this resentment. You're valued for your skill rather than your earnings.
Ireland needs MABS thinking, but at the moment, the government is obeying the moneylenders' every instruction. If we look forward 20 years, what kind of country do we want?
The ECB and the IMF would like a privatised state run by capital for capital, with money as the motivator for all work.
I would prefer a country with relatively level salaries, where the bus driver takes enormous pride in his job, as does the surgeon and the childminder - and it's pride in the job itself, because the money is not an issue: because we all earn enough to live well.
Surely it's time for the government to take the MABS approach?

Kavanagh Country

2011-04-21T10:22:00.004+01:00

The perfect conjunction of genius has come together in this book: Patrick Kavanagh's poems and a little prose; a sensitive and learned introduction to Kavanagh and his work by PJ Browne, the photographs of David Maher, and the design of Syd Bluett.
David Maher is a sports photographer, whose pictures every week capture the moment of triumph of despair. But here, he photographs stillness: on the cover, Kavanagh's statue on a seat by the canal, deep in the meditation of composition. Or maybe terribly hungover.
Horses grazing in a mist-shrouded field, a postman wheeling his bicycle up Raglan Road, tufty grasses, a half-broken wooden farm gate, a statue of the Virgin railed off, a ladylike Grafton Street - the photographs in black-and-white enrich the poems without outsmarting them.
The introduction understands Kavanagh - his hunger for poetry, his small-farmer mentality, his acerbic Catholic Standard film reviews, his arrogance and kindess - without patronising him.
The layout is the best I've ever seen - utterly understated and graceful, the photographs perfectly chosen for each poem, the typeface exactly right to give the poems their voice, the titles - in large and small upper-case - gently exact.
And the poems... Raglan Road, The Great Hunger, Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal, Dublin - to read them again is to learn them anew.
At the back are short notes on each poem - the place and circumstance of their writing, fascinating.
If you can get this book, snap it up. I hear there are a few copies left in Dubray.

A Preparation for Death by Greg Baxter

2011-04-17T08:54:00.003+01:00

GLOOMY and hilarious, Greg Baxter's mocking novel about a failed novelist (himself, in a wryly-created version of the dank Dublin bedsitter life of the exiled American artist) will have you whooping as you reach for the Luger to end it all.
He lays it all out at first: the arrival in Dublin, crushed by failure, his acquisition of a job teaching creative writing (no! not that!) in the Irish Writers' Centre, his smothering, humiliating memories.
But it's not long before he opens the gun cabinet, with a rib-busting, vicious description of a session of the Sewanee writers' week, carefully calibrated with the use of forgotten, once-famous writers.
"A group of white-haired and weathered figures were standing around looking like Southern writers," he writes, sharpening up his stiletto. "If you've ever seen a group of them together, you'll know what I mean. The closest I can come to describing it accurately is a highbrow and slightly effeminate fishing trip."
It was at this stage that I actually put down the book and laughed out loud.
Baxter has a killing eye for the telling detail, and watching him poking fun at the writing scene is like watching a horrid, intelligent little boy poking hopefully at the corpse of a putrefying lizard with a pointy stick - what can you do but snicker.
His mentor, it soon turns out, will be Barry Hannah - a fabulously typical character: the novelist as liar. Barry is in the middle of chemo, and eats only pink stuff through a straw. But when he drags Baxter off on a search for a burger, mitching from the conference, Baxter - blind as a bat - ends up driving them along the country roads, and is gobsmacked when Barry meets a coven of rednecks, moustachioed and survivalist, inspecting their Stars and Bars and ammo and reliving their defeat; Barry, whose books are awash with moustachioed Deep South villains just like these, agrees vociferously with their hogwash. Aha, so are all his promises of publication for Baxter lies too? Mm? Hm? Mm?
From this villainy Baxter delves further, into the death of his grandfather, a Waffen SS man, and his grandmother's marriages of convenience - material any writer would give his right ear for, of course - and we're back to the flat in Dublin, now shared with an Icelanding playwright for whom everything is part of her stories.
Anyone who's spent any time in the horror subgenre of writers' retreats and hope will love this book, or else find it so terrifying that they run for their life.
Terribly funny; perhaps too sharp for anyone but the brave.

Ireland's banks

2011-04-01T09:35:00.006+01:00

Back in the day, I took a morning off and went into my bank, Allied Irish Banks, to borrow some money.
I had a loan of £15,000 from Dublin Corporation to buy the inner city cottage I was living in, I told the executive.
He hadn't invited me into his office but was leaning an expensively-clad elbow on the mahogany counter and desultorily leafing through my account details and cancelled cheques, which he had brought out with him.
"Why do you want to borrow this money?" he asked coldly, emphasis on the 'borrow'.
"The Corporation want me to rebuild the kitchen and bathroom to meet their standards, so I need another £3,000," I told him.
"You should have saved the money up, in that case," he told me. "Your account shows you as quite unreliable."
I was indignant. I don't think I even had an overdraft; money went in and money went out, but the balance stayed steady.
Apparently the problem was that I tended to cash my cheques in pubs - as people did in those days. I wasn't a drinker; a glass of Guinness or a Coca-Cola was about my limit. But the bank hours of the time - 10am to 3pm with a generous lunch hour during which they closed to customers - made it impossible for those who worked all day.
"But... but..." I stuttered. I'd been led into that very bank - then the Munster & Leinster in Grafton Street - at the age of five to open my first account. My great-grandmother, grandmother and mother had all had accounts there before me, reliable women all.
He told me with a lifted lip that neither factor had any bearing on the bank's likelihood of lending me money.
Off I went back to the office where I toiled in misery at the time.
I had another account that I used for savings, in the TSB as it was then. I rang them up (conscientiously tearing up a stamp so my State employer would not bear the cost of my private call), and made an appointment to see the manager.
The TSB at the time was a tiny Dublin bank. Their ads, causing tearful scenes in cinemas and homes, showed an old lady tottering into her bank with an equally elderly golden labrador. Called into the manager's office, she attaches the dog's lead to the umbrella stand outside - and the manager opens his door and leads the dog inside.
But the TSB really was like that, then. "This looks grand - we'll see if we can get it past Head Office," the manager of the nearest branch told me. I got bridging finance, got the kitchen rebuilt, bought the house, and paid back the TSB loan, and the Corporation loan.
I borrowed again, this time to buy a roomier three-bed semi. The full loan was from the TSB.
A few years later I was working in the Irish Press Group when it collapsed. I spent three months as office manager for the chapel and journalists as we tried to find a new buyer, then the usual fortnight or so of blinded terror and grief that follows losing any work, then made an appointment to see the bank manager.
I was shown into the manager's office, clutching my mortgage documents and a list of direct debits, and so on. A new manager - I hadn't met this one.
After introductions, I gulped, and started: "Well, as you may know, I was working in the Irish Press."
"Now, pet," said the bank manager, "will you sit down and have a cup of tea and a biscuit, love?"
He looked calmly at the figures, and suggested that the bank give me a year's rest on the mortgage payment, until I'd get back on my feet.
I walked out of there on air - knowing that the year's respite would buy me time to find other work.
The very best thing was knowing that my bank was at my back, defending me against the trouble that had come against me.
A few years later the bank was sold to Irish Permanent. Another manager told me that the staff were getting a nice payoff, and that this was scarcely fair - the shareholders were us, the customers, and we were the ones who should have been paid. I didn't mind; it was good that such decent people were getting their reward.

Radio review March 4 2011

2011-03-06T13:16:00.003Z

Wonder what the Greeks are saying now, when they go out to riot: "We're not the Irish. We're not like that. We don't use democracy."
Democracy in Ireland, though, is different. The politicians stalked the streets like exiled princes in the days before the poll. On the day, white-faced - or unbelieving and delighted - they stood in the count centres while the radio journalists feasted on them.
There was a palpable air of schadenfreude as the interviewees - or in some cases, anticipatory schadenfreude, for who knows what the future will bring. Will it be premature coalition, or coalition interruptus, ending in tears and slaps?
High points on the day the cleamhnas was set up were Newstalk's breathless early reporting - "Envision the picture: Taoiseach Enda Kenny, and in the seat directly opposite him (pause) Arise, Baron Gerry Adams" - Ivan Yates with a chuckle in his voice at 10am.
I don't know who said it, but I choked on my tea, at home in the Dublin South Central Soviet, at "The blue bloods of Dun Laoghaire have turned blue for Fine Gael, while working-class Dublin South Central is red for Labour."
By mid-morning Radio 1 was as avid as a cat looking at a bird and making that unnerving chattering noise with its teeth. The noon news reported: "Every Fianna Fail seat in Dublin is in danger.... the Greens are in a fight for their political lives".
The most unconsciously telling statement for the fallen princes was from Sinn Fein's Dessie Ellis. Revealing how Fianna Fail's fortunes have changed, he said: "We're not going to be like the three main parties - and I include Fianna Fail in that."
Radio 1's was a master feat of reporting, going on through the day, relentlessly circling from constituency to constituency, and Rachael English and Sean O'Rourke finally staggered off to bed at 4am, leaving those last few centres still counting, counting.
It's all a dream - could it really be the end of the Tammany Hall fixing that has been the curse of Irish politics since the 18th century?
By midweek, Fine Gael and Labour have their match well on the way, and the two stations were reporting Enda, spurning the Enda-pendants for the fine reliable farm of Labour, murmuring "D'you want to be buried with my people?"

* A made match can work better, sometimes, than a mating in the full heat of passion; as the Indians say, in a love-match the kettle is boiling and is only going to cool; in a made match the kettle is cold when it's put on the fire and keeps getting hotter.
Labour and Fine Gael, though, will have to have the same careful trust that goes into any marriage. They may get help from the book Little White Whys - about why men lie. Brian O'Connell gave David Harvey the skinny on it, having talked to author Ish Major.
Everything you want to know about a man is in first three conversations, said Brian. He gave some helpful questions to ask a man if you're interviewing: Have you any legal problems? If you hear "Not that I care to discuss" or "Nothing that affects me now", run a mile.
The texters were speaking tough love. "Little white lies will lead to big black eyes," texted Dave. Texter M was indignant: "I don't think that writer's going to have many male friends." David pointed out: "Giving away trade secrets."
Listener Marie said bitterly: "Men are animals but some make better pets." And her ideal match, Noel: "Women's place in kitchen cooking - and they shouldn't be allowed on the road."

Election coverage, Newstalk, Saturday
Election coverage, Radio 1, Saturday
David Harvey, 4fm, weekdays

Bust, by Dearbhail McDonald, Penguin Ireland

2010-10-03T12:48:00.003+01:00

TIGER cubs didn’t come any more tigerish than Breifne O’Brien and Fiona Nagle. The well-connected couple owned a family home in Glenageary, an apartment on Dalkey’s Vico Road and a golfing villa in Barbados.
They were always in the social diaries - Nagle with her exclusive PR and event management company (€2,500 minimum for organising a private party for six), and O’Brien with…
With what? Most of us have only the vaguest idea of how the complex financial dealings of the property and bank bubble worked.
But Dearbhail McDonald, legal editor of the Irish Independent, was in the catbird seat for all the court cases. She lays it all out in its squalor in Bust: How the Courts Have Exposed the Rotten Heart of the Irish Economy.
Ireland watched it all with a mixture of horror and schadenfreude: Nagle’s humiliation as she lost everything; the collapse of O’Brien’s investment schemes.
The fraud squad raided the family home; O’Brien handed over his Aston Martin DB7 to the County Sheriff and his art collection to Adams - it was the end of a glittering life.
“Why, Gardaí wondered, had O’Brien’s banks missed the signs,” McDonald writes. “Gardaí were staggered by the vast sums of money entering and leaving O’Brien’s bank accounts, of which he had close to 100.
“At the time of writing, O’Brien has not been charged with any offence, and investors are still being interviewed.”
McDonald segues from O’Brien’s Ponzi schemes to people like Caroline McCann, a barely literate young mother who was sued by a credit union - after borrowing over €18,000.
Between 2003 and 2008 the state jailed 1,138 people for debt-related offences, writes McDonald. In 2009, 4,806 were jailed for failing to pay court-ordered fines.
Readers start Bust with astonished laughter that gradually subsides to a sickened terror. McDonnell writes about developer Sean Dunne’s €1.5m party on the yacht Christina O to mark his wedding to former Sunday Independent gossip queen turned barrister Gayle Killillea.
She covers Liam Carroll’s Zoe Group’s 51 companies owing €1.1 billion to its creditors - and Carroll’s estimated debts of €3bn through his various business interests.
And she describes the suicides, including developer John O’Dolan, found hanged in a disused horse shed after his investment in Dubai’s The World archipelago went wrong, and he “felt under siege” from the bankers.
Seanie Fitzpatrick sauntered grinning out of the Four Courts last Wednesday. McDonald remembers how he was forced to resign after admitting that the bank had for years been transferring personal loans it made to him - worth more than €80m at their peak - to the Irish Nationwide Building Society balance sheet at Anglo’s year end, so their existence would not be discovered.
Anglo later turned on Fitzpatrick, and he was questioned by the Gardaí, just as it was revealed that Anglo was set to transfer at least €28bn worth of toxic property loans to NAMA.
The collapse of the economy leaves not so much a victimless crime, in Irish minds, as crimeless victims. But Dearbhail McDonald’s devastating scour of the courts shows otherwise.
Here were many criminals, and a plethora of hapless victims convinced by their sleight-of-hand, lies and scams.
The hero is High Court judge Peter Kelly, who followed the criminals down the dark trail of deceit and shameless greed.
If you buy one book about the crimes and schemes that underlay the Celtic Bubble, let this be the one.

Dearbhail McDonald interviewed by Matt Cooper on Today FM radio show The Last Word

Love in the Making by Roisin Meaney, Hachette Ireland

2010-09-09T10:35:00.003+01:00

Real romance?
True love in all its forms and varieties. Hannah is about to open a cupcake shop -
What? Why?
It’s not the same way it takes all of us. Anyway. About to open her shop, when her utterly romantic, adoring boyfriend, Patrick, ditches her for a pregnant Other Woman.
Doesn’t sound that romantic to me
Kind of guy who brings you to the airport to meet a flight and whisks you away to Paris. Or in this case, whisks himself away to live with a masseuse.
Ooh, I see his point
Tut, you have no heart. Hannah, stunned with grief, sets up in business, baking pink cupcakes to soothe her troubled heart and feed her hungry customers. And Adam -
Who he?
Hannah’s best friend and non-romantic love - Adam moves in with her.
And they fall in love?
Not my job to tell you that, honeykins. I will say this - it’s a village story, so there are different storylines twining and twirling. There’s the shy, strict-looking clarinet player who’s wooed by -
Who? Who?
Whoops! Nearly told you. The ubiquitous taxi driver who’ll be a love interest. The sexy Scottish sax-playing carpenter who fancies Hannah. Seven months later, life has changed for everyone.
Plenty going on there
Too much at times - there’s a drunken car crash subplot that seems to have been imported from a completely different book. But it’s all as heartwarming as a cupcake sprinkled with silver spangles.
What’d she write before?
Kerry-born ex-teacher Roisin has six adult books and two for kids, selling worldwide in various languages. The Last Week of May, The People Next Door and Half Seven on a Thursday were all Irish bestsellers.
Worth a read, so?
Definitely - if you’re off to the beaches of Marbella or the dentists of Mardyke, bring this with you and sink into a world of sweetness where the good are rewarded and the bad get their comeuppance.
Author's site

The Man from Beijing by Henning Mankell, Knopf

2010-09-09T10:30:00.003+01:00

Eh? China? Wallander?
You’re right, m’dear, this is by Henning Mankell, who writes those gloomy Swedish thrillers about depressed detective Kurt Wallander - but this time his lead is a woman and his villain Chinese.
A copper?
Not as such. Judge Birgitta Roslin, loosely associated with an extended family wiped out in a remote hamlet on the border between Norway and Sweden.
How loosely?
Her mammy was fostered by a couple now in the far reaches of antiquity, who are among the 19 members of the Andren clan to be sliced and diced. The police have a theory. Birgitta soon has a different one.
But Beijing? What? Where?
Meanwhile in Beijing’s wealthiest sector, a super-powerful industrialist is reading the diary of his ancestor, who was enslaved. The foreman of the railroad gang that destroyed his life was one Jan August Andren.
Straightforward revenge story then?
Indeed no - this is Mankell. Darker forces are at work. In Africa, the Chinese (nervous of internal revolution, as why wouldn’t they be) are preparing a plantation - they want to ship in millions of poor Chinese farmers.
To Africa? You’re joking?
They’re persuading the African leaders that it’s going to benefit their own people, because schools, hospitals, roads, telecommunications, etc will follow the planters to sparsely populated areas.
Mankell’s making this all up out of his head?
Hope so. Unnervingly, he has inside knowledge of Africa - the author lives part of his time in Mozambique.
It’s linked to the killings how?
The psycho who sent the killer is high up in China’s elite. And - well, read it for yourself.
Good, then?
Very good at times, but Mankell has trouble keeping all the themes - murder, Maoist theory, modern Chinese emigration, 19th-century exploitation - from spinning out of control.
Author's site

Horns by Joe Hill, Gollancz

2010-09-09T10:20:00.002+01:00

Horny, eh?
Not like that. Ignatius Perrish wakes up after a night when he did ‘terrible things’, and finds horns growing on his head.
Not a good look
Actually, nobody notices. Except that they want to tell him their darkest desires and get his permission to do bad things. Like give that screeching kid one good slap.
Ig’s a bad boy?
Son of a legendary musician, brother of a TV star, he’s grown up in wealth and privilege. But Ig’s the kind of sweet innocent who is a beacon of truth. In fact, his evil friend Lee Tourneau - our villain - lives his life by thinking ‘WWID’ - What Would Ig Do - and mimicking his behaviour.
A good villain’s important
Lee Tourneau’s native water is deception. And there’s others: a few nasty cops. And Ig’s family don’t come too well out of it. Lots of badness.
And Ig…?
Everyone in town thinks Ig raped and murdered his girlfriend, Merrin, when she tried to break up with him.
What’s this girlfriend like?
They meet in church, where the pretty redhead flashes a message in Morse code using the gold cross she wears.
Small-town life, then?
All kinds of strange, dreamy magic happens, at the same time as a townie childhood of jokes and japes. Hill writes beautifully about the secret life of kids - the wild, dangerous things they do without their parents ever knowing. And about treachery.
Then he turns into Satan?
Kind of. But still a sweet guy. Hill, the writer of Heart-Shaped Box - a big hit last year (and Neil Jordan is going to film it) - and the Locke & Key comics, brings his reader on a hold-tight ride through the story.
Serious stuff?
With some jokes that make you burst out laughing. And a great story, with a spiralling series of shocking twists at the end that leave you open-mouthed and going “Wow!”.
A buy?
A definite buy.
Author's site

Room by Emma Donoghue, Picador

2010-09-07T17:27:00.004+01:00

Kidnapped and hidden? Like that Austrian kid?
Like Elisabeth Fritzl in Austria and Jaycee Lee Dugard in America and Deirdre Crowley in Ireland, the girl in Emma Donoghue’s Booker-shortlisted bestseller Room has been kidnapped and hidden.
Room?
It’s what they call their little world. Five-year-old Jack and his mother, Ma, live in Room, among their friends - Rug and Wardrobe (where Jack hides when the kidnapper Old Nick might come), and Meltedy Spoon and Lamp.
Oh, sad
Ma turns the lamp on and off at night, trying to signal through the skylight. They watch TV - but not too much because it rots your brain - they was their hands, and wash their teeth after every meal.
Trying to be a good mother?
Making a pretty good fist of it too. But Jack - though he’s super-bright, has a huge vocabulary and understands a lot about the mysterious world outside, and everything about their own Room-world - is a weird little kid.
They’re in Room for the whole story?
No, halfway through they work out an escape plan. It’s not spoiling the story to tell you this - you can look forward to it, in fact. It’s the best part of the book, sheer terror.
So they’re happy then?
Ah no - this is where Emma Donoghue - a fabulous writer, this is her seventh book - gets her teeth into western society. Ma and Jack become celebrities, in the same way that Jaycee and Elisabeth did, and she agrees to go on TV.
Not so bad?
They need the money - this is America; they have to pay for hospital, and have to save for their college fees. Ma was a 19-year-old student when she was snatched; now, at 27, she wants to study again.
So they’re stars?
The media treat them like freaks: “The despot’s victims appear to be in a catatonic state,” one newspaper blared; the TV show host probes droolingly, is it true that Ma still breastfeeds Jack. “In this whole story,” Ma asks mockingly, “that’s the shocking detail?”
Eww. But they now have a family?
Kind of. Some of that is traumatic - Jack’s grandfather is sickened by the sight of him. Some is very funny, like Jack’s first day out shopping with his uncle and cousins.
A buy?
A definite buy. A brilliant book, moving, true, funny, desolate and unmissable.

Video of Emma Donoghue talking about Room

Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger, Jonathan Cape

2010-09-06T17:59:00.003+01:00

Evil twins?
Eerie twins anyway: Elspeth and Edie, identical and inseparable, had a catastrophic row sometime in the 1980s. Edie, it seems, split for Chicago and married Jack, father of her twins, Julie and Valentina.
Wow, twins within twins
And wheels within wheels. Elspeth dies, and leaves her flat beside Highgate Cemetery in London to her nieces. So Julie and Valentina head for London, to live in the flat for a year.
Oooh, wish someone would do that for me
Careful what you wish for, babes. Elspeth isn’t a very nice person. The girls move in. Upstairs are Martin and Marijke, downstairs is Robert, who was Elspeth’s lover.
All pair off neatly?
Not so. Martin suffers terribly from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and as we meet her, Marijke is leaving him because she can’t stand to live this way - she can’t even enter the flat without platic bags over her feet.
Bags? What?
To keep the place super-clean. Meanwhile, Robert - much younger than his late lover, and haunted by the astonishing similarity between the new twins and Elspeth, is fascinated by them.
Good thing she can’t see that
Ah, but she can. Elspeth has awoken as a ghost in the flat. And from then on it gets weirder and weirder. Niffenegger, author of cult bestseller The Time Traveler’s Wife (Now a Major Movie) and other hits, knows how to spring a stunning surprise.
And does it end happily?
It does. A wonderful ending - though it comes after quite a long saggy time in the middle of the book where I was muttering “Ah, get on with it”.
And shockingly?
Certainly that. You’ll puff out your cheeks and go “Whoo, wasn’t expecting that at several points.
Good characters?
I particularly liked the Little Kitten of Death, a feral white kitten that comes in from the graveyard and is captured by the ghost and the twins. And the cemetery staff are nice old codgers.

Becoming Scarlett by Ciara Geraghty, Hachette Books

2010-09-06T17:50:00.003+01:00

Scarleh?
Scarlett O’Hara, no less. Daughter of retired actor (resting, dahling) Declan O’Hara, heartthrob of ladies of a certain age. And now staring in horror at the blue stick of a pregnancy test.
She doesn’t want a baby?
She’s all on her owney-o, after her beloved - plain-speaking John Smith - left her, the rat. And as it rapidly transpires, she’s not absitively sure who’s the father-to-be of the sprog-to-be.
Ouch! How so?
She had a little pity party, during which she was comprehensively pitied by -
Don’t tell me: Rhett Butler?
Close. Daniel Butler, universally known as Red Butler for his flaming hair. And soon to meet Scarlett again under circs embarrassing enough to make both of them live up to their names.
Who wrote it, btw?
Dubliner Ciara Geraghty, rumoured to have a six-figure deal with Hachette for two books, Saving Grace (her first, about a girl who falls for the office geek) and Becoming Scarlett.
How does this Scarlett make the redsers?
A popular job in chicklit: she’s a wedding planner. Now working on the ‘Smithson-Carling wedding’. High-end. Martello towers. Glam. And she’s in line for promotion.
All going well, then?
Hmm, not quite. The boss’s lover is also in line for that promotion. And no partner to help Scarlett raise the sproglet. So organised organiser Scarlett, determined not to have her five-year plan thrown out of synch, heads for the abortion boat.
Not! In a chicky book?
When she faints at the airport, disaster strikes… but I won’t spoil it for you.
Worth it, then?
Quirky characters - love the chip-shop heiress who’s one of Scarlett’s clients - heartrending turnarounds, and an ending that’s far from traditional. The supporting actors - including dad Declan and mammy Maureen, his femme fatale muse - are charming.
Publisher's site

Plum Spooky by Janet Evanovich, Headline Review

2010-09-06T17:45:00.003+01:00

Haunting and deathless?
Neither. Stephanie Plum, heroine of the world’s best-selling comedy mystery series, is hunting a paranormal murderer. Or maybe he’s hunting her.
Paranormal how?
Gerwulf Grimoire likes to kill people by wrenching their heads around backwards and leaving a burned-in mark of his hand on them. Disappears in a cloud of smoke.
Nasty!
But Plum has the help of Diesel, Wulf’s cousin, who’s just as paranormal, and has the hots for her. And there’s a monkey.
And monkey business?
Plum, oddly, never seems to get any except from her long-suffering cop boyfriend, Joe Morelli. But Joe is currently babysitting a cousin of his own, who’s been thrown out by the wife.
But this monkey?
Carl is a monkey who’s all too like a small boy. He spends most of the action playing Mario Brothers, when he’s not intervening to save Plum from the villains.
These villains…
Wulf is truly evil. He’s bankrolling the weather experiments of nerdy Martin Munch - together they hope to blackmail governments by threatening them with demonic storms.
Explain again why Plum’s involved?
Ah. Yes. Plum is a bounty-hunter - her job is to bring in folks who’ve forgotten to appear for their court dates. She has two big jobs on at the moment: Munch, who’s disappeared with his employer’s caesium vapour magnometer, and Gordon Bollo, who’s run over his ex-wife’s new husband. Twice.
All is clear
And the monkey was doorstepped on her by a former client, who is on her honeymoon. Quite normal.
Good fun?
Goodish. Starts strong, some very funny moments, but towards the end you get the feeling that Evanovich is thoroughly sick of Stephanie Plum and all to do with her. Which is fine, because there’s going to be a movie soon, starring Katherine Heigl. Now that should be fun.
Author's site

Saving CeeCee Honeycutt

2010-02-18T16:16:00.006Z

By Beth Hoffman
Viking
I’m fated to go mad.
Why so, my dear? You seem sane enough to me. Well… relatively.
You don’t know my family
Ah yes. The genetic taint. You fear that you’ll be struck down by mental illness because it’s in the family? What you need (apart from learning about genetics) is Saving CeeCee Honeycutt.
Which is?
A cosy novel of the American Deep South. CeeCee - 12-year-old Cecelia Rose - is minding her increasingly disturbed mother at the start - her dad has taken it on the lam, and is present only in maintenance cheques.
And this will help me how?
Be calm. CeeCee’s mother is killed, and her great-aunt Tootie swoops in and brings CeeCee to Savannah, Georgia, to a world run entirely by ladies.
Georgia? KKK fanatics?
Of course the racism question raises its head soon - Tootie’s housekeeper, Oletta, is black and proud. But in this simple story, simple decency wins out.
How unlike life
Not always, honeychile. Oletta, Tootie, their appealingly nutty neighbour Miz Goodyear, Oletta’s friends in the old folks’ home, all help to heal the troubled child.
Sounds sugary
Certainly not safe reading for diabetics. But kindly and reassuring for anyone too taken with the current craze for seeing DNA as an unstoppable force.
No villains?
A horrid neighbour, Miz Hobbs, is a saccharine racist. But CeeCee gets her revenge by kidnapping her bra and photographing it in many appealing locations, and sending nasty Miz Hobbs the photos with nice notes.
Beginning to like the sound of it
It’s a big hit in America, where its simple story chimes with the nostalgia for a supposedly kinder past. All the problems - like those of CeeCee’s beloved old neighbour from the icy north - are solved with a smile and a generous offer.
Best thing?
The sense of place - interior designer Hoffman’s writing brings Savannah and its people lovingly into your mind. A gorgeous book.

The Dating Detox

2010-02-12T10:57:00.004Z

by Gemma Burgess
Avon
So dating is toxic?
For lonely London ad copywriter Sass, it is: she’s just been dumped for the sixth time straight. This time after finding her current squeeze shagging another, dressed only (him) in a judge’s full-bottomed wig.
Tasteful!
So Sass swears off men. After Arty Jonathan, Rugger Robbie, Smart Henry and the others, she’s had enough. Sass and her friend Bloomie make a 10-point plan: the Dating Detox. No More Men - for three months.
That works?
Like dreams, it goes in reverse. Instantly, Sass is the cynosure of all lusts, with men panting after her looking for her phone number.
Nice guys?
Most of them the usual bastardos. But Sass has a good line in put-downs. To a man who says he doesn’t believe in global warming, she withers: “It’s not the tooth fairy. ‘Believing’ makes no difference.”
Writing that down now
Irish chick-litterateurs had better watch out - Gemma Burgess is about to eat your cake. Smart, plotty and funny, The Dating Detox is the work of a master. And it’s her first book - started when Gemma’s sky-high heels put her back out and she wrote a couple of chapters for fun.
Knows her stuff?
In what they call a ‘recursive metaphor’, she has her heroine describe chicklit: “The girl is somehow identifiable. The guy is somehow unattainable. There is fashion. There is a dancing scene… a klutzy friend.”
Whoah! Every single film -
“Then somewhere along the line, there is a fear that he’s messed up forever and has to prove himself to her to win her love.”
But wait - she’s not dating. So how -
Fear not. When she meets spicy Jake - very tall, with broad shoulders and dark hair, crinkly-round-the-edges eyes, teeth almost straight and very white…lips look like they get sunburnt a lot. In short, attractive as hell -
Mm. Get the idea.
And before you ask, yes, buy it, read it, love it. Brilliant fun.

Author's site

The O’Hara Affair

2010-02-11T06:55:00.004Z

by Kate Thompson
Avon
Quiet village life?
Not! A glamorous film is being made in the village of Lissamore in ‘Coolnamara’, and the streets are full of sexy stars and slimy Tinseltown types. And hopeful actresses-to-be with stars in their eyes.
Magic!
Magic is right, and Fleur O’Farrell, née Saint-Eveurte and otherwise known as Flirty, proprieteuse of stylish designer shop Fleurissima, is preparing to tell fortunes.
Eh?
For charity. Fleur logs on to Facebook and discovers the secrets of villagers and visitors, and she’s able to magically manipulate lives like a kindly fairy godmother.
Whose lives?
Mainly mouselet Bethany, a bullied teenager who blossoms into a gorgeous creature under Fleur’s care. Meanwhile, Dervla Kinsella, heroine of Thompson’s The Kinsella Sisters, reappears - newly married, and struggling with minding her husband’s senile mother.
I sense a political tone
You do. I bet the next in the series will have Dervla - a go-getting former estate agent - in politics and fighting for the rights of the aged.
Gritty real life
Real and online - a chunk of the book is lived in the ghostly online world, where you can be who you want, and do what (or who) you want. Until the fairy godmother catches up with you.
And a bad guy?
Fleur’s tycoonish lover, Corban O’Hara, one of the film’s producers, is far more flirty than Flirty knows, and as she wanders the cybernetic corridors of Second Life, she discovers secrets she might not want to know.
Ooh, bad boy
And a bad girl - the star Anastasia Harris, commonly known as Nasty, though she’s out-nastied by Corban, a mind melder of the first order.
Scary guy?
The kind of manipulator who should have Garda crime-scene tapes around him at all times.
But a happy ending?
This is a cuddly, kindly book. Don’t worry, good will triumph and the bad will pay.

Author's site

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

2010-02-06T18:53:00.002Z

by Muriel Barbery
Europa Editions
The what of the what?
French bestseller - it keeps selling and selling. Now it’s here, and is building slowly, and is about to take off big time.
And is it worth it?
Run and buy it quick. Very funny, full of fantastic juicy insights, tres tres French.
Et cet ’edgehog?
That would be Renée, concierge of a fabulously upmarket apartment block where the future prime minister, the country’s top food critic and other luminaries reside.
Why hedgehog?
As Pandora, the little girl who is Renée’s co-narrator, explains it, spiky Renée “has the same simple refinement as a hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary - and terribly elegant”.
How does Pandora know?
She’s 12, and plans to commit suicide and burn the place down on her 13th birthday. Yet she’s a lovely child - she just feels that life has no meaning. Then she meets those who gives it meaning.
But funny?
Slapstick sometimes - an encounter with a Japanese toilet that plays Mozart’s Requiem, hiccups on a proposal of love - but mostly it’s the way Renée and Pandora satirise the world of the shallow, cruel rich.
Secret lives?
Renée is doing an ace imitation of a typical concierge: flat feet, dull stare - while secretly living the life of an aesthete. Pandora is a manga fan, super-bright, witty, almost always silent.
And then…?
And then, for the first time in generations, an apartment is sold, and a Japanese gentleman moves in. He’s the hub that connects and humanises the residents: the idle rich, the tramp who sleeps outside in his cardboard box…
Plotty and gripping?
Oh no, this story moves gently along, interrupted only by the reader’s guffaws as Renée and Pandora slice into the false lives of the rich and the affectations of the intellectual.
It’s a buy?
A wonderful book.
Publisher's site

Am I the Only Sane One Working Here? by Albert J Bernstein, PhD

2010-01-29T10:32:00.005Z

Always wondered that
New work year is here, and it’s time to deal with those work issues. Al Bernstein, psychologist and conflict resolution specialist, gives his ‘101 Solutions for Surviving Office Insanity’.
Solutions? There are solutions?
Turn straight to Albie B’s ‘Worst Case Scenarios’ chapter - losing jobs, losing work, losing income, facing the dole - Bernstein’s advice is so useful.
Like what?
Simple advice in the first place: don’t get stuck in one stage of dealing with things, take rumours with a grain of salt, know you’re in charge of your own feelings.
Sounds like flabby self-helpism to me
Some of it is. Some not. In ‘Companies that Offer Human Sacrifice’ he talks about how to survive the ‘dangerous ritual’ of random sackings and ‘appease the angry gods’.
Funny! And how?
He says these Aztec-style companies value workers for loyalty, not competence (not a good sign for the company). If you’re in a firm like this, he says, keep your network and CV up to date - and if you lose the job, ‘make finding a job your new job’.
It all sounds so sensible
Bernstein also has good advice on alcohol, work affairs (‘Flirting with Doom’), temper tantrums, office parties. All those things that make working life the joy it is.
All for the workers?
Most of it, in fact, is for managers, including how to criticise (four praises for every criticism), how to be promoted (be a positive-thinking conformist), how to get slackers to work.
You can do that?
So he promises - and Bernstein is writing with the expertise of a professional. Really a pretty useful book.
What else has he done?
Emotional Vampires: How to Deal with People who Drain you Dry; Dinosaur Brains: Dealing with all those Impossible People at Work; Neanderthals at Work - you get my drift.

Buy Am I The Only Sane One Working Here? on Amazon.com

Luna sits

2010-01-18T06:17:00.004Z

Not a review this time - I was going to post this on my LiveJournal blog, which is more personal, but LiveJournal doesn't seem to allow the use of home videos.
I love training animals, though 'training' is the wrong word - it suggests a stern, ordering process:
"Sit, sir. I say, Sit."
Clicker training is different.
Since I read Don't Shoot the Dog, Karen Pryor's book about using positive reinforcement to train, I've learned a new and getter way.
Training is a question of treats and fun, and a bonding of love between humans and pets.
Here's a video of me training my cat Luna.
Luna came to me as a terrified little animal. Her real owner had migrated back to America, and Luna was suddenly homeless. She spent most of her first six months under my bed.
By the time she died - I think a car got her, but it might have been a simple heart attack - some months ago, Luna was outgoing enough to come downstairs and touch noses with my dog and play chasing games with her. Luna's 1,000-yard stare had become the smiling face of a happy cat.
This is the second session of training to 'sit'. After this one, she'd always sit on command - though 'command' is the wrong word to use for a cat, of course. She'd sit if I said 'Sit', and gaze up at me with a joking look, as if we shared the same in-joke.

I See Rude People by Amy Alkon

2010-01-13T09:30:00.006Z

McGraw Hill
Don’t we all
See rude people? All the time. But Amy Alkon, ‘The Advice Goddess’ of Good Morning America, The Today Show, MTV, etc, sees them like the kid in The Sixth Sense says “I see dead people”.
They haunt her?
Seemingly. One story is about her battle with Bank of America after a toothless fat African-American claimed to be skinny redhead Amy. Seven withdrawals later - one in Texas (Amy’s in California) she was down $12,000.
Now that’s rude
The bank failed to help her find the fraudsters, she writes, then the letters from credit card companies thanking her for her ‘application’ started. A privacy researcher told her she could be legally responsible for crimes committed using her fake ID!
Madness! What did she do?
She got her boyfriend Gregg - researcher for detective novelist Elmore Leonard - on the job. He and others easily withdrew money using inadequate ID and blurry signatures.
Couldn’t happen in Ireland, right?
Amy also rails against people who share their lives in mobile phone calls on buses and in cafes and shops. “Just because you have a self doesn’t mean you have to express it,” she tells them.
And online boors?
Amy helpfully describes step-by-step how she tracked down people using their work computers to abuse her online, and rang them at work.
Telemarketers?
Amy actually succeeded in getting money out of them - she put herself on the ‘Do not call’ register, and when telemarketers called her, she traced them, and charged them for her time.
My hero
She’s a decent skin - she saw a citizen bargaining street artist Gary Musselman down to a tenner and blogged about it, illustrating the story with his work. A day later he had sold $1,500 worth, and had free legal service and his own blog.
Worth a buy?
You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll grind your teeth with rage. V worth it.

Author's website

Buy I See Rude People on Amazon.com

The Gates by John Connolly

2010-01-07T13:42:00.003Z

Hodder & Stoughton

I forgot to buy the nephew a pressie!
Fear no more, my child, your fairy godmother is here, and the present you need (*pouff*) is The Gates, by John Connolly, a magical tale that will scare the hell out of the poor child.
Don’t want that, do I?
Ah, but it does it in a cosy, reassuring, Englishy kind of way, and on the road to redemption the little one will learn lots of physics.
Do tell
You know the way many boys and girls love abstruse facts? This is riddled with physics stuff, told in exactly the right confiding whisper.
And is there a story?
Indeed there is. The Large Hadron Collider and Satan have got together, in the unlikeliest pairing since 50 Cent said he wanted to take Susan Boyle clubbing.
Satan?
Or one of the Evil One’s other trade names. Unfortunately, as the residents of 666 Crowley Avenue dance in a pentacle at the same time as the Hadron Collider is doing its thing, there is a watcher.
Our dashing hero?
Exactly. Young Samuel Johnston and his trusty dachshund Boswell are peering through the window, having received a cold refusal while trick-or-treating.
How young?
Eleven; young enough to have a babysitter, the unspeakable Stephanie. Lots of evil in this story. Including the ex-residents of Number 666, who have been gobbled up and replaced by decaying versions of themselves.
Eee - don’t want to give the nephew nightmares
If he’s a delicate, nervy child, steer clear. If he’s the usual gruesome-loving little boy, go for it. Adult thriller author John Connolly struck the Dahl note in this kids’ book.
How does it end?
That would be telling. I can reveal that Johnson is a misunderstood hero in the tradition of Camus, and that a secondary demon, Nurd, is sulkily ready to thwart the plots of the Great Malevolence (alias Satan).
Worth buying?
I’d give you 666 to 66 that the nephew will love it.

Writer's site

An Elegy for Easterly by Petina Gappah

2010-01-07T00:03:00.004Z

Faber and Faber
Out of Africa?
Zimbabwean writer Petina Gappah won the Guardian First Book award with these stunning short stories.
A troubled land
In one story, the narrator’s aunt boasts that her daughter sent her a present of Z$250 billion - equivalent to £200 with Zimbabwe’s raging inflation.
And the words?
Lovely spare stuff, simple sentences piled on each other, making stories that take your heart out.
What kind of stories?
In the same story, a family is waiting for ‘something nice from London’ - the body of their son. And if he doesn’t turn up soon they’re going to go broke, because a host of hungry relatives are staying and feasting until they can bury him.
Gloomy!
Like a lot of stories by the young, these are in no way cheery. But they’re brilliant. In one, the widow of a hero of the revolution attends his funeral - they’re burying a sack of earth, for political reasons.
Political?
The Party insists he be buried in the equivalent of the Republican Plot in Glasnevin; the family that he be buried in his home place. All very Soldiers of Destiny.
I feel almost at home
In another story, ‘Harare’s finest blackmailers’ - traffic cops - extract ‘fines’ from hapless motorists. In another, a man dances himself to death.
Eee! Too sad!
Oddly, not. The stories are so fascinating, the characters so entrancing, that their dark subjects don’t infect you. Even while you’re watching a successful young couple scammed by a would-be illegal emigrant, you’re laughing.
And the writer?
Lawyer with degrees from Graz, Cambridge and Zimbabwe Universities, works in Geneva for a body that gives developing companies legal aid on international trade law. Currently working on her first novel, The Book of Memory.
A buy, you say?
An antidote to our own sorry-for-ourselfness. And a fine work from a new voice. A buy.

Total Oblivion by Alan DeNiro

2010-01-06T23:09:00.003Z

Ballantine Books
Scythian warriors in Minnesota? Really?
Unreally. As America gets weirder, genres are collapsing into each other. Westerns set in space, zombie private eyes, vampire porn.
But Scythians?
In this teen novel, 16-year-old Macy has the life so familiar to our own children from TV: the mall, the branding, the whole culture. Then the world changes, and her family are refugees.
Happens a lot
But not usually to Americans. Ancient Scythian and Thracian warriors ride in, giant wasps sting people who turn to paper and die, bizarre plagues sweep the land. Fast-food joints are the only restaurants left open.
Dystopian stuff
Nearly as dystopian as what we’re living through. All speckled with brilliant stories. Example: a coal miner finds a diamond. Inside is Satan’s head. Satan says “Bring me to the surface and you can have one thing.” The man agrees, and he’s never heard of again.
It sounds a bit - uncentred?
That it is. A lot of the time DeNiro is having fun telling tall tales and riffing on the tropes of American culture. But it’s fun.
Tropes? Eh?
Cultural metaphors. Like Macy’s family take a riverboat for St Louis, a la Huck Finn. Her dad has a job waiting for him in the astronomy department. (He then turn his hand to astrology - handy in the new dispensation.)
And family life?
Macy’s brother Ciaran turns into a tangler who fixes deals between all the factions; her sister gets sold into slavery; Macy and her mother catch the plague. Life, you know.
Healthy children’s reading?
Not if you’re concerned about drug use and foul language. But for older teenagers and those who can distinguish fiction from reality, it’s a rattling yarn.
The author?
DeNiro’s first hit was with a strange little book of stories, Skinny-Dipping in the Lake of the Dead and he runs the Goblin Mercantile Exchange blog. One to watch.
Author's site

We Are All Made of Glue by Marina Lewycka

2009-12-16T21:03:00.005Z

Fig Tree
Glue? Really?
Our heroine, Georgie Sinclair, is a freelancer on Adhesives in the Modern World. But the glue thing is more about how we, like, bond.
Who’s Lewycka?
Pronounced Levitzka; she wrote A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian (a surprise hit) and Two Caravans (less so). Her million-selling books are hilarious, but about deeply serious subjects. In this case, that includes Israel and Palestine.
This is a stick-’em-up?
Of human bondage. Georgie, daughter of a gritty North of England Commie (“If they ‘adn’t shut all t’pits, they wouldn’t be so mad for oil now, would they?”) has split up with her nerdy husband, and needs human contact.
She finds a new man?
She finds an old woman. Mrs Shapiro lives in a spooky mansion with seven cats. “When you see a good man you just grebbit quick,” she advises Georgie.
Rock steady
But Mrs S falls on the ice and a social worker plots with an estate agent to sell the mansion and grab a profit.
Sticky situation?
She’s sending desperate messages from the ‘care home’ - but Georgie has fallen into the Velcro-handcuff clutches of devilish Mark Diabello, the estate agent.
A demon lover?
Things start to go suspiciously wrong in the absent Mrs Shapiro’s house, and Georgia calls in Mr Ali the handyman. “Jews live here?” he asks, looking at the mezuzah on the door.
You’re giving it all away!
Not. There’s much more - brilliant, funny, and you’ll learn about Israel and Palestine, the Holocaust, the Danish Jews who were saved -
And the pusscats?
Lewycka writes great animals. The rapist Wonder Boy, delicate Violetta, The Stinker and the other cats are as real as the Palestinians, the surprise Israeli, the Jesus-freak son, angry husband and the rest.
But is it good?
Better than good. Get the flu just so you can stay home, tucked under a duvet with a warm fire and a mug of spicy chicken soup and gobble up this book.

Under the Dome by Stephen King

2009-12-16T20:40:00.002Z

Hodder & Stoughton

The dome in the tome?
‘Under the Dome’ is Americanspeak for happenings in Washington: Stephen King is symbolically writing about his government in this stonking great thing.
Tell the tale
A Maine town is cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible dome that clangs down, chomping off a woman’s arm, neatly halving a woodchuck and de-nosing a plane in midflight.
Exciting!
Yeah, it starts big. The US government sends in the army, as is its wont. But nothing gets through the dome: not missiles, not acid, certainly not troops.
And inside?
Inside, it’s like a speeded-up view of the onset of Naziism. The corrupt Selectmen (like county councillors) already have a giant meth lab running behind the Jesus is King radio station…
Eh?
Surprising, all right. The police chief dies when his pacemaker explodes in the Dome’s electrical field, and evil used-car salesman and Selectman Jim Rennie hires thugs as policemen.
But there’s a hero?
Naturally. Dale Barbara - regretful Iraq veteran and short-order cook - is named by the President as leader. But Rennie ain’t havin any.
Rubbing my hands here
So was I. But after the first 200 pages, which rip along, it stumbles around for the next 700. Our Barbie isn’t MacGyver. A second crash - of an Irish jetliner - is desultorily treated. The characters are great and there are wild plot twists - Rennie’s son turns necrophiliac - but the story somehow doesn’t integrate.
Should I buy it?
The writer of Carrie, The Shining, Misery and a million other hits loses the plot here. I wonder if it’s because computers are so fast to write on. After that fabulous opening, the story is like an extended video game.
Best points?
Shows how easily totalitarianism can happen; how we’re all stuck on a planet with limited resources; how the powerful bully the weak.

It’s Not Me, It’s You by Charlotte Ward

2009-12-02T07:54:00.006Z

Headline
Oh noes, breakup time is here
It certainly is. When you scent the first mince pie and hear the tinkle of glasses at a staff party you know tears are not far behind. Christmastime is breakup time.
Why? Why?
What everyone asks herself after Mr Right turns out to be Mr Right Little So-and-So. But help is at hand - Mirror reporter Charlotte Ward has written a devastatingly funny account of some stonking great splits.
But why?
Lots of whys. Ward’s pal Anne was really into her new man, but the sex was too embarrassing - wake-the-neighbours yells. Olivia took an instant dislike to her boyfriend’s “little friend” - It was long and skinny and looked like a chipolata... or a severed finger.”
Severed? Ewww!
Verity’s boyfriend showered her with attention and presents and adoration - but when she came home from a Malaysian holiday she felt like her stuff had been moved.
A bit paranoid?
Then she found the superspy-type pictures on his mobile: everything she owned, photographed so he could store them while he had some nookie, then return them to their places.
Oh. So steer clear of them all?
The awful breakup stories are the most fun, but Ward gives good advice for the newly single, and reveals how men deal with breaking up too.
Revenge?
Actually, a lot of her revenge stories are girly ones - like Anna, who found steamy texts from women on her boyfriend’s phone. She told him she knew he was playing away because she’d caught an STD from him…
Any happy stories?
Stacy squeezed through a packed pub with drinks for herself and a man she fancied. “I thought this might be yours,” he said with a grin - holding up the wraparound skirt she’d been wearing. Reader, she married him, and lived happily ever after.
Most shocking thing?
A revelation in the “Truth About Men (by men)” section: “We don’t always pee standing up. There. I said it.”
Author's site

Half Broke Horses by Jeannette Walls

2009-12-01T07:45:00.006Z

Simon & Schuster
Cowboys & Injuns?
And real cowboys, some of ‘em Native American. Jeannette Walls’ first book, The Glass Castle, was a memoir of growing up dirt-poor, daughter of homeless, wandering eccentrics.
But she made good?
Glamour-puss TV reporter. Glass Castle was a best-seller, and she followed up with this novel about her grandma - a convent girl and tough babe who ended up as a wealthy rancher.
What of these horses?
By the age of six, Lily is helping her crippled father break horses. He’s just out of jail - someone got shot, but it ain’t his fault, despite his ‘Irish temper’ - he’s the son of a Famine refugee.
She became a cowboy?
No siree. First her father’s helper and interpreter - kicked in the head by a horse as a child, he’s unable to talk clearly. Then a schoolmarm, but she keeps gettin’ fired for whalin’ on them young’ns.
Career-change time?
Sacked for pulling a pistol on a polygamous Mormon elder after telling the gals about wimmin’s rights, she decides to go to college.
Sensible
She has to make the money, so she gets a factory job in Chicago, then, when her pal gets pulled into the machinery by her ‘long Irish hair’, as a maid.
Why do I think this will go wrong?
She marries a fast-talkin’ dude, but whoop-de-dee, he’s a bigamous hound dog who’s spent all the savings from their joint bank account. After that she swears off men.
But she’s a grandma!
Keep your shirt on. When she’s half-qualified she gets a teaching job. Her pretty little sister turns up pregnant - but when the priest finds out -
Uh-oh
After the tragedy, she marries a big steady guy, deals bootleg from under the baby’s crib, teaches, runs a ranch, and brings up her kids with the strap always at the ready.
Some story
You bet your bottom dollar. And that’s only the half of it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll chaw tobaccy.

Truth or Fiction by Jennifer Johnston

2009-11-18T08:39:00.003Z

Headline Review

Not girly?
Jennifer Johnston writes tiny, perfect books, as delicate as wisps of silk chiffon booby-trapped with Semtex.
Ah so? Explosive secrets, then?
Book reviewer Caroline Wallace’s boss in the Telegraph sends her to Dublin (from her greyish life in London) to interview aged writer Desmond Fitzmaurice - everyone thinks he’s dead years ago, but he’s not.
Alive and kicking?
He promises her “lots of sex and some violence” in his diaries, which he holds under lock and key. Unlikely, she thinks, looking at the creaky old gent living in Sorrento Terrace over the strand at Dalkey.
And is there?
Oh, there is. There’s also lovely wry humour. When Caroline meets Desmond he strikes her as a bit of an egotist, waited on by wife, ex-wife, cleaning lady, sons and daughter. By the end of the book, she thinks he’s a monster.
Monstre sacré?
Less sacred, more selfish. He’s like the sun around whom a solar system of infuriated female planets whirls. All his relationships are biting, with a dash of spite, like a pink gin dripping with Angostura bitters.
Any of this autobiographical?
Scarcely! Though the details of Fitzmaurice’s life share a likeness with the author’s father, playwright Denis Johnston, who was, like our hero, a war corr in WWII, and did, like him, divorce a beloved actress wife to marry another. But I can’t see him murdering anyone.
It’s mainly about murder?
No, it’s mainly about the horrors of growing old, and very funny with it. Desmond F is so antique he’s practically auctionable, but he’s still determined to chip his way back into the world of fame and fortune. He’s a ruthless old beast.
A good buy?
Good buy to all that. The editing, unfortunately, is a little lax, with ‘their’ for ‘there’, ‘affect’ for ‘effect’, and the like. It spoils the, er, effect.
Article by the author's son about the book's background

A State of Mind by Kevin Casey

2009-11-11T08:34:00.003Z

Lilliput
Ireland of the welcomes?
Bestselling writer Bill Cromer and his sexy German girlfriend Ingrid move into Wicklow, in the heyday of the tax-free status for artists, when government action lured in millionaires to spend their money here.
And do they love it?
Up to a point. Cromer is a working-class Englishman who longs to be accepted by the county types living in Wicklow. But he has landed into the homeland of one O’Dalaigh, a still vividly anti-English hero of the War of Independence. Soon Cromer is getting visits from sinister men in trenchcoats.
Scary - does he flee?
No, because the sinister trenchcoated ones fail to make sure of who they’re talking to, and instead of threatening Cromer, they try to blackmail our narrator, ex-journalist John Hughes.
When are we?
In the 1970s, a time of bank robberies, the Ra and a word in your ear. And, of course, sex.
Sex! I was hoping you’d mention sex
Our narrator - bored with his matriarchal family - is eager to fling his marriage to the wind and bed Cromer’s mot, Ingrid, while doing some research for his novel at the same time.
Sounds like a plan. He’s the dashing hero?
Unfortunately, Hughes isn’t a very appealing hero. The character is flat and lacking in subtext, to be technical about it.
What happens with the Ra?
Hughes is coaching Cromer in books about history. He recommends Tom Barry’s My Fight for Irish Freedom with an airy “Completely unreliable, but it provides some insight into the O’Dalaighs of this world.”
And?
After that - it’s kind of unclear. There’s a beating. There’s a tryst. There are misunderstandings. There’s a suicide. Hughes’ life with his wife and beloved daughter is in the balance.
Who’s Kevin Casey?
Married to poet Eavan Boland, he was one of the good writers of the 1970s, and has come back with a swing with this glumly comic story.
Publisher's site

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest by Stieg Larsson

2009-11-04T10:05:00.003Z

Maclehose

Thriller by Swedish reporter, ja?
You betcha. Third and last of the series by the late Stieg Larsson, founder of anti-racist magazine Expo and world authority on right-wing extremist groups. He handed a publisher the manuscripts of the three books and promptly dropped dead aged 50. The books have been an international sensation.
Nice for his heirs
Not, it turns out, for the woman who shared his life for 30 years. Under Sweden’s tight-fisted cohabitation laws, Eva Gabrielsson isn’t entitled to a single öre.
Ouchy
She’s going to write about it, apparently. But meanwhile…
Oh yah, the hornet’s nest
Hornets’, plural. Lisbeth Salander, our hero, starts the book in hospital with a brain injury and riddled with bullets.
Eee, no - it’s not about her?
Not for the first 250 pages or so; you can basically skip them. At that stage, ace reporter Blomkvist - Larsson’s fictional alter ego - smuggles in her Palm Tungsten, and she’s suckin’ diesel again.
Who are these eponymous hornets?
Basically, Sweden’s security services - they’ve been covering up after a cell of lunatic Russian defectors and psycho killers for years - and in the process they’ve had young Lisbeth confined to a mental hospital for much of her youth. Now, facing exposure, they have too much to lose.
So it’s a spy story?
Ironically, in the circs, it’s about suppression of women, and how male society closes ranks to enable violent men.
Salander’s a hacker, if I remember rightly
And her faceless friends, citizens of the online ‘Hacker Republic’, weigh in to help her, as do unconnected women - a newspaper editor, a lawyer, a security official and a policewoman. And Blomkvist, natch.
Good, then?
To be honest, not as great as the first two. But I’ll bet fans will read it just to find out what happens to Salander.
Stieg Larsson site

The Brightest Star in the Sky by Marian Keyes

2009-11-03T16:45:00.004Z

Penguin

Zowie! A new Marian Keyes book!
In 66 Star Street - Keyes’ latest bestseller, I’ve no doubt - couples are coalescing and bursting apart like an experiment with mercury, and some strange beast is slouching towards Bethlehem to be born. Is it life? Is it death? Wait and see.
Sounds less cuddly than usual
It’s edgy enough, but very funny - several loud guffaws every few pages. The characters are great -
Tell me more
Two fine Polish hunks, one holy and prayerful, one zippy and zingy with blazing blue eyes, both sharing their flat with vividly bad-tempered taxi driver Lydia. One psychic -
The real thing?
Jemima, an aged Protestant lady, and yes, genuine psychic, with a troubled grey dog called Grudge, works for a psychic hotline. Her gorgeous foster-son Fionn is about to be the star of a new TV gardening programme.
Gorgeous, you say?
Fionn is so lovely that even his photo throws a sparkly wink to anyone who looks at it. More of the tenants at No 66: Matt ’n’ Maeve are married, quiet, devoted, a decent-living couple with a calm routine.
How ideal
You may think so; I won’t contradict you. And glam-mam type Katie is 40 this hated birthday. She’s the beloved of unreliable workaholic Conall.
All about coupledom?
No indeed - one aged parent is dying, another is struck by illness but no one will listen to her frantic daughter; companies go bust and people are sacked. Most of the action takes place in a haze of alcohol and sex, often both at the same time.
So many stories?
And more, indeed, since all these lives and others weave in and out - including the dog’s. The stories don’t have the driving force of Keyes’s earlier work, but this is good fun, and you know that in the end the good will win out and the bad be punished with icy force.
A buy?
A cosy read to comfort you in this nasty rainy winter we’re facing.

Makers by Cory Doctorow

2009-11-03T16:31:00.003Z

HarperVoyager
This is the Boing Boing guy, yah?
Yah. Co-editor of the Boing Boing zine, begetter of the Craphound blog. Author of a shelf of books, also released online under creative commons licences that encourage filesharing.
Blah. Is this any good?
Just giving you the background - because Doctorow is writing about what he knows. Son of Trotskyist teachers (his father born in a refugee camp in Azerbaijan), he grew up an activist.
And the story? The story?
Well, uh, yeah. At first it’s a spark-shower of creativity, with ideas zipping and humming and bouncing off each other. Reporter Suzanne is lured in to write about deeds of derring-do by corporate suit Kettlewell, head of a merger between Kodak and Digicell.
This is a story?
It’s like one of those old dotcom novels - remember Microserfs? Kettlewell wants zillions of creative cells around America to work for his firm Kodacell. He drags Suzanne to Florida to meet nerdy Perry and lardass Lester, who are doing crazy projects combining science and art.
Sounds worthy
Then they bring in talented people from a nearby shantytown, whose guru is an old aerospace engineer bankrupted by his dying wife’s medical bills.
And they do what?
That’s the problem. Doctorow’s story is tugging itself to pieces, his vocational egalitarianism pulling one way, his natural elitocracism dragging him relentlessly another, while he’s trying to write about a kleptocracy.
No! No! Big words!
Put it this way: the boys want information to be free; vicious tycoon rivals want to crush their ideals. There’s randomish violence. A subplot about Russian gene tech that cures obesity, and a whole class of ‘fatkins’ - skinny, avid former fat people who have mad sex like the 1980s gay subculture.
Worth a buy?
Certainly worth reading online for that brilliant first 100 pages.
Author's site

206 Bones by Kathy Reichs

2009-11-03T16:20:00.004Z

Heinemann
How many bones?
There are 206 bones in the human body - as forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan knows. Or should, but not if she’s an incompetent flake, as an anonymous caller claims to her bosses.
Hate that
A long-lost heiress turns up dead, and Tempe supposedly botches the post mortem. Then the only person who can reveal the anonymous caller’s name dies.
Zut alors!
This is the 12th Temperance Brennan book. In it, a particularly weird serial killer is targeting old ladies in French-speaking Quebec. A bunch of them have been found, very dead and in a decomposed state, some just skeletons.
Bones! That’s it!
No, the Temperance Brennan in the TV show Bones isn’t based on this series. Actually she’s based on the writer, Kathy Reichs, who is herself a forensic anthropologist.
Wow, that’s pretty circuitous
Tant pis. Temperance is having workmate trouble: a highly ambitious woman whose only lack is, well, qualifications, as well as a stalker who leaves her notes basically saying “Yankee Go Home” - in French, of course. And a seedy spelunker lurks in the lab.
Spelunkwha?
Potholer, normally. Guy who crawls through city sewers, in this case. In other news, Tempe seems to have lost some finger bones, and hasn’t noticed an obvious flaw in a child’s tooth. Canny readers suspect foul play, not incompetence.
Big sellers, these series?
All 11 so far made the Sunday Times bestseller list. This one is a good read, and the story keeps you interested, but there’s a certain feeling of running on the spot - tropes from the earlier books, like sports plane crashes and historic bodies, are repeated here.
Any hot romance?
Tempe’s old romantic interest, Detective Andrew Ryan, is dangling around, but not really on the scene until the end.
A buy, or not?
I’d advise waiting for the paperback.
Authors site

Jumping in Puddles by Claire Allan

2009-11-03T16:14:00.003Z

Poolbeg

I need a box of chocs and a girly story
Look no further, my dear: a box of Lily O’Brien’s best and Jumping in Puddles, the story of a group of lone parents in a Donegal village putting their lives back together.
Village full of gossip?
You have no idea. Ciara is 17 and won’t tell anyone her baby’s father’s name - not even her mam, who’s helping her bring up the sprog. The poor kid has left school and gone to work in the village shop, run by the local dragon.
Worst thing I can imagine
Maybe, maybe not. Niamh (why do authors give characters lookalike names? Ciara… Niamh - confusing for readers!) is mourning her perfect husband. He’s left her rich and living in their dream home, but she’s shattered. And about to be more so.
And no one to talk to?
Until Niamh and Ciara - and Ruth and Liam - join Detta O’Neill’s support group for lone parents, to the fascinated delight of the village. Ruth and Liam’s spouses have run off with each other, by the way.
Yikes! Makes a bond, though
Liam is dead solid, an old-fashioned Irishman who likes his fried breakfast and his traditional values. Unfortunately, his mother loathes his ex. All he wants is Laura back and his life the way it used to be.
Know the feeling
Socially ambitious Laura and bossy bank official James, Ruth’s ex, seem perfectly suited. But as Ruth knows, there’s more to James than meets the eye. Ruth is a weepy, downtrodden type who’s bullied by her bold strap of a teenage daughter, and worried about her sons.
Kids? These poor souls have kids?
The kids are the centre of the story - the Loony Lone Parents (as they nickname themselves) grow into a strong group who help each other with their children and their rapidly changing lives.
Rattling good yarn?
If RTE have any sense, they’ll buy this and turn it into a fab series and sell it internationally.
Author's site

Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann

2009-10-01T15:53:00.005+01:00

Bloomsbury

About a fellow on a tightrope at the World Trade Center, I heard?
A bunch of connected stories riffing on that central image - Philippe Petit really did dance on the high wire between the recently-built towers for 45 minutes early in the morning of August 7, 1974, a quarter-mile above ground, watched by spellbound New Yorkers.
It’s not about him? Confused now
He appears in the linked stories, the first about a saint: Corrigan, an Irish worker monk living among the New York prostitutes who are his friends. Corrigan’s brother, who tells the story, becomes entranced by Tillie and her daughter Jazzlyn, two of the prostitutes.
Uh-oh. When men write about prostitutes, they die
The omens aren’t good, I’ll admit. Then there’s a story about a group of mothers of men who have died in the Vietnam War. Two of them, upper-class white lady Claire and dead-solid black lady Gloria, are moving towards a tentative friendship in this sometimes catty milieu.
Very 1970s
And an arty couple, travelling back from a failure to sell their paintings and smoking dope who tip a van, cause it to crash. The man immediately absolves himself from guilt; the woman goes to the funeral of the people killed in the crash.
Worth reading, you reckon?
Su Perb. Couldn’t put it down. McCann has a way of tenderly drawing you into a world where terrible things are happening to people you care desperately about.
Famous writer, I think, eh?
Multi-award-winning writer’s writer - Paris Review published extracts from Let the Great World Spin and it was longlisted for the Booker. But don’t let that put you off; it’s a beautiful book. I came across him first when he wrote a column for the Evening Press while cycling across America as a teenager - amazing stories about backwoods psychopaths and the like. Buy this. Read it.

What to Expect When You’re Expecting by Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazell

2009-09-30T10:00:00.007+01:00

Simon & Schuster
Suddenly, everyone’s pregnant
You’d think it was infectious, wouldn’t you? The baby virus. So here’s ‘the world’s bestselling pregnancy manual’, as it says on the cover.
Wasn’t there some controversy?
Heidi Murkoff isn’t a doctor, and there was criticism about her writing on illness, and especially on diet, in pregnancy. And people said the early editions made labour and motherhood sound like hell.
Accurate, then?
Ah, now - their advice is actually down-to-earth and sensible. In this fourth edition - the best one to get - Murkoff and Mazell talk about everything you can possibly imagine wanting to know. Get a highlighter and sticky bookmarks, mark questions you want to ask your doctor, and bring the book with you.
OK, let’s see, what do they say about… smoking?
They advise not to smoke when pregnant, and not to hang around smokers. They also recommend not drinking alcohol - certainly not drinking a lot. And they have good words on cocaine, marijuana, heroin. Things people might be afraid to ask a doctor.
Oh dear, scolding?
There is a certain tut-tuttiness, but generally they lay out the book month-by-month, and offer sound sense. For instance, they talk about work and pregnancy - when you should tell your boss and colleagues, what kind of work you shouldn’t do when you’re pregnant, even whether you should play Mozart to your bumpy tummy.
Eh? Take it easy
Last thing you should do is take it too easy - they advocate keeping fit. By the way, there’s a good section on how to get pregnant (get that filthy look off your face; it’s about diet, ovulation and so on). And they have a bunch more books on toddlers, nannies, pregnancy diet and pre-pregnancy planning.
So I should buy it?
Woolly little booties, a baby sling and this book. I’m off to Mothercare.
The What to Expect page - helpful pregnancy, baby and pre-conception advice

Savvy by Ingrid Law

2009-09-23T19:49:00.004+01:00

Puffin
Kids with magic?
Secret super-powers. The Beaumont family always discover their ‘savvy’ on their 13th birthday. When Fish turned 13 the family had to move inland, because the storms he caused were too dangerous near any large body of water.
What do the others do?
Rocket (16) is electric. Grandpa can make land - when Mom and Pop married he made them six acres as a wedding present, moving neighbours’ homes further apart without their noticing.
Mom and Pop?
Pop doesn’t have a savvy; his family’s talent is losing all their hair by 30. Mom’s savvy is to be perfect - not an easy one. Grandma used to catch radio waves, so there are jars of happy tunes and inspiring speeches all over the house.
A great book for kids?
If you’ve got readers, they’ll just gobble it up. It’s a gorgeous book, about a quirky but happy family who look after each other, and about teenagers finding their way.
Teenagers? Oh no!
Oh yes. Mibs (for Mississippi: the kids on the school bus call her Missy Pissy), turns 13 as it starts. She’s dying to see what her savvy will be - but it’s no longer important on the day. Poppa’s car is crushed in a crash, and he’s hospitalised far away, in Salinas, Kansas.
Her savvy isn’t raising the dead and healing the halt?
What do you think? Mom, Grandpa and little Gypsy take the family clunker to Salinas, bringing Rocket to charge the battery. Mibs decides she has to get to Salinas too, and hides away in Lester the Bible salesman’s bus with brothers Fish and Sampson - and Will Meek, the preacher’s son she fancies, and Bobbi, his cool sister.
A Bible salesman? A flake?
Far from it - Lester is dead sound, and when he stops to rescue Lill the waitress, whose car has broken down, things get even more interesting.
Maybe I’ll read this myself
Good idea. I love this book. Sweet, kindly, courageous, funny, hopeful. Love it.

Twenties Girl by Sophie Kinsella

2009-09-23T19:42:00.004+01:00

Bantam Press
Ain’t it grand to be bloomin’ well dead?
Not dead but sleeping - or in the case of Lara’s ghostly Great-Aunt Sadie, doing the Charleston while smoking gaspers at cocktail parties.
Sadie masochism?
Sadie died aged 105, unvisited, in a nursing home. At the funeral she turns up as a 23-year-old ghost in a silky shimmy dress. She’s horrified at Lara, still drooping over a guy who dumped her by email. “Why don’t you take a new lover?” she asks, astonished. “Or several?”
I’m sorry for her trouble
“Don’t be a trailer,” dead Sadie tells Lara. “You can want and want a man, but if he doesn’t want you back, you might as well wish the sky were red.” Sadie’s more interested in getting Lara to find her necklace - mysteriously missing from the nursing home - and steal it back.
I sense the grinding of a ghostly axe
Sadie drags Lara into japes, mocking her cautious nature and demanding that she take crazy risks, like asking sexy American executive Ed Harrison out on a date after crashing his business meeting - Sadie has a far from otherworldly interest in delicious Ed.
Nothing like entrepreneurial eroticism
That would be Lara’s Uncle Bill, a coffee magnate who leveraged ‘two little coins’ into a worldwide business - and an irritating trope. The US president rings him for chats. They’re making a film about him, starring Pierce Brosnan.
What a great role model
That’s what he thinks; he runs seminars where people hold up the ‘two little coins’ he started with and chant that they too can succeed if they start from nothing. But sexy Ed snarls: “The only people who go to those seminars will be self-deluding fantasists, and the only person who’ll make money is your uncle.”
Should I buy it?
Only if you want to bust your sides laughing, adore the characters and be pulled in by a great plot full of twists. Brilliant!

The Help by Kathryn Stockett

2009-09-23T19:33:00.005+01:00

Penguin Fig Tree
A story about maids in the Deep South?
Don’t expect to put this book down once you pick it up - the story sucks you in and won’t let go. And it’s funny. Set in the 1960s, when Mississippi was the heartland of American apartheid, it’s about how the most powerless people start things changing.
Gripping stuff?
Our heroes are saintly Aibileen, who loves her white boss’s neglected little daughter; Minny, the sassy-mouthed maid who’s the best cook in town; and Skeeter, a white girl who wants to be a writer. Skeeter is trying to find out what happened to Constantine, who brought her up - but no one will talk. And she’s consulting Minny for her house cleaning column.
Her what?
Everyone has to start somewhere. Skeeter (so nicknamed because she’s skinny as a mosquito) writes a column on difficult stains, with advice from the expert: Minny, who has just been sacked by her white lady employer, Hilly Holbrook.
I sense a vicious villain?
Hilly is vile. She runs the bridge club, the ladies’ dances, the whole Jackson social scene, and she’s demonic in her control. Her ambition is to get people to instal outside toilets for the ‘help’ to use, so white bottoms don’t have to sit on the same toilet seats as black ones.
Noble, eh?
Lying Hilly has told everyone Minny is a thief. But Minny gets a job with the only one who hasn’t heard: Celia Rae Foote, a white-trash girl who married the man Hilly had her eye on.
Oooh, bad move
Worse, poor Celia doesn’t know what she’s done, and keeps trying to get in with Hilly and the ladies. Then Skeeter decides to write a book about maids in Jackson, and she gets together with Aibileen to collect all the maids’ stories.
Aren’t they scared?
Oh yes. But that’s what makes this story brilliant: the real horror amid the sugar-coated niceness. Funny, sad, angry: this book has everything.

The White Queen by Philippa Gregory

2009-09-07T20:38:00.006+01:00

Simon & Schuster

A dish fit for a king?
The most beautiful woman in England, they called Elizabeth Woodville, back in the 15th century. “I didn’t raise you to be a poor widow,” her witchy mother tells her, “alone in a cold bed, her beauty wasted on empty lands.”
And so say all of us
Never fear: enter the usurper king, Edward IV - the Yorkist commander who has booted out the Lancastrian king Henry VI. Elizabeth, daughter of a big Lancaster supporter, is a descendant of Melusina, an Anglo-French water goddess, so she’s able to slither into his affections.
Is this a real historical person?
Elizabeth? Oh yes. Mother of the Princes in the Tower, poor mites. Though Gregory (like many actual historians) believes that the ‘false pretender’ Perkin Warbeck was the real deal. He was the younger of the princes, and had (she reckons) been hidden away in Flanders by a Jewish merchant pal of Elizabeth’s.
She’s a pale and distant beauty?
She’s a hard-edged rip. Herself and the magical ma are constantly ill-wishing those who would use the lady ill. Edward’s cousin ‘Warwick the Kingmaker’, who was the politico that got him the throne, went on to plot with his brother to oust him.
Lovely, lovely people
Believe you me, the Plantagenets were a nasty bunch of snakes, surpassed only by the Tudors who finally got the knife in them. Anyway, our Liz and the ma are forever whistling up ill winds (which almost wreck Warwick and one of his invasion forces, but then go on to do the same to her Ed), and writing their enemies’ names in blood and putting them in lockets.
Bit daft, eh?
Well, the 15th century was kind of like that anyway. Everyone believed in witchcraft, though witches ran the risk of being strangled at a crossroads by a blacksmith.
Why don’t we have these books about Ireland?
Doubtless because we’re much, much nicer.

One Day by David Nicholls

2009-09-07T18:53:00.006+01:00

Hodder & Stoughton

The latest fashion across the water?
One Day is a Brit hit, a wry love story told through 19 years, set on St Swithin’s Day every year.
Et pourquoi, ca?
Symbolism, don’t you know - traditionally the English weather on that saint’s day, July 15, is a predictor of the weather for the next 40 days; if it rains it’ll be a summer of rain, if it’s sunny it’ll be glorious.
Hope it keeps fine for them
When we meet them Emma has just got a brilliant degree. Dex isn’t too bright, but is gorgeous, a more useful talent.
She soars, he sinks?
Oh no. Soon he’s seducing his way around South Asia, TEFLing (Teaching Eroticism as a Foreign Language), bronzed, slim and having a great time. Emma gets a dismal job in a greasy caff. They write letters, each dazzling the other. They sorta plan to get together at 40 if they haven’t found anyone else.
Eejits - why don’t they just get it on?
Wouldn’t make a satirical novel then, innit? Dex sinks inexorably towards his destined career, as a TV presenter on a laddish show called largin’ it. Emma rises briefly, becoming a teacher, but then, alas, writes a series of teen novels.
Why do I sense an unhappy ending?
Somethin’s gotta give. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of awfully BBC humour. Emma gets off with Ian, a comedian working days in the caff. Dex weds a terrible Tory and they have a daughter, Jasmine. There’s an Irish sandwich tycoon in there too.
Lovely people?
She’s a misery-guts; he seduces every woman he meets. I have no doubt that we’ll soon be picking up the hit DVD of the TV version.
And this David Nicholls chap is?
Kind of a political lads’ chicklit writer - his first, Starter for Ten, was about a working-class Marxist kid trying to get off with a rich gel and on to a TV quiz show.
Should I buy it?
More of a lads’ book, I’d say. But if you love those chirpy English comedies, go for it.

Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon

2009-08-19T19:53:00.004+01:00

Jonathan Cape

California in the Sixties?
Flowers in the hair, a joint between the fingers, a wave under your board and Hendrix’s Hey Joe floating through the air.
Groovy
Not quite. In this - well, historical novel, really - the LA police are deep in the heroin trade and have a hit man rubbing out union organisers and illegal immigrants. The Manson Family have just been caught for the Tate murders. Our private eye hero’s old girlfriend’s new rich squeeze has his wife putting out a contract on him.
What? What?
Dope fiend shamus Doc Sportello uses his stoner ESP to probe complex interlocking mysteries. Surfie band the Boards may be haunted by zombies. The Golden Fang may be a ship, a smack-dealing cartel or a tax dodge. Billionaire Micky Wolfmann may not have been kidnapped.
There’s a story in there?
Kind of. But this really doesn’t stick to the thriller structure - it wanders around, kinda toking on this philosophy and that and playing with words and images and concepts and… what was I saying?
Does it work as a thriller?
Hell, no. Every now and again something nasty happens, but it’s all in such a haze that you don’t really notice.
What characters inhabit this dark world?
El Drano (acronym for Leonard), who sells heroin - cut, one surmises, with America’s favourite toilet cleaner. Dirty cop Bigfoot Bjornsen. A sweet young family fighting to recover from addiction. Sixties tropes: an English moptop band (wink, wink); TVs with those giant remotes like a brick that buzzes in your hands.
Should I buy it?
Oh, definitely - Pynchon is the core literato, his Gravity’s Rainbow, V, etc must-reads. Just carrying this around and leaving it on cafe tables gives you instant street cred. But you should be wearing shades when you’re reading it, and endangering your health by at least smoking a mentholated.

Benny and Shrimp by Katarina Mazetti

2009-08-12T09:20:00.005+01:00

Short Books
Swedish sex god seduces librarian?
In a sense. Benny and Shrimp is the story of an unlikely love. It came out in Sweden in 1998 and became a mass seller, then when it was published in the US it took off there. Now it’s about to explode here.
A love fated to be?
Pretty unlikely, really. In the graveyard, Desirée is gazing sadly and resentfully at her husband’s starkly designed grave while Benny tends his parents’ over-the-top grave of frills and marble and plastic flowers, and they dislike each other on sight. Then they smile at each other, and Zowee!
But…?
Ah yes. Benny is a dairy farmer crushed by a 16-hour day tending cows, clearing manure, fixing tractors, doing accounts, paying the vet, working in the forest, with no one to help. Desirée, or Shrimp as he nicknames her, is a serious intellectual with a career in the library.
So he needs a different kind of woman?
And she needs a different kind of man. Benny needs a sonsy farmgirl who knows how to make meatballs with lingonberry sauce from berries she’s gathered herself, and keep the farmhouse trim, and back the tractor and baler while he’s loading. Desirée needs a Lacan-discussing cafe lizard.
But then how…?
One smile, and next thing she’s fondling his blond curls and they’re having wild experimental sex all over the place. He buys her birthday presents - butterfly-shaped soap, a mouth organ, silly earrings, mauve tights -
Wait! Wait! What was that about sex?
Oh, lots of sex. Funny sex too, better still. And the story! A real page-turner, with nice subplots as well - one of the librarians keeps files and photos on colleagues; a friend loves a bad man who does her wrong.
But a happy ending?
The weirdest ending you could imagine, and morally equivocal, to say the least. But I won’t spoil it for you. Go and buy it pronto. It’s wonderful.
Author page for Penguin (Mazetti's US publisher)

Civil & Strange by Cláir Ní Aonghusa

2009-08-07T13:17:00.007+01:00

Penguin Ireland

Civil and strange? What’s that mean?
It’s a Munster saying, meaning you should be civil with your neighbours, but keep a distance so the gossips don’t ate you alive.
What’s the story?
Kind of an Irish Aga Saga - Ellen escapes her unhappy marriage and manipulative mother by going back to the country town where she spent happy summers as a child.
Shudder - peeling wallpaper, dank rooms?
Until she gets the builders in, then it’s bright paint, conservatory, sexy cherrywood and granite kitchen, sexy kitchen installer.
Whoah, say again?
Yup, Eugene, gorgeous, flirty carpenter, has a fine pair of hands on him, and wants to get them on our Ellen. But he’s 12 years younger than her - shock horror - and she’s now a teacher in the local school.
She’ll bring disgrace on the family
Aha, your roots are showing. The nearest thing Ellen has to local family is her uncle Matt, whose wife, Julia, is icy and distant and wouldn’t have Ellen to stay when she was a kid.
And for why, like?
Matt married Julia at his mother’s instigation when the woman of his heart left him for someone else. Or so they say….
It’s good, so?
Brilliant. Not a pageturner, but told in a very appealing dialogue-heavy, slangy style. You like these characters and want to know what’s going to happen to them.
Gonna be a country girl again, eh?
Small-town, really. The local shopkeeper who’s avid for gossip. The way everyone knows everyone else’s business. The sly power plays by parents who bully the teachers.
Who’s this Cláir?
Poet, short story writer, novelist - this is her second novel; the first, Four Houses & A Marriage, was published by Poolbeg in 1997. Civil & Strange came out last year in the US, to critical acclaim, before arriving here.
It’s a buy, then?
A gently funny book that’ll make you nostalgic for your old home town.
US publisher's site

If This is Paradise, I Want My Money Back by Claudia Carroll

2009-07-30T21:54:00.006+01:00

Transworld Ireland

Dead? Not dead!
Yes, the heroine of Claudia Carroll’s rollicking new chicklit is Charlotte - generous, kind, loyal, and apparently dead as a doornail.
Wrecks the career path, that
The career - she always wanted to be a producer - was going nowhere. And now the late Charlotte is offered a new gig: guardian angel to James Kane, the TV producer who ditched her for screechy-voiced poodley-head Sophie. James also took Charlotte’s best programme ideas, giving her no credit, much less cash.
Charmer. Does she help him?
She does her vengeful best - this is a book for the box of chocolates and the Kleenex (for the tears of laughter). In the afterlife (rather like an old folks’ home) Charlotte realises her friends were right, James is a waste of space.
She’s got mystic powers, right?
Only James can hear her, so she has fun freaking him out at important moments: when he’s with the new mot, or he’s trying to pitch a script to a wealthy backer. The description of the backer is wickedly like certain Irish entrepreneurs, by the way.
So she only guardian-angels James?
She can give others dreams. Dreams of happy pregnancy for her wannabe-pregnant sister, who’s married to Perfect Paul and has a flock of sisters-in-law who hate her guts. Of the old boyfriend who’s just broken up with his wife for Charlotte’s internet-dating friend.
The author, isn’t she -
Yup, Nicola from the soap Fair City - now a full-time writer. So she knows the scene when she sets her hilarious story in the TV world, among producers, agents, actors and musicians.
Ooh, maybe this will be a movie?
Wouldn’t be surprised - her I Never Fancied Him Anyway, about a psychic agony aunt, was optioned by the producers of The Devil Wears Prada, and Oscar-nominated Robin Swicord is writing the screenplay.
TV3 interview with Claudia Carroll about If This is Paradise

Living with Murder by Yvonne Kinsella

2009-07-18T22:24:00.005+01:00

Gill & Macmillan

You’d be afraid to leave the house
You would that - all those druggies shooting each other, it’s like the Wild West.
But at least it’s only each other
Poor souls. But it’s often civilians too. Donna Cleary was “a gorgeous little thing, very chubby and looked like her dad”. Tough guys tried to muscle in on her friend’s 40th party. When they were politely refused they heaved the flowerpots through the window. Donna went out to clear up, and they drove up and shot her.
Was anyone charged for it?
Her suspected killer was a coke-stoked heroin fiend, a violent bank robber, according to Living with Murder. He died of a methadone overdose in a garda station.
And wasn’t there that plumber?
Anthony Campbell’s mam staggered into a friend’s house, white with shock, and said: “I’m after getting a call saying my son’s after being shot.” Anthony had tried out newspapers and stockbroking on work experience, but he plumped for plumbing, loved it. He was in a house fixing radiators, criminal Marlo Hyland sleeping upstairs without Anthony knowing. Hyland’s murders killed Anthony too.
Bloody drugs
Some people aren’t safe in their own home, either. Like the blind man in Monageer who smothered his two daughters, who had the same eye disease as himself, and hanged himself and his wife.
It leaves so many questions...
His mother swears he didn’t do it. He was in debt, terrified of moneylenders. But she’ll never know.
All so sad
A prison officer who sounds like a decent sort, Brian Stack, was executed with a shot to the head that left him quadriplegic and totally dependent for the 18 months he lived. He’d told his wife he was having hassle at work.
Not a happy read, then?
It’s a sad, sad book, especially when you look at the snapshots of people in happy times. But reading it gives you an insight into the stories in the papers.
Publisher's site

My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult

2009-07-18T21:51:00.008+01:00

Hodder

Say what?
But if you had a child with a dangerous illness, and you could choose the genetic makeup of a new baby so the blood from its umbilical cord could save her, would you do it?
Oh, that’s a tough one
The trouble for Anna Fitzgerald, the little girl in My Sister’s Keeper, is that it didn’t stop at that first donation. For years her parents have used her as a replacement parts factory for her sister - blood, bone marrow - and now they insist that she donates a kidney.
What, without asking her?
She’s a kid - by definition, her parents are the ones who decide what’s right for her. Until she asks a lawyer to sue them for the right to her own body.
Sounds fair enough
Yeah, but her sister Kate is very sick now; unless she gets one of Anna’s kidneys, she’ll die. And Sara, the girls’ mother, is absolutely focused on getting Kate better.
Sounds like one of those conundrums from religious education class
Unfortunately, that’s a bit how it’s written. Picoult generally takes an ethical problem and plays it out with stock characters - heroic people in tough circumstances, a troubled teen - and she’s done that here.
‘Now a major film’, it says on the cover?
Starring Cameron Diaz, Alec Baldwin; in cinemas now. The novel has more twirly bits - the lawyer has a service dog and there’s a whole subplot involving him; Anna is a hockey star in the book and losing a kidney will stop her playing, and so on.
I sense a certain muted withdrawal?
The book badly needs an operation to cut away some flab. It could have been really good if the writer had co-operated with a brilliant editor to sharpen and tighten it.
So I could skip this one?
It’s a grand beach read, and Picoult is a good writer. But it’s not her very best. Go to the picture instead. Oh, wait - it only gets 44% on Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer. Hmm.
Author's page

Flagging the Therapy by Dr Harry Barry

2009-07-18T21:45:00.005+01:00

Liberties

I am not mentally ill!
Just a little, maybe? Think about it - maybe a downer is the mental equivalent of a nasty head cold? Maybe we’re all mentally ill sometimes, the same as we’re all physically ill sometimes.
And you have a solution?
Harry Barry’s Flagging the Therapy - he’s a Louth doctor, a director of Aware, the anti-depression charity. He has a bunch of stuff you can do to fight it.
Ack, it’s a huge book
Not so huge. But annoyingly, there’s no index. Luckily, I’ve read it for you, and can tell you to cut to the chase and turn immediately to page 216, where the good doctor outlines his master plan.
Which is?
I’m getting to it… Exercise, take Omega 3 oils, lay off the sauce if you’re depressed -
What? But drink is the only thing that keeps me sane
Apparently not when you’re depressed. He warns against drink, dope, cocaine - Irish women especially are using wine to deal with stress, it seems.
Life would be a dark, empty room
He says you should share your distress with someone you know and trust - ideally a professional in the area. And so on. Actually he has good guides to the various types of depression we may suffer from - bipolar or unipolar, anxiety, etc - and what approach helps them.
I’ve tried everything already
Oh yeah, and he warns that some therapies have a shallow foundation. But if we can learn to accept and love ourselves…
You’re joking, surely?
And you should organise a proper healthy diet - eating fish and eggs and greens and grains and good things keeps you on a steady keel. I don’t want to sound like Miss Thistlebottom, but a hearty meal -
Bleagh
Give the guy a break, he’s trying to help you. And he’s right - when you’re huddled in a cold black fog and you can’t get up or wash the dishes, it really helps to go out and go for a good fast walk. But you really should read the whole thing.
Maybe I will
Attagirl.
Publisher's site

The Corner by David Simon and Ed Burns and The Wire by David Simon

2009-07-18T21:08:00.005+01:00

Canongate

They wrote The Wire? I love The Wire!
The Corner, and Homicide, A Year on the Killing Streets are two books of classic journalism by reporter (and now fiction maven) David Simon and former cop and teacher Ed Burns, who together wrote the cult series The Wire.
True life stories, eh?
The two lads spent a year on the streets of Baltimore with low-level drug dealers, and Simon spent another year with the homicide squad. The Corner is basically about a family, the McCulloughs, falling to pieces as the drug world reaches out and sucks them in.
Lucky it’s not here
Oh, it will be. They write about “the slow, seismic shift that is shutting down the assembly lines, devaluing physical labour and undercutting the union pay scale”. That’s happening here too, in the Dublin and Limerick inner cities, places that used to be homes to factories and docks and skilled work.
Who are these McCulloughs?
Serious working-class people, descendants of slaves, who work two and three jobs each to make money and keep the family decent. Later, addicts and dealers whose life is a ruin, whose friends are gunmen and knifemen.
And Homicide? Same as the TV series?
Homicide, Life on the Streets was based on these real cases - the woman accused of killing a series of husbands for insurance, the cop blinded in a shooting, the 11-year-old disembowelled on her way home from the library.
Not nice
And characters: the Fish Man, suspected child murderer; cops like jokey Jay Landsman and steadfast Tom Pellegrini. Shocking twists, inside gen on cop work.
Not a chicky giggly book?
Affirmative. Deeply sad, very male, an incantation to the dying working class and the end of the unions, the schools, the law, the newspapers.
But still...
If you like The Wire and you’re gripped by Generation Kill, you’ll love these two books.

Sacred Hearts by Sarah Dunant

2009-06-24T13:29:00.004+01:00

Virago

Heavy breathing in a 16th-century convent?
Kinda. Young, beautiful, madly in love and protesting with every breath, 16-year-old Serafina is shoved into the nunnery by her angry family.
Angry why?
Blame it on the boogie. They’d made a good match for Serafina, but she fell for the wrong man (wrong for her family, that is), and enters with a secret stash of letters To Ser With Love.
Mortifying
Which is what the convent proceeds to do to her. The Council of Trent is tightening the screws on over-indulgent nuns who wear makeup, keep pets, put on theatrical holy shows and consume wine and biscuits.
I didn’t think nuns were like that
We didn’t think nuns were like a lot of things. This St Caterina’s convent in Ferrara is raging with strife. Humble Suora Umiliana wants miracles, fasting, prayer and mortification of the flesh. Abbess Chiara, smoothly political, wants to keep things as they are.
Ah, life
Then there’s an aged nun who’s basically been in the slammer for most of her life, banged up in her own cell because her stigmata and visions are too politically exciting for Ferrara.
Holy God
All done in his name. Then there’s our heroine, Suora Zuana, herbalist and doctor, and the nearest thing you’ll find in the time and place to a rational human being.
And Serafina's boyfriend?
Wouldn’t want me to reveal the whole thing, would you? The good guys win in the end, but you’ll have to guess who they are.
Who’s this Dunant dame?
Multifaceted writer who leaps with effortless ease from noir thrillers (she’s a Silver Dagger winner) to The Birth of Venus, about a Renaissance babe torn between a dashing painter and her wise, kindly husband.
Should I take a vow to buy it?
If you like a book full of continual change and transformation, as the rule of St Benedict would put it. A bit too long, but the story is juicy.

The Demon’s Lexicon by Sarah Rees Brennan

2009-06-20T08:28:00.004+01:00

Simon & Schuster

My niece’s 16th birthday and what can I get her?
Teen demon fiction by young Irish writer Sarah Rees Brennan. Demons, magicians and a sexy, surly hero.
Sexy?
Nick Ryves has a Heathcliffy kind of dark passion about him. He’s gloomy and misunderstood, and cares only about oiling and exercising his sword, and escaping his demons.
A teenager, in other words
Ah, far, far more, m’dear. For Nick has a dark secret. He and his brother Alan and their crazy mother are on the run. The magicians are out to get them.
Mostly I thought it was teachers
There’s something strange, and strangely attractive, about young Nick, but it’s Alan who cares about people. And all the girls who care for Nick.
Tis well I remember it
Enter Mae, cute as a witty kitten (when a boy admires her breasts she says “Thank you - I grew them myself”) with her claws out to defend her own brother, the witless Jamie, who’s in trouble deep.
Lots of magical action?
Oh yes, plenty of flights and fights and fun as the boys dance for demons in the Goblin Market, and seek out the magicians well known to haunt the snugs of London pubs.
And hot sex?
Please. This is a teen novel. Though there’s a fair amount of heavy breathing between Mae and Nick.
First novel?
Surely. Though the young author (pictured on the press release charmingly pouting as she poses against a gravestone) has a blog with 4,000 followers, and has written ‘fanfic’ - stories about other authors’ characters, very popular online - for years. She really has a way with a plot - some of the turns and twists make you go “woof”.
Sounds just the dart for the niece
And - v important for teens - it's a guaranteed source of street cred to carry this around. It has the feel of an underground hit.
Author's site
Author's blog

Last Train from Liguria by Christine Dwyer Hickey

2009-06-17T11:35:00.004+01:00

Atlantic

So you’re raving about it?
…writing as deep and warm and soft as a kiss, a story as stark as a knife, you have to read it, it’s going to be 2009’s big Irish novel. Buy three copies at least, because this is the kind of book you press on your friends, and you’ll want to keep one for yourself.
Gripping from the start?
Actually, no. It starts with a depressing scene from the 1920s when a drunk wakes up having apparently murdered his sister, and goes on the run.
Charming
At first you’ll keep reading because of the beauty of the writing, which has the kind of immediacy where you actually think you’re the characters. Which is amazing, because they’re very different from each other - reserved, wise Bella in the 1930s, her messed-up granddaughter Anna in the 1990s, whose one-night stand is one of the funniest scenes I’ve read.
So what’s the story, morning glory?
Bella goes to work as a private tutor to Alec, the son of a beautiful German Jewish woman and a dying Italian aristocrat. ‘Edward King’ - the putative murderer of the first scene - is his music teacher. Over the years they become loving surrogate parents to Alec, whose mother remarries and basically forgets him. Then the anti-Jewish laws come into effect in Italy, and they have to try to smuggle him out before the Nazis get him.
I don’t really like those Holocaust novels
Me neither - there’s often a kind of lip-licking excitement about them. But this is different - you get to love Alec, and the reserved Bella and secretive Edward, and the odd lives they live.
I didn’t know Italy deported Jews?
Me neither, either. But they did - and Alec’s stepfather pays lots of money to priests and nuns to get him out, using his teachers to smuggle him and his baby half-sister, in a terrifying flight. I promise you, this is the best book of the year. It’s extraordinary.
Publisher's site

Curse of the Pogo Stick by Colin Cotterill

2009-06-02T19:27:00.004+01:00

Quercus

Quirky Commie murders?
Back in 1978 the aged Dr Siri Paiboun, hero of the Laos revolution and now national coroner, is about to become a married man and father of two at the ripe old age of seventysomething.
Hardy man
Indeed. Not only has Dr Siri been snaffled off the shelf by an aged beauty, a former comrade in arms, he’s also forced to attend the Communist Party’s Quarterly Planning and Progress Conference.
A thousand flowers will bloom
And he’s being haunted by ghostly American thugs who chase him down the dark streets of an otherworld ‘hood sneering racial insults.
Where does the pogo stick come in?
What? Oh, the title? The toy is worshipped by Hmong hill people. Someone brought it home from a war and it caused mayhem - all the kids fought over it. Convinced it was demonically possessed, the tribe set it up with its own shrine.
And sure why not?
While Dr Siri is up in the hills with the pogo stick worshippers, his assistants - lovely Dtui, and Mr Geung, whose Down’s Syndrome makes him particularly efficient as Dr Siri’s assistant - are trying to thaw out a suspicious deep-frozen corpse.
Where do writers get these ideas?
My question exactly. But this series of books about Dr Siri have a sweet, feelgood vibe that’s kindly and reassuring. The characters are all good people, except the ones who are satisfyingly bad.
And tell me this, what’s a communist doing being haunted?
You know how it is with occupied countries - it’s not just the country that gets occupied. Soon the citizens are culturally colonised too. Dr Siri has become the habitation of a thousand-year-old shaman, who is a magnet for bad guys from the spirit world.
Best thing you’ve ever read?
Wouldn’t quite go that far. But if you want a sweet and fuzzy book with plenty of gentle laughs, this is the one for you.
Author's site

The Kinsella Sisters by Kate Thompson

2009-06-02T19:20:00.004+01:00

Avon
Funny, you say?
Snort-tea-through-your-nose funny. And upbeat and life-affirming, and a great story.
Saor is Gaelach?
Set in Lissamore, a trendy Connemara village full of creative locals and high-priced visitors. Two households both alike in dignity, in fair Lissamore…
Oh, get to the hot stuff
Bohemian Rio and her high-flying sister Dervla communicate only through notes about the care of their ageing Da. When Daddy dies, Rio finds a letter with riveting news.
And the other family?
Millionaire developer Adair Bolger and his petit bourgeois princess daughter Izzy (the comic relief - she thinks it’s classy to call your dessert ‘pudding’, and has some unfortunate luck with hair extensions) have a massive second home, built on the site of a cottage to the rage of locals.
Poor little rich girl Izzy falls like a ton of awfully elegant bricks for Rio’s son Finn.
Sounds wholesomely local
Norratall, my dear. Finn and Izzy are both keen divers, and a chunk of the action takes place in the seas off Thailand. And Finn’s actor father, sultry welfare-bum Shane Byrne, is about to hit the big time.
Cut to the chase: who gets of with who?
Ah, that would be telling. Rio is under siege by Shane, but too busy laughing at his fans’ internet fantasies, and Adair has the hots for her - but will he get anywhere? Will he?
Hey, don’t tell me the whole story!
There’s plenty more, don’t worry. After all, this is set in the first drastic days of the recession, and estate agent Dervla is trying to sell houses as everyone in Ireland tries to shed the second home and its mortgage.
What’s the best thing?
Lots of overhearing and picking things up wrong and subsequent tangles. And the descriptions of luxury and bohemian life and sun-drenched Thai holidays make you feel totally pampered.
I’m going to rush out and buy it
Good move.
Author's site

The More You Ignore Me by Jo Brand

2009-05-22T11:26:00.003+01:00

Headline Review
She’s that angry stand-up comedienne?
The very one. Contrarian, self-deprecating, foul-mouthed, loveable in a hurt kind of way.
So a growly Doc-Marten-wearing novel?
It’s Morrissey in book form. Depressing, unstructured, dark, with weirdly funny moments.
And the story, the story?
It’s about Alice, a child growing up in the country. Well, no, really it’s about Gina, Alice’s psychotic mother. Or maybe Alice’s father Keith and his secret lukewarm passion for the local GP. Or Alice’s friend Mark, whose father wants him to be a macho man. It wobbles a bit - you’re not sure who’s at the centre.
Well, go on
We’re in the middle of hillbilly Herefordshire, where the only hurricanes that happen come from Gina’s family, especially her scary brothers Wobbly and Bighead - poachers, wild men, the terror of the village. At the other end of the social scale, the thuggish leader of the huntin’, shootin’ set is disgusted that his sensitive son Mark is hanging out with young Alice.
High points?
Alice and her hippyish, very English dad trying to get a naked Gina clutching a guinea pig down from the roof. A social worker driving through the countryside and seeing the grinning Gina bouncing along the road on a Space Hopper (on her way to find Morrissey - she’s become obsessed with him after Alice plays her some Smiths music.
An everyday story of country folk, then?
With forays into Manchester’s gay scene as the star-struck psychotic and her worried relatives seek Morrissey and find love.
Sounds like fun
If you’re a fan, you’ll probably love it.
And it’s based on…?
Jo Brand’s life? No. But her mother was a social worker, and Jo herself worked as a psychiatric nurse, so the psychotic behaviour is brutally realistic. And the Wildgooses (Wildgeese?) and their posh counterparts are familiar to anyone who’s lived in a village.
Spend my dosh or save it?
It’s your money, my dear, your decision.
Author's page

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built by Alexander McCall Smith

2009-05-15T20:49:00.002+01:00

Little, Brown
I’ve lost my job!
Oh, pet! Here, have some tea… and cake, quick, cake.
I’m going to be back in work in a week - determined
Of course you will. But you need to recoup your forces after a shock like that. Comfort reading is what you need.
And you recommend?
Things are tough here, no question - but in Botswana, bordering on Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia, Angola, Zambia, the AIDS epidemic has cut life expectancy from 65 years to 35. They know about hard times.
This is supposed to cheer me up how?
The ‘traditionally built’ (22 stone) ladies of the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency sail through life, oiling the wheels with kindness and courtesy. These are truly life-affirming babes.
Sounds serious
Funny, actually - a gently ironic humour based on Botswana’s sweet-natured way of doing things. In the 10th in the series, detective-in-chief Mma Precious Ramotswe and her trusty sidekick Mma Makutsi are trying to find out why the Kalahari Swoopers football team has lost its swoop and is losing every game.
Not a thriller, I’d say?
In its way. A ruthless man-stealer is moving in on Mma Makutsi’s fiance with her effective bed-selling skills. A client’s husband has invited his boss to dinner - not knowing that his boss is her husband too - she’s a woman rich in husbands. And Mma Ramotswe finds out that her own husband’s apprentices are more than they seem.
The writer is, um, Motswana?
Alexander McCall Smith was born in Zimbabwe, not Botswana, and is now Emeritus Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh. But these books are gorgeous, just the thing to read when you’re in trouble.
You promise…
Go to bed with a pot of tea, a big box of chocolates and this book, and it will salve your wounded soul. By the time you’re finished, you’ll be ready to leap up and get that work.
Author's site

The Cut of Love by Helena Close

2009-05-15T20:44:00.002+01:00

Hachette Books Ireland

No way!
Way. I thought the same before I started reading: “Eww, misery lit about a girl who self-harms” - and I was wrong. This is superb.
But I thought -
Yeah, I was going to tell you about Lee Child’s new Jack Reacher book, Gone Tomorrow. It’s great, full of blood and guts, especially guts. And Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nocturnes is delicate and gloomy and brilliant. And Claire Kilroy’s All Names Have Been Changed is darkly hilarious -
All right, I get the idea
I didn’t want to read this, but I got a tipoff, tried a couple of pages, and couldn’t stop reading.
Well, go on?
Two families in Limerick -
Eeek!
Stoppit. Twelve-year-old Leah’s brother is dead, and the family is coming to pieces in grief. And her best friend Jane’s separated parents are fighting all the time, and Jane is secretly cutting her arms.
Sounds cheery
Sounds dreadful. But you really like these people as you get to know them. And the tension has the torque of - whatever has a lot of torque. Alison, Leah’s mother, secretly watches her dead son’s Bebo page. And she’s going out and following two people.
These people are cracked
Cracking up, anyway. But it’s kind of funny and awful too. Jane’s father - too handsome to live - joins the kids’ karate class, to Jane’s mortification. He’s flirting with Leah’s mother, while giving Jane’s mother dog’s abuse. Every page you turn has something new to pull you in.
It sounds… real
It’s one of those books where you’re sorry it ends because you want to keep knowing the people in it.
Happy ending, then?
Oh, the ending is devastating. But you have to read it. This is powerful stuff - I’m just going to look out everything else Helena Close has written.
Which is?
This is her sixth book - four co-written with her best friend, using the pen name Sarah O’Brien. But she’s really hit the spot with this one. Buy it. Now.
Author's agent's website

The Fidelity Project by Susan Conley

2009-05-15T20:37:00.002+01:00

Little Black Dress
Fidelity back in fashion in the recession?
Oh aye. Max and Jax, ace ad copywriters, are standing shivering on the chill cliff of recession, looking at the gulf of redundancy looming beneath them -
Enough of the metaphors, already
The agency’s downsizing. The ‘creatives’ are about to be out of a job.
Bummer. Dole time?
Entrepreneur time for feisty ladies. New Yorker Maxine and Dub Jacinta say “Hey, we know how to film ads - we could film our own TV programme!” The idea is to take a bunch of couples and talk to them - reality TV style - about their relationship, while secretly filming.
What are they like!
Indeed. Jax is engaged to gorgeous but wooden Fergal Delaney, who’s far away in Dubai. Max has her own secrets… And when Jax’s actressy mammy says she hopes they have a starring part for her - without realising just what they’re filming - well, little does she know.
I love go-get-em-girls books
This is full of happy success. The girls roller-coaster over every obstacle and you just know they’re going to succeed - when you can stop laughing. And they film some truly horrendous couples, who unwittingly reveal all.
Written by?
Susan Conley, who works with us here in the Herald.
A colleague? Biased much?
Hey! This is hilarious! Family-centred! Heartwarming! With enough hot sex to warm up a caravan on a rainy Mayo beach, if you can’t afford Lanzarote.
Hot sex? Now I’m interested
They need tech support - so they turn to trusty brown-eyed John Paul. His Holiness is well smitten - but I won’t spoil it for you.
And there has to be a villain?
Nasty Niamh, forever on the snoop around their workplace, puts her oar in and throws a spanner in the works -
What did I tell you about metaphors?
Sorry. Very funny, anyway, and all about Dublin - except when the mysterious Mr La Motta appears from Max’s past. Mm hmm.
Publisher's site

American Rust by Philipp Meyer

2009-05-15T20:30:00.003+01:00

Simon & Schuster
American, eh?
Big American Novel of the year. Blurb by Colm Toibin - “dramatic integrity and pace” - lots of online play. One to watch. Carry this around and your cred is steady.
Male, then?
Very. Pals Isaac and Poe run into trouble when they meet some bums intent on exploring their bums.
Eww! Male rape?
Calm down. Nothing so graphic. Only murder. Isaac is running away to go to Stanford and become a rocket scientist. Poe’s the local football star.
I sense American heartland
Smart kid - yes, we’re in Pennsylvania steel country, where a generation ago skilled men could earn $30 an hour. Now it’s Depression country, with everyone fighting over a job in Wal-Mart.
Not a comfy family novel?
Plenty of family, though. Isaac is minding his grampaw while his brilliant sister makes a success after Yale. Poe’s mom has crazy sex with his transient dad in their double-wide trailer, while keeping the faithful sheriff on a string.
Cheery stuff
Mm. It starts “Isaac’s mother was dead five years but he hadn’t stopped thinking about her”. It’s gritty - but it’s really good, if you’re brave enough to read it.
Who’s this Philipp Meyer?
Volunteered in a trauma centre in Baltimore (where he’s from - the town The Wire is set in), went back to study English in Cornell, worked as a derivatives trader, builder, ambulance man, yada, yada.
Any hot sex?
Isaac’s sister comes home to sort out the problems. She’s married now - but she’s always been Poe’s sweetie, and their sweet tooth takes over. Hurt, Isaac heads for California again.
Problem solved?
Puhlease. This is the Great American Novel of the year. Problems don’t get solved in those, just probed like a sore gum. No, Poe is now in the hot seat, facing trial for murder if things go really wrong.
And do they?
What am I, your personal reader? Read it yourself and find out.
Publisher's site

Not Enough Hours by Owen Fitzpatrick

2009-05-15T20:25:00.003+01:00

Poolbeg

Can’t talk to you! No time!
Disorganised, eh? Always catching up? Not oriented in time and space? You need this book.
Haven’t got time to read it! I just -
Less mouth, more ears! Owen Fitzpatrick, who wrote this, organises people on the RTE programme. Follow his guidelines and you’ll never be late again. All your work will be done perfectly, and on time. You’ll be happy -
All right, bossy-boots, what do I have to do?
“We are what we repeatedly do,” he says. “Excellence, therefore, is not an act but a habit. (Aristotole)”
Say again?
Set up a routine and you’ll get things done. I know, don’t look at me like that - they all say that. But Fitzpatrick says different people need different ways of organising, to suit their own way of seeing the world.
Here’s my list
Let’s see: ‘get the toilet fixed, make more money, bring the dog to the vet, save mankind, get married’ -
Eeek! I’m late for work!
Fitzer says you have to look at how you see time. Is the past behind you or on your left? How do you visualise the present?
Go on outa that
He swears it works. Actually he got one person to change totally just by reversing the order of how she planned her day. Look at your own list - some things are more urgent than others. All of them need different actions. You have to do the urgent ones first - then concentrate most of your work on the ones that matter most to you.
It all sounds very… controlled
Nothing wrong with control, my girl. Fitz managed to untangle a couple of workaholics on his TV show, and get them back spending serious time with the family. That can’t be bad.
But isn’t workaholic good?
Nope. Not efficient to spend every hour of your life working - you use up time in a flurry of emails, phone calls, meetings. You get more done if you work shorter hours, but organise your work.
So I should read it?
Put it at the top of your list.
Author's site

Very Valentine by Adriana Trigiani

2009-05-15T20:06:00.004+01:00

Simon & Schuster

Sexy Italian romance set in New York? Mmm!
Oh yeah! Valentine comes home to Greenwich Village from the horror of a family wedding - everyone asking why she’s not married yet - and goes up on the roof to water the tomatoes, naked.
As you do. The roof?
Flat roof, silly. It’s a lush garden where Valentine and Gram, her gorgeous grandma, grow enough tomatoes to feed every mama’s boy in Italy.
But naked?
She’s hot. In both senses, it turns out - the man of her dreams, Roman Falconi, is looking at an apartment in the empty building opposite. He sees her raining the water down on herself and her plants, and thinks: “Oh Mama, that’s a hot tomato.”
Is Roman romantic?
Full bodied with a great nose - and he sends her red roses and branches of baby lemons to fill a room full of scent and earthy passion. Roman’s hands are soon roamin’ over Valentina in his kitchen - he’s a top chef with his own restaurant.
But the course of true love…
Never runs smooth. La Valentina bella is a craftswoman - she and Gram run the family business, making wedding shoes. But her brother Alfred -
Alfred? Not very Italian!
These are American Italians - Roman, from Chicago, says he’s Pugliese. Anyway, Alfred wants the building sold and Gram and Valentine making shoes as a hobby.
But love triumphs?
Not saying. But throw in a trip to Italy - where Gram meets her old love and Valentine is courted by the gorgeous Gianluca - and a contest to design fashion shoes for a world fashion leader…
Who’s this Trigiani babe?
Factoid: the bestselling writer shares her writing studio with Michael Patrick King, who wrote the Sex and the City series.
So it’s a buy?
Si, si. Valentine is a nice kid who values manners, hard work and kindness, and you’re rooting for her all the way. And this is just the first of a trilogy, so there are two more books in her story.

Very Valentine by Adriana Trigiani

2009-05-15T20:06:00.000+01:00

Simon & Schuster

Sexy Italian romance set in New York? Mmm!
Oh yeah! Valentine comes home to Greenwich Village from the horror of a family wedding - everyone asking why she’s not married yet - and goes up on the roof to water the tomatoes, naked.
As you do. The roof?
Flat roof, silly. It’s a lush garden where Valentine and Gram, her gorgeous grandma, grow enough tomatoes to feed every mama’s boy in Italy.
But naked?
She’s hot. In both senses, it turns out - the man of her dreams, Roman Falconi, is looking at an apartment in the empty building opposite. He sees her raining the water down on herself and her plants, and thinks: “Oh Mama, that’s a hot tomato.”
Is Roman romantic?
Full bodied with a great nose - and he sends her red roses and branches of baby lemons to fill a room full of scent and earthy passion. Roman’s hands are soon roamin’ over Valentina in his kitchen - he’s a top chef with his own restaurant.
But the course of true love…
Never runs smooth. La Valentina bella is a craftswoman - she and Gram run the family business, making wedding shoes. But her brother Alfred -
Alfred? Not very Italian!
These are American Italians - Roman, from Chicago, says he’s Pugliese. Anyway, Alfred wants the building sold and Gram and Valentine making shoes as a hobby.
But love triumphs?
Not saying. But throw in a trip to Italy - where Gram meets her old love and Valentine is courted by the gorgeous Gianluca - and a contest to design fashion shoes for a world fashion leader…
Who’s this Trigiani babe?
Factoid: the bestselling writer shares her writing studio with Michael Patrick King, who wrote the Sex and the City series.
So it’s a buy?
Si, si. Valentine is a nice kid who values manners, hard work and kindness, and you’re rooting for her all the way. And this is just the first of a trilogy, so there are two more books in her story.

Loser’s Town by Daniel Depp

2009-05-15T20:00:00.003+01:00

Simon & Schuster

Daniel Depp? I know that name!
Johnny’s big brother, indeed.
Oooh, a babe?
Mmwell, when the talents were divvied up in Clann Depp, Johnny got a fair share of the handsome gene. Daniel has more of a Bilbo Baggins look - if you like ‘em short, plump and beardy, he’s the man for you. But he has a lovely personality.
Hmm. Can he write?
Hilarious and dark and heroic. ‘Loser’s Town’ is Hollywood - and Depp knows La-La-Land from the inside. As one of the characters, a gangster turned producer, says: “Movies make heroin and cocaine look like child’s play.”
Yeah, yeah. But is Johnny in it?
Heavens, no. Just a superstar called Bobby Dye.
Bobby Dye, Johnny Depp. No resemblance
Actually, no. Johnny Depp is a nice guy, from all accounts. Bobby is a weak little sniveller who’ll compromise his every friend for the sake of his career. And Hollywood is run by the Mafia.
So far, so noir
Yeah. Bobby’s getting death threats - “You’re going to Die, Dye!” So our hero - tall, taciturn, rock-like white knight David Spandau, a heartbroken former stunt man who’s now a detective - is brought in to help.
All so typically American
Ah, but there’s an Irish angle. Spandau’s sidekick is wee Terry from Derry, who learned martial arts in the IRA -
Eh?
- and now lives on a houseboat in Ventura, listening to Bach and reading Tolkien and longing for love. And overcoming big guys with magical kung-fu grace.
My kinda guy
Don’t get too attached. I warned you it was noir. But the writing is gorgeous. When a criminal psycho meets the girl he loves as he’s on his way to do a murder, he “felt happiness come over him like a cool mist”.
And funny too?
Really funny - full of bitchy cracks and crazy scenarios, and you like the characters - even the creepos. And written like a bullet: hard and fast.
Worth buying?
Run, don’t walk, and be first to grab it before it goes.
Publisher's site

The Insider by Ava McCarthy

2009-05-15T19:24:00.006+01:00

Harper

A tense, riveting thriller?
Shh, I’m reading. Yeah, finished in a minute. G’way. I can’t put down The Insider, Ava McCarthy’s cracking first thriller.
With a lovely love story?
Far from. A story where you clutch the book, eyes bulging, tongue sticking out of the corner of your mouth, not realising you’re holding your breath until you gasp with horror.
Plot twists? Thrills?
More twists and turns than a property developer’s back pocket. More thrills than a day in Limerick. Geeky grrrl Harry Martinez is pursued by a maniac who signs threatening anonymised emails ‘The Prophet’, and kills her friends.
Can’t she, er, hack The Prophet back?
You’d think so - but the emailer knows all about the €12 million her father and his rogue trader pals stashed away in a numbered account.
Of course, €12 million goes nowhere nowadays
Oh yes it does - it appears in Harry’s own bank account, then, just as she’s arranged to pay it back to the bad guy, *pouf*, it disappears again.
Trouble coming every day. But a tough babe has her ways?
Oh yes. Harry would mind mice at crossroads - and hack into their user accounts while she did it. She follows the money all the way to the Caribbean - but I won’t spoil it.
Wait - what about the da? Wouldn’t he know who’s after the €12m?
He’s the last thing Harry wants to see - a gambler who lost the house when she was a kid, and now a thief. Also he’s due for release from Arbour Hill, and she doesn’t want to queer his pitch.
Blood will tell?
You might say. Harry has inherited his creative way with a problem, and he taught her to be a poker ace when she was in nappies.
The writer knows her stuff?
Yup; an analyst programmer for the London Stock Exchange’s trading division; she got a first in physics and a masters in nuclear medicine - and she can write.
Is it a buy?
Mos’ def. Right to the end - where there’s a fabulous final twist - she keeps you hanging on.