Death of the Novel

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 […]

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The Seahorseman; The Silence; The Dirty South; Maradona

I learned a lot from watching The Seahorseman (RTE1). I learned, for instance, that the female seahorse has a penis and that the male is the one who gets pregnant, which presumably means that the male is actually the female, and vice versa, though the filmmakers chose not to enlighten me on that. But I […]

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Book Blurb

“It has interested and excited me more than any novel I have read for a number of years.” That was TS Eliot’s  considered opinion of F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and for many years it was used by Penguin as a blurb to their edition of the book. Nowadays, though, book-jacket endorsements by famous […]

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Harper Lee

Much has been made of the fact that Harper Lee never wrote another book after To Kill a Mockingbird, which was first published fifty years ago tomorrow, but she’s not the literary world’s only one-hit wonder. To name just a few of the more famous, there are Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights, Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes, […]

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A Bloody Friday; Bombings…

On these balmy summer evenings, when God’s in his heaven and all’s right with the world, there’s nothing that boosts one’s sense of euphoria quite like a a barrage of programmes about bombings. TV3 was first up, with Sunday night’s A Bloody Friday: The Dublin-Monaghan Bombings, RTE continuing the theme on Tuesday with the first […]

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Adverse Criticism

The art of adverse criticism is all but dead, or at least so rare as to be the occasion of news stories. A century ago, George Bernard Shaw regularly railed at the awfulness of  English music and the turgidity of Brahms. In the 1950s , Kenneth Tynan felt free to skewer the pretensions of Beckett […]

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A PREPARATION FOR DEATH.

By Greg Baxter. Penguin Ireland, 14.99 sterling At the outset of this book, the narrator finds himself surrounded by the naked calves of women as he retrieves some dropped change in a Dame Street shop. “I wanted to lick them,” he says of these calves. “I often feel one drink away from whatever makes a […]

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The PDs; The Limits of Liberty…

With Fine Gael busily devouring itself in the manner of one of Goya’s more nightmarish visions, I summoned up memories of A Family at War, that hugely entertaining RTE documentary series from a couple of years back in which disgruntled party members gleefully disembowelled each other as they recalled various leadership heaves. This history of […]

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A MOVEABLE FEAST: The Restored Edition

Long before I ever set foot in Paris, Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his life there in the 1920s had begun my love affair with the French capital. Published in 1964, three years after the author’s suicide, its loving evocation of a vanished time and a vibrant place and its gossip about the writers and artists […]

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Hot air sends Dunphy to new heights

IT was just before kick-off in the England-USA game and on RTE2 Bill O’Herlihy wanted to know what Eamon Dunphy thought of Wayne Rooney. “A great player,” Eamon sagely pronounced before stepping up the praise a gear or two. “I think he’s magic. He is a great, great player. He could light up this World Cup.” And, as if that wasn’t enough: “He’s a nice kid.”

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THE HOLY THIEF. By William Ryan.

William Ryan is an Irish writer, though you’d never guess it from his outstanding debut novel, a thriller that’s set in mid-1930s Moscow at the onset of Stalin’s Great Terror. Formerly a barrister in London, where he still lives, Ryan took a Masters in creative writing five years ago at St Andrew’s University under the […]

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The night that Marty really spun my wheel

Halfway through Eurovision: The Contenders (RTE1), Marty Whelan stood beside an ancient cot at the Dublinia exhibition and announced “I’m going to have a lie-down in a second”.

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Eurovision / Alzheimer’s

Halfway through Eurovision: The Contenders (RTE1), Marty Whelan stood beside an ancient cot at the Dublinia exhibition and announced “I’m going to have a lie-down in a second.” I’d have dozed off, too, were it not for the surreal sight of Marty making lavish hand gestures and droning out drivel against the backdrop of our […]

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Joe Duffy

“You don’t hear the hanging and flogging brigade on Liveline,” Joe Duffy told a newspaper interviewer  a few months ago, “you don’t hear racist stuff.” That’s true. On this long-running interractive radio programme, which Duffy has now been hosting for more than ten years, there’s none of the rancid bigotry that you encounter on the […]

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RTE to air every World Cup game as sport takes over for summer

IT’S traditionally the season when RTE personalities take even longer holidays than TDs, but there’ll be no rest for Montrose’s sports department in the coming months.

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QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS / THE HOUSE / RYAN’S DAUGHTER

Ten European Parliament hopefuls were in the Questions and Answers studio to explain the role of  MEPs in this time of unprecedented economic crisis. From Fine Gael’s Gay Mitchell I learned that the first duty of any self-respecting MEP was to “turn up” in parliament, from which vantage point he or she could then “network” […]

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BAZ’S EXTREME WORLDS/STEPHEN FRY/AFTERSHOCK

Baz Ashmawy is RTE2’s intended answer to Louis Theroux, except that the BBC has never required its man to co-host a cringe-inducing reality contest. But then again, on those occasions when he’s not being smirkingly faux-naif, Theroux can come up with programmes of insight and substance, whereas Ashmawy was all too suited to the ghastly […]

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Gerry Ryan Hysteria

A man dies suddenly at the age of fifty-three. He is unknown to the wider community, but he has a wife and children, parents, siblings, friends, neighbours and work colleagues. A death notice appears in the newspapers and his removal and funeral service are attended by those who knew and loved him. We all attend such funerals, and others will be attending ours one day.

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Alan Sillitoe

From what I’ve read about Alan Sillitoe, who died recently, he seemed to be an admirable man as well as a fine writer – and far removed in basic values from some of today’s most celebrated authors, for whom rock-star fame and fortune appear to be as important as their supposed vocation. Certainly I can’t […]

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CITY OF LOST GIRLS. By Declan Hughes.

Seventy years after Raymond Chandler’s man of honour Philip Marlowe first ventured down the mean streets of Los Angeles, the private eye remains a staple of crime fiction. He’s an absurdly unrealistic figure, of course, and Declan Hughes acknowledges the fact in his fifth Ed Loy thriller. “The entire PI genre is basically preposterous boys’-own […]

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