Arriving is always the same sweet mix of promises.
Leaving, well, you never know a person or a place
until you leave.
("Carl's Bar and Grill")
( more )

Salt's website is here

( A piece of travel writing this time - behind cut )

Chasing Dean is here on amazon.uk.

A novel review this time:

Ghosts and Lightning, by Trevor Byrne, Canongate 2009


Denny Cullen, 21st-century Dubliner at university in Wales, thinks he's left home, but home isn't finished with him yet. Called back for his mother's funeral, he soon seems to be back in the groove, with relatives and friends who are going nowhere fast and doing nothing much (though, this being Dublin, they do it with considerable wit and inventiveness).

His sister Paula senses a ghost in the house she and Denny are allowing to go to rack and ruin; it might be her alcohol-fuelled imagination but then again it might be composed of memories of their dead mother, their absent father, the brothers from whom they are estranged and much other baggage. Before Denny can move on, he needs to decide which bits of his past he wants to leave behind, and which he needs to take with him. Though this is very much a novel of a young man in 21st-century Dublin, he is also a man with a sense of a long historical and mythological past (and his surname is no accident).

One reason this novel lives so vividly for the reader is the liveliness and realism of its voices. Denny's friends and family constantly come alive off the page: the insanely brave Paula, Uncle Victor the long-term book-borrower, gentle Pajo the emaciated recovering drug-addict with Buddhist tendencies ("he's mad into this kind o thing; life after death, ghosts, yetis, any and all religions. Basically anything there's fuck all proof for, Pajo'll believe it.")

Both fulcrum and observer, Denny himself is a joy of a voice. He is sardonically honest about himself:

Probably why I can't get a job, some witch's hex. Well, that or the fact I never filled out them forms at the FAS office

but also endlessly imaginative, as when he describes his friend Maggit having second thoughts about something he's stolen:

And wha about the kid who owned it? Is he not gonna miss it?
Maggit thinks about this. He looks into the bag again, like he might o robbed the answer as well by accident.

or when, travelling west, he finds himself overwhelmed by a sense of history:

… Dungloe, Annagary, Glencolumbkille. Never even heard o those places before, never mind been to them, and yet I dunno why, it all seems dead familiar. Mad that, isn't it? This feelin I get that nothing is new, not really.

There are a lot of very funny scenes in this novel – the car being constantly turned upside down, the funeral dominated by a priestly speech impediment. The variation of pace is remarkable too, from frenetic to leisurely and back, but above all the register of language, which accommodates colloquial and lyrical effortlessly. It's a terrifically assured and likeable debut.

Geraldine Paine: The Go-Away-Bird pub. Lapwing Publications, Belfast, 2008, £7.95 ISBN 978-1-905425-92-1

( review here )
The Go-Away-Bird is on amazon.co.uk and there's also order information here from the publisher.

Lately on Facebook the poet Fred d'Aguiar raised the question of politician-poets. He was looking for the early poems of Obama and said he trusted they would be an improvement on "Karadzic and Ho Chi Minh". (Why, I wonder? Though I don't subscribe to Obamamania - too reminiscent of T Blair - I do think the man well-meaning, but plenty of well-meaning folk write duff poems, while some of the greatest poets have been downright unpleasant bastards.)

But what really bugged me was the reference to Ho Chi Minh's poems, which I read as being dismissive – if I got that wrong, sorry Fred. I grew up in the 60s, when Uncle Ho was of course famous for other things like winning the Vietnam war (one of McCain's less tenable assertions was that he "knew how to win a war", when in fact he's only ever been on the losing side of one). But I had, and still have, a little collection of Ho's epigrams, written while he was a prisoner of Chiang-kai Shek in 1942-3, constantly on the move between a series of South China jails. They were published as The Prison Diary of Ho Chi Minh by Bantam in 1971, introduced and edited by Harrison Salisbury.

They are brief, epigrammatic verses in the classical Chinese style and are a "diary" in the sense that they chart his travels from prison to prison and experiences in them. He emerges from them as a wry, humorous character, keenly observant and with a rather endearing determination to see the best in the people and places he encounters. But also, very decidedly, as a real poet.
( cut for length )

The sequel to Catherine Fisher's Incarceron, which was The Times children's book of the year, landed on my doormat this week.



And if anything, I think it's better than Incarceron. The theme of both is really unusual for a children's book: the way we interpret (and misinterpret) the world we live in. In the Realm, outside, extreme modern technology is used to create the illusion of a pre-tech age of imagined arcadian bliss (for the rich), complete with picturesque hovels whose impoverished inhabitants are forbidden to glass the windows because it isn't compatible with the era they are meant not to have moved on from. Jared, near the end, muses on age and decay, generally the last remaining taboo in this genre: ".. a staircase he had climbed every day for years had become a treacherous obstacle, a deathtrap. This was how time transformed things, how your body betrayed you. This was what the Realm had tried to forget, in its deliberate elegant amnesia". In Incarceron, the vast (or tiny, depending whether you are inside or outside) prison, Rix the magician's act depends on allowing people to persuade themselves things are true:

"So it wasn't the real Glove? [...] But it burned him?"
"Well, he was right about the acid. As for not being able to take it off, he was perfectly able to. But I made him believe he could not. That is magic, Attia. To take a man's mind and twist it to believe the impossible".

( cut for major spoilers )

In short, a brilliant book which raises all sorts of fascinating questions this genre often doesn't. Now watch the Grauniad's review pages ignore it because it's fantasy. I don't think they have ever given her a review, despite the fact that she has been shortlisted for the Whitbread and Carnegie, translated into about 20 languages and both the Times and Telegraph regularly rave about her. Mole-eyed fools, the Guardianistas.

A new one for a change - ( here )

Another review imported from elsewhere (it was first published in the now-defunct Thumbscrew) as part of an ongoing project to get them all in one place.

( review here )

I'm moving some more book reviews, not necessarily new, in here.

( review here )

On the Back of the Wind by Frank Dullaghan, Cinnamon Press 2008



Though this is a first full-length collection, Dullaghan has been writing some years, and holding down a career as a City lawyer, besides being a husband and father. So his poems are not those of some twenty-something with a burning desire to look clever and little actual experience to write about. They are more mature and polished than your average first collection, and cover a wider range of subject matter than most, but at the core of the collection is a number of poems about the fraught relationship between a boy, later a man, and his father. These are very moving, but that alone wouldn't validate them; what does that is their inventiveness of thought and language, and their eye and ear for telling detail.I don't think anything is more useful in a review than quoting, so here's "How It Could Happen" in full:

HOW IT COULD HAPPEN

It could be an evening like this,
turning away from a mirror,
the garden moving closer to the house,
the lights not yet lit,
that the corner of my eye will catch him
glancing at me from the glass
before slipping aside, gone
when I step back in front.

Or perhaps early,
the sun not up, I'll be in the kitchen
filling a cup at the tap
when the room will momentarily darken
and I'll sense a shape at the door
till I turn and the room brightens,
the sky lying against the door glass,
blond, blazon, the morning risen.

But I'll know he's been there,
trying to find a new language
of light and shade, some way to bridge the gap,
leave some message,
or maybe just to reach out,
the way the wind might move through a room
to turn the pages of a book,
brush the sleeves of a coat in the hall.

This is how it could happen.
This way or some other.

The delicacy and subtlety of this is very striking: the unstated pun in "the sun not up", the observation in "the garden moving closer to the house", the quiet, throwaway tone of the last two lines, that leave one unsure whether the poem ends in hope or negation. This poem is one of the stars of the collection, but its tone and method are not untypical of the book as a whole.

Being the review I've just left on facebook and amazon.co.uk of Matthew Francis's collection Mandeville
( review here )

I'm simultaneously diverted and annoyed by the book I'm reading, Necropolis: London and its Dead by Catharine Arnold. Diverted, because it's the sort of subject I love and who wouldn't be fascinated to find out that "occasionally, scholars from St Paul's and other grammar schools would meet in St Bartholomew's churchyard for learned debates, but these inevitably degenerated into street fights and had to be discontinued" or that the Chelsea pensioners' graveyard contains Christina Davies, veteran of Blenheim and Ramillies, who had a volley of three shots fired at her funeral?

Annoyed, because I keep seeing how it could be better written.
( rant commences )