Review This Book!

Sadly after being out for two months it looks rather like I'm not going to get any United States newspaper reviews for I Hear The Sirens In The Street which isn't that surprising to me really. American newspapers have been cutting down on their review staff and for the review section to remain profitable it has to feature books that the public is interested in. It's a bit of a Catch 22. They'll only review books by well known authors but you can't become a well known author unless the papers review your book. If you're a new author you're pretty much doomed unless you're coming out with a major publishing house with a huge advertising campaign behind you. Or unless you're young and attractive and live in Brooklyn - that seems to help too. 
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Which is where you come in, gentle reader. I'd really appreciate it if you could take a few minutes out of your day and review my book somewhere: Good Reads, Amazon, Audible or other social media. I'm not like PBS, I only usually ask this of you once per year and I won't ask it again until In The Morning I'll Be Gone is out in 2014. So thanks in advance for your review of Sirens (or Cold Cold Ground or any of my books at all actually) ... It really helps and I'm awfully grateful. 

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Borgen

Season 1 of Borgen finished on Wednesday night here in Australia on the "minority needs" channel SBS. Borgen gets about 40,000 viewers each week in Melbourne which represents about 1% of the population of the Greater Melbourne Area. Borgen gets even lower viewing figures in Australia's other capital cities. (For some reason all the quality shows get their highest ratings in Melbourne, while the lowest common denominator shows get their highest ratings in Sydney - make of that what you will...) Borgen's low ratings were a real shame because while it was running it was the best show on TV in Australia and whether SBS will run Season 2 has now been called into serious doubt. Low ratings are a double edged sword aren't they? You want them to be low enough so that the show you're into doesn't become a pop culture phenomenon but you don't want them to be so low that the network takes the show off the air. I have to say that I liked Mad Men, Breaking Bad and the novels Cormac McCarthy better when I was the only person in the neighbourhood who had heard of them.
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Borgen is about the Danish parliament and machinations of Denmark's first female Prime Minister, her permanently unshaven annoying husband, her sprightly spin doctor, her dour cabinet colleagues and a spunky - slightly irritating - TV news reporter and her colleagues. More realistic than either House of Cards or The West Wing it's a political drama without much melodrama or hacky stories. Aaron Sorkin's downfall on West Wing wasn't 9/11 or an interfering network it was Spielberg Disease whose symptoms manifest themselves in deafening musical scores that seek to cover up what James Joyce called "unearned emotion". Borgen doesn't usually have that difficulty because the problems that get solved each week are so banal and ordinary. Banal and ordinary yet weirdly and utterly gripping. When it tries to preach Borgen does fail: the Greenland story was oh so politically correct but still fascinating as I don't think I've ever seen any other TV drama have an episode that was shot in Greenland.
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The whole thing is in Danish, of course, subtitled into English. I read on a TV blog that subtitled programmes do very badly in Oz because the Australian TV viewer is a multi-tasker who likes to surf the net with the TV on in the background. Yeah well, people should learn to stop doing that when there's something good on the box. (Remember the lessons of the zen Buddhist monks who spent 10 years meditating in a cave in order to learn to be able to do just one thing at a time.) Trust me Borgen is worth an hour of your undivided attention even if you're not a political theory geek like me; so please do seek out Borgen wherever it is showing in your area. Takk. 

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Willam Least Heat Moon

One of my favourite contemporary authors is the American travel writer William Least Heat Moon. A best seller in the United States he is almost unknown in the UK and is completely unknown here in Australia. This is a shame because his stance would go down well in Britain and Oz. He's a slow traveller and a close observer of places and people. He's the antithesis of the Michael Palin school of travel journalism, whereby a celebrity Palin goes on vast voyages and meets people prepared for them by their producers or researchers. Heat Moon occasionally does go on epic journeys but when he does this he takes his time about it so that he gets a real feel for the land and the human geography. The people he meets are the people he meets, he doesn't go out of his way to look for eccentrics or characters; he encounters the people who happen to be in the same place he is. 
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Heat Moon's first book was Blue Highways a journey on American backroads that he took after he got fired from his job, divorced and lost his house. He lived in his car for a while and then took Paul Simon's advice and went out to look for America off the national highway grid. It's a terrific read and an exploration of a country that is gradually ceasing to exist as regionalism and localism vanishes in the face of corporate sameness. The first Heat Moon book I read was PrairyErth: A Deep Map where he explores a tiny community in the Flint Hills of Kansas, unpacking this one small place in intimate and extraordinary detail. I love Heat Moon's concept of the Deep Map - the idea that although you're not travelling very far you are getting to know one place very well. I've been doing a Deep Map of St Kilda for the last five years, before that I did an eight year Deep Map of Denver and before that a one year very Deep Map of the Old City of Jerusalem; before that a Deep Map of Upper Manhattan (Manhattan across 110th Street). I didn't know about Heat Moon before I read him in New York but in a way I was still carrying out Deep Maps without knowing the concept: in Oxford, Coventry, the Kings Cross area of London and my very first Deep Map: Coronation Road in Carrickfergus where I knew who lived in every house, what their father did for a living, who their brothers and sisters were and often who their cousins were too. 
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I see I got off the topic a little there...Ok back to Bill Least Heat Moon. As you can see from his name he's part Native American and in the spirit of the Indian guides who helped Lewis and Clark he decided to see if it was possible to canoe from one side of America to another with the least number of portages possible for River Horse. This, I think, is my favourite of his books and should be required reading for everyone who's ever had the dream of kayaking or canoeing from river to river across the map (I can't be the only one can I?) I loved this book both for the adventure and for the beautiful prose and its one of the few "great ideas for a travel book" that actually led to a great travel book. 
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PrairyErth, Blue Highways, River Horse - 3 travel classics that deserve to be on your bookshelf. 

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Where Did The Irish Come From?

I won't draw out the suspense, the simple answer is Spain. I think the evidence is now pretty definitive that Ireland was populated from the Iberian peninsula fairly soon after the ice retreated at the beginning of the current Holocene Epoch. In the last five years DNA evidence has shown convincingly that from an Ice Age refuge somewhere in the current Basque region the original founder population of Ireland migrated up the Atlantic coast before settling along the Irish littoral. The great Irish neolithic monuments are the work of these people. But you don't just have to rely on the DNA evidence. This week a little noticed paper was published in the journal PLOS ONE about snails that gives credence to this Spanish story. Apparently edible white lipped snails are found only in two places in Europe - the west of Ireland and the Basque Country. Scientists doing DNA research into these snails have concluded that they originally came from Spain and were carried to Ireland by migrating populations as a food source around the time that the first people also entered Ireland. I confess that I'm not a big reader of PLOS ONE and happened upon this story in Science News at the above link.
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All of this should be familiar to people who have read the work of historian Barry Cunliffe who has long spoken about an Atlantic civilization and ancient sea links between the British Isles, western France and northern Spain. Cunliffe turns the map of Europe on its side and points out that the Atlantic and the rivers flowing into the Atlantic and the North Sea were the most efficient way for ancient peoples to travel in a Europe that was covered by dense forests. Cunliffe argues that rather than seeing the Atlantic coast on the edge of Europe (as we do today) we instead should see it - as Neolithic people saw it - as an important sea lane between cultures. I find Cunliffe's work compelling and I wasn't surprised to see it referenced favourably in Robert Macfarlane's The Old Ways, a book I've been raving about since last week. Macfarlane notes the similar folk traditions on the Celtic fringe of Europe's western periphery from Galicia to Orkney and speculates that it represents a unified culture connected by ancient sea routes that transcends the current temporary arbitrary national boundaries. 
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If you're not convinced by the DNA evidence, the snails or Barry Cunliffe's Atlantic civilization, you could also rely on Irish mythology and oral histories (written down much later) that speak of the "Milesian Peoples" who apparently were the last invaders of Ireland. The Milesians were a dark haired civilization who came from Spain. Long discounted as completely fictional these "Invasion Myths" perhaps reflect a folk memory that goes back thousands of years when the first peoples from Spain arrived in Ireland not too long after the retreat of the glaciers. 
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And who were these hardy Ice Age survivors? They were the descendants of the homo sapiens who first entered Europe about 40-50,000 years ago from Africa. The cave painters of Lascaux and Chauvet, the makers of bone flutes and the carvers of ivory jewelry and the Venus of Willendorf. People who'd entered a Europe filled with rhinos and lions, zebra and antelope, that didn't look that different from the place where they'd travelled from. So, ultimately, of course, the answer to the question of where the Irish came from is where we all came from: the savanna lands of The Great Rift Valley in East Africa.

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The Most Creative Place On Earth - Iceland

They have more professional musicians per capita than any other country in the world. More authors, more poets, more screenwriters, more directors, more playwrights per capita than anywhere else. One in every ten Icelanders will publish a book in their lifetime - in Reykjavik the percentage is even higher. The Scandinavian crime writing boom has been a feature of the mystery scene for half a decade but what is even more remarkable is the fact that Iceland with a population of 300,000 (an over estimation because many Icelanders live abroad) holds its own with Sweden, Norway and Denmark who have thirty times, twleve times and fifteen times as many people respectively. Halldor Laxness won the Nobel Prize for Literature and Arnaldur Indridason won the Golden Dagger Award for mystery writing. One of my favourite bands in the 80's was the Sugarcubes, in the 90's Bjork came along, in the 2000's I only stopped listening to Sigur Ros when I discovered that Gwyneth Paltrow had given birth to their album Takk which ruined that record forever. One of my favourite current bands is Reykjavik's own Of Monsters and Men whose most recent video (right) is very gothic and trolly and, well, Icelandic. 
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I think I've proved that Iceland punches well above its weight in the arts, the question is how it does this. I don't know the answer but I have some theories based more on Wikipedia than my own brief visit to Iceland at the end of the 90's. According to Wikipedia Iceland has more bookstores and libraries per capita than anywhere else in the world and the average Icelander reads more books. Long dark winters certainly would encourage book reading or practicing a musical instrument or writing a book (or drinking heavily). I also think it helps that Iceland does not have a strong culture of sport. Iceland has no professional football league (of any code) and this is a good thing. Spectator sport is a massive time suck, time that arguably could be spent better doing something creative for yourself. People who have a job only have a finite amount of leisure hours a week so it stands to reason that the crazier a place is about sport the less creative the population. Other theories? 1) Sagas. Iceland's literary tradition of Sagas goes back 1000 years and I've been told that many Icelanders of the older generation can still narrate and perform tales from the Sagas from memory. 2) TV. I don't know what the TV situation is in Iceland but I'll bet Icelanders watch less television than Americans or Europeans. 3) Weather. The poor weather in Iceland encourages indoor activities like reading, practicing with your garage band, writing poetry etc. (I'll bet you good money that more poetry books are bought in Reykjavik than in Miami or Rio despite the vast population differential.) 
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Is there a lesson here for other countries? I don't know. Iceland's success seems to be due to its unique geography and literary history, but maybe if we could encourage kids to seek out their local bookstore or library it would help. Having children learn a musical instrument is also good idea and when schools in the UK, Australia and America stopped having kids memorize poetry by heart it was, in my opinion, an enormous mistake. Finally it's nice that young people play sport but watching sport on TV is, let's face it, not a terribly productive use of their time. 
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If you ask me it all comes back to the bookshops and the libraries. Books fire imaginations. Cicero said that a room without books is like a body without a soul and one of my favourite quotes on creativity is from Werner Herzog - when someone asked Herzog how he could become a film-maker like him some day Herzog replied instantly: "Read. Read. Read." Quite. 

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The First North American Newspaper Review of I Hear The Sirens In The Street

First of all let me wish you all a Happy Bloomsday. Do try and read some Jim Joyce, today, you'll thank me for it...Now down to business...The first North American newspaper review of I Hear The Sirens In The Street came out in last Friday's Toronto Star (Hemingway's old newspaper). It was written by the great Jack Batten who had this to say about the book: 

Toronto Star Fri June 14 2013

Jack Batten Book Reviews

I Hear The Sirens In The Street

By Adrian McKinty

Seventh Street Books, 318 pages, $17

McKinty varies radically from other Irish crime novelists in one significant stylistic department. The difference is mostly a matter of humour. McKinty’s central figure, Detective Inspector Sean Duffy, offers the quota of laughs we’ve become accustomed to in Ireland’s crime literature, but unlike the rest of the country’s sleuths, there’s nothing mordant about the Duffy brand of funny stuff. The DI might even be described as optimistic. This is remarkable considering that events in the highly readable new book take place in 1982 when the Troubles meant that explosions, assassinations and spilled blood were daily routines.

Duffy is from the north, a cop working out of a station in a town next door to Belfast. Since he’s also a Catholic, he gets it from all sides, under siege from both the IRA and the UDA. His sense of irony helps him through most crises. Cool nervy and intelligent Duffy drinks his vodka gimlets, watches The Rockford Files on television, and goes about his investigating business with a style that’s mostly unflappable.

Duffy’s latest case begins with the discovery of the dismembered body of an American tourist. The coppers, led by Duffy, chase the clues on a trail that leads our man into dangerous places in Ireland’s political and industrial worlds. If it begins to look as if the country’s unhinged violence is at last going to crush him, we readers remain certain his valour and wit will guarantee survival in the end.

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The Icknield Way

As you know last week I had a whale of a time listening to Robert Macfarlane's book The Old Ways which I just thought was wonderful and up there with the best travel writers I've read. Macfarlane began his journey in part as an homage to the Welsh writer Edward Thomas who was killed in World War 1 and who was one of the first old way walker/explorer/writers in England. Macfarlane took with him The Icknield Way where Thomas wrote about his journey on "the oldest road in England" that runs from East to West (or West to East) over the chalk downs from Cambridgeshire to Hampshire. It's a happy coincidence that Macfarlane began his book (where he began following Edward Thomas's route) just a little to the south east of the village of Sawston which is where my novel Falling Glass ends. Like I say this is only a coincidence but a strange one as Sawston is a beautiful, but nondescript, out of the way sort of place.
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Just as one book leads to another so reading Macfarlane has led me to Thomas's Icknield Way that my local library did not have but which has been scanned and put online by an archivist from the University of California. Helpfully the archivist provided an embed code so I was able to blog the entire book below. I appreciate that only 1% of the people who chance on this blogpost will be interested enough to read the below book, but that's ok, you're the 1% I do everything for anyway. The best way to read it is to click the full screen button and then the two page option (the two rectangles). The dedication at the beginning is off puttingly dry but, trust me, the rest of the book is charming. If you're interested in British travel writing in the Golden Age (and if you're not you should be) then you'll enjoy this. Other authors worth checking out from this era are: Robert Byron, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Peter Fleming, Freya Stark, Rebecca West and the travel books of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Anyway thanks to the University of California, here's Thomas's lovely, eccentric, borderline mystical, Icknield Way:

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George McFly Day!

What is George McFly Day? It's the bit in Back To The Future where George McFly's box of books arrives from his publisher and his career as a science fiction writer becomes a reality. If you remember the film, in one version of the present George doesn't follow his dreams to become a writer because he's afraid of failure, but in the altered version of the present a more courageous George McFly does pursue his ambition and when his box of books comes it's a kind of vindication. What makes this George McFly day particularly interesting and exciting for me is that the box of books which arrived today from my publisher (Seventh Street Books) was I Hear The Sirens In The Street which is partly about the DeLorean scandal in Belfast in 1982 and the book actually begins with a quote from Back To The Future (the British version also begins with a Tom Waits song but I couldn't afford to pay the royalties for its use in the US edition). . .Earlier this week I also received the French and Spanish versions of the first book in the Sean Duffy series, The Cold Cold Ground, which both look fantastic. This morning my daughters Arwynn and Sophie gleefully ripped all the boxes of books apart, ably helped by Rocky, our next door neighbour's cat, who sincerely believes that he belongs in our family.

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The Old Ways

Most of the products of our dumb, doomed culture seem specifically designed to get on my nerves, almost as if their authors have looked inside my head and thought to themselves: now what can we do here that will irritate Adrian the most. Of course this is a paranoid, solipsistic way of thinking and probably as silly as the implied idea that in the past things were better (things only look like that from the perspective of now but I'll bet back then there were just as many crap books, crap films and crap songs that history has filtered into oblivion). Much rarer are the cultural products that come my way that seem to be written just for me. Last year I saw a couple of films Fish Tank and Wendy & Lucy that were that way; a couple of books: The Fortress of Solitude and The Art of Fielding and one play: Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth. This year so far no films have wormed their way inside my solipsistic mind but a recent audiobook has. The book is The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane, which could have been written solely to give me pleasure. It's a travel book about Macfarlane's adventures walking on the 'old routes' of Britain, Europe and further afield. Along the way he ruminates about other famous walkers and their journeys on foot: Rousseau, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Wittgenstein, WH Davies, Edward Thomas, George Borrow, John Muir etc. who are writers that I also love (Patrick Fermor's A Time of Gifts may be my favourite book of all time). Macfarlane is something of a naturalist and he observes flora, fauna and landscape with a keen eye. And it's a philosophical book too. Macfarlane is at one with the German Romantics who felt that one's surroundings could influence one's spirit and who recommended travelling to the wild places as a way of coming to understand oneself. The outward journey leads to the inner one: nach innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg as Novalis says.   
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Listening to The Old Ways as an audiobook while walking through the city or the countryside or along the beach was such a pleasure for me that I had to ration the book out to thirty minute increments a day lest I finish it too soon. Most of my heroes, it seems, are big walkers: Iain Sinclair walked the route of the M25, Werner Herzog walked from Bavaria to Paris, George Orwell tramped all over England. There's nothing quite like walking to connect you with the place you live in or a new place. If you're not a big walker or need a little inspiration along the long lonely path may I suggest that you get yourself an iPod, an Audible account, and as your first free audiobook get The Old Ways which I really cannot recommend highly enough. 

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Radio Silence

If you've read my Sean Duffy novels you'll know that, I, like Duffy, am a bit of a music obsessive. I like all kinds of music: classical, pop, rock, opera and my daughters have explained to me the differences between someone like Keisha (a hack) and Taylor Swift (apparently a rather good song writer). Last year an old friend of mine, Dan Stone, offered me the opportunity to write a piece for a new journal he was starting up called Radio Silence whose tag line is: Literature and Rock & Roll. In the inaugural Radio Silence I was very happy to do an essay on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks which I consider to be the best Irish pop album ever and one of the greatest albums of all time. I was also tickled to be sharing space in Radio Silence #1 with my old flat mate Alicia Stallings who was given a Macarthur 'Genius' grant in 2012 for her poetry and translations. Alicia wrote a lovely essay in RS#1 on her youth in Athens, Georgia when the scene around REM was starting to explode. 
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Radio Silence #1 evidently did well because Radio Silence #2 (that I got this week) is bigger, longer, more colourful and has a lot of heavy hitters inside: Bruce Springsteen, Robert Pinsky, David Remnick, Ray Bradbury et. al. I've written an essay for RS#2 on the Radiohead song "Creep" which begins thusly: 

One of the late comedian Patrice O’Neal’s most watched videos on YouTube is a short radio interview he gave on KITS San Francisco where he hilariously dissects Radiohead’s song Creep and wonders about the strange power Creep seems to have over white men of a certain age. He speculates that it digs deep into the confusion and angst of Caucasian males in America, perhaps mining some rich seam of inadequacy, helplessness and loserdoom. For O’Neal, Creep and the movie Fight Club are the holy grails of contemporary American Whiteness. Black men, O’Neal says, don’t react to Creep or Fight Club in this strange obsessive way, but for young white males these two cultural touchstones describe perfectly what it is to be a man in an increasingly complicated, gender neutral, multi-ethnic world.

I first saw Radiohead play Creep in September 1992 at The Venue Club in Oxford on the same night that parts of the music video for the song were shot. I wasn’t that impressed with the group, who I hadn’t heard of before, and who seemed to be rather posh boarding school boys completely out of step with the times. As many of us saw it back it then real music, authentic music, was the blue collar stuff we were hearing from Seattle bands such as Nirvana who had triumphantly closed the Reading Festival a couple of weeks previously. Kurt Cobain and Thom Yorke came from different planets. Cobain was a homeless junkie who had lived under a bridge in Aberdeen, Washington, whereas it seemed that the worst thing that had ever happened to Yorke was a bad experience with the bleach bottle in the hairdressing salon...

You can read the rest and a lot of other great stuff in RS#2 available at all good book and magazine shops.

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