Category: Book Reviews

DEAD PEOPLE by EWART HUTTON

The cover describes this as a Glyn Capaldi mystery. It is in fact the second in the series. A friend reviewed the first book, “ Good People” for Writing .ie last year.

It’s not hard to see the series evolving with a common link in the book titles of “people” rather as Peter James has done with “dead” in his Roy Grace series.

Glyn Capaldi is a detective sergeant, exiled from Cardiff to Dinas in rural Wales after a cock-up in the city. The local crime is rural, not too serious until a pilot wind farm project uncovers a skeleton – minus head and hands. Further exploration leads to the discovery of two more skeletons similarly mutilated. The remains are dated to at least eight years earlier.

Then, close to the wind farm, the freshly interred body of a young woman is discovered, similarly mutilated. She is identified as a local teen who ran away from home two years earlier. Where has she been in the interim? Is her body connected to the skeletons.? The answer of course is yes – and the rest of the novel is given over to establishing the link and finding out the identity of the killer. On the way Capaldi has to take orders from his mortal enemy from Cardiff, DCI Kevin Fletcher and has time for a brief romantic interlude.

The book is well written in an easy style with some throwaway humorous lines and at least one neat twist. One reviewer thought the style reminiscent of R.D. Wingfield’s Jack Frost, which was something that had occurred to me after about 20 pages. Yet whereas Frost always seemed to get the better of Horn rimmed Harry, Fletcher seems to be his nemesis.

The only problem I had with the plot was that the later murders seemed pointless in the context of the earlier ones and were certainly less justifiable, even to the twisted mind of the murderer. (There was a somewhat analogous discordance in one of the last Wallender DVDs in which murder and cover –up are carried out to thwart a prosecution for far less serious crimes.)

All in all, though, the author has created a plausible likeable detective who is likely to feature in a number of sequels.

17/7

FEVER
MARY BETH KEANE
SIMON & SHUSTER 306 pages €15.99

Typhoid Mary was a figure in the popular folklore of the USA during the early decades of the Twentieth Century. A carrier of typhoid, to which she was immune, she worked as a cook and infected considerable numbers of people in New York, some of whom died. This novel tells her story, fleshing out the few stark known biographical details about her.

Mary Mallon was born in Cookstown in 1869 and emigrated to the USA in the mid-1880s. From 1900 on she worked as a cook for wealthy families in New York. In 1907, when members of several families for whom she had worked contracted typhoid, investigator George Soper established that typhoid had broken out virtually everywhere she had worked since 1900, with several deaths.

Soper was convinced Mary was a carrier and eventually, despite her angry protestations, she was tested and Soper’s theory confirmed. Using obscure provisions in the Greater New York Charter, the authorities held her in isolation for three years on tiny North Brother Island, off Manhattan, where a special cottage, 10 foot by 12, was built for her. She was released in 1910, on condition that she did not work again as a cook. By then, also, other carriers like Mary had been identified, but not locked up.

However, in 1915, after 27 patients in Sloane Maternity Hospital contracted typhoid, two dying, Mary was discovered there working as a cook under an assumed name. Public sympathy was conspicuous by its absence. “ Before was carelessness; this time it’s criminal.” She was again removed to the island, where, incredibly, she was kept until her death in 1938.

She appears to have been the only typhoid carrier isolated in this fashion without much in the way of due process. That she was a woman, working class, difficult, even that she was Irish are among the reasons popularly advanced for her treatment.

Mary Beth Keane has woven a skilful and largely sympathetic novel around the bare facts of Mary’s life, without pulling any punches about her often difficult personality. She has also painted a vivid portrait of tenement life for New York’s poor at the time. The description of North Brother Island, all 20 acres of it, during Mary’s first confinement is particularly memorable.

The book concentrates on the period 1900 – 1915 with the final 23 years meriting only a few pages. But then what was there to say about those last lonely decades marooned on a tiny island with only a TB hospital, a small leper colony and the medical staff, who commuted, for company.

April 013

CROCODILE TEARS
MARK O SULLIVAN
TRANSWORLD IRELAND 362 pages €13.99

“Crocodile Tears” is a clever play on the similarly named medical syndrome denoting a constantly weeping eye – an affliction of the book’s hero – and the sentiments expressed over the murder victim in this, the debut crime novel by Mark O’ Sullivan, already well known as an author of children’s books.

In it we meet Garda Detective Inspector Leo Woods and his assistant Helen Troy, he middle aged and with a facial disfigurement, she on her first assignment as a Detective Sergeant. Together they are investigating the murder in Howth of property tycoon Dermot Brennan.

The murder takes place in November 2010, with the economic recession in full spate. There are no lack of suspects: a disgruntled, and broke, home owner from one of Brennan’s ghost estates, former business associates, an estranged son as well as two unsavoury family acquaintances. The several possible motives make the detectives’ task more difficult.

Leo Woods is a memorable character, permanently disfigured, physically and psychologically, by Bell’s Palsy, who collects face masks as a way of coping with his affliction. He smokes, he snorts, he suffers bouts of malaria – souvenir of a tour of duty with the UN – and has an uneasy relationship with his superintendent, product of a past liaison with the latter’s wife. His methods are unorthodox but he gets results.

Helen Troy for her part has personal complications as she tries to establish herself in her new position, with a waster of a brother desperate to milk his share of their father’s estate, and an ex who won’t stop pestering her. The Garda team is completed by a bright and ambitious young policeman, a constant source of annoyance to Woods, together with an accident prone Garda with a crush on Troy.

Sub plots abound in what becomes an increasingly complicated mystery to unravel, with real and suspected liaisons involving a sculptor, an American gardener and the radical German owner of an animal shelter, all with a possible bearing on the murder. Throw in political interference, a holdall stuffed with cash in the victim’s house and a disappearing Latvian housemaid and there is more than sufficient to test the investigating team’s mettle. The story proceeds at a fast pace and includes several twists, some outside the box thinking and a mounting body count before the final denoument ,all the action compressed into a single week.

The book is well written, gritty, with dark humour and some striking metaphors and is a good addition to the Irish crime fiction corpus. The author’s agent has likened it to “The Killing.” I saw enough to compare it to Mankel’s “Wallender”, in the Henriksson T.V. series. A satisfying read. There should be a sequel. Woods deserves it.

April 2013

TO MOVE THE WORLD
JFK’S QUEST FOR PEACE
JEFFREY D. SACHS
THE BODLEY HEAD 250pp €21.45

Fifty years ago today John F. Kennedy left Ireland after a visit regarded by many here as a watershed moment. This book is a timely reminder that the Kennedy Presidency produced another watershed moment which nearly did for civilisation itself.

As the sub-title suggests, the book, written by the renowned economist and JFK admirer Jeffrey Sachs, is a study of Kennedy’s foreign policy initiatives in the wake of the defining moment of his Presidency, the Cuba Crisis of October 1962. It was a year that saw Kennedy extend an olive branch and shift superpower relations onto a more stable footing, highlighted by the successful conclusion of the partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of July 1963.

Kennedy’s Presidency can be divided into the periods before and after October 1962. When Kennedy became President U.S – Soviet relations were already at a low ebb , and JFK, to quote Sachs, came “out swinging… in three provocative ways”. He ordered a major build-up of nuclear weapons, where the US already had vast superiority, he sanctioned what would be a disastrous CIA inspired invasion of Cuba and he went ahead with plans to install nuclear missiles, pointed at the USSR, in Italy and Turkey.

While Kennedy learned from his early mistakes, in particular not to trust the CIA or the generals, the next year saw superpower relations lurch from bad to worse. A disastrous summit, the erection of the Berlin Wall and the resumption of atmospheric nuclear tests by both parties did not augur well, though Kennedy seems to have grasped early on the depth of Russian fears of German rearmament and of a possible German finger on NATO’S nuclear trigger.

Most of this was posturing but in the autumn of 1962 came a game changer. The beleaguered Soviet leader Khrushchev, under political pressure from military hard liners, facing also domestic economic problems, embarked on a plan to install medium range nuclear missiles in Cuba, ninety miles from the US mainland. For Khrushchev it would be a propaganda coup, relatively inexpensive, a response to U.S. aggression against an ally and would also give the U.S. a taste of the sense of encirclement that Russians felt with NATO missiles on their borders.

Many books have been written about the Crisis blaming either or both parties. That Khrushchev never intended war was irrelevant. That the move did not alter the strategic balance did not matter. There was an awful political reality. Kennedy could not ignore Khrushchev’s action. The military and the US right called for air strikes or invasion. To do nothing invited rapid impeachment, with unforeseeable consequences. It was, in Kennedy’s rueful words, “ the week I earn my salary”.

The superpowers were suddenly toe to toe . Kennedy, aware how the European powers had blundered into war in 1914 through miscalculation or misunderstanding was determined that this would not happen. He grounded U2 spy planes. He dismissed demands for military action ( the generals could not guarantee complete success) and opted instead for a naval blockade of Cuba, a strategy that bought some time for negotiations. The world watched, in horrified fascination, as numbers of Soviet ships neared Cuba. Nuclear war seemed inevitable.

At the nadir a U2 plane from Alaska strayed into Soviet air space. Soviet fighters were scrambled; the US planes sent to escort it back were authorised under their high alert status to fire nuclear warheads. As Sachs notes, “ by dumb luck the world survived. JFK’s comment: “ There’s always some dumb SOB who doesn’t get the word.” The glimpse of catastrophe proved sobering. Khrushchev, shaken, backed down and withdrew the missiles. Kennedy, shaken, gave a quid pro quo (on Turkey) and determined there would be no repetition.

The Crisis changed Kennedy fundamentally. Sachs focuses on JFK’s attempts during 1963 to forge a lasting détente. He reproduces four major speeches , including the address to the Dail, concentrating in particular on the seminal “Peace Speech” of June 10 to Columbia University, in which Kennedy challenged the US to re-examine its view of the Soviet Union.

Sensing a growing rapport with Khrushchev, he prepared to cut the Gordian knot on nuclear testing by suggesting a partial rather than full treaty ( excluding underground tests). The treaty banning atmospheric nuclear tests was concluded in July and successfully shepherded through the US Senate by 81 votes to 17 – a considerable feat – in September. It proved negotiation and agreement were possible. By then Kennedy, in his final UN speech, had attempted to prescribe further steps towards improving relations and eventually ending the Cold War. A “hot line” was agreed, as well as cultural exchanges and the sale of wheat to the USSR.

A new era beckoned. Then came Dallas. It was to be decades before the Cold War ended, a period that included nasty proxy wars, a continuing nuclear arms race and spells of superpower hostility and tension. Wasted years. Yet nothing ever approached those thirteen days when the fate of mankind was truly in the balance. Kennedy showed leadership when it mattered during and after October 1962. A lesson there for politicians today.

June27 2013

Dennis Lehane goes from strength to strength. He is best known for the film adaptation of his novel “Mystic River,” the Oscar – award winning and thought provoking film of several years back, and of the more recent “Shutter Island.” He has also won awards for his part in script writing for the cult HBO series “The Wire.”

The son of Irish parents from the last great wave of 50’s emigrants, he shot to fame in 1994 with “A Drink Before the War” the first of five highly acclaimed detective novels based in Boston, one of which, “Gone Baby gone” became yet another successful film .

Lehane has now embarked on a series of novels set around the Prohibition Era and after, of which “Live by Night” is the second; a third is promised. The earlier novel, “The Given Day” featured the Boston Police Strike of 1919 and events in Tulsa Oklahoma prior to the infamous race riots there in 1921 and was described by the New York Times as a majestic fiery epic. The story revolved around Boston police captain Thomas Coughlin and his family.

“ Live by Night” again features the Coughlins, with the third son Joseph as the central character. Joseph is a career gangster, surviving hard time in jail, to emerge and work with members of the Italian and Irish mobs in Boston and then in Tampa during Prohibition, where he masterminds the supply of liquor, including Cuban rum, north to New England. His first Irish gangster boss sets the scene early on, telling Joseph in his casino that “the people we serve…they visit the night. But we live in it. They rent what we own.”

Later, post Prohibition, Joe relocates to Cuba, where much hope is being invested in a reforming Colonel Batista who kicked out the previous dictator (that same Batista whose corrupt regime was ousted in 1959 by Castro).

There’s violence in plenty, but this is counterbalanced by love stories, one unrequited, a complex father-son relationship and an emerging different dimension to Joseph, that of local philanthropy, both in Tampa and Cuba.

The work transcends the mere gangster or crime novel and has been receiving rapturous reviews, some critics comparing Lehane with Steinbeck and Chandler and describing him as among the most accomplished and versatile American novelists. The characters are finely drawn, the era is superbly recreated with great attention paid to the historical detail.

The broader social issues of the time are explored, particularly in the portrayal of 1920’s Tampa and the impact of the Great Depression, with ten thousand bank failures and thirteen million jobs lost in less time than our own recession. Race relations loom large, particularly in Tampa’s mixed ghetto of Ybor City, where Cubans, African –Americans, and Italians, rich and poor, are thrown together, while outside, the local whites and the Klan ( providing muscle) stare balefully on.

The book is a great read and can stand alone or as part of what is shaping up to be a major historical saga

MIXED BLESSINGS

Peter Somerville-Large is best known for his non-fiction books on Ireland, including “Dublin, Irish Eccentrics, The Grand Irish Tour, The Coast of West Cork.” He is now in his eighties and lives in Kilkenny. In this elegant novel he charts the life of Paul Blake-Willoughby, born into the Anglo-Irish Ascendency in 1929, product of a mixed marriage, with an aristocratic Catholic soldier father and an eccentric staunchly Protestant mother.

Surprisingly, in the era of Ne Temere, the parents agree to let Paul choose his faith. Much of the early part of the story centres on the sometimes hilarious pitches made by both churches to recruit him. At one point a priest ponders bringing in the heavy artillery of John Charles McQuaid. Enough said. Here, as elsewhere, there is a serious side to the author’s whimsical and gentle approach.

Take elements of ”The Irish R.M.”, “Brideshead Revisited” and P.G. Wodehouse and set them against the background of De Valera’s Ireland. It is all there, the 1940s and 50s, in evocative detail, or just hinted at. Ireland during World War Two; the rationing, the lack of basics, the mounds of turf in the Phoenix Park, cars modified to run on charcoal. Paul’s boarding school, with its privations, bullying and caste system will strike a chord with many. There are intimations too of sexual abuse, while the Magdalen homes are treated as a source of cheap domestic labour.

Paul’s big house, a decaying mansion too expensive to repair and renovate, is portrayed in all its awfulness: too cold to heat, a leaking roof and infested with vermin. The family share it with servants and a melange of dogs, cats and a parrot. The servants come and go, knowing their place, for class distinctions are paramount, with one hilarious exception. Friendships are confined to persons of similar class, which in the book’s case include some memorable and eccentric personalities, none more so than Paul’s mother.

The story explores themes of snobbery, bigotry and infidelity and is peppered with outrageous jokes, remarks and occurrences. The author’s eye is sympathetic but incisive. Splendid and highly recommended.

BOOKS TO DIE FOR

This is a delicious book, a veritable Wisden of Crime Fiction. The megastar of Irish Crime Writing, John Connolly, has teamed up with one of the rising stars, Declan Burke, to edit an anthology which brings together over 100 of the world’s best crime and mystery writers to nominate and write about their favourite book in the genre. The result is a hefty tome – 700 plus pages – that entertains, educates and stimulates.

The list of  contributors constitutes virtually a roll-call of today’s top mystery writers who overwhelmingly and enthusiastically  agreed  to participate by choosing  just one work by one author of particular importance to them.  Their choices  range from Poe to the present , covering  major and not so well known artists in the field, presented and analysed with a fresh eye. Some subjects get two contributions (Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Dickens), while some of the contributors are themselves the subject of articles (Rankin, Lehane, Pelecanos, Leonard, Connelly)!

All the types and themes of crime and mystery fiction past and present are represented including the eccentric high IQ and wealthy amateur sleuths, solving mysteries which the plodding police cannot, as well as the hard-boiled private eyes at the coal face of street crime.  Two thirds of the contributions cover the more cerebral and reflective authors and works of the last half century.

We get fascinating insights into the minds of the contributors, how they think, what influences them, even what inspired them to write. The essays are deep and informative, with fresh modern appraisals of both work and author. For the reader there is the added bonus that, as the editors point out, where a favourite author is the subject of an essay, chances are that the reader will enjoy the work of the essayist also. The result, not just one but two lists of books and authors to be read.

The editors also acknowledge that there will always be some to take issue with what is not there or even the particular book chosen from an author’s work. Take Raymond Chandler, where neither The Big Sleep nor The Long Goodbye make the cut, with Michael Connelly (a big Chandler fan) focussing instead on The Little Sister, because that book was more personal to him. Many of the contributions are in similar vein, inviting the reader to explore the designated author more thoroughly.

The selection is mouth-watering. The editors each have two choices, with  John Connolly selecting Michael Connelly’s The Black Echo, featuring Harry Bosch, and Ross Macdonald’s The Chill, with his  hero Lew Archer,  the subject of an incisive and sensitive biographical essay. Declan Burke chooses Liam O Flaherty’s The Assassin, a much underrated novel, and George Pelecanos’ ( the Washington D.C. writer and co-producer of “The Wire”)The Big Blowdown, ” a crime novel that can make you cry.”

Among the other Irish contributors, John Banville picks Simenon, though not a Maigret, but rather one from the darker side of the oeuvres, “Act of Passion,”  possibly the only Simenon work to be written in the first person. Colin Bateman picks on  one of Robert  Parker’s Spenser novels, explaining that when he wrote Divorcing Jack, Spenser was the model, Parker the style. Tana French writes about Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and its strong influences on her, with the characters driving the plot, rather than vice versa. Eoin Colfer picks The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips, dubbing it a comedy classic and  genuinely hilarious as well as excellent crime noir.

Many British writers stick with their own. Peter Robinson picks Ruth Rendell, Minette Walters Du Maurier, Val McDermid Reginald Hill and Ian Rankin (Black and Blue chosen by Brian McGilloway) Derek Raymond. Mark Billingham revisits The Maltese Falcon, what many consider the greatest mystery novel ever,  cautioning against the iconic screen portrayal by Bogart( Houston’s preferred choice, George Raft,  far closer to Hammett’s original Sam Spade). Elmore Leonard picks The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which he describes as a revelation. Leonard, famous for his dialogue, learned from Higgins and considers the book “makes The Maltese Falcon read like Nancy Drew.” Praise indeed.

Jo Nesbo chooses Jim Thompson’s Pop. 1280, reflecting on the author’s sad decline as well as paying tribute to his best work, an influence on  Nesbo’s own.  Kathy Reichs  picks The Silence of the Lambs, inter alia because of the use of a strong woman as the lead. This was not, though, the landmark Reichs asserts. Sara Paretsky launched  V.I. Washarski , her iconic and feisty Chicago detective in 1982, a giant leap in the development of fictional  female detectives. Indemnity Only and Toxic Shock are subjects in the book, while Sara herself contributes a superb essay on Dickens’ Bleak House, focussing on his social conscience and compassion for the poor.

Just a taster.  No need to look any further for a Christmas present, though beware,  this is a book that fans will rush to acquire.

September 2012

Jon Mcgregor: This Isn’t the Sort of Thing that Happens to Someone like You

1. Jon McGregor is  a young (36), highly thought of British writer, author of three successful and critically acclaimed novels, the first of which, “If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things” was long listed for the Booker Prize before winning the Betty Trask and a Somerset Maugham Award.
2. This is his first short story collection. Most of the 30 have been published before. “Wires” was the runner up for the 2011 BBC National Short Story Award; “ If It Keeps on Raining” was runner up in 2010; an early version of “In Winter, the Sky” appeared in Granta magazine in 2002, “Which reminded her, Later” in Granta in 2007.
3. In April 2010, interestingly, he wrote a lengthy piece, “A Long Way Back”, for the Guardian on a TV film about a trip back to Ireland by a group of elderly homeless Irish emigrants  resident in Nottingham.
4. The stories vary widely in length from thirty pages to one line. The unifying element is Lincolnshire, one of England’s largest counties,  located on the east coast,  rural, agricultural and sparsely populated. It’s  quite flat topography and proneness  to flooding  present some distinctive  landscapes and skyscapes.
5. Some of the stories reflect  the title, i.e. something unusual or unexpected happening to ordinary people. Others concern or involve people who are , in some way, not  ordinary. There are examples of eccentricity, alienation, violence (actual and hinted at), helplessness and regret. Flooding occurs as a theme in several stories, both the threat and the result. Three stories in particular stand apart from the rest, in language and tone, either directly or indirectly pointing  to a terrible event , a war or occurrence of apocalyptic magnitude.
6.  Well worth looking at also are two pieces on You Tube, one featuring an interview with the author, the other  him reading  one of the gems in the book, “We were Just Driving Around.” His website is also quite entertaining and his piece on the book  features some interactive elements (maps, photos of the stories’ locations).

Some Analysis and Comments

1.  The shortest story, “Fleeing Complexity” comprises one line: “The fire spread quicker than the little bastard was expecting.” Per the author, it is about a boy setting fire to a barn, and hints at unforeseen and possibly tragic consequences. Understating, or just hinting at events never touched on  characterises a number of the stories.
2. “Wires” has been the subject of much critical acclaim. A sugar beet crashes through the windscreen of a young woman’s car on the motorway. She reaches the hard shoulder where two apparent Good Samaritan motorists in a battered blue van tell her what a narrow escape she has had and tell her they have phoned the police. She is persuaded to leave the car and cross the barrier and climb the embankment (“it’s safer”). While waiting she broods on her relationship with her boyfriend, finally deciding to end it and moves to retrieve her phone from the car. But her arm is held tight by one of the two men, while the other waits, looking tense, beside some nearby trees. The sense of menace is palpable.
3. “If It keeps on Raining” is also highly regarded. An eccentric lives on a river bank. He is obsessed with the prospect of flooding, whether from the river  after rain or after a biblical deluge which never stops. He has survivalist aspirations and is building a tree house and plans a raft in preparation for the coming catastrophe. He is the laughing stock of the boat club, at the recollection of which he shows flashes of an inner brooding violence. But he remains convinced in his belief of what is coming. A much shorter story in the collection, “The Cleaning,” deals with the practical aspect of attempting to clean up after a major flood.
4. “In Winter The Sky” – my personal favourite – has been rewritten for the book. A young farmer, decades before, accidentally knocked down and killed a pedestrian late at night. He buried the body, which is not found for years. After it is discovered, he has a conversation with his wife. He tells her that “They needed to bring things out into the open and deal with the consequences and stop trying to hide what it was doing to them both.”

Thus the narrative, which occupies the left hand pages of the story. But the facing pages consist of poems – her poems – with language scored out (final drafts  or finished). As well as presenting highly evocative and haunting images of  rural Lincolnshire, they flesh out the story. They form a continuous whole with phrases lifted from or associated with the facing narrative. We learn that he blames her – it would not have happened had he not been returning from a date with  her – that  they are haunted by his memory of the man’s arms lifted skyward when he was hit, that the event has corroded their relationship.

The language of the  poems merits mention. It is strong, lyrical, describing the sky, seriatim, in  different seasons, the landscape, the topography, some waterway names, the effects of flooding (again the flood theme), and the sky’s aspect during different times of the day. The final image is of “the great ship of Ely Cathedral just visible across the water.”

1. “Which reminded her, Later”, and its associated story, “Years of This, Now” tell of a vicar’s wife, frustrated in her own career and stuck with the downside of her husband’s job (vocation). A sponging house “guest” marks a type of watershed. When, in the second story, the vicar has suffered a  major stroke, the wife, with the prospect before her of decades as a carer, decides – she is off.
2. Several stories feature people who are not ordinary. A woman seeks her father’s coat in a lost property office, but there is something strange about her, in “She was looking for this Coat”. An oddball has a phobia about finding a chick in an egg in the story of the same name. It eventually costs him his marriage. In “French Tea” another eccentric  sits in a café babbling senselessly about how to make, or not make, a good cup of tea.
3. Some stories feature bereavement, actual and threatened. “That colour” concerns someone coming to terms with his partner’s creeping Alzheimers. In “Airshow” a widowed grandfather, coming from the funeral, is riven and distracted by his loss. In ”The Singing” a bereaved woman is coming to terms with the hollow emptiness of life, “with so many things to be done and no one now to do them for.” In “Vessel “ a newly widowed woman faces unwanted and disturbing approaches from a male acquaintance. In the grimly repetitive “The Remains” a man is haunted by the failure to locate the long missing body of his loved one, wife, partner or daughter. Her remains “have yet to be found”.
4. Loneliness is explored, passim.  In “Close” a spinster has a near miss with romance on holiday in Japan –or was it all just in the mind? In “Looking up Vagina” a lonely schoolboy, who doesn’t fit in and is bullied in consequence, is perceptive enough to realise (or deluded enough to fantasize)that his destiny is above and beyond his yobbish schoolmates. In “New York” the lonely and alienated existence of migrant workers everywhere is touched on through an account of migrant agricultural labourers from Eastern Europe– a current feature in rural England – awaiting collection after work.
5. Violence, in different manifestations, is another recurring theme. “Keeping Watch over the Sheep” features an estranged father trying to access the nativity play featuring his young daughter. He is a known and marked man. Led away in handcuffs, he is unreconciled to reality. He cannot understand why his daughter is reduced to tears by his antics or where his marriage went wrong, though he does concede that “breaking things had never helped.”
6. In “Dig a Hole” – a two paragraph story – there has beenviolence and a man has been hurt. In “Thoughtful”, another two paragraph story, there is violence aggravated by drink. In “What happened to Mr Davison”, something serious, perhaps tragic, has happened to a landowner after four people took the law into their own hands; a mechanical digger is involved. While chastened by the outcome, the four do not regret their original action.
7. “We Wave and Call” encapsulates the book’s title. Truly this isn’t the sort of thing that happens to someone like the person featured. A youth is on holiday, possibly in Croatia, with friends, and is swimming and snorkelling. His friends want to leave, but he is enjoying the warm sea, just floating, and tells them he will catch up in a minute. He continues to soak up the sun lazily. Then he realises time has passed, and sets out for shore. But the current has carried him. It is much further than he thought. He begins to panic, but reassures himself that he can make it and thinks about his friends, the apartment, drinking beer, and how he will describe his close shave to those back in England. Meanwhile , and despite his efforts, he is drifting farther away, towards the next bay; “sometimes it happens like this.”
8. “I’ll buy you a Shovel” sees two ex-cons, casually employed, plot and carry out a minor theft  on the fringe of a wedding party. One of the longest stories in the book, we are introduced to several of the pair’s traits and life history, with minor acts of physical violence carried out on each other, fuelled by drink. An undertone of sexual menace obtains (one at least appears a sexual predator). The action takes place over a week in which RAF jets are repeatedly using the nearby sands for bombing practice, growing in intensity, with,  in consequence, the two judging the big one to be imminent.
9. Three stories are markedly different from the rest. Do they reflect the author’s political views? They  concern war or civil strife or preparations for or the aftermath of an apocalyptic event of some sort. There have already been hints elsewhere , as in  “Shovel”  “I remember there was a hill”, a very short story, sets the scene. A small village seems deserted, devoid of life, as if in the wake of a neutron bomb. The public phone rings. It is answered. Shortly afterwards two planes fly over. An explosion is heard, then silence.
10. “The Last Ditch” is difficult to read. It is very much tongue-in cheek and is not, properly speaking, a story at all. It is, rather, couched as a briefing note for an in-house meeting  of military/intelligence officials tasked with  planning for  self-sustaining mini communities to withstand/survive  major societal breakdown. The note goes into considerable and quite boring detail regarding defences, natural and otherwise, food, waste disposal, energy, medicines, reserves and weaponry.

There are sections also on the type of outside threat such a community could  anticipate as well as one entitled, delicately “Managed Exit”, i.e. the liquidation, voluntary or otherwise, of the community  to avoid capture, enslavement,  torture, rape and extraction of vital information. “Any proposed method must be a) quick, b)low pain/distress where possible, c) non-rescindable, d) enforceable/enactable by others if req.” An addendum makes clear that the controller of the briefing note’s  author is sceptical of much of its content, particularly the last piece,  while taking on board much of the basic intelligence information provided.

The cause of societal breakdown is left unsaid but McGregor points obliquely at an energy supply crisis or some outcome of acute global warming. It is sobering to reflect that someone, somewhere, in the real world may be working on plans along these lines.

1. In the same vein, but an altogether much stronger piece is “Supplementary Notes to the Testimony.” Here Armageddon of some form has taken place, with Britain referred to as “the former UK” and  tracts of  south east England depopulated. Large numbers of British refugees have been living on the Continent, some, ironically – and obviously intentionally placed by the author – in Sangatte, including the “Appellants” who are giving the testimony. After five years in Sangatte they spent eight or nine years in “ a series of displaced persons camps in the Netherlands” before being expelled as “ the draft peace agreement was in force.” The “Notes” – and they are just that – suggest some of the means and routes for refugees to return to the Lincolnshire area, an area much changed in the aftermath of events.
2. The last piece in the book is entitled “Memorial Stone”. It consists solely of lists of place names, presumably in Lincolnshire, grouped by ending. Thus we have places ending in “well”, “ham”, “Bank”, “Steeping”, “ton”, “field”, “worth” grouped. These are followed by “Moore”, “Marsh”, “by”, “try”, “thorpe”, “gate”, “dyke”, “Leake”, “beck”, ”brook”, “bridge”, “ford”, “Ferry”. There is then a group of place names containing the name of a saint; the final two sections are of places ending in “End” and some others. The piece seems designed to be read aloud – there is an attraction to hearing the names read out. I am reminded a little of Seamus Heaney’s “Weather Forecast” poem.
3. Finally, a little gem. “We Were Just Driving Around.” (The clip of the author reading the story is available on You Tube.) A car with young people is driving around,  just driving around. Josh, the driver, is romancing about his plans for a shop making gourmet snacks. He gets slightly carried away trying to answer Tom’s practical objections to locating a business in a rural area (customer base, etc.). The music is loud; his voice is loud. They jolt over a small bridge, driving fast. Josh has a high pitched laugh and the decibel level in the car goes up.  Amanda asks Josh to slow down a bit. “He turned round to ask what she’d said so that must have been how come he never saw the corner.”

Assessment

1. There is a certain organic unity about the book, diverse as the stories are. It should sell on the quality of the stories alone. Jon McGregor is clearly a very talented young writer about  whom we will hear much more  He has an older and wiser head on his shoulders than his years. His prose, his eye, his ear are all good. This book will cement his reputation.
2. A good read? Certainly. Enjoyable? Definitely. A page turner?  Certainly the reader’s interest is held. Would I buy it? Yes indeed.

S.F.

23/2

YANKEE DOODLES

Dennis Kennedy, former deputy editor and long-time columnist with the Irish Times, was one of fifteen  journalists chosen to visit the USA in 1963, courtesy of the World Press Institute in Minnesota . Almost 50 years later he has published his reminiscences.

The one year fellowship, designed to increase awareness of the USA among foreign journalists, included a period at Macalester College in Minnesota, a spell working for the Newark News, an extended tour of 20 states and ended with the 1964 Republican Convention which nominated Barry  Goldwater.

The group’s well-connected hosts  also provided icing on the cake  in  the form of corporate access at a high level, including meetings and briefings with major figures from the Sixties, including the owner and founder of Time Magazine (Henry Luce) and Readers’ Digest,  Senators Fulbright and McCarthy, Willy Brandt (then Mayor of Cold War hot spot West Berlin)and Billy Graham.  Governor Wallace of Alabama, segregationist hero,  reminisced  to the Japanese journalist in the group about his part in the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945.

It was a memorable, indeed seminal  year. When he arrived in August, JFK was in the White House  and Martin Luther King had just made his famous “I have a dream” speech. Then came the bombshell of Dallas. Amazingly, their hosts got  the group  to Washington, flown on 3 M’s corporate plane, into the White House to view the President’s coffin and to witness the funeral, and even into the empty Oval Office.  Looking back, the author remarks not only on the assassination but on the smooth transfer of power and the first months of the new President, LBJ, who proved far more than the journeyman politician he had appeared.

The book contains a number of  vignettes covering the main events and places visited by Dennis, some amusing, some amazing, and offers a short time capsule of  the USA before  Civil Rights and Vietnam. In Newark he was house guest of  James Joyce and Joyce Joyce, proud Irish Americans. Particularly striking is his account of the US South and the “profoundly shocking” blinkered attitudes on race he encountered among some of the whites he met –many of whom denied there was any racial problem whatever in the South.  The world he describes, including a “Whites Only” municipal drinking fountain in Montgomery,  was  portrayed vividly recently in the film “The Help.”

A different era, certainly. All fifteen journalists were male, unthinkable today. By the end, the USA, though English speaking,  had become for the author “a foreign country with which I had a unique bond.” A sequel, offering comparison based on a return visit today, would  be fascinating.

A gentle book by a gentleman.

July 2012

The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Volume 4  The Passage of Power, by Robert Caro

The fourth volume of Robert Caro’s monumental work  “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” is above all the story of the relationship between Johnson and the Kennedys. The book covers the years from 1958 to the end of 1963 and includes Johnson’s 1960 Presidential bid, his acceptance of and unhappy tenure in the Vice Presidency under JFK  and his sudden elevation to the position he lusted after, courtesy of an assassin’s bullets. There is also an extended coda on the first, astonishing, seven weeks of  his presidency.

Lyndon Johnson will  be remembered chiefly for the disastrous war in Vietnam and for succeeding the assassinated President Kennedy. The photo of him being sworn in on Air Force One with Jackie Kennedy  beside him wearing the suit stained with her husband’s blood, is one of the images of the 20^th Century.

Yet there was much more to Johnson.  Arguably, without the monumental civil rights legislation which Johnson, a Southerner,  forced through Congress in 1964, Barack Obama would not now be President. He set up  Medicare, a social landmark, and set out to create what he termed the “Great Society”, involving the eradication of poverty in the USA. This idea foundered on the failure and the cost of Vietnam and he left office a broken man.  Though personally flawed, he remains a  significant figure in US politics.

The destinies of Johnson and the Kennedys became inextricably mixed from 1960 on, though  Johnson and Bobby had actually clashed as early as 1953 and loathed each other. This dislike morphed into lifelong enmity after Bobby’s strenuous attempts to prevent Johnson accepting  JFK’s surprise offer of running mate at the 1960 Democratic convention.

For Johnson, defeated by Kennedy for the nomination,  the decision to accept seemed a win-win one.  While he knew that the Vice Presidency would be minor compared to his role as Senate Majority Leader,  considered by many to be the second most powerful in the USA after the President, he entertained the illusion, wrongly, that he would be able to carve out a meaningful role  as Vice President.  Cynically, he also knew that no southerner had been elected President since 1848 and was well aware of the odds of a Vice President succeeding,  given that one in four US Presidents since Lincoln had died in office or been assassinated!

For the Kennedys also the marriage of convenience offered much.   Caro suggests that JFK never wavered in wanting Johnson, knowing Texas’ 24 electoral votes would be crucial. In retrospect it is doubtful whether Kennedy could have won without Johnson. He was certainly instrumental in carrying Texas (amid suspicions of vote fraud)  and several other key southern states, and helped neutralise much anti – Catholic sentiment.  Bobby’s attempts to keep Johnson off the ticket remain puzzling – the northern Democratic party bosses could live with him – and Caro places this as the origin of one of the great political blood feuds of the century.  Johnson carried his hatred of Bobby  to the grave, hectoring interviewers and well-wishers in his retirement. The feeling was reciprocated.

Johnson endured  years of frustration and powerlessness as Vice President. Derided by the Kennedys and their  White House team ( who mockingly  dubbed him Rufus Cornpone), he was effectively excluded from any  decision making and was reduced to attempting to ingratiate himself by sending gifts to the President, including cattle from his farm and a pony for Caroline. Such, of course, had traditionally been the lot of the Vice President, but Johnson bore the slights badly.

In the defining moment of  the Kennedy Presidency before Dallas – the Cuba Crisis –  Johnson, as a member of the National Security Council, was party to much of the deliberations but initially contributed little. As the Crisis developed, with Bobby insisting on restraint and seeking a diplomatic solution, Johnson’s hawkish views, and his ability to persuade and cajole others, particularly when  the Kennedys were not present, became more pronounced. The Crisis was resolved peacefully and Johnson’s views ignored. Afterwards President Kennedy named three men whom he would  be happy to see succeed him as President; Johnson was not among them.

Then came Dallas, which, with its aftermath,  comprises half the book. By then Johnson was almost an irrelevance; rumours circulated that  he would be dropped from the ticket in 1964. The book has little new to add beyond detailing how rapidly, ruthlessly and  comprehensively Johnson took over. There was the immediate, brutal, phone call to Bobby, the insistence on taking the oath of office before leaving Dallas and that Jackie be beside him when he was sworn in. The domineering  master of the Senate, absent for three years, was back suddenly in a new role. Bobby Kennedy was marginalised malevolently. Caro spares no detail.

Over the next seven weeks there followed the elaboration of  a strategy to unblock Congressional opposition to Kennedy’s reform legislation, stalled and buried deep in Committees. Johnson cleverly used the tactic of JFK’s martyrdom to push matters, side-lining  and silencing Bobby as he did so.  Cautioned about moving too quickly on Civil Rights and other reforms, described to him by his fellow southern advisers  as lost causes, Johnson snarled “What the hell’s the Presidency for?”  Caro describes this as his finest hour. Bobby’s assessment of him was “formidable but flawed, powerful but dangerous”. The years to come bore that out.  Over Vietnam, with no one to rein him in, the outcome was disaster.

A superb, standalone study.