Once you enter the world of Trevor Comerford, you will not re-emerge unscathed. Formerly employed in Dublin at the Central Remedial Clinic, Trevor was empathetic and anxious to help his students in his English classes there, creating firm bonds of friendship with them by making them laugh at his vulgarity, by refusing to recognize their physical challenges as “limitations,” and by taking them on day-trips (which became shoplifting expeditions to the local shops). His departure from Dublin for a new life in New York City was made in full knowledge of the challenges he would have dealing with the chaos of that city’s street life, which, in many ways parallels the chaos in his own life. An ad Trevor finds in the Village Voice requests a companion for Ed, an extremely bright teenager with muscular dystrophy who has little time left to live, and Trevor, upon investigation, quickly learns that the typical “companion” for Ed lasts only a week. Thoughtful and often hilarious.
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The fraught events in the Balkans leading to the occupation of Greece by the Nazis in April, 1941, form the structure of this complex novel, which begins in Greece and ranges through Albania, France, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Hungary, and Turkey, as small, vulnerable Eastern European countries try to stave off both the Italians and the Nazis. Alan Furst, famous for his carefully researched espionage thrillers focusing on events from 1940 and 1941, recreates the confusions and the complications of the Balkan countries in early 1941, as they try to maintain some semblance of sovereignty against the massive war machine of Nazi Germany. Forty-year-old Costa Zannis, a senior police official in the northern Greek city of Salonika, is in the middle of the conflict. Zannis walks a tightrope, doing his part to aid people in Germany who have risked their lives to save others. His life becomes even more complicated, however, by his suddenly developed attraction to the wife of one of Greece’s wealthiest men.
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When the obnoxious Sean Rafferty, a twenty-six-year-old “pasty-face” with a link to drug gangs, is murdered, his aunt Gina, a young businesswoman, is shocked, and hastens to console her much older sister Catherine, Sean’s mother. Within twenty-four hours, her uncle, also named Sean Rafferty and someone to whom she has always felt close, dies in what is assumed to be a driving accident. The younger Sean worked for Terry “the Electrician” Stack, a man linked to drug suppliers operating out of the Netherlands, but there were no gang wars going on. The elder Sean Rafferty was a partner in BCM, a structural engineering firm involved in the Richmond Plaza development. BCM was hired to work with Paddy Norton, chairman of Winterland Properties, the developers of Richmond Plaza, and with Martin “Fitz” Fitzpatrick, his security expert. Before long, the reader, like Gina, suspects that there was an error, and that the wrong Sean Rafferty may have been killed first. (On my Favorites List for 2010)
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Thirty-five years after Henry Smart became one of the heroes of the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, the most significant rebellion of the Irish against British rule in over a hundred years, Henry is in Hollywood, where he is an “IRA consultant” to director John Ford, a second-generation Irishman from Maine who plans to make a film about Henry’s life. The making of this film and its aftermath become a major focus of this final novel in the “The Last Round-Up” trilogy by Roddy Doyle, who had intended the trilogy to reflect Ireland’s history from its independence to the present day. This final novel covers eight decades as Henry Stark leaves Hollywood and returns to Ireland, attempting to live a normal life under Irish self-rule. Those who are unfamiliar with the preceding two novels will have a difficult time understanding who the characters are and what their backgrounds entail, and as the action moves back and forth in time, even someone familiar with the trilogy will sometimes be hard pressed to figure out what is happening.
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From the opening pages of this kaleidoscopic debut novel, Canadian author Jaspreet Singh works his magic, setting the opening scene on a train from Delhi to Srinagar, in Kashmir. A born story-teller, gifted with the ability to describe the sights, sounds, and smells of his many Indian settings, Singh also creates, at the same time, lively characters and interconnected plot lines which span two generations. Anyone who has read other novels concerned with the partition of India and the perennial conflicts between mostly Hindu India and Muslim Pakistan over the fate of Kashmir knows how complex and emotionally fraught these conflicts are, but Singh explores the conflict through the eyes of Kirpal (Kip) Singh, a chef who once worked for Lt. Gen. Ashwini Kumar, formerly chief of the Northern Command in Kashmir. With his limited focus, Kip is able to convey all the tensions and conflicts of the area without getting bogged down in the logistical technicalities. His vision is personal, and because he is an honorable person, he becomes the conscience of the novel.
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