Heinemann, 1988, 158 p.

The setting is Northern Ireland during the troubles. Cal spends his days lazing about as he is unemployed, having not been able to stand the job he had in the slaughterhouse where his father works. They are the only remaining Catholics in an otherwise Protestant street and subject to threats as a result. He is plagued by Crilly and Skeffington, Provisional IRA members wanting him to go on more jobs but is haunted by the memory of his part in the killing of a police officer where he drove the car they used. A new woman assistant at the local library begins to consume his attention. She is Marcella, and happens to be the wife of the man that was killed.

Being burned out of his house gives him the chance both to evade Crilly and Skeffington and to take a job at the farm where Marcella lives. He is a man living, if not a life of lies, at least one of omissions. A situation like his cannot end well.

Quite how psychologically perceptive all of this is is perhaps questionable. Not Cal’s reluctance to be drawn deeper into acts of violence but his attraction to a woman he feels he has wronged. The atmosphere of constraint though, of circumscription, is entirely credible.

Note: Mac Laverty is how the author’s surname is spelled on the book’s cover and title page but it is more usually rendered MacLaverty

Pedant’s corner:- “and how he would kiss her and touched her” (and touch her.) “‘You’re a boy without?ELSomebody might’” (I have no idea what that ‘?EL’ is about.)

Farewell to old Ireland. Vintage, 2003, 419 p, plus xiv p Preface.

The Star of the Sea of the title is a clapped-out paddle steamer making a crossing from Cobh (Cove) in Ireland to New York. It is 1847, the Famine is at its height and the steerage compartments of the ship are crammed with hundreds of refugees, mostly starving. These desperate lives and the Famine itself are essentially background, though, as the narrative does not mention most of them except in passing when extracts from the log of the ship’s Master, Josias Lockwood, notes which of them have died in the night and been consigned to the deep, as well as instances of disease and quarantine, or incidents requiring incarceration of the perpetrators.

Is this a general aversion? I am personally not aware of many works of fiction dealing with the Irish Famine (or the Great Hunger as it is also known.) Perhaps the subject is just too overwhelming, too raw, or even too daunting for the novelist to approach, except obliquely as here. Though Irish writers appear prominently in British literary life the subject itself tends to be shied away from in Britain and perhaps British publishers may be wary of it.

In the book Star of the Sea, each chapter (plus the prologue and epilogue) is prefaced by an illustration from the time it is set along with the usual Victorian novel practice of the short chapter precis. Some of these illustrations depict Irish life or scenes of the famine but many show the grotesque stereotypes of so-called Irish characteristics prevalent in the nineteenth century.

The book as a whole is supposedly drawn together in retrospect by passenger G Grantley Dixon, a US journalist, from letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, conversations of his with the characters and his own writings. In the prologue he describes the only clergyman on board, a Methodist minister as conducting, “the adamant hymns of his denomination.”

The story is woven around the well-to-do passengers David Merridith (Lord Kingscourt,) his wife Laura, their children’s nanny, Mary Duane from Carna, and one Pius Mulvey, initially a shadowy presence on the ship – referred to as a ‘Ghost’ – though not entirely inconspicuous as he has one wooden foot. While following the ship’s voyage and the ever-mounting toll of dead passengers the narrative skips back to cover incidents in the principal characters’ pasts.

In her youth Mary Duane lived on Merridith’s estate (then in the hands of his father) and they formed a friendship. He greeted the Duane household with “God Bless” about which her father would say, “‘And as for God-bless, he’s a God-blasted Protestant. He doesn’t even believe in God.’” The relationship was developing into something deeper when Merridith went off to boarding school, where he learned ‘rules’. Neither his nor her father thought that their liaison could or should progress and he broke it off. In the aftermath she was betrayed by another man and only many years later did she and Merridith come across each other again.

Merridith himself displeased his father by his later marriage to Laura and by the time he inherited, the estate was in a poor condition, hence the journey to the US. Merridith and Dixon are at odds since Dixon berates him with the conditions of the Irish poor. Merridith responds with the fact of slavery in the US. That Dixon is having an affair with Laura (the Merridith marriage had long been on shaky ground) is added reason for dislike.

Mulvey has reasons to keep himself to himself on the ship. On pain of death he has been tasked by the ‘Liable’ men of Galway to kill Merridith for his many perceived sins against his tenants or for passing them on to those who treat them even more badly. The Liable men represent one of those many clandestine Irish associations desiring overthrow of English rule and gained their name because they signed off their warning missives with “Els-be-lible.” Mulvey (whose father once said to him that when you were talking about God you couldn’t expect bloody miracles,) has a chequered and violent past, once escaping from Newgate Jail thereby engendering the term Monster of Newgate, and has gone through many pseudonyms. Later Dixon tells us that the Monster led to an evolution in the representation of the Irish. Previously shown as foolish and drunken, now they more frequently shown as murderers. Ape-like, fiendish, bestial, untamed. There are also quotations from various sources exemplifying the prejudices of the ‘superior’ classes against the non-landed Irish.

In his time in London Mulvey had met Charles Dickens and spun that voraciously avid author a tale about a Jew who ran a school for young thieves – adding in details from Connemara ballads. Prompted by Dickens for the name of the Jew, Mulvey remembers that of an unpleasant priest who had hated Jews and also inveigled Mulvey’s brother (albeit temporarily) into the priesthood. The impeccably Irish-named Fagan.

In the Epilogue we find Dixon latterly wrote a book with a short section on the Monster of Newgate, which beguiled the public’s imagination. People attended fancy-dress evenings costumed as the Monster or one of his victims. Plays were performed. Grantley adds, “Soon the monster was to be subjected to the final indignity. That horror among horrors. A musical.”

Dixon has other observations to make, that among those of certain religious persuasions “Dancing was ‘back-legs fornication,’” that “Any assemblage comprising human beings … will bind itself together not by what it shares but ultimately by what it fears, which is so often so much greater.” Most powerfully that “The dead do not die in that tormented country, that heartbroken island of incestuous hatreds; so abused down the centuries by the powerful of the neighbouring island, so much as by the powerful of its native own. And the poor of both islands died in their multitudes. … The flags flutter and the pulpits resound. At Ypres. In Dublin. At Gallipoli. In Belfast…. Yet they walk, the dead, and will always walk: not as ghosts, but as press-ganged soldiers, conscripted into a battle that is not of their making.…They do not even have names. They are simply: The Dead. You can make them mean anything you want them to mean.” As people do to this day.

Though the connections between all the main characters are perhaps a little too close and strain credibility somewhat, Star of the Sea is still a superb piece of work. And it has to be said that a book whose plot turns on a first edition of Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell has to be saluted.

Pedant’s corner:- “staunch the bleeding” (stanch,) termagents (termagants,) “Verazano narrows” (Verazzano narrows,) Engels’ (Engels’s.)

Sadly, Irish writer Edna O’Brien has passed away.

Her first novel, The Country Girls, made her something of a bête noire among traditionalists in her homeland, a reputation only added to with its successors Girl with Green Eyes and Girls in Their Married Bliss. As well as those – very short – novels I have also read the equally short novel Night and her first collection of short stories The Love Object.

All concise and to the point.

Josephine Edna O’Brien: 15/12/1930 – 27/7/2024. So it goes.

Picador, 2009, 300 p.

This typically quixotic Banville novel unfolds over one day in paradise, or at least in a house called Arden, in which have gathered the Godley family; Adam and his wife Helen to attend the death bed of his father (also Adam, a famous physicist,) along with his sister Petra and mother Ursula who live there, as do housekeeper Ivy Blount, scion of the ancient family who owned the land the house was built on, and Duffy the gardener. In the morning Petra’s not-quite-lover Roddy Wagstaffe arrives, and later in the day appears the mysterious Benny Grace.

This may seem a crabbed setting but many writers choose to examine the world in microcosm. In this case an elevated perspective is provided by the characters’ interactions being observed via the thoughts of an almost omniscient narrator, the god Hermes, musing on the condition of the gods and humans, though the narrative occasionally shifts into the consciousness of Old Adam, or Petra. And its discourse travels wide.

In his younger days the elder Adam developed the theory of ours existing in the midst of multiple intertwined worlds. For this is an altered history, one where it was a man called Schrösteinberg who posited an anticipant cat, J Robert Oppenheimer “failed to build the bomb he boasted so much of,” Sweden is a belligerent power, “gentle” Cesare Borgia was a peacemaker and patron of natural sciences and the arts, and, thanks to cold fusion, founded on the Science of Adam’s “notorious” Brahma equations, the greater part of the world’s energy is derived from brine. This is all slipped in as background, not emphasised as it would be in the conventional Science Fictional style.

As narrator, Hermes tells us that all immortals want to die; “that is well known.” Humans, of course, wish the opposite. The gods also “love to eavesdrop on the secrets of others.” In the case of Hermes’s father, Zeus, a presence in the house, he is ever hankering after his favourite activity; not eavesdropping, but insinuating himself in one guise or another – usually their husband’s – into the beds of mortal females in the vain hope of having them begin to love him. So that Zeus can do just that with Helen, Hermes is made by him to hold back dawn for an hour and to make young Adam sleepless, rising to roam the house. Helen passes her experience off as a dream. Zeus’s hope of thereby making himself more human fails, as ever. However it seems the gods – Hermes included – cannot resist interfering in the humans’ affairs.

The complicated web of relationships within the household is laid out in various two-handed conversations. Each of the characters is flawed in some way, each lost in their own preoccupations.

Hermes tells us the older Adam has an affinity with words but “sought to cleave exclusively to numbers, figures, concrete symbols,” but, “even he, like me, mistook sometimes the manifestation for the essence. Because for both of us this essence is essentially inessential, when it comes to the business of making manifest. For me, the gods; for him, the infinities.” For Hermes, “Words are so friendly, so accommodating, so loosely adaptable, not like numbers, with their tiresome insistence on meaning only what they mean and nothing more.”

The above gives the flavour of Banville’s style here. It is not the language of the best seller. It is consciously literary and Banville’s prose is thought through, his descriptions to the point and words carefully chosen. Banville has a wide vocabulary. The book is peppered with uncommon words – imbricated, streels, chanticleers, squinny, horrent, parousia, chlamys, suggestum, lentors, finical, paresis. In this context it was good to see that fine Scots (and presumably Irish) word, skelp, employed judiciously.

Old Adam looks back on his life, his former wife Dorothy, the woman physicist whose name he can’t recall but thinks is Ilse, his meetings with Benny Grace and that character’s supposed mother, Madame Mac. He remembers “the great instauration, after we had exposed the relativity hoax and showed up Planck’s constant for what it really is,” when he “posited the celebrated chronotron … for an exquisite concept, time’s primal particle.” The book is not short of concepts to chew on.

Naturally, given its prime narrator, Banville scatters the novel with allusions to the old gods and myths. At his bedside Benny Grace says to old Adam, “Still the black hair, the noble profile. The original Adam.” Old Adam reflects that “Saints are monsters, as we know, and as for the gods – well.”

But in fiction it is human dilemmas we wish to read about in order to find out about the condition of this strange species of which we are a constituent. Within this small compass of bodies Banville gives us misapprehensions, fears, despair, concupiscence, hope and acceptance as well as touching on the usual literary flavours of love, sex and death. The Infinities is about life.

Pedant’s corner:- “opens its maw to eat cities whole” (does this convey the sense that a maw is a stomach?) “Should I open my eyes? Should I open my eyes.” (I’m not sure why that sentence is repeated nor why its repeat has no question mark.) “I have never been any good in dealing with people” (it’s usually ‘any good at’,) “perfectly oblivious of” (it’s usually ‘oblivious to’,) “[after we had] showed up” (shown up.) “There is only a few of us that understand” (congratulations for ‘there is only a few of us’ but it ought to be followed by ‘who understand’,) “wile away the day” (while away,) French doors” (French doors,) “he say quietly” (he says.) “I had always a crick in my neck when he is about” (either ‘I have always’ or, ‘when he was about’,) “When the object of one’s baffled regard were these minute brand-new beings” (when the object … was these brand-new beings,) “sat at the end of” (seated, or, sitting.)

Penguin, 1970, 166 p.

This is a collection (her first) of the author’s short fiction. The stories date from the 1960s.

The object of the affections of the narrator of the title story tells her at the start that he doesn’t intend “a mean and squalid little affair” with her, that instead they would become friends, but a mean and squalid little affair is what it turns out to be.

An Outing describes another affair, this time unconsummated, between a woman only ever referred to as Mrs Farley, who is unhappy with her husband. The other man is someone she had seen casually at bus stops but suddenly notices has been missing. When he turns up again (after being ill) they realise their affection for each other.

The Rug was delivered, with no clue from whom, to the narrator’s childhood home and immediately became her mother’s pride and joy. Her feckless father allowed himself to be thought of as the agent of its arrival through one of his many acquaintances; but of course it wasn’t.

The Mouth of the Cave is a tale of frustrated hope. A woman on a walk to a nearby village sees another rise from the ground and begin to dress. Thereafter she waits for the other to turn up at her house for dinner, only to be disappointed. She avoids that route from then on.

How to Grow a Wisteria has nothing to do with gardening. Rather it is about slowly coming to terms with yourself and the opportunities lost while you are doing so.

In Irish Revel a seventeen-year-old Irish farm girl goes to her first party at the hotel in the nearby town. It’s a disappointing affair all round.

Cords is the tale of an Irish farm-wife visiting her daughter Claire in London, a daughter whose ways she finds far too modern, but who cannot be her true self while her mother is there. The visit paradoxically moves them apart but also closer.

Paradise is set in a Mediterranean resort where a woman finds herself in a doomed attempt to fit in with the set of acquaintances of her relatively new – and older – lover. He has set her the task of learning to swim while there. She eventually succeeds but the vacuousness of it all starts to get to her.

Pedant’s corner:- ecstacies (ecstasies,) saccharine (not sickly sweet; it was the sweetener, sacharrin,) cow lats (cow pats makes more sense,) “her breathe” (breath,) connexion (connection,) instuctor (instructor,) “would not leave go of her”(is this an Irish formulation? ‘Would not let go of her’ sounds far more natural to me,) light-house (lighthouse.)

Penguin, 1978, 120 p. First published 1972.

Mary Hooligan has trouble sleeping. The usual remedies – counting sheep or apples, pills – have no effect. The novel is a rendering of her thoughts during one night of such sleeplessness, involving memories of her upbringing in Coose in Connemara, various odd encounters, sometimes scatological, and a multitude of sexual (mis)adventures.

Though I have read neither and so cannot comment, the narration apparently reflects Molly Bloom’s soliloquy from Ulysses and prefigures Eimear MacBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. I’ll take their word for it.

With its focus on one person’s life experience, the novel stands in contrast to O’Brien’s “Country Girls” trilogy. There is no doubting, however, the author’s technical skill as a writer nor her proficiency with words; the book is peppered with Latinate derivations, Irishisms and seeming neologisms (gaimbeaux?) but even so is easy enough to read. Fifty years on from first publication what is striking about the book is its brevity. Nevertheless it says what it needs to say. Economy is a welcome attribute in a writer.

Fair enough it’s only 120 pages worth, but also revealing is the cover price of the edition I read. 75p! Those were the days.

Pedant’s corner:- tête-a-têtes (têtes-a-tête?) “doh ray me fa” (doh re mi fa,) frequent omissions of commas before a piece of direct speech, sherbert (seven lines earlier was the correct ‘sherbet’, with sherbert again a further seven lines on,) jelley (of frog spawn; surely usually spelled ‘jelly’,) “the think I couldn’t endure” (the thing,) seemliness’ (seemliness’s,) she’s (‘she’d’ made more sense,) an opening quote mark that was never closed, Leuwenhoech (Leuwenhoek?) caprolites (coprolites.)

Penguin, 1982, 158 p.

Being a further installment of the lives of the two Irish friends introduced to us in The Country Girls and explored again in Girl with Green Eyes.

This book finds both of them married but, as its title sarcastically suggests, not entirely – or at all – happily. Unlike the previous two books in the series which were seen entirely from Kate’s point of view, here there are first person sections narrated by Baba, complete with her idiosyncratic spelling and grammar – in which frustrations with what she sees as Kate’s inadequacies are expressed. The other, third person, sections adopt Kate’s viewpoint. She is married to the Eugene Gaillard she took up with in the previous book and has a five year-old son, Cash. Baba married a “thick builder” who knew almost nothing about women when he met her – and still doesn’t. His money is welcome, though. Their marriage is childless at the start of the book.

Neither of the ‘girls’ acts in what you might call a mature manner even if Baba does have the thought, “People liking you or not liking you is an accident and is to do with them and not you.”

The trilogy could be seen as an illustration of the influences of background on behaviour and the harm a lack of a rounded education can do but this one seems to have devolved into a book about not particularly likeable people acting less than creditably – and muddling through with greater or lesser success.

It is though by modern standards incredibly short.

Pedant’s corner:- Gaeltacth (Gaeltacht,) “less that” (less than,) occasional missing commas before or after a piece of direct speech, a cleaners’ (a cleaner’s,) “Kate slung towards ..” (slunk?) “had looked … and drank from” (and drunk from,) plimsols (plimsolls,) connexion (connection.)

Penguin, copyright page has 1964 but this edition is a later reprint, 211 p. First published in 1962 as The Lonely Girl.

This second part of O’Brien’s trilogy sees Caithleen Brady not really having learned the lesson of her infatuation with Mr Gentleman in The Country Girls. On one of her nights out with her friend Baba in Dublin (where she has lodgings and a job) she meets Eugene Gaillard and immediately finds him attractive. He is of course much older than her but she does not find out till a bit later he has a past which includes a wife and a child. Nevertheless she allows herself to be taken to his home in the country for weekends but only after several false starts (one visit being interrupted by her drunk of a father coming mob-handed to the house and assaulting Eugene) does she finally lose her virginity to him. Even her chance encounter with Mr Gentleman, where she is dismissed more or less curtly, does not forewarn her of the dangers of intimacy on such terms.

She finds the exposure of her background embarrassing and later Eugene characterises her (and by implication rural Ireland) as bred in “Stone Age ignorance and religious savagery.” Eugene’s wife turns the screw by threatening to prevent contact with his child and Caithleen fatally gives him an ultimatum.

Her experiences do give her insight though, “it is only with our bodies that we ever really forgive one another; the mind pretends to forgive, but it harbours and re-remembers in moments of blackness,” but the situation cannot hold. “Up to then I thought that being one with him in bed meant being one with him in life, but I knew now that I was mistaken, and that lovers are strangers, in between times.” Yet she still hopes Eugene will come to rescue her.

Pedant’s corner:- haemorridge (x2, haemorrhage,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech (many times,) salame (salami,) sprung (sprang,) “a tick in his right cheek,) (tic,) “the Miss Walkers” (the Misses Walker,) “The inside of my lips were covered with water blisters” (The inside … was covered with … .)

Penguin, 1981, 186 p. First published 1960.

Narrated by Caithleen (Kate) Brady, this is the story of two childhood companions. I use that word as friends doesn’t seem to be quite right since Bridget (Baba) Brennan, the other girl concerned, isn’t really a true friend and is always likely to lead Kate astray.

The book is set mainly in rural Ireland in the very early 1950s. Kate’s mother is put upon, her father a drunk, and feckless. When her mother is drowned as she was returning to her parents’ home (apparently having decided to leave her husband) Kate’s life changes as she is taken in by Baba’s parents. Kate wins a scholarship to a convent boarding school to which Baba is also going as a paid-for pupil. Boarding schools are of course hell, convent ones even more so.

Kate’s life is only made bearable by the attentions paid to her by the local rich man known to everyone as Mr Gentleman. Gentlemanly in manner he may be but married as he is and much older than her his behaviour to Kate is nothing short of predatory (and nowadays would be called grooming) even if it is a long time before it comes close to becoming sexual conduct beyond kissing. That his wife seems to be in poor health (or at least highly strung) is no sort of excuse. Nevertheless, Kate is enraptured by him.

Details of Irish rural and urban life (after school, from which Baba contrived to get them both expelled, Kate gets a job in a grocer’s in Dublin where she and Baba share a flat let by a landlady of Central European origin) are scattered through the book. Expressive of the repression prevalent in those days, things barely hinted at, is that, even at sixteen, Kate’s naivety in terms of the facts of life is profound.

Reading this I was struck by the similarities it bears to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, a later work of course, and the descriptions of landscape are akin to those in Scottish novels.

Also worthy of note is the book’s length, at 186 pages, remarkably short by today’s standards. Yet it says all it needs to.

Pedant’s corner:- “which was hundred yards up the road” (was a hundred yards,) some instances of commas missing before and at the end of direct speech, cist (cyst,) gamp (used here for a nun’s headdress,) “crinothine fire-screens” (first result on Google for crinothine is from Google books results and comes from this book,) satchet (sachet?) “a memorium” (an in memoriam.)

Caliban, 1983, 310 p, plus ix p Introduction. First published in 1914. One of the 100 best Scottish Books.

In some respects this is an odd choice of book for inclusion in that 100 best Scottish Books list. MacGill was Irish and the book starts off in Ireland with the early life story of Dermod Flynn, offspring of a poor family living off potatoes and buttermilk (with the occasional variation of buttermilk and potatoes.) When Dermod takes exception to his schoolmaster picking on him and hits him back, his schooling is over and he is packed off to be an agricultural hired hand – in effect, a slave for six months – so that he can send money back to his mother and father. But the majority of the book is set in Scotland to where Flynn decamps as a member of a gang of potato-pickers and ends up as a tramp until, via a stint on the railway, he joins the workforce building the aluminium works at Kinlochleven.

In the text MacGill affects to be giving us Flynn’s unvarnished autobiography, denying any artifice, explicitly stating that he has taken incidents from his (Flynn’s) life – though the assumption is that they are from MacGill’s own as his biography is all but identical – and written them down, but there is an organisation to them, a novelistic arrangement that belies such simplicity.

The itinerant life, the characters Flynn meets, are described in detail. The brutal existence of the life of a navvy, the arbitrary dangers it involved, admirably demonstrated. The only interests of the men of the gangs at Kinlochleven – outside working hours – are drinking, gambling and fighting one another. Somehow through all that Flynn learns to read, to jot down poems and incidents which he sends to a newspaper and whose acceptance is briefly parlayed into a job as a journalist in London. But the “civilised” life does not suit him.

However, at the core of the book is Flynn’s connection with Norah Ryan, a girl from his village of Crossmoran in Donegal, who came across to Scotland as part of the potato-picking gang but to whom Flynn neglected to pay attention as he fell into gambling and, consequently, she into a relationship with a farmer’s son which will not end well.

MacGill also brings out the ungratefulness of the general public who do not care about the dangers the navvies endured, the risks they took, but after they are laid off – all but en masse – only see itinerant wasters before them.

Flynn’s bitterness towards the church – both Catholic, in Ireland and Scotland, and Presbyterian in Scotland – is no doubt a reflection of MacGill’s own. “The church soothes those who are robbed and never condemns the robber, who is usually a pillar of Christianity….. To me the industrial system is a great fraud, and the Church which does not condemn it is unfaithful and unjust to the working people….. I have never yet heard of missions for the uplifting of MPs, or for the betterment of stock exchange gamblers; and these people need saving grace a great deal more than the poor untutored working men. But it is the nature of things that piety should preach to poverty on its shortcomings, and forget that even wealth may have sins of its own.” He goes on, “In all justice the lash should be laid on the backs of the employers who pay starvation wages, and the masters who fatten on sweated labour. The slavery of the shop and the mill is responsible for the shame of the street.”

In its unalloyed description of the life of the working man Children of the Dead End is of a piece with many works of Scottish literature, so maybe its place on that 100 Best list is justified after all.

Pedant’s corner:- In the Introduction; “is, indeed, that of MacGill’s” (that of MacGill.) Otherwise; “‘His name in Jim MaCrossan’” (is Jim Macrossan,) pig-stys (pig-styes or pig-sties,) “shot the crow” is defined in a footnote as ordering and drinking whisky without intent to pay (in my experience it has always meant to leave, to leave anywhere – or anyone – without notice,) “a group of children were playing” (a group was.) “A shower of fine ashes were continuously falling” (a shower was continuously falling,) by-and-bye (by-and-by,) Lough Lomond (yes, the Irish spelling is Lough, but Loch Lomond is in Scotland; so ‘Loch’. I would never write ‘Loch’ Neagh for the loch in Northern Ireland,) “a pair of eyes were gazing at me” (strictly, a pair was,) “there were a fair sprinkling of them” (there was a fair sprinkling,) sprung (sprang,) pigmies (pygmies,) dulness (I gather it’s an alternative spelling but I’ve only ever seen it before as dullness.) “For whole long months I saw a complete mass of bruises” (I was a complete mass of bruises makes more sense,) a phenomena (a phenomenon.)