Lethem Binge

a repost from last year and, I guess, part of my ongoing influences series...
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If you're like me (and for your own sake I hope to God you're not) when you find a new author that you like you simply have to read everything by them that you can get your hands on, bingeing horribly on their words for weeks at a time until you just can't read anymore. I suppose Tolkien was the first author I consumed like that, devouring The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and even the largely unreadable Silmarillion in the Christmas holidays of 1979. A few years later I read the entire Raymond Chandler oeuvre in one week and when I discovered Cormac McCarthy a few years after that it was a wonderful sensation knowing that I was probably the only person in my high school that had heard of him. I had to hunt high and low to find copies of his books in Northern Ireland, but hunt I did and had Cormac McCarthy polished off in a fortnight. My Dostoyevsky binge in my first year of law school took me an entire term and my eccentric Melville completist phase took over a year (you try reading Clarel some time (or better yet don't)). As you get older you're unlikely to run into authors you haven't read before but when you do and you get one you like it can be just as fun. I wolfed through the David Mitchell collection in a week a couple of years back. Earlier this year I went on a mad dash through Michel Houllebecq (the hilarious Platform is the one to read there) and over the last month I've been reading the collected works of Jonathan Lethem. Like all the best novelists Lethem is very hit and miss. (Mediocre writers don't experiment and thus don't have epic failures or epic successes.) His early science fiction novels are ok as far as they go but his early mystery novel Motherless Brooklyn is unique, strange, funny and all together brilliant. It's the story of a detective with Tourettes trying to discover who knifed his boss and left him in a Dumpster in Brooklyn, but it's the characters and the style that really sing here not so much the plot. After Motherless Brooklyn Chronic City is a bit of a disappointment: a washed up child star and a pothead Rolling Stone essayist dick around the Upper East Side of Manhattan while the child star's astronaut fiance is stuck on the International Space Station. Lethem's true genius comes to the fore the narrower his focus gets and this is the case with his masterwork The Fortress of Solitude which is about life on one block in Brooklyn in the late 60's and 70's. It's clearly heavily autobiographical and although the blurb says that its the story of the friendship between two boys, one white and another black, it's actually about much more than that. It's a kind of history of the gentrification of Brooklyn and along the way we get tales about the music, fashions, street culture, stick ball games, comic books, graffiti styles, food, folk wisdom and life in general during the 70's. I loved Fortress of Solitude, it's such a rich, dense book, every page brimming with good stuff. It reminded me so much of my life on Coronation Road in Victoria Estate, Carrickfergus during the 70's - a street that was also full of kids playing arcane games with colourful eccentric characters by the score. Dean Street in Brooklyn is a mix of rich and poor, working class, middle class, artists, dreamers, blue collar city employees, with the added dimension of complex race politics. Lethem was lucky to have grown up in such a rich and fascinating environment for a writer and he's done justice to his source material.
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Too many novels these days don't have a good line in the whole book, Fortress has good lines in virtually every paragraph. Lethem doesn't push the prose, he just is patient enough to distill the sentences into economical nuggets of universal truth. There are a few negatives of course: the book is long and does outstay its welcome a little when we jump from the crazy energy of 70's Dean Street to the narrator's college years; I also wasn't completely convinced by the magical realism which I can't talk about at all without giving away major spoilers. But these are minor quibbles - the ending is terrific and like I say the first two thirds of the book is utterly brilliant. 
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This has been a great reading year for me and I'm happy to say that in the last few months I've read two modern American masterpieces, Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding and Jonathan Lethem's wonderful Fortress of Solitude.

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Another Sirens Review

Still don't have your copy of I Hear The Sirens In The Street, yet? Well, that's ok, it's certainly not for everyone (one lady recently dissed me on Good Reads complaining that I put too much thought into my prose style) but it is for some people and this is what Winsor Dobbin in last Sunday's Melbourne Age thinks: 

CRIME FICTION

I Hear the Sirens in the Street 

Adrian McKinty 

Serpent's Tail

Winsor Dobbin

The Melbourne Age, 26 May 2013

Northern Ireland. 1982. An uncomfortable place to be a policeman, let alone a Catholic one. Sean Duffy, articulate, urbane and stubborn as they come, is a detective in Protestant Carrickfergus at the height of the decades-long sectarian war that ripped Ulster apart: ''A shooting in Crossmaglen, a suspicious van in Cookstown, an incendiary attack in Lurgan - nothing that serious.''

As for settings, it doesn't get much bleaker: ''Army helicopters flew over the lough, sirens wailed in County Down, a distant thump-thump was the sound of mortars or explosions. The city was under a shroud of chimney smoke and the cinematographer, as always, was shooting in 8mm black and white. This was Belfast in the 14th year of the low-level civil war euphemistically known as The Troubles."

It's hard to be enthusiastic about your job when your first task each morning is to check your car for a mercury tilt bomb. Forget one morning and …

When the torso of American veteran and war hero Bill O'Rourke is found in a suitcase in an abandoned factory, it looks as if the IRA might have been up to its old tricks, but then it turns out the victim has been poisoned by a mixture containing the root of a rare plant.

Duffy's investigation leads him to a desperate aristocrat, a foxy widow and an American billionaire chancer (a real one, in this case) and us on a musical journey from Saint-Saens to Blondie.

You have to drink in descriptions such as: ''Belfast was not beautiful. It had been built on mudflats and without rock foundations nothing soared. Its architecture had been Victorian red brick utilitarian and sixties brutalism before both of those tropes had crashed headlong into the Troubles. A thousand car bombs later and what was left was surrounded by concrete walls, barbed wire and a steel security fence to keep the bombers out. ''

This is probably the best police thriller I've read over the past 12 months - lyrical, poetic and mean. ''I tried to think of a curse but Irish articulacy had clearly diminished since the days of Wilde and Yeats, Synge and Shaw. Three 'shites' and a ciggie, that was the best we could come up with in these diminished times,'' Duffy muses.

This book is atmospheric, beautifully paced and precisely constructed; one that is genuinely hard to put down.

Fans of Billingham, Rankin and Lehane and their ilk will not want to miss out on McKinty, who is now basing himself in Melbourne - where he will doubtless become a valuable addition to the brotherhood of wordsmiths in Australia.

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President Obama's Guide To Belfast

President Obama is coming to Belfast next month. They'll probably drag him to the usual tourist spots, but if I were him I'd try and see some more interesting sides of the city instead. These are the top 10 places I'd go to: 

1. The Crown Bar: yes it is a bit of a tourist trap, but it's still worth visiting. A pub owned and run by the National Trust, lit by gas lamps and with its original Victorian fittings. A visit here really is like stepping back in time. My name is carved under the table in one of the snugs.
2. The Titanic Museum: My dad and sister used to work at Harland and Wolff shipyard and I wish the company were still making ships rather than memorialising their least successful vessel ever...I was opposed to the whole concept of this place but a lot of people seem to like it so why not check it out. 
3. The Game of Thrones set: Since you're already at the Harland and Wolff shipyard why not visit the Game of Thrones set in the old Paint Hall. Castle Black, bits of forest, The Wall...it's all here.
4. Carrickfergus Castle: 12th century Norman Castle only 10 minutes from the centre of Belfast. This place has got quite a history having been attacked by the French, the Scots, the Irish, the Americans and even the Nazis. The castle is built on the rock where King Fergus Mor Mac Erc's ship ran aground in the seventh century which, naturally, gave Carrickfergus its name. The castle is only a few hundred yards from where I grew up but don't let that put you off. And if you're hungry while you're in Carrick do check out my sister's pub The Joymount Arms, a literal stone's throw away from the front gate, where they do a fabulous Irish Stew and the best pulled pint of Guinness in the town. 
5. Milltown Cemetery Belfast: Although a little macabre it's very interesting to walk around the gravestones of the Republican Plot.
6. Belfast City Hall: actually the city hall isn't that exciting but it's a well proportioned building in Baroque Revival style made with clean Portland stone. Stir up some controversy on your visit by asking why there are no flags flying...
7. Queens University: the alma mater of Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and their circle and the place where Philip Larkin lived and worked. A nice oasis of calm in the middle of the city.
8. No Alibis Bookshop: best bookshop in Ireland if you ask me. Easy to find on Botanic Avenue. Mention my name to the bald guy and you'll guy a 10% discount. Either that or you'll be unceremoniously booted out. 
9. HMS Caroline: the only surviving warship from the Battle of Jutland in 1916 which, remarkably, is still floating on an obscure pier in Belfast. Well worth a visit. 
10. Cyprus Avenue: about a 10 minute walk from the centre of Belfast, just off the Upper Newtownards Road, visit the street that helped inspire two of Van Morrison's most famous songs: Cyprus Avenue and Madame George.
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One thing that may be hard to resist is to take a Black Taxi Tour of the major paramilitary murals and scenes of violent incidents during the Troubles, but resist it you should; many tourists do this on their trip to Belfast but personally I find the whole idea a little bit vulgar.  

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Adrian McKinty, Parker Bilal and Paul French at the Adelaide Writers Festival

I'm blogging this (below) to coincide with the US release this week of I Hear The Sirens In The Street...And since I'm - rather embarrassingly - talking about me, I'd also like to point you in the direction of some reviews: Dana King reviewed Sirens in the New Mystery Reader, here. The lovely Connie Wilson reviewed and profiled me over at Yahoo Voices. Peter Dragovich (the Nerd of Noir) reviewed Sirens in Spinetingler Magazine, here. Finally I'm pretty excited that Steven Dougherty wrote a very sweet profile of me in The Wall Street Journal, here. It's all too easy for reviewers to cover the mainstream releases from the big publishing houses so I really appreciate the fact that Dana, Connie, Peter and Steven looked beyond the big publicity campaigns to seek out a peripheral voice like mine. Slainte.

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Harvey Pekar

(a repost from July 12, 2010, the day Harvey Pekar died and, I guess, part of my little series on influences that began with JG Ballard last week (I'm surprisingly worked up in this little obit, I'm not quite sure why...))

If its even a little bit true that our elite institutions like the BBC, The New York Times, Hollywood, The New Yorker etc. are dominated by middle and upper middle class white males perhaps it explains why we often get so many patronising and phony images of blue collar people in the arts and why artists like Harvey Pekar were so bitter. The establishment in England is largely run by men who went to private school; I expect (although I'm only guessing) that the East Coast establishment in the United States is also largely a closed club of elitist faux liberals who are, in fact, reactionary defenders of their hegemony. Pekar was an angry scourge of corporate America and elites of all shades and with the old boys network against him (famously he was banned from Letterman for badmouthing GE) it's a minor miracle that his epic vision of ordinariness became so well known. His multi volume comic book American Splendor was a paean to everyday life as an office drudge in that most hardluck of American cities, Cleveland. Pekar had no car chases or superheroes in his comic. He was the superhero himself, a superhero who got up in the morning, went to work through the cold, dealt with bureaucracy and tedium, his aches and pains, his petty humiliations and suffering...you know, life. Anomie, weltzschmerz, angst - these were Pekar's muses. But he tempered the misery with a rare intelligence, irony and humour. His parents spoke Yiddish at home and Pekar wrote firmly in the Mittel Europa Jewish tradition of Kafka and Sholem Aleichem, IB Singer and Bruno Schulz. 
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Like Jim Thompson and Charles Bukowski, Pekar was a poet of the mundane, an artist of the regular. He lived a blue collar life amongst blue collar people. I remember years ago watching that ghastly, false Clint Eastwood film Million Dollar Baby and being amazed by the conniving, cheap, unpleasant working class caricatures. That's how they really see us, I thought to myself. Harvey Pekar was the man we sent back into the lists to tell truth to power and speak for us. He was our knight errant in K Mart jeans and Payless Shoes. Pekar spoke for the losers, the failures, the grifters, the bums, the working poor, the unworking poor. He saw beauty where others saw only despair, he saw abominations where the powers that be saw slum clearance schemes and new developments. He loved old jazz and old records and old books. He liked talking to old people in coffee shops to hear what they had to say. He hated standing behind old ladies in lines at the supermarket. A lot of this made it into his comic books.

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When future generations want to know what life was like in the late twentieth century I don't think they'll bother with the Hollywood movies or the Pulitzer Prize winners or the hipsters writing clever stories in the New Yorker, no, I think they'll probably just read American Splendor instead.

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The Israeli Flags In Belfast

I've been reading Tony's Blair's memoir A Journey which isn't as masochistic an exercise as it sounds. It's an interesting book for Blair's take on his own life and it's helping me understand some of the British policies towards Ireland in the 1990's. Tony Blair seems to have been more interested in Ireland than any British Prime Minister since Gladstone: his maternal grandparents were from the County Donegal and he used to spend his summers in that very odd town, Rossnowlagh. The chapter in his memoir on the Irish Peace Process is full of interesting stuff including this little story:

On one visit to Northern Ireland I saw a remarkable demonstration of how the culture of opposition is enforced. Sinn Fein had invited the Palestinians to town. As I landed to stay overnight, I saw the Palestinian flag displayed along the Republican roads of Belfast to welcome their guests. Next day I drove through the town to leave and I saw arrayed along the Unionist enclaves the white and blue flags of Israel. How they got them and how they put them up overnight I'll never know but the moment those Palestinian flags went up Unionist solidarity with Israel was total.

The Israeli flags were always there of course; Blair just hadn't noticed them. There are a couple on the A2 as you drive into my home town of Carrickfergus and there also used to be several flying in Victoria Estate in Carrick (but I didn't see any when I was back home in January). I'm not sure that the reason for the Israeli flags is quite as oppositional as Blair says either. There's always been a feeling of solidarity between the Unionists of Northern Ireland and the Israelis. Perhaps it's something to do with the Bible which every good Presbyterian reads before bed time and the Biblical idea that just as the Jews have found their Promised Land in Canaan, so the wandering tribe of Ulster Scots has found its promised land in the north of Ireland. Blair is also mistaken about the link between the PLO and the IRA which has been longstanding (I remember the big "PLO-ETA-IRA One Struggle" mural on the Falls Road in the 1970's) and something of an embarrassment for American right wing IRA apologists such as Congressman Peter King (R, Long Island) and left wing IRA apologists such as the Kennedys.

The deeper link between Israel and Ireland of course is Albion Perfide: the successive British governments beginning with Lloyd-George's cabinet who made promises to the Jews and Arabs and to the Irish Protestants and Catholics that were mutually incompatible. The sight of competing Israeli and Palestinian flags in far flung Belfast is an odd but ultimately unsurprising commentary on the ironies and dualities of history in the aftermath of the British Empire. The fact that Tony Blair understood none of this, even in retrospect, isn't that surprising either: Like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair was always the brightest boy in the class, but he was never as observant or as perspicacious as he thought he was.

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JG Ballard

This is the first in what I hope will be a fun little series about writers and artists that I'm obsessed by. If I don't give up after this effort I'll do pieces on the writers Harvey Pekar, Philip K Dick, Michel Houellebecq & Iain Sinclair, comedians Stewart Lee & Louis CK and the directors Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Stanley Kubrick and David Lynch.

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According to historian Eric Hobsbawm the twentieth century really began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in his car in Sarajevo on June 28th 1914. It was a century dominated by assassinations, cars, aeroplanes, wars, mass production and American pop culture. For me the novelist who perhaps best captured the obsessions and imagery of the twentieth century was the Shanghai-born English novelist J G Ballard. Pigeon holed early as a science fiction writer, for a long time Ballard was not noticed by critics. He had his champions, of course, such as Martin Amis, but in general his books seldom broke through into the popular consciousness until the publication of Empire of the Sun in 1984.

Ballard’s early apocalyptic novels from the 1960's such as The Drowned World and The Crystal World cut against the mainstream science fiction of the time with their concern for the effects of disaster on protagonists’ psychological states. In 1973 Ballard’s most remarkable period as a novelist began with the publication of Crash, a book famously rejected by one London publisher’s reader with the phrase “This author is beyond psychiatric help - DO NOT PUBLISH.” Crash is the story of Vaughan, a television psychologist who is fixated by the sexual power of the car crash and who wishes to die in an auto-erotic accident with Elizabeth Taylor’s limousine. A damning indictment of, and also a love letter to, American celebrity culture, Crash reads as fresh, subversive and lively today as it did forty years ago. It prefigures the deaths of Princess Diana and Grace Kelly and recapitulates the deaths of Franz Ferdinand, JFK and screen siren Jayne Mansfield who was decapitated in the 1967 crash of her Buick Electra 225.

Ballard’s follow up to Crash was a retelling of the Robinson Crusoe story, Concrete Island, about a man who crashes his car and is trapped in it at the junction of many motorway flyovers and sliproads, living desperately on his concrete island and finally dying unseen by the thousands of commuters passing by on their way to work. High Rise (1975) is a funny, perverse and oddly believable novel about the collapse of civilisation’s norms within an apartment building. Satires on the English sense of decorum seldom get this ribald or excoriating.

For me, though, the climax of this period in Ballard’s evolution is the willfully strange, surrealistic novel The Unlimited Dream Company (1979) about a man who hijacks a small plane and crashes it into the Thames in the sleepy suburb of Shepparton. It’s never clear whether the pilot died in the crash or not but certainly some kind of apotheosis takes place and throughout the novel London is transformed into a seething, primordial, tropical city (similar in many ways to the London of The Drowned World) rich with sexual and avian imagery. The Anglo-Saxon world has generally been uncomfortable with the erotic and surreal in serious fiction but Dream Company is a book which treats both these tropes with the gravity they deserve and it may be Ballard’s finest work.

Empire of the Sun (1984) is a novelistic retelling of the young Jim Ballard’s imprisonment in a Japanese internment camp from 1942 - 1945. Although the story is told in conventional matter-of-fact prose the book throbs with Ballard’s usual obsessions: war, repressed sexual desire, cruelty, ruined cities, America, cars, flight. As a novel of people in extremis it is a psychological masterpiece as well as being probably the last great novel to come out of the direct experience of World War Two.

In the 1990's and early 2000's Ballard wrote more volumes of memoir and interesting novels about the growth of advertisement speak, business parks, motorways, urbanisation and the spread of pop culture into all walks of life. In 2009 Ballard died of prostate cancer and the British obituaries were respectful but somewhat restrained in their praise. Ballard had been hard to categorise and he was never completely embraced by the British establishment even after his success in Hollywood. It’s a shame because many of Ballard’s contemporaries have dated rather badly and their books read like peculiar period pieces, but Ballard has hardly dated at all. Like Philip K Dick his voice is that of the clear sighted Cassandra warning us of the perils and strange joys ahead. Ballard agreed with the poet Horace who famously said that “they change their skies but not their souls, those who run across the sea,” which is true even when the seas are black with pollution and the sky is a radioactive hell.

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