In this intriguing police procedural, Irish author Gene Kerrigan keeps the action crisp and fast-paced, with plenty of complications to keep the reader busy. What makes this novel different from so many of this genre is that he is also outstanding at creating characters with whom the reader develops empathy—especially Garda Chief Inspector Harry Synnott. Synnott is likeable and basically good-hearted, but he is busy, and he is easily distracted by events in which he is directly involved. He fails his ex-wife and son, even as he is trying to help poor junkie Dixie Peyton. Eventually he fails everyone he tries to “help.” His final recognition of his failings comes dramatically and brutally, and the reader is left to ponder whether he will be able to deal with his self-realization. Outstanding “Irish noir.”
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Although Nolan’s prose has often been compared to that of other, more famous Irish writers-James Joyce, Dylan Thomas, W. B. Yeats, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example–his style is more accessible, making his story more readable, more emotionally powerful, and more personally involving than anything I’ve read by these other great writers. Minnie O’Brien lives, loves, ages, aches, and ultimately haunts. She’s an extraordinary character presented in an extraordinary way by an equally extraordinary author. Nolan brings her to life by following the first rule of fiction: “Don’t tell about something; recreate it.” He does this, in part, by using vivid, emotionally charged words in new ways, sometimes using adjectives and nouns as verbs, conveying not only the emotional sense but also an action: In describing Minnie’s actions at the death of her husband, we find that her cries were “cartwheeling around the room,” before “she sacked her voice of screams” and dried her eyes, going downstairs to “perform the miraculous loaves and fishes reenactment,” for the neighborhood wake. (On my list of All-Time Favorites)
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Frankie Crowe is one of those men who takes shortcuts. A “little” criminal, in the sense that he has a small mind and grand ideas of his own self-importance, he is among the most dangerous of criminals, a young man for whom no one else counts. Life in Dublin—at least the kind of life Frankie wants—is expensive, and his current scheme is to kidnap one of Ireland’s wealthiest men and hold him for ransom. Justin Kennedy, the man selected, has been involved in the purchase of a small private bank, and Frankie figures that he will have an easier time obtaining a large sum of money than some of the other men on the “Rich List.” Collecting a group of petty criminals around him, Frankie and his three associates conspire to make the snatch. Debunking the myth of a jolly Ireland in which life revolves around storytelling, singing, and companionable drinking at the pub, Kerrigan shows the growing pains of economic “progress” and how that has changed the fabric of the country for its young people, a number of whom have put their entrepreneurial skills to use in unsavory ways. (On my Favorites list for 2008)
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Booker Prize-winning author John Banville presents a sensitive and remarkably complete character study of Max Morden, an art critic/writer from Ireland whose wife has just died from a lingering illness. Seeking solace, Max has checked into the Cedars, a now dilapidated guest-house in the seaside village of Ballyless, where he and his family had spent summers when he was a child. Images of foreboding suggest that some tragedy occurred while he was there, though the reader discovers only gradually what it might have been. Now renting a room at the Cedars for an indefinite stay, Max broods about the nature of life, love, and death, relives earlier times, and tries to reconcile his memories, some of which are incomplete and imperfect, with the reality of his present, sad life. An ordinary man in his late fifties or early sixties engaging in interior battles with personal demons may not appeal to readers who prefer snappy dialogue and action plots. But other readers, especially those who may have faced the deaths of family or friends and recognized the limitations of memory, may recognize in Max a kindred spirit. (On my All-Time Favorites list)
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Originally published in 1970 and newly reprinted by The New York Review of Books, J. G. Farrell’s Troubles, the story of Ireland’s fight for its independence from England, from the close of World War I through 1922, illuminates the attitudes and insensitivities that made revolution a necessity for the Irish people. Farrell also, however, focuses on the personal costs to the residential Anglo-Irish aristocracy as they find themselves being driven out of their “homes.” Major Brendan Archer, newly released from hospital where he has been recovering from the long-term emotional effects of his wartime experience, arrives at the ironically named Majestic Hotel on a bleak and rainy day to reintroduce himself to his fiancée Angela, daughter of the proprietor, and, if they agree to marry, to return with her to a home in England. The Major, however, is greeted by no one upon his arrival at the hotel desk, and he must find his own way to the Palm Court, “a vast, shadowy cavern in which…beds of oozing mould supported banana and rubber plants, hairy ferns, elephant grass and creepers that dangled from above like emerald intestines.”
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