Boston

I spotted this tram stop poster on Acland Street in St Kilda today. It's for the city of Boston and is an attempt to encourage visitors to come to Boston in the wake of the negative publicity generated by the Boston bombings and the subsequent shoot out in Cambridge and Watertown. At first glance it might seem to be a poor use of Boston taxpayers money - doing an advertising campaign for the city 10,000 miles away in Melbourne, Australia, but I think it's a smart move. Once a place gets tarred with a negative brush, especially in relation to terrorism the legacy can last for decades. Northern Ireland had only half a million overseas visitors last year whereas the Republic of Ireland had over six million overseas visitors. Five and a half million visitors to the south of Ireland chose not to travel to the North, despite the fact that the scenery is better, the people are funnier (and friendlier) and because we don't have the Euro everything is cheaper. Why didn't they come? Because they're afraid. The legacy of the Troubles has engendered a false belief that Northern Ireland is a risky place to travel to. Of course it isn't at all. A tourist is statistically many times more likely to be robbed or raped or murdered in Britain than in Northern Ireland; but none of that matters: it's all about PR which is why the city of Boston is smart to go global and go early with the idea that everything is fine. I have a lot of affection for Boston - I have family there and I've spent 15 of my last 20 summers in Massachusetts. I have subjected myself to vitriol many times by wearing a Yankees cap at Fenway, I'm with Jonathan Richman on Roslindale and I still maintain that the greatest ice cream in the world comes from White Farms in Ipswich. This situation is not without irony however. Boston is the only place in the world where I've seen collecting tins on bars for the so called "Real IRA". The horrific 1998 Omagh Bombing cured everyone in Ireland (save for a few mentally ill sociopaths) of any love for the "Real IRA" but in Boston the message that indiscriminate bombing is a moral evil hasn't quite penetrated to the darkest corners of Southie. Maybe the Marathon bombings will change that too. In any case here's hoping that the City of Boston's world wide tourism campaign works. We'll see.   

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The Way of the World

a post from 2011...
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The Way of the World, Nicolas Bouvier's story of his 18 month journey from Yugoslavia to India, undertaken 55 years ago with his friend Thierry in an unreliable Fiat is my book of the year so far. It was first self-published in Switzerland and has now been rereleased in a lovely edition by NYRB books complete with an introduction by the Marcel Proust of travel writing, Patrick Leigh Fermor.
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Bouvier and Thierry had no money at all and they blagged their way to India by charming the locals, writing newspaper articles and organizing art exhibitions. No one undertakes journeys or writes travel books like these anymore. The friends went slowly and observed places and people and thought about them. In Iran they are thrown into prison and nearly killed and a contemporary book editor surely would have made Bouvier play up these events, but he was his own editor and told the story his way, underplaying the drama and concentrating more on the prose and personal reflections. The Way of the World unfolds slowly with passages of lyrical sweetness and no histrionics. Thierry and Nicolas remain friends but the latter's hatred of the former's ability to sleep in all circumstances becomes pathologically funny as the book goes on. Still, Nicolas doesn't complain about anything much until late in the book when he goes on a hilarious 3 page Jeremiad against the effrontery of the flies of Asia. Sleep also becomes a bit of an obsession. Here's a little paragraph from the Quetta section:
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Opposite the entrance to the Station View [Hotel] a very robust beggar was stretched out in the shade of a plane tree on a folded newspaper, which he changed every morning. Despite a long career as a sleeper our neighbour was still looking for the ideal position which very few people attain in this lifetime. Depending on the temperature he tried out variants evoking in turn breastfeeding, the high jump, a pogrom and love-making. He was a courteous man when he was awake, without that gnawed prophetic air that Indian beggars so often have. There was little misery here and much of that frugality which makes life finer and lighter than ash.

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My 10 Favourite Westerns

To hell with Frank Miller, I would have gone with Grace Kelly in the cart

I've blogged this list before but it's changed a bit in the last two years. (There's a  new entry at number 9.) This is not the list you'll see at Empire Magazine or at the AFI or whatever. You wont find Winchester 73 or Red River on here as these are my 10 personal favourites.

10. Dead Man. Jim Jarmusch's alternative western with Johnny Depp, Gary Farmer and a brilliant Crispin Glover. (Actually isn't Crispin Glover always brilliant?)

9. Meeks Cutoff. Kelly Reichardt's minimalist, feminist western starring Michelle Williams. No one saw this and its certainly not for everyone, but I think its an enchanting, hypnotic, compelling tale of a bunch of settlers lost on the Oregon trail.

8. High Noon. Carl Foreman's screenplay, Grace Kelly's close ups, the badge in the dirt, the action playing out in real time. If you don't like this film, I'm sorry, I just don't know who you are anymore.

7. The Searchers. Just about the only John Wayne film I can enjoy these days. Funny, dark, broody and beautiful. John Ford at the top of his game.

6. Paris, Texas. A guy is wandering in the desert. He has amnesia. The good news is that he was married to Nastassia Kinski. The bad news is that he tied her to a fridge and she set their trailer home on fire. His mission is to ride into town, bring mother and son together, ride out of town. Classic. BTW, "there is no safety zone."

5. Unforgiven. Clint's mission is to ride into town, kill a couple of dudes, and, er, ride out of town. It all goes to hell and then it rains. David Peoples wrote the script, Richard Harris stole the show. Gene Hackman was pretty good too.

4. Blazing Saddles. Richard Pryor was the unsung hero here and with him in it this might have been the greatest comedy of all time. Still there's the beans, the Nazis, the governor, Maddy Khan. What a flick. 1974 was some kind of Wunderjahr for Mel Brooks and then, alas, zilch.

3. For a Few Dollars More. Best of the spaghetti three. They laugh, they cry, they shoot each other's hats. . .Then the wonderful Gian Maria Volontè breaks out of jail, robs the bank at El Paso and after that it's all: laaah, laaah, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, dada, dah, dah, laaah, laaah, la, la, la, la, la, la, laaah etc.

2. The Wild Bunch. Sam Peckinpah says that this is what happens when men go down to Mexico. When I went down to Mexico I did some nice snorkeling and drank margaritas but when MEN go down there, they machine gun entire armies of baddies. In slow motion. Brilliant.

1. Blood Meridian. They havent actually made this film yet but the movie of it in my head is bloody awesome.

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Why The Booker Prize Might Actually Go To The Year's Best Novel This Year

The Booker Prize longlist was announced yesterday and it was an encouraging sign that the Booker people want their prize to be taken seriously as an award for the year's best or, at the very least, the most interesting novel. Too often the Booker has gone to someone in a clique of white, posh, North London based writers who have written some dreadful old rubbish that has been reviewed favourably by their friends in the broadsheet press. The Booker for a long time became a kind of lifetime achievement award for someone who had said the right things, gone to the right parties and blurbed the right people. Or, if petty jealousies got the better of the clique, the prize was given to some random person from the Commonwealth that nobody had heard of. 
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But this year's prize is being judged by Robert Macfarlane who I respect as a writer and a man of integrity and whose range of interests is broad. Yes he's a privately educated third generation literary-type who lives in Cambridge (no surprise there) but Macfarlane is better read than most Booker judges and better travelled too. I expect he'll take his job very seriously and actually read all the books. (This doesn't always happen.) The longlist has excluded nearly all of the North London clique - much to their fury I expect - and has actively sought out writers from the Commonwealth and Ireland. Only Americans are excluded from the Booker Prize for reasons that are still obscure to me. 
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Anyway here's the list in full (below). I've read 4 of the books on there and I was happy to see that three of the authors are Irish. (Colum McCann better hope the judges don't find out that he has a US passport.)
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Five Star Billionaire Tash Aw (Fourth Estate)

We Need New Names NoViolet Bulawayo (Chatto & Windus)

The Luminaries Eleanor Catton (Granta)

Harvest Jim Crace (Picador)

The Marrying of Chani Kaufman Eve Harris (Sandstone Press)

The Kills Richard House (Picador) 

The Lowland Jhumpa Lahiri (Bloomsbury)

Unexploded Alison MacLeod ( Hamish Hamilton) 

TransAtlantic Colum McCann (Bloomsbury) 

Almost English Charlotte Mendelson (Mantle) 

A Tale for the Time Being Ruth Ozeki (Canongate)

The Spinning Heart Donal Ryan (Doubleday Ireland)

The Testament of Mary Colm Tóibín (Viking)

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In The Morning I'll Be Gone

locked and bolted from the inside...

I'm just finishing up the third Sean Duffy novel called In The Morning I'll Be Gone which, of course, is another homage/rip off of a Tom Waits title...You can listen to the marvellous In The Morning I'll Be Gone, here. (It's the one with the fantastic "I have a French companion" line which I think is the greatest line in the history of popular music.) 
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The bulk of my In The Morning I'll Be Gone is going to be taken up with a locked room mystery. I've never written a locked room mystery before but I've read several over the years and designing one has been an extremely enjoyable intellectual exercise. And rest assured that I'm not the kind of bastard who will cheat you with a supernatural solution or who won't give you enough information to solve the puzzle for yourselves. I certainly won't insult your intelligence and lie to you (the unforgivable sin of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo's locked room portion.)
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You can read the first 6 chapters of In The Morning I'll Be Gone, here and if my publishers allow it I'll try and get the first 100 pages or so up on this blog in the next couple of months. The first 6 chapters don't quite get you into the locked room problem, they merely show you Duffy in the shit and starting to climb out again but like I say I'll try to add to the story in the next few months. You can get the first two volumes of the, ahem, award winning, Duffy series on Amazon, Audible, Book Depository or at all reputable book shops. This may be the last (Duffy) book I ever write so hopefully you'll enjoy this swansong if it is the swansong...

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The Australian Weighs In On Sirens

As you know I can't get a review of my Sean Duffy novels in the US press for love nor money (admittedly I haven't actually tried love or money...yet) but at least all the British, Irish and Australian newspapers are reviewing me. This latest review was from last Sunday's Australian newspaper and was written by the multi-talented Graeme Blundell who you non Aussies might still recognise as Natalie Portman's father in Star Wars...
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I Hear The Sirens In The Street
Adrian McKinty

Reviewed by Graeme Blundell The Australian July 14 2013

The first book in McKinty's Sean Duffy series, The Cold Cold Ground, found Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy newly promoted and posted to Carrickfergus CID in Northern Ireland in 1981 at the height of the Troubles. Now living in Melbourne, Northern Irish born McKinty took us inside the sectarian violence of the period as Duffy, a Catholic cop trusted by no one in a Protestant town, struggled with two different cases: one was Northern Ireland's first possible serial killer who was possibly preying on homosexuals and the second was the mysterious suicide of a young woman that looked a lot murder. Now in the new novel Duffy has got a man's headless body in a suitcase dumped in an abandoned factory. Army helicopters are still flying low over the lough, sirens are wailing in County Down and the distant thump thump in the background is the sound of mortars or explosions. McKinty is seriously brilliant, his flair for language matched by his remarkable feel for place, appetite for redemptive violence and gravely cool appreciation of characters who reject conformity. There are echoes of Dennis Lehane, Joseph Wambaugh, Eoin McNamee and even Raymond Chandler but McKinty is resolutely his own hard man. 

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Ireland Is A Railway Poster: Philip Larkin In Carrickfergus

For years I've been single handedly peddling the concept that my hometown, Carrickfergus, is the centre of the universe, with admittedly, limited success. What I particularly like are the literary connections which are surprisingly rich in so small a place. Famously Louis MacNeice lived in Carrickfergus and wrote about it more than once. He brought WH Auden to the town to stay with him but what he thought is not recorded. Jonathan Swift lived in Carrickfergus (at Kilroot) where he wrote A Tale of a Tub (and possibly plotted Gulliver). Anthony Trollope lived in Whiteabbey near Carrickfergus where he wrote The Warden. William Congreve lived in Carrickfergus as a boy. Charlotte Riddel - best selling Victorian pot boiler novelist - was from Carrick. William Orr, United Irishman and poet, (with a famous poet brother) lived and was, er, hanged in Carrickfergus. Currently the best selling science fiction writer Ian McDonald lives not a million miles away from Carrick, science fiction writer David Logan lives in Carrickfergus and for his sins Carrick is the first thing Colin Bateman sees from his chateau when his butler opens the curtain windows every morning. Several episodes of Game of Thrones have been shot at Red Hall in Carrickfergus (but none yet at Carrick castle which is a bit odd as its the best preserved castle in all of Ireland!) My favourite Irish female poet, Sinead Morrissey, lives just up the road from Carrick. And speaking of poets I've just found this letter (below) from Philip Larkin to Monica Jones talking about his lonely visit to Carrick in 1950 when - who knows - he could have seen my mum and dad out for a walk around the harbour. Larkin is on fine miserable form thoughout...

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What The Failure Of JK Rowling's Crime Novel Says About The State of Crime Fiction

As you are no doubt aware it came out earlier this week that JK Rowling released a crime novel in the Spring under the name Robert Galbraith. The Cuckoo's Calling failed pretty spectacularly: it garnered few reviews and although those reviews were generally praiseworthy they were not ecstatic and the book vanished quickly from the shelves, selling about 500 copies*. Now that JK Rowling has "accidentally" been revealed as the book's author I imagine that the novel will sell in the millions. I haven't read The Cuckoo's Calling and I don't think I will. I've tried 3 of Ms Rowling's books - 2 aimed at children and 1 aimed at adults - and they're just not my cup of tea. No harm to her but she just ain't my thing (I don't think my lack of interest is likely to trouble her sleep). I do have one friend who has read The Cuckoo's Calling and pronounced the book as "meh...not bad." But the quality of the actual novel isn't what interests me, what interests me is the fact that without a marketing campaign behind her** JK Rowling couldn't even sell 500 units* of a contemporary crime novel. No one can. As I've said on this blog many times marketing is the single most important factor in the success of a novel. The quality of the book is utterly irrelevant. If you are marketable (being young and pretty and/or connected) then you've got a chance, but if you are unmarketable you are doomed and your book will fail. There are 2 exceptions to this rule. 1) You might just get lucky. Occasionally a book will capture the Zeitgeist or get read by a powerful newspaper editor or a celebrity who will promote it. 2) You are from Scandinavia: if you are from Scandinavia you can write any old rubbish and the punters will buy it. If Ms Rowling had chosen as her pseudonym Robert Svensson and set the book in Stockholm she would have sold tens of thousands of copies instead of hundreds. Budding authors take note. 
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*Joan Smith in the Guardian says it sold 1500 copies which actually isn't bad for a 'debut' novel. I've also read elsewhere that the book sold 700 and 650 copies. You can't really get an audit on book sales until the years end because of returns and remainders but unfortunately now that the jig is up I don't think we're ever going to get an accurate accounting of the pre Rowling reveal numbers. Suffice to say that Cuckoo wasn't, ahem, flying off the shelves...
**Rowling's editor did learn who the book's real author was and thus the book did have suspiciously more marketing than was customary for a 'first' novel but without Rowling's actual name the book still died, although, as we shall no doubt see, the cuckoo will become a mighty phoenix...

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15 'Great' Big Books You Don't Have To Read

Life is short, you've got a lot to do and you still havent watched The Wire or read War and Peace. Well I haven't watched The Wire either but fortunately I have read everything so here's a quick primer on 15 'great' big books that I've read so that you don't have to.

1. Clarissa: It's unlikely that you'll chance on this by accident but if its on some kind of university course or book group reading list then run don't walk. This will take you hundreds of miserable hours to finish and at the end of it you will have no feeling of achievement, merely the aching knowledge that you wont get those hours back. Even Richardson's much shorter Pamela drags and Fielding's pisstake on Pamela, Shamela isn't the barrel of laughs you'd like it to be either.
2. The Mill On The Floss: You don't need to read this. The soppy ending is telegraphed miles ahead and its a dreary trudge to get there. If you're only going to read one George Eliot in this lifetime make it Middlemarch. 
3. Finnegan's Wake: A literary experiment or a longform poem, not a novel: read Ulysses or Dubliners or Portrait instead. 
4. Jude The Obscure: Thomas Hardy's books and prose style have not aged well. His poetry is terrific but I think you can easily skip the gloomy Jude The Obscure, The Return of the Native & Tess and maybe just read Far From The Madding Crowd which, spoiler alert, has a rare-for-Hardy happy-ish ending.  
5. The Brothers Karamazov: Controversial one this. I loved the Brothers K but if you're only ever going to read one Dostoyevsky read Crime And Punishment instead because its shorter, more focused and more contemporary. But hear me well: the five 5 big Dostoyevsky novels are all worth getting stuck into if you've got the time...
6. Little Dorrit: Read the first chapter that begins in a prison in Marseilles. Skip to the end. But definitely read this before Dombey and Son or The Old Curiosity Shop or Hard Times or the steadfastly unfunny Pickwick Papers. My preferred Dickens is the late 3 act masterpiece: Bleak House. 
7. Armadale: Wilkie Collins has been undergoing a revival of late but this isn't the one to start with. The Woman in White, No Name, The Moonstone - stick to those. 
8. From Here To Eternity: Interesting gay subtext, strange nihilistic ending, but James Jones's masterpiece is The Thin Red Line - go get that. Now. 
9. Infinite Jest: DFW's real genius was for writing essays. Read those and you won't regret a minute spent in the great man's company. 
10. War and Peace: The war bits will irritate those of you who like romance. The romance bits will irritate those of you in it for the war. The weird lengthy coda will annoy everyone. Look, I'll be honest I did like this book but if you're pressed for time read Anna Karenina or The Death of Ivan Ilyich or Hadji Murad. 
11. To The Lighthouse - Not really a fan of Woolf but I think Mrs Dalloway is better and sharper than Lighthouse. 
12. A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu: the first 30 pages will give you gist. Trust me.
13. The Harry Potter Series: I think we can all agree now that some kind of collective madness overcame the word in the late 90's when fully grown adults started wearing wizard hats and reading these books. No one over the age of 14 should really be tackling these.
14. Dune. I read all 6 Frank Herbert Dune books and a couple of knock offs written by his kid. What the hell was I thinking? Don't get sucked in. 
15. A Suitable Boy. Only joking. A Suitable Boy is terrific and I won't hear a word against it. I carried it around India with me for two months and it makes a useful stool, a source of emergency toilet or roll up paper and it could be a handy defensive weapon. Its perfect really except for the fact that . . . MAJOR SPOILER ALERT after 1300 pages she HIDDEN TEXT: doesn't actually marry the suitable boy. 

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TransAtlantic

My review of Colum McCann's TransAtlantic from last week's Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning Herald...

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Ask a random American to name the first person to fly across the Atlantic and they will probably tell you “Charles Lindbergh!” It’s something every school child knows and it is, of course, completely wrong. The chilly narcissist and Nazi sympathiser, Lindbergh, was the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic but it was the British aviators Alcock and Brown who were the first men to fly non-stop across the ocean in pursuit of a prize offered by The Daily Mail. If Colum McCann’s wonderful new collection of short stories TransAtlanticsells only a fraction of his National Book Award winning, Let The Great World Spin, then many more Americans are going to know about the daring adventures of Jack Alcock and Teddy Brown.

            TransAtlantic begins in 1919 with the two aviators contemplating their modified Vickers Vimy bomber “all wood and linen and wire,” months after the Great War has “concussed the world.” Dipping in and out of his account of their flight from Newfoundland to Ireland in all its icy, claustrophobic detail, McCann transports us back to the men’s boyhoods, their prisoner of war experiences, and the electric moment they meet at the Vickers factory: “Alcock and Brown took one look at each other and it was immediately understood that they both needed a clean slate. The obliteration of memory. The creation of a new moment; raw, dynamic, warless.”

            The second story in TransAtlantic takes place in Dublin in 1845 during the visit of the great African American writer and abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Douglass is feted everywhere for his eloquence and his talk of liberation, but the festive mood is tempered by the news drifting in from the countryside that the potato crop has failed.

            The action then skips forward 150 years to 1998 as a weary American politician, Senator George Mitchell, criss-crosses the Atlantic in a desperate attempt to bring to an end the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ which have been raging for nearly three decades. Suffering through verbose speeches and endless cups of tea in meetings with The Reverend Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, Mitchell flies to Washington to brief President Clinton, and then back to London to talk to Tony Blair. He wonders how he ever got involved in any of it. He only said he would go for a week and “before he knew it, it was a year, then two, then three. The shadows of Harland and Wolff falling over Belfast. The vague hope of helping to turn back the long blue iceberg, the deep underwater of Irish history.” McCann, in this passage, cleverly mentioning without mentioning Belfast’s most famous trans-Atlantic gift to the world, the RMS Titanic.  

            Parts 2 and 3 of TransAtlantic unpack and interweave these stories taking us from a bleak homesteader’s shack on the American prairie to a wedding in dour 1920’s Belfast, to the death of a young man during the ‘Troubles’, a victim of the conflict’s confusing and fissiparous alphabet soup of paramilitary groups. The book ends with the story of one letter carried in Teddy Brown’s mailbag that had lain un-opened for almost a hundred years.

            Colum McCann was born in Ireland in 1965 and moved to New York in the 1980’s. Like so many Irish writers before him exile has given McCann the space and perspective to write objectively about his homeland, and the most exhilarating sections of TransAtlantic are these forays into darkest Ulster or gentile Dublin on the cusp of chaotic industrial revolution and apocalyptic famine.

The thematically linked short story collection has been around for centuries but it was Italo Calvino’s If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller that showed how subversive and post-modern a genre it could be. TransAtlantic bears comparison with Calvino and with David Mitchell’s, Cloud Atlas, and while not quite as revolutionary or as dazzling as those masterpieces it is McCann’s most accessible and intellectually stimulating book since 2003’s Dancer.

 TransAtlanticcould so easily have fallen into cliché but by skilfully avoiding the Titanics and the Lindberghs and other obvious voyages “over the water” McCann has shone a light on adroit fictional archetypes and genuine heroes who deserve to be better known in America and across the globe.

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The Broken Road: A Time Of Gifts Part 3

Every month or so for the past 10 years I've been checking Amazon and Booklist to see when Patrick Leigh Fermor's A Time Of Gifts: Part 3 is coming out. When Leigh Fermor died in 2011 without finishing the book I despaired but then I began to hear rumours that actually the ms. was near completion and his publishers, the venerable John Murray, were putting the book together from this ms. and Fermor's notes. Yesterday my internet persistence paid off and with a great deal of exictement I saw on Amazon.co.uk, a listing that has appeared for TOG Pt3 to be called The Broken Road. The first part A Time Of Gifts was published in 1977, the follow up volume, Between The Woods And The Water, 10 years later so this has been the longest wait of all, but since Fermor is no longer with us we're lucky to have the book in any form. 
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Patrick Leigh Fermor was a war hero, a bon vivant, a wit, a polyglot, a belle lettrist, an impeccable prose stylist and, possibly, the last of the great English travel writers. In 1933 at the age of 19 after failing to get into university Leigh Fermor decided to travel on foot from London to Constantinople. He caught the ferry to Holland and began an epic journey, the first part of which he chronicled in A Time of Gifts. After making it to Constantinople he fell in love with Greece and travelled there until war broke out. He joined the SOE and worked behind enemy lines in Crete. His exploits as a commando were later made into the Michael Powell film Ill Met By Moonlight.
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Patrick Leigh Fermor is the man as far as I'm concerned. He loved languages, travel, scholarship, cultural differences and most of all people. He never accepted the surface judgement on anything or anyone and preferred to investigate things for himself. He had a keen eye for the country, for buildings and human beings. There's a new biography of Fermor by Artemis Cooper out now and if the name is unfamiliar to you, you can read the excellent Daily Telegraph obituary here.  If you haven't had a chance to read A Time of Gifts yet consider yourself lucky - you are in for a real treat. 

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