WILLIAM GOLDING: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies.

By John Carey. Faber & Faber. You can tell a novelist is out of fashion when his publisher feels obliged to subtitle a biography of him with the nervous declaration “The man who wrote Lord of the Flies.” In a postscript to this book, John Carey defends the subtitle as “ironic and purposeful,” hoping it […]

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If Lynch had invaded; School Run…

As a half-hour programme, If Lynch Had Invaded (RTE1) might have been interesting, or at least intriguing. At an interminable ninety minutes, it was farcically overblown twaddle. The premise was there in the title – what if Taoiseach Jack Lynch had responded to the August 1969 police brutality in Derry by ordering the Irish Army […]

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FEAR AND LOATHING IN DUBLIN by Aodhan Madden

Aodhan Madden and I were colleagues on the Evening Press and much of what he writes about his experiences there are familiar to me. Well, semi-familiar, anyway. Here he is on subediting, at which both of us toiled for many years: “The subs desk in the Press was like a home for terminal eccentrics. They […]

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COLUM MC CANN’S TRIUMPHANT NEW YORK TIGHTROPE WALK

Although only published in Ireland this weekend, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin has been on the bookshelves in America since June, where it has been attracting the kind of attention most writers would die for. “The first great 9/11 novel,” Esquire magazine raved. “One of the most electric, profound novels I have read […]

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COLUM MC CANN’S TRIUMPHANT NEW YORK TIGHTROPE WALK

Although only published in Ireland this weekend, Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin has been on the bookshelves in America since June, where it has been attracting the kind of attention most writers would die for. “The first great 9/11 novel,” Esquire magazine raved. “One of the most electric, profound novels I have read […]

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In the Footsteps of American Giants

On this side of the Atlantic, mention of literary awards automatically causes us to think of the Man Booker Prize, the Costa, the Impac and maybe — if we’re Francophiles — the Prix Goncourt. As regards awards on the other side of the ocean, only the Pulitzer Prize has achieved an international reputation. Yet perhaps […]

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Clive James

In the early 1980s, after a decade as Britain’s funniest and sharpest television reviewer, Clive James became an active participant in the medium that had so excercised his marvellous critical faculties. In doing so, as he relates in this fifth volume of his memoirs, he found himself inhabiting “the strange world where everybody knows your […]

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INHERENT VICE by Thomas Pynchon

Here’s a first – a Thomas Pynchon novel that you can actually read and understand. In his 73rd year, the reclusive author who has furrowed the collective brow of generations of literary students with his dense, complex and often baffling fiction has finally come up with a genial and almost entirely comprehensible shaggy dog story […]

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THE REVOLT OF THE PENDULUM: Essays 2005-2008. By Clive James.

Clive James is the finest living essayist and many of us have long admired both his supple prose and the bracing wit that enhances rather than  undermines his essential and humane seriousness on subjects as diverse as artistic excellence, popular culture, the perils of celebrity and the evils perpetuated by political ideologies. No one, however, […]

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Questions & Answers; Lemass…

For a television critic, Questions and Answers, which ended its 23-year run this week, was that weird combination of the unmissable and the frequently unwatchable. It was unmissable because, as RTE television’s main forum for political and social debate, it always offered the possibility of controversy. And it was often unwatchable because the politicians who […]

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THE REVOLT OF THE PENDULUM: Essays 2005-2008.

By Clive James. Picador, £15.99 sterling Clive James is the finest living essayist and many of us have long admired both his supple prose and the bracing wit that enhances rather than  undermines his essential and humane seriousness on subjects as diverse as artistic excellence, popular culture, the perils of celebrity and the evils perpetuated […]

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Two Books by Maeve Brennan

THE SPRINGS OF AFFECTION. By Maeve Brennan. Counterpoint, €11.99 THE LONG-WINDED LADY. By Maeve Brennan. Counterpoint, €11.99 When Maeve Brennan’s stories of suburban Dublin life were posthumously published in The Springs of Affection twelve years ago, they were greeted with acclaim, and rightly so – here were 21 masterpieces which few had known about unless […]

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THE SPRINGS OF AFFECTION and THE LONG-WINDED LADY

By Maeve Brennan. Counterpoint, €11.99 When Maeve Brennan’s stories of suburban Dublin life were posthumously published in The Springs of Affection twelve years ago, they were greeted with acclaim, and rightly so – here were 21 masterpieces which few had known about unless they’d been faithful readers of the New Yorker or had been fortunate […]

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Prime Time Investigates; Rugby Lions…

When it’s not shamelessly stealing lifestyle and reality formats from abroad, RTE loves nothing better than to indulge in easy outrage, and usually belated easy outrage at that – lurid retellings of stories that have already been in the headlines, accompanied by oodles of tut-tutting and overheated editorialising. I’m not really thinking of the long-running […]

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TWINK

Despite the promise of its title, there’s nothing remotely amusing about the current RTE1 series A Little Bit Funny, in which various over-exposed comedians are given free rein to tell viewers how great they are. First up was Twink, a woman whose thirst for self-publicity far exceeds her pantomime talents, while this week it was […]

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REVOLUTION IN THE AIR: The Songs of Bob Dylan, Vol.1: 1957-73.

By Clinton Heylin. Constable, £20.00 sterling. Bob Dylan has always attracted extreme admirers, but among the goodly number of daft books written about him none was dafter than Dylan’s Visions of Sin (2004), in which eminent literary critic Christopher Ricks chose to regard the songs as lyrics on a page, divorced both from their melodies […]

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Seamus Heaney; Single Handed; Secret of the Stones

Much as some of us cherish the poetry of Seamus Heaney, RTE’s celebration of his 70th birthday seemed just a teensy bit over the top. As someone who contributed his own tuppence worth to the occasion in this newspaper, I still couldn’t credit that the people in charge of RTE radio set aside one hour […]

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Brides of Franc; Designs for life…

Someone should tell RTE that the party’s over. While the rest of us are wondering where our next meal or pay cheque is coming from, our national broadcaster blithely commissions a new series of Brides of Franc (RTE1), in which a preening wedding planner encourages his clients to embrace ostentatious opulence. In his pursuit of […]

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Seamus Heaney at Seventy

Despite his tousled mass of silver hair, it registers as a small shock that Seamus Heaney is now seventy – despite his status as grand old man of Irish poetry, it’s his infectiously boyish openness to both life and literature that has always distinguished him from his peers. Yet grand old man he is and […]

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HOW WE BLEW THE BOOM WITH GEORGE LEE

This week, an international survey revealed that, of 19 countries polled, the Irish had by far the gloomiest view of the current economic crisis – and right on cue along came RTE’s George Lee to tell us that the country’s banjaxed. George, of course, has been droning on about this for years and though he […]

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