John Boyne – The Heart’s Invisible Furies

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Book Review, Irish writer, John Boyne, The Heart's Invisible Furies

Warm hearted narrative: a 70 year span of changing attitudes towards sexuality.

John Boyne’s beautifully titled ‘The Heart’s Invisible Furies’ reminds me not a little of William Boyd’s Any Human Heart/ The New Confessions. A central character, fictional, with some connections to the artistic world, is taken through a lifetime’s sweep of cultural and attitudinal shifts, often around personal relationships. The individual life story is set within the wider story playing out. Fictional characters within the book, who are artists of some kind, with a body of work, are nudged by comparison with real works, and ‘real named characters’ flit through on the sidelines as passing players. This gives a hook to make the reader feel they are reading ‘reality’ rather than the fiction they are actually reading, but the ethics of making ‘real’ characters do things they didn’t do, is not transgressed, as the ‘real people’ are left as minor, background, chorus.

There are a couple of important characters in this book, written about at length, both of whom are writers, and though I did know these were ‘fictional’ their work was described so well, and their history and psychology seemed so authentic and believable that I did have to Google their Wiki pages, and search for the titles of their works on Amazon, laughing at my foolishness whilst I did so.

The Heart’s Invisible Furies takes place primarily in Ireland, but also in the Netherlands and America, from 1945-2015. It follows the life of, and is narrated by, Cyril Avery, the adopted son of a rather unusual couple, the writer Maude Avery and the successful (but sometimes fraudulent) financier Charles Avery. Maude and Charles are both self-obsessed, eccentric and larger than life. They are not cruel parents, though they are rather indifferent and laissez-faire ones, absorbed in their own pursuits. Cyril, narrator of this story, begins his first person narrative at the age of 7, in 1952, a rather shy and lonely little boy. He has, from this early age, even without quite understanding its importance, had a kind of falling in love with a much more extrovert, defined and assured little boy, whom he briefly meets, the son of Charles Avery’s solicitor.

Friendships and loves, sometimes in the unlikeliest of guises, are going unfold across a lifetime, in a kind of tapestry of many colours and textures in this book : tragic, heart-breaking, joyous, accommodating, kind, bitter, reconciled, and at times amusing and surprising.

However……Cyril’s story starts before his birth, when he is still in his mother’s womb, and he does not learn this part of the story till he is in late middle age, when it is recounted to him. This is the story he tells us, in reflection, and it starts the book, with surely a most wonderfully hooking, seductive paragraph :

Long before we discovered that he had fathered two children by two different women, one in Drimoleague and one in Clonakilty, Father James Munroe stood on the altar of The Church of Our Lady, Star of the Sea, in the parish of Goleen, West Cork, and denounced my mother as a whore

I was utterly hooked by the rhythms of that opening sentence and by the carefully exploded bombshells, and had to read on. Nor was I disappointed. Here is a writer, a story teller, who bowled me along for nearly 600 pages, and the journey itself, long as it was, did not seem so. It was a full, eventful one; a grand one

Pulling me back for complete 5 star surrender: very late in the day, Cyril turns out to be a dry and witty man, particularly in conversation, not something he had displayed much of earlier. This did feel, a little, as if the writer had felt the need to inject some wit, humour and banter in the dialogue as we neared the end of the journey.

If I’m being hypercritical, there are a lot of coincidences which drive encounters and plot along – though I must say Boyne manages them with wonderful charm. I think this is because the reader (but not the central character) is kept aware that there will be meetings and connections which will drift in and out until their final connections become clear to Cyril, in the patterns of his own story. The sense of it seemed to me like some courtly, formal dancing in sets – partners change but all will meet again as the dancers move around the circle, and down the line of sets. And like this kind of dancing, there is a joy in the lovely pattern of changes, repetitions, and the form itself.

This is a book the reader can happily lose themselves in. Lock the door, take the phone off the hook, ignore interruptions, they will only annoy

I was delighted to receive this from Amazon Vine UK

The Heart’s Invisible Furies Amazon UK
The Heart’s Invisible Furies Amazon USA

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Tana French – The Trespasser

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Book Review, Crime Fiction, Dublin, Irish writer, Tana French, The Trespasser

Dark, twisty and immersive, just as the reader expects from Tana French!

Tana French’s eagerly waited for Dublin Murder Squad 6 did not disappoint.

For those unfamiliar with her writing, she is a literary fiction writer, subject or territory, crime fiction. Where her lit fic credentials are clear is not only in the excellence of her writing itself, but specifically because it is character and relationship, not to mention the fact that her books have larger themes than the particular story unfolding, rather than plot which is the driver. However, for sure she knows how to keep her readers turning pages, wanting as surely as her detectives do, to unravel the crime. However – if your wish is for a speedier whodunit, howdunit, whydunit, her books might be less grippingly pursued by crime fiction fans, as the dead ends and the solves going nowhere, not to mention the turning towards solutions and the ratchet of tension take their time.

For those who are already firm French fans, this is one to be hugely enjoyed, even if, for this reader, it does not quite touch the giddy heights of Broken Harbour and The Secret Place, books 4 and 5.

As in all her previous books, there is a crime, and that crime will be much more than it seems. Though it will be a murder which has happened to an individual or individuals, the crime will have echoes which happen wider, in the cultural time and place it arose within. French’s original approach is to follow a particular detective or pair of detectives in each book. It is as if the entire Dublin Force is like a chorus, out of which the leading player or players will emerge, and through their investigation, the reader, their colleague or colleagues and the central character themselves, will gain self-knowledge, often painfully

The Trespasser begins with the investigation of what appears to be a murder due to domestic violence. Aisleen Murray, a single woman, but with the table set for a candle-lit dinner a deux, appears to have been punched in the face and hit her head on the fireplace as she fell backwards. Identifying her projected dinner guest, easily done, would seem to nail the suspect. Except, of course, that there is a more tangled trail to follow.

The centre stage detectives in this one are the two from her previous book, The Secret Place. Antoinette Conway and Steve Moran, unwillingly working together for the first time in that book, are now an established professional pairing. Sort of. Both have their histories. Conway, the senior, is wrong, or has always been made to feel wrong, on several counts. Firstly, her gender. Secondly she is mixed race, possibly of Arabic, possibly South American origin – her birth certificate says ‘father unknown’. She is a fighter, bitter, angry, does not suffer fools and takes no prisoners. To say she has chips on her shoulders is an understatement, but the chips have arisen from experience – particularly from the misogyny, overt and covert, from others in the squad. Conway does not need people to like her, or that is what she projects.

Moran is very different, charming and a people pleaser, but there is a suspicion, and some background, which shows him to be hugely ambitious and possibly not above using charm to advance his career. That was certainly what Conway thought of him when they first started working together. The two are a natural for a hard cop soft cop pairing. The cynical, distrustful Conway – who is the first person narrator of this, and the much smoother, emollient seeming Moran, have formed a professional working friendship and respect for each other, unlikely though that might seem for both of them. It has partly formed from the excitement both feel, and the ambition both have, for being detectives in the murder squad. Or, in Conway’s narration:

Murder isn’t like other squads. When it’s working right, it would take your breath away: it’s precision-cut and savage, lithe and momentous, it’s a big cat leaping full-stretch or a beauty of a rifle so smooth it practically fires itself. When I was a floater in the General Unit, fresh out of uniform, a bunch of us got brought in to do the scut work on a murder case, typing and door-to-door. I took one look at the squad in action and I couldn’t stop looking. That’s the nearest I’ve ever been to falling in love

And, perhaps the trajectory of this book is a kind of love story going wrong, a devastation of love. Conway is well past seeing anything through rose-tinted spectacles. Her acerbic dismissive view of the world and most of those in it is clear, even in her first thoughts about the murder victim

She’s on her back, knock-kneed, like someone threw her there. One arm is by her side; the other is up over her head, bent at an awkward angle. She’s maybe five seven, skinny, wearing spike heels, plenty of fake tan, a tight-fitting cobalt-blue dress and a chunky fake-gold necklace. Her face is covered by blond hair, straightened and sprayed so ferociously that even murder hasn’t managed to mess it up. She looks like Dead Barbie

Something I’m beginning to see is a pattern in French’s very different books, is that the crime her particular detective is investigating will be something of a catalyst for them – there will be something which will push the investigator’s button big time, some kind of psychological resonance.

I just hope she is well along in writing book 7, and am wondering who will make their way out of the chorus in that one

I originally ‘found’ French thanks to a couple of bloggers, firstly Jane of Beyond Eden Rock, but who at the time alerted me to Broken Harbour on her earlier blog, Fleur In Her World and secondly, Cleopatra at Cleopatra Loves Books who seduced me into chasing down The Secret Place. Now I’m needing no urging and at the front of any queue baying for a new Tana French book!

I received this both as a review copy from Amazon Vine UK and as a digital review from NetGalley. This review will hopefully whet interest – the book is published on 22nd September in the UK and on the 4th October in the States

The Trespasser Amazon UK
The Trespasser Amazon USA

Paraic O’Donnell – The Maker of Swans

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'Magic Realism', Books about Books, Irish writer, Paraic O’Donnell, The Maker of Swans

Of roses, swans and the ordering of fine things in great rooms……….

Paraic O’Donnell’s strange, seductive, immersive Gothic literary creation had me pretty well hooked from the off.

Set in a time which is not immediately clear, it has an eerie, crumbling quality which feels almost Gothic Victorian – except that the dramatic opening involves the arrival of cars to the crumbling mansion which is the main setting. However, at a later point in the novel, where some back story of one of the central characters will be revealed, the mode of personal transport appears to be horses, with the theft of ‘a good horse from a coaching inn’ . As some of what is going on in the book is tied in with a secret society, mysterious powers, and some indication that those connected with the society seem to age more slowly than the rest of us, it’s perfectly possible some kind of Rip Van Winkle effect is happening………………

This is a difficult book to categorise in some ways. It inhabits some kind of nether world which is not exactly magic realism, not at all faery, somewhat fantastical, whilst at the same time much involved with reality, and, even more so with the power, mystery and magic of artistic creation itself. Particularly writing. It’s also a mystery, a thriller. And beautifully written.

Millais – The Lady Of Shallott 1854

Where Paraic O’Donnell has particularly scored is in his creation of character and relationship. Clara is an unusual young girl, an astonishingly gifted artist, and someone with an imagination of great intensity. The true potency of that imagination and artistry will become clear as the story progresses.

 ‘What art must do is attempt, as nature has, to assemble the tissues of beauty for itself. It must construct its own rose from the raw air, endow it with its colour, its small weight, its tender volutes – even its scent. Art must set this thing before us, must assert its reality in the void of our disbelief. It must make it live’

Clara strains against the impulse to yawn, She is thankful that she has never been made to go to school. It is this sort of thing, she supposes, that children must endure in classrooms all the time 

Clara is also mute, and in some ways self-sufficient. She is not emotionally withdrawn, though, and her strongest connection is Eustace, who is a kind of minder, retainer, butler, major domo, possessed of both brains and muscle, and employed by the owner of the crumbling mansion, Crowe. Crowe is dissolute and louche, a genius of a writer, though exactly what he is writing is again, something to discover. He might almost be the writer of everything which ever was. Crowe, Eustace and Clara exist in some kind of equable state. Unfortunately this is shattered at the start of the novel. Definitely the worse for drink, and in a squabble over his latest woman, Crowe kills a would be rival, unleashing the forces of retribution. Those forces will be implemented by shadowy members of the strange secret order Crowe belongs to. Eustace, who is the central character, the central point of view, for most of the novel, is the one who will try to salvage things, to prevent the un-spelt out punishment which Crowe must suffer, as the murder has broken an immutable law of the strange society. Eustace is deeply loyal, there is some strange history to be discovered between him and Crowe, but most of all, he wishes to protect Clara, the mysterious child, and keep her from harm.

Altered Reality Royal Photographic Society Ribbon. Photographer Michael Maguire: Morning Mist

The agents of harm are also a little strange. Chastern is a dying academic, deeply envious of Crowe’s creativity, deeply disdaining his crudity and indulgence in fleshly pursuits. Chastern has his own ‘minder, major-domo, retainer and all the rest, – a sinister, watchful, highly intelligent, dangerous and deadly one.

There are definitely god-games being played, and things get remarkably dark and messy

O’ Donnell creates his immersive story wonderfully well. The book is not presented in linear fashion, there is a lot of cutting back and forth, in time and place, but for the most part this is managed really well, and I enjoyed the gradual unpicking of the past as the story progressed insistently towards ‘what happens next’ page turning suspense

I must confess to a sense of disappointment in the ending of the book, the two final confrontations. The games played with the reader (well, this one) the hints and allusions had been most enjoyable and atmospheric, but I fell out of complete surrender at the end

Nonetheless, a very impressive first novel. If you were intrigued by, for example, The Night Circus, or Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, for both quality of writing and the compulsive, authentic strangeness of the created world, I think this will appeal. Like those two novels, it is much more literary than fantasy fiction.

I must also comment on the delectable cover image, which drew my attention to the book. It is both beautiful, and, having read the book, is in keeping with major themes; far more than ‘the title is swans, a picture of swans’ . The artist is Sinem Erkas

I received this as a review copy from the publishers via NetGalley

The Maker of Swans Amazon UK
The Maker of Swans Amazon USA

Tana French – The Likeness

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Book Review, Crime Fiction, Ireland, Irish writer, Police Procedural, Psychological Thriller, Tana French, The Likeness

“Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat. I’d give it all gladly if our lives could be like that” Lyrics, ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream

I’ve been working my way pretty compulsively through Tana French, Irish literary crime fiction writer’s books, since coming to her fourth book Broken Harbour, on the strength of two book reviewers blogs. Stand forth Fleur In Her World and Cleopatra Loves Books

Having just finished The Likeness, her second book, I’m reeling, punch drunk, from the emotional journey of this, which for sure must take part of its inspiration from Donna Tartt’s first explosive novel, The Secret History, but is nonetheless in no way derivative, and is all imbued with French’s own intelligence, style, and intricate character and plotting.

Cassie Maddox, the central detective of her gripping first novel, In The Woods, is still feeling the after-shocks of the crime she investigated. No longer in the Murder Squad, she has relocated to the quieter shores of the Domestic Violence Unit, and has begun a relationship with one of the detectives from the murder squad.

The Likeness does read as a stand-alone, for anyone who has not read In The Woods, and anything which the reader needs to know as background does get dripped into the story of this, as Cassie herself continues to come to terms with the events of In The Woods.

We learn something about her professional back-story, too – unfortunately, this is a major spoiler which I think the publishers chose to reveal, and it represents my major criticism of this book (not French’s fault) Cassie worked for a time a few years ago in Undercover Ops, infiltrating a drug ring. Her invented identity was that of a woman called Alexandra (Lexie) Madison. And then a body is found, in a derelict cottage, clearly a very recent murder victim. The wallet on the body shows the victim is called Lexie Madison. Running the identity through the police computer brings in the big gun of Undercover ops, Frank Mackey, who ran Cassie as Lexie. The shock is that this Lexie Madison is a double for the very much alive Cassie Maddox.

The dead Lexie was part of an elite group of 5 post-graduate students, close friends, living in a beautiful, decaying mansion, Whitethorn House, on the outskirts of Glenskehy, a small backwater in the Wicklow Mountains. Inevitably police interest centres initially on the others in the group, but their stories all stack up, and the group are united in their grief that one of theirs is dead. And there are other suspects, which link in to Ireland’s deep history going back through generations, and the tensions arising out of class and nationality – the working class and the peasantry of old Ireland, and the wealthy Anglo Irish landowners.

Irish history is firmly woven into all French’s novels.

So, an audacious plan is set in place (and I’m afraid it is the spoiler of the blurb itself) Cassie could go undercover again as Lexie. The pathology report shows that the woman in the derelict cottage died from a single stab wound which did not happen in the cottage itself, the woman had run from somewhere to the cottage, and bled to death there. Had she been discovered earlier, she might have survived.

The group (including the dead Lexie) were very much the golden, charismatic, bound together elite (and odd, skeletons in their backgrounds) of The Secret History. French adds something else into this however – there is very much a sense of the yearning, soulmate romance of deep friendship, above and beyond sexuality, the kind of friendship that arises in youth, and at the time seems as if it could last a lifetime. And in this book, it is centred as much on place as time. Even whilst within that place there is a kind of looking back to it, a ‘Lost Domaine/Grand Meaulnes’ quality. Cassie herself and Cassie taking on this second ‘Lexie Madison’ identity and the 4 others, is someone who longs for the powerful sense of belonging, of friendships as a more powerful bond than bloodkin, and a more powerful bond than the one-to-one of sexual partnership.

In the sitting room the piano is open, wood glowing chestnut and almost too bright to look at in the bars of sun, the breeze stirring the yellowed sheet music like a finger. The table is laid ready for us, five settings – the bone-china plates and the long-stemmed wineglasses, fresh-cut honeysuckle trailing from a crystal bowl – but the silverware has gone dim with tarnish and the heavy damask napkins are frilled with dust……Somewhere in the house, faint as a fingernail-flick at the edge of my hearing, there are sounds: a scuffle, whispers. It almost stops my heart. The others aren’t gone, I got it all wrong, somehow. They’re only hiding; they’re still here, for ever and ever

And that quote is as powerful a paean to memory, and the sense of our pasts almost within reach, as any I’ve read

This is indeed a long book (she shares that too, with Tartt!) – at nearly 700 pages, but the unravelling of the story, the careful and believable psychology of all the major characters, the tangles and twists of all the relationships, and, for Cassie herself, the weirdness of being herself-and-not-herself, the whole question of identity, arising when anyone is leading any kind of double life, is superlative. And there is also the fascination of the police procedural itself, and how individual police can marry their work functions, with who each of them is, individually.

Most of all – it is the wonderful, seductive quality of French’s writing, and a first person narrator who grabs the reader and makes them as desperate to want the golden lads and lasses to be real, and unsullied as Cassie would like, because of her own yearning for lifelong soulmates, whilst at the same time, making us as needy of her fierce professional desire to solve that crime as she is. She (and we) know that there are two drives going on here, which may not be compatible

The Likeness Amazon UK
The Likeness Amazon USA

Tana French – In The Woods

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Crime Fiction, In The Woods, Irish writer, Police Procedural, Psychological Thriller, Tana French

Pointers to what she will become……..

I encountered Irish writer Tana French only recently, when her fourth book, Broken Harbour, got a rave review from a blogger who is firmly wedded to good writing, rather than genre fiction. Go see FleurInHerWorld As this is my position too, I was swayed, and blown away by French’s version of crime fiction, police procedural and psychological thriller, all carefully showing she is a literary fiction writer, who chooses to write in this kind of subject matter area.

Another blogger then pushed me over to her fifth, currently latest book, The Secret Place, which grabbed me even more. And you should visit that persuasive other blogger, CleopatraLovesBooks

And so it is that I’ve gone back to explore French’s progression as a writer, via her first book, and will, for sure, progress to books 2 + 3

For those unfamiliar with her work, Book 1, In The Woods, is of course the perfect place to start.

French’s territory is murder, and the police investigations undertaken by Dublin’s Murder Squad. She has chosen not to follow one particular detective and partner through all the subsequent investigations; rather, she focuses on the squad itself and a different pair of detectives will come to the foreground in each book, and others in the pool may stay as a background note across several investigations, be bit players, or come to take stage centre.

This is a fascinating and excellent approach, as it does mean that the reader can start reading her books in any order, without thinking they have missed vital back history, often a problem when one particular main character is followed in a series.

There are a couple of central cores to the three books I have read so far – the story of each individual main detective, including their back history which will slowly be revealed and will explain who they are, and why. There will also be the crucial relationship between the two detectives themselves, and their relationship within the murder squad as a whole. By this, French wonderfully covers the interior workings of a central character, how they are in a significant one-to-one relationship with a working colleague, and how they, and indeed the two of them, are within a wider community of others. And then, of course, in parallel is the investigation, the crime, where the victim and their story will be teased out, the thread to connect them with the perpetrator worked clear from all the potential many threads which will need to be explored and investigated

French’s own background is as an actor, and, to me, there is a correlation here between 3 kinds of theatrical focus a performer may have – there is first of all the interior, which may be expressed as soliloquy, a performer alone upon a stage. Then there is the immediate focus of `small other’ where there is a relationship between two individuals on a stage, and, however tangled, the lines of that relationship may be clearly seen. Finally, there is the relationship of the group of characters themselves, cross currents, tangles and all – and then this may be taken out even wider, in plays where the fourth wall is broken down, and the characters acknowledge the wider world which incorporates the audience as another collective. French does not just set her crime investigation as an isolated event, as so far, wider concerns which may be present in society are examined

In this particular story the victim is a young girl, and a particularly horrible crime. As all investigations must, initial focus is on the family itself, and that family is quite strange.

What is also going on, as part of the whole Celtic Tiger economic phenomenon, and the collapse which happened, is a story around community expansion, business interests, corruption and politics.

And, central stage in this novel, two detectives, a man and a woman, who from the off have been firm and platonic friends. Cassie Maddox has, like another female detective in the squad in French’s fifth book, challenges because she is a woman in an environment which is aggressively old fashioned and macho, still. Rob Ryan her work partner, has the history of a terrible and unresolved crime which happened back in his childhood, to two of his friends. He has, in theory at least, found ways to deal with something which devastated him, his family and the families of his two dead friends. However, because the crime was never resolved, and became a cold case, with neither the bodies discovered, nor a perpetrator found, there has been no closure, for anyone from that community. And it also means that any murder involving a child is one which could completely shatter all Ryan’s coping strategies.

These three children own the summer…This is their territory, and they rule it wild and lordly as young animals; they scramble through its trees and hide-and-seek in its hollows all the endless day long, and all night in their dreams.

They are running into legend, into sleepover stories and nightmares parents never hear. Down the faint lost paths you would never find alone, skidding round the tumbled stone walls, they stream calls and shoelaces behind them like comet-trails. And who is it waiting on the riverbank with his hands in the willow branches, whose laughter tumbles swaying from a branch high above, whose is the face in the undergrowth in the corner of your eye, built of light and leaf-shadow, there and gone in a blink?

I suspect, had I read this book without having read French’s latest two, I would have five starred it. Because I know where she now is as a writer, my bar for her is set very high. In this one, I think she is a little closer to the more formulaic writing in genre, than she now is, a little more obvious in her choices. It is however a wonderful first novel, and, as ever, her understanding of psychology, relationship, narrative drive are excellent.

She is a writer who seems to focus more on how the ordinary man or woman crosses the line into violence and there is less focus on graphic gore and deranged psychopathology than often litters the genre. And that external restraint, and more meticulous examination of the process of crossing the line which is certainly a hallmark of book 4 and 5, is what I think of as a kind of sophistication in her as a writer, not completely in place in book 1.

However, still recommended, still highly recommended

In The Woods Amazon UK
In The Woods Amazon USA

Tana French – The Secret Place

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Crime Fiction, Ireland, Irish writer, Psychological Thriller, Tana French, The Secret Place

WTF, OMG, like, WOW!

I’m rarely reduced to both incoherence AND speechlessness by a book. Incoherence, yes, but generally accompanied by loquaciousness,; incoherence because of loquaciousness, perhaps.

This compelling, satisfying, dark, twisty, evocative thriller by French, set in an elite girls’ boarding school outside Dublin, did though, leave me thinking for once that perhaps the operatic over the top incoherence of stylised ‘youth-speak’ was the only possible response, after all. Not because Tana French is in any way incoherent or over the top, though she certainly deals with huge issues which are the stuff of opera and classical drama – the individual and the domestic opening out into much wider, mythic, universal themes. The gobsmacked reaction is really one of awestruck admiration, is all.

Continuing with her ‘Irish Chorus’ of leading characters from the Dublin Murder Squad (she highlights and focuses on a different detective each time) this time her investigating duo are both, in different ways, outsiders. Antoinette Conway is outside because she is a woman, and, moreover, a fierce one who lashes back at evidence of misogyny, patronisation and exploitation. This has made her unpopular with her male colleagues. Stephen Moran wants to be liked, sure, and has charm, but is not prepared to be one of the laddish lads. There is a sense that perhaps he is a little better than the rest, and knows himself to be so. This means he too is a slightly dubious, slightly marked card, by virtue of this aloofness behind the affable. The dynamic between the two, and the building of a professional working relationship, is fascinating – both gender and class are subtexts.

A year earlier, a dead body had been discovered in the grounds of St. Kilda’s girls’ school. It belonged to a popular and lusted after catch of a boy from the neighbouring elite boys’ boarding school. Conway, with another professional partner had attempted to solve the murder, and failed to do so, and the failure left a stain on her. So when some compelling evidence comes Moran’s way, re-opening the investigation offers a way-out, the prospects of advancement, but also the danger of ultimate professional failure, for both. Stakes are high

The fervid, hothouse, intense setting of adolescent girlhood (plus the allure of the neighbouring testosterone) is magnificently done. The reader, like the detectives, is drawn into a world which is both terrifying and sparkling with energy, dreams, passions and possibilities.

Any comparisons to Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, which French clearly nods at in her own title, are neither audacious nor undeserved. Once again, we have an elite (albeit a crucial few years younger) and issues of class and privilege, cliquery which is both full of possibility and full of poison.

Cypress, featuring heavily in this novel, mythically is connected to death, transformation, times of transition and symbolises everlasting, enduring bonds, that might exist between people

What I particularly liked about French’s superb mastery of relationships, characterisation and dialogue amongst the charged teens is that she does not fall into relentless cliché – though there are the ubiquitous rhythms and language of the group, portrayed with accuracy – she does not cut each individual girl and boy from an identikit cloth – the reader can hear individual rhythms.

There is a substrate to French’s writing which seems to have a particular sensitivity to ‘atmosphere and preternatural energetics’ I suspect she is someone who feels the indefinable, that which, for want of a better term, gets tarred dismissively as ‘supernatural’. So this is certainly a strong element running through this book. But, for those who absolutely dismiss such things, there is certainly much evidence throughout history of the effects of a kind of group hysteria, group hyper-arousal to ‘mysterious comings and goings’ and activities involving poltergeists which cluster around adolescence. So, take a group of highly charged young girls within a cloistered setting, and the explosion of a dark, brilliant energy out of which mysterious things happen does not, in any way, feel like a novelist copping out by invoking the supernatural. It just adds to the shiver and the tension.

Structurally, a beautifully told tale : alternate chapters, the detectives, taking place over a little more than a day, the central groups of two rival groups of girls, moving slowly forward over eight months and two weeks towards the day the boy was murdered.

And as for the writing itself, gorgeous, authentic, and every now and again arising into something even finer, some kind of summing up :

Conway..spun the MG onto the main road and hit the pedal. Someone smacked his horn, she smacked hers back and gave him the finger, and the city fireworked alive all around us: flashing with neon signs and flaring with red and gold lights, buzzing with motorbikes and pumping with stereos, streaming warm wind through the open windows. The road unrolled in front of us, it sent its deep pulse up into the hearts of our bones, it flowed on long and strong enough to last us for ever.

So………..I have recovered loquaciousness, though I’m not so sure about coherence….read it, just read it!! A brilliant, highly recommended outing.

And I am indebted to Cleopatralovesbooks for her superb review of The Secret Place which sent me hot-footing to the library for a copy. It IS one which I know I’ll want to read again, so I know a Kindle purchase is on the cards!

The Secret Place Amazon UK
The Secret Place Amazon USA

Colm Tóibín – Nora Webster

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Book Review, Colm Toibin, Irish writer, Nora Webster

“It was all over and would not come back”

Colm Tóibín is a writer with an astonishing ability to write from inside the minds of women. He focuses particularly on writing beautifully complex women who are in some ways held back from really flowering into their full potential, because society at large has inhibited this, and they have, on the outside at least, conformed to those strictures.

Nora Webster, the eponymous central character, is a woman from a small town, Enniscorthy in County Wexford (where Tóibín is from), who has recently been widowed. Her teacher husband, Maurice, interested in political debate, more outgoing than Nora, has died from a degenerative heart condition. Nora has her own grieving to do, and also concerns about her 4 children, two daughters, one almost at the end of her teacher training, one about to enter tertiary education, and her two younger sons, the eldest nudging adolescence, one still very much a child. It is the late 60’s, and feminism is beginning to seep into wider consciousness.

Tóibín explores the fact that though relationships enrich us, they also inhibit a different development which might have happened. Most beautifully, with warmth, compassion, and a lovely humour he leads us into Nora’s journey through grief. But Nora also follows a half yearned for, half-resisted growth into independence and change, as she discovers that she has abilities, opinions, gifts and desires which she had subsumed beneath the role of being a wife and mother within a loving marriage. Now, she is the one who must make decisions, and some of these are for her own happiness, not only the happiness of her children.

Living in a tight knit community, where everyone knows each other, and people inhabit specific places and roles, friends, family and neighbours may be wonderfully warm and caring, but sometimes, as Nora finds, that care may be stultifying, despite coming from a well-meaning place. Though superficially she is a woman fairly conventionally within her milieu, what bubbles, sometimes with difficulty, free, is a more ornery, passionate, highly intelligent, stubborn and feisty woman.

In future, she hoped, fewer people would call. In future, once the boys went to bed, she might have the house to herself more often. She would learn how to spend these hours. In the peace of these winter evenings, she would work out how she was going to live

From small beginnings, making momentous decisions such as selling the family holiday home, getting a fairly menial clerical job, and even getting a haircut and colour which others think is more suitable for a younger woman, Nora grows and changes.

Wonderfully, Tóibín doesn’t turn her into an angel; she is at times wilful, stubborn, tactless, and selfish – in other words, a very real and authentically human person. And part of the great pleasure of this warmly written book is that though loss, pain, grief are at the heart of it, there is a rich enjoyment, the deep and ordinary pleasure in life – in the day to day, the buying of an expensive dress and feeling grand in it, as well as the finding of transcending, deeper pleasures, such as music which stirs the soul.

This is in many ways a very simply written, accessible book, but its simplicity is extraordinarily skilful. Tóibín is a master story teller; one so good that he creates the illusion that to write like this is utterly effortless.

I was happily pointed towards this by fellow blogger FictionFan. Though we can find that what one loves the other hates and vice versa, this one at least left me purring as loudly as it left her, as you will discover if you read her review

I received this as a copy for review, from the publisher, via NetGalley. Many thanks

Nora Webster Amazon UK
Nora Webster Amazon USA

Michele Forbes – Ghost Moth

Tags

Belfast, Book Review, Ghost Moth, Irish writer, Michele Forbes

An ordinary life: Always far above the ordinary

Several of the comments from readers in her publishing house, refer to Forbes’ writing as dreamy, dream-like. For me, it is the reverse. It is writing which awakens the slumbering reader from their soporific state, into noticing, into being present.

There came a point, fairly early in the book, when I suddenly sat up and said `Yes!’

The central character Katherine, a wife and mother of 4, is married to George, a dependable, good man. They live in Northern Ireland. It is 1969. This means some shattering events are just over the horizon.

The book opens with a small, alarming event, which unsettles Katherine enough to send her memory spooling back to an earlier time, 20 years ago, when she was a young woman with a beautiful operatic singing voice, and perhaps was at a major fork in her life’s road. In 1949 George is already courting her, but she meets Tom, a far more volatile curious character who makes her feel dynamic, touched with glamour and vitality.

The shape of the book is to take us between the then of 1949 and the now of 1969 and see how that became this, and the intercutting structure allows the reader (like 1969 Katherine) to hold both.

My `Yes!’ moment came at the recounting of a meeting in a café between Katherine and Tom

The large doors leading into the tearooms from the foyer swung backwards and forwards as people bustled in and out. Nearby, a high-spirited couple chatted about a film they had just seen. Other people were looking out for the arrival of friends. Four young women sitting together chimed together like a carillon, their words ringing around them. One woman sat on her own just to the left of the doorway, every so often lifting her head to view those coming and going. She twisted her teacup on its saucer, occasionally tipping it to peruse its contents. As she lifted the cup to her mouth, small drops of tea fell onto the saucer like brown baby lemmings falling into a shiny white sea. Never before had she seemed so aware of the detail of her surroundings. Never before so keenly as this.

My `Yes’ moment wasn’t just the delight of a couple of `awake, reader’ images which helped me to really `see the moment’ – that ringing carillon of voices, and the wonderful lemmings image – it was the realisation here was a writer doing a lot more than `painting the scene’ – here was a writer inside a character in an altered state of consciousness. It is Katherine who is awake, not the writer putting some description in place to make the scene real for the reader.

Katherine, at this point, demonstrates the `aliveness’ Tom brings her by the quality of her noticing.

I was reminded, wonderfully, of a couple of lines from a Yeats poem, Vacillation where `awakening’ suddenly happens:

While on the shop and street I gazed
My body of a sudden blazed;
And twenty minutes more or less
It seemed, so great my happiness,
That I was blessed and could bless.

Forbes had thrown me into Katherine’s experience by this sudden description of the character’s vision.

I was nicely heading towards surrendering to Forbes’ writing, there had been other little jolts to take me out of my own reality and into her fictional world, but from this point, I flung up my arms and said `okay, I capitulate to your book; resistance is futile’

As the book progressed, however, it became more and more clear that Forbes’ horizons with this book were expanding into all sorts of areas. What she does, in effect, is take the weft and warp of a quite ordinary life, and makes the day-to-day reality of it both three dimensional and paper thin, so `this real’ is but a cloak for the beauty or terror of the world – sometimes both, which lies thinly hidden by the material world. There are some wonderful, unostentatious descriptions of how we move through a world of solid things, the `stuff’ we surround ourselves with, anchoring and grounding us in the here and now.

She is very definitely a writer of poetic sensibilities, something I value very much – I don’t by this mean necessarily lyrical writing – poetry can be full of harsh, stark violent imagery – its that sense of proper perception, of not being satisfied with the superficial cliché, of a choice of word after word which has weight, resonance, solidity.

How does she do this? Dunno, guv, it’s a mystery, I can’t see her joins, her mastery of her technique is fine enough so that the reader can’t spot how she is doing what she does.

One chapter (amongst many) really stood out for me. A simple description of 3 little girls going off to play beside the blackberry bushes. Meanwhile, Northern Ireland is trembling on the edges of fast escalating sectarian violence. I read this chapter, from inside the head of Elsa, Katherine’s youngest child, and was almost permanently sick with anxiety and terror, during the reading of it. And yet, terror of what? Nothing concrete, nothing nameable, only that Elsa was close to the thin boundary of `ordinary reality’ where we normally try to live, in unawareness of the fragility of it all.

This is a first novel. The cover has reviews from the great and good, in praise. And in (I finally realise) a nice sense of the ordinary, page after page of breathless praise from all the people in the publishing house who read this book. Initially I read the praise of these named, but unfamous people with some cynicism.

That changed, when I fell into Michelle Forbes’ textured, powerful, tale of a life, like all ordinary lives, far less ordinary

And, in a world where thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier books become the norm – Forbes’ needed no red pencil to her less than 250 pages, slim, rich, easy read, deep read, novel.

Stunning.

I received this as an ARC from the Amazon Vine programme, UK

Ghost Moth Amazon UK
Ghost Moth Amazon USA