On the opening page of this emotionally overwhelming novel, Lilly Bere, age eighty-nine, begins the grand story of her seemingly insignificant life, a story in which she speaks directly from her heart, begging to know “How can I get along without Bill?” her grandson who has just died following the First Gulf War in Kuwait (1990 – 1991). Each of the next sixteen chapters is one more numbered day “without Bill,” and we soon learn through flashbacks that Lilly and her family have suffered deaths connected to three earlier wars – the Great War (1914 – 1918), the Irish War for Independence (1919 – 1921), and Vietnam (ca.1965 – 1975). Though all the men she loved did not necessarily die in combat, their deaths were all inescapably war related, and Lilly becomes, in many ways, the prototypically devastated wife of Tadg Bere (in the Irish Revolution), sister of Willie Dunne (the Great War recruit featured in The Secret Scripture), mother of Ed (in Vietnam), and grandmother of Bill (in Kuwait), a mourner who is equally a victim of the wars that have taken her men. One of the best novels I have read all year.
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In his fourth novel featuring Dr. Quirke, a Dublin pathologist at the Hospital of the Holy Family with unusual insights into forensics, Booker Prize-winning author John Banville, writing as “Benjamin Black,” reveals yet another grim side of Dublin life in the early 1950s. When Dublin Detective Inspector Hackett investigates the gruesome death of “Diamond Dick” Jewell, a wealthy man whose head had been blown off in what was thought to be a suicide, he calls Quirke, who has helped him on several occasions in the past and who agrees that this death had to have been murder. “Few outside the family circle and few inside it, either, considered his demise a cause for sorrow.” As Hackett investigates, he finds himself relying on Quirke more and more, since Quirke has access to the elite of Dublin society, people who know all the powerbrokers in the business community, in politics and the church, and on both sides of the law. Whom you know is more important than legal fine points, and Hackett trusts Quirke to provide him with information he might not otherwise obtain.
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From the time of Irish “independence,” recognized by treaty between Ireland and Britain in 1922, to the Good Friday Accords of 1998, the island has suffered from sectarian violence. Even in recent years, after the “Peace” agreement, many Republicans, nearly all of them Catholic, and including the IRA and Sinn Fein, continue to want a united Ireland and the return of the six northern counties which have been ruled by Britain for eight-five years. Ardent Loyalists, mostly Protestants who support British rule and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, want to protect their minority interests by remaining in control in their limited area of the island. Set in Belfast in November and December of 1979, this novel by Louise Dean focuses on the violence which reached its irrational peak at that time, and she holds back nothing in describing the brutality and tit-for-tat horrors in which both sides engaged.
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Where else but Dublin might you find a James Joyce scholar dead, and Det. Supt. Peter McGarr and the Murder Squad of the Garda Siochana reading Ulysses, and occasionally Samuel Beckett, in an effort to understand what led to his death? This is, no doubt, the only murder mystery ever written which takes so seriously the conflict between James Joyce, who was committed to writing “novels of competence,” and Samuel Beckett, who believed totally in “the novel of incompetence,” a conflict which also involved the literature scholars and critics at Trinity College who were as partisan as the two novelists. As esoteric as this sounds, author Bartholomew Gill has a field day here, creating characters who do more than just live and breathe—they live riotously, get roaring drunk, have wild and sometimes hilarious love affairs, wear their hearts and emotions on their sleeves, love their country and its history to the depths of their being, and, though they take their jobs seriously, they see them as just one part of real life. Gill includes lively and wonderfully droll conversations throughout–the teasing and byplay one expects of close and caring relationships–both at the Garda station among his repeating characters and at home. And when Det. Hugh Ward and Det. Ruthie Bresnahan finally “discover” each other, one of the highlights of this novel, their love scenes are as hilarious as they are steamy. My favorite of this series.
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Posted in 9a-2011 Reviews, Humor, Satire, Absurdity, Imagined Time, Ireland and Northern Ireland, Literary, Mystery, Thriller, Noir, Psychological study on Mar 16th, 2011
Darlng Jim has every characteristic that I usually avoid in novels–it’s melodramatic, gothic, completely unrealistic, filled with horror and romance and magic, and over-the-top with coincidence, bloody medieval battles, and men turning into wolves. And I enjoyed every minute of it! From the opening pages to the absolutely perfect (and perfectly outrageous) ending, I was under its spell, smiling at the author’s deliberate manipulation of my feelings, his unembarrassed use of well-worn plot devices, and his comic book style of narrative which kept the action coming and coming and coming—a book to be read for pure, unadulterated fun! Danish author Christian Moerk “breaks the rules” by setting this terrific story in Ireland, both contemporary and ancient, and does so with panache and flair–and with a huge smile on his face.
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