Books

Sex and Irish Literature

by John Boland

Irish Independent, 2011 When Eugene McCabe’s King of the Castle was premiered at Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre in 1964, a man in the audience became so incensed by an onstage sexual proposition that he shouted at the offending actor “You dirty bastard!” His outburst was considered so quaint by visiting London critics that a reviewer from the Sunday Times […]

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Irish Independent, August 25, 2012 On the inside cover of Ian McEwan’s thirteenth full-length book, Peter Kemp of the Sunday Times declares its author to be “the supreme novelist of his generation”. Not, you will note, the supreme English novelist or even the supreme British novelist but simply the best in the world in whatever language. Indeed, so […]

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Irish Independent, February 23, 2013 Was it an accident or did he jump or was there skullduggery by MI5 or the IRA? Various speculations have been raised over the 1979 death in West Cork of 44-year-old Man Booker winner JG Farrell, and Lavinia Greacen devotes both her prologue and her epilogue to the circumstances surrounding his death. However, […]

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Irish Independent, April 13, 2013 When Irish yachtsman Tom first encounters Irish lawyer Clare, it’s at the quayside of Ortigia on Sicily’s south-east coast and he’s about to embark on a one-night stand with a French woman who has moored nearby. When he meets Clare again the next day, the French woman has sailed off into the sunrise. […]

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Irish Independent, April 27, 2013 Ciaran Collins’s outstanding first novel concerns a doomed teenage love affair in a rural West Cork small town sometime in the 1990s. Yet though the story is essentially tragic, comedy comes in the form of narrator Charlie, who proves from the outset to be a highly entertaining chronicler of what happens. Charlie is […]

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Irish Independent, October 22, 2011 Government relations with RTE have always been fraught with deep suspicion and never more so than in 1967 when long-time RTE career man TP Hardiman became the station’s third director-general. Erskine Childers had recently been appointed Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, a brief that included responsibility for broadcasting, and during a dinner with […]

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Lecture given to Kate O’Brien Winter School, February 2010 What I want to do in this talk is to celebrate the Irish short story and, in the process, to try to define what makes it so distinctive – and, indeed, to try and tease out what has drawn so many Irish writers to it. But […]

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Mistaken by Neil Jordan

by John Boland

Towards the end of Neil Jordan’s new novel, the narrator reflects on “that strange obsession with past decades, the fifties, the forties, the twenties, that bedevilled Irish fiction. Didn’t they ever write about the present?” The same question could be asked of this book, in which the present proves no match for the lovingly recollected […]

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Nineteen hundred and nineteen marked the end of an eventful and turbulent decade for William Butler Yeats, both personally and artistically, and the volume of poems he published that year, The Wild Swans at Coole, was its poetic summing-up. His previous collection, Responsibilities, which was published in 1914, had revealed a poet whose range of […]

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William Trevor

by John Boland

William Trevor is Ireland’s greatest living writer of fiction and one of the world’s finest short story writers. He is also very prolific. The Collected Stories, which runs to almost 1,300 pages, was published in 1992 and since then there have been four more volumes, and he has also published nineteen novels. The latter are […]

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Halfway through this eccentric and irritating book, the author lists the sixteen albums that Van Morrison released between 1980 and 1996 and then, dismissing them all as unworthy of consideration, asks rhetorically: “How do you write off more than fifteen albums and more than fifteen years of the work of a great artist?” The short […]

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About halfway through this sequel to the 1984 bestseller The Witches of Eastwick, I found myself doing what no conscientious reader likes to countenance, let alone admit – I started skimming the pages, hoping to follow the narrative thread without having to endure yet more of the author’s adjective-laden prose in which no detail is […]

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John Updike writes so beautifully that it’s tempting for a reviewer simply to quote him. Here he is on William Trevor: “His breadth of empathy, his deeply humane ruefulness, and his love for the sound of demotic English in all its inflections of class and geography give his short stories the timbre of novels.” And […]

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Dolly Sinatra was a tough woman. A midwife and a back-street abortionist – nicknamed “Hatpin Dolly” and twice arrested for the latter activity – she was a formidable figure both as a mini-Mafia figure in her rough-and-tumble New Jersey neighbourhood and also in the confines of her home, where she inflicted hard love on her […]

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Brevity, as Shakespeare noted,  is the soul of wit, which is probably one of the reasons why some readers cherish the lyric poem over the epic and the short story over the novel. But how short can a short story be before it loses all substance and meaning? Very short, indeed, in the view of […]

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Alice Sebold loves to grab you with her opening lines. Her 1999 memoir, Lucky, begins: “In the tunnel where I was raped,  a tunnel that was once an underground entry to an amphitheatre, a place where actors burst forth from underneath the seats of a crowd, a girl had been murdered and dismembered.” Her first […]

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Thomas Harris has a lot to answer for. There had been serial killers in fiction before he came along, of course, but Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs set the template for what is now a staple, indeed a cliché, of contemporary crime writing, and there are few authors entering the field who […]

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American Caesars

by John Boland

Lives of the US Presidents from Franklin D Roosevelt to George W Bush. By Nigel Hamilton. Bodley Head Caligula, the vilest of the Caesars, snarled at someone who criticised his actions. “Bear in mind,” he said, “that I can treat anyone exactly as I please.” Almost two thousand years later, in an unguarded aside, George […]

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In the introduction to her 1996 Collected Stories, Mavis Gallant had some sound advice for readers. “Stories are not chapters of novels,” she pointed out. “They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.” […]

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Death of the Novel

by John Boland

The novel is dead. So says American critic Lee Siegel who, writing in a New York newspaper, has dismissed contemporary fiction as “culturally irrelevant.” And his pronouncement has been greeted as worthy of extensive coverage in media outlets on both sides of the Atlantic – “Literary storm as top critic declares death of fiction” being […]