Reading Matters

'Are you Somebody?' by Nuala O'Faolain

Non-fiction - paperback; New Island Books (2nd edition); 264 pages; 2008.

I've read some extraordinary memoirs in recent years, all by professional writers -- Pete Hamill's A Drinking Life, Hilary Mantel's Giving Up the Ghost, Amélie Nothomb's The Life of Hunger -- and this one, by Irish author, journalist and TV producer Nuala O'Faolain, is right up there with the best of them.

O'Faolain, who died last year aged 68 from cancer, was a household name in Ireland. Indeed, in the introduction to this edition, she writes that she was "fairly well known" but is quick to point out that she was "no star":

People have to look at me twice or three times to put a name on me. Sometimes when I'm drinking in a lounge bar, a group of women, say, across the room begin to look at me, and send one of their number over to me, or when I'm in the supermarket someone who has just passed me by turns back, and comes right up to me and scrutinises my face. 'Are you somebody?' they ask.

By contrast, I know very little about O'Faolain outside of her wonderful novel My Dream of You, which I read earlier in the year and had been told was a thinly veiled biography. Having enjoyed it so much I figured I should try the "real" thing, which is how I came to read this memoir.

There's no doubt that O'Faolain knows how to write. There's also no doubt that she knows how to do so in a very candid way. There's no hedging her bets, or taking a softly-softly approach. It's all here, warts and all.

She was born one of nine children in 1940 "when nine was not even thought of as a big family among the teeming, penniless, anonymous Irish of the day". She viewed herself as a nobody, just an ordinary girl, in a country constricted by Catholicism, who would eventually be married and kept by a man. And yet, for most of Nuala's life, she rages against this stereotypical expectation and breaks as many social norms as she can.

Without going into too much detail, she moves in with a man she has not married (a huge no-no in Holy Catholic Ireland at the time) and later flees to England, where she forges a hugely successful academic and journalistic career. But along the way, despite her successful working life, there is something missing: a troubled past and estranged relationship with her family seems to keep her back (her father, a well-known Irish journalist, does not come off very well in this memoir, nor her mother, who turned to drink to numb the pain of a bad marriage). And then there's her promiscuity and search for "passion" which ultimately leaves her feeling rather lost and empty.

Surprisingly, for a woman so candid about her sexual desires, she gives scant regard to her partner of 15 years, the journalist Nell McCafferty and barely mentions her in this book, apart from describing the odd cosy holiday together. (Perhaps Nuala's second volume, entitled Almost There, may fill in some of these gaps.)

Are You Somebody? is about one woman's search for meaning, dealing with a past that you cannot leave behind and coming to terms with growing old. There's a sadness at the heart of this memoir, and a slow-burning rage, too, and perhaps just a smidgen of self-pity. But, ultimately, it's a powerhouse of a read, and you come away from it feeling as if you really got to know the lonely, flawed and hugely intelligent and brave woman who wrote it.

'Everyone's Got a Bono Story' by Anne-Marie O'Connor

 

Fiction - paperback; Tivoli; 352 pages; 2004.

If you ever needed proof that I have rather eclectic reading tastes, then this review coming directly after W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four should do it. Admittedly, I read Everyone's Got A Bono Story on my sick bed; my mind couldn't settle on anything and I was looking for something completely fluffy, something that wouldn't tax my brain and would be as easy to read as a knife slicing through soft butter. This book, the first by Anne-Marie O'Connor, fit the bill perfectly.

It's set in Dublin where everyone has a story to recount about Bono, the lead singer of U2. Perhaps they've seen him drinking in a bar, maybe a cousin went to school with him, or a friend of a friend once delivered him a pizza. But Aoife Collins, a 20-something office manager who has dreams of becoming a fashion designer, hasn't got a story to relate. When she loses her job and is evicted from her flat, all in the same week, her lack of a Bono tale seems the least of her worries. Then her best friend, Rory, throws down the gauntlet: if she can engineer her own encounter with Bono he will give her 5,000 euros.

You see where this is going, right? Okay, the story is as cheesy as the cover image, and the whole premise is just ridiculous, but it's a very witty read. Part of the joy of reading Everyone's Got a Bono Story is following Aoife's exploits as she tries lots of different ways to meet the man himself, including dressing up as a nun and knocking on his front door. There's certainly an element of farce to it, and I'm surprised no-one's actually made it into a film -- it'd be a riot.

O'Connor fleshes out the narrative by giving both Aoife and Rory complicated parental relationships: Rory's dad is super-rich but oblivious to Rory's homosexuality; and Aoife's mother just wants her daughter to return to rural Kerry, where she can settle down with a nice man, rather than running amok in the city.

Of course, there's the obligatory romantic liaison for Aoife, which doesn't go according to plan, and a similar amount of angst about her career, because she just lacks the confidence to do what she really wants to do.

There's no surprises in the rather predicable plot, which ends on a rather happy note for all involved (including Aoife's mother), but this is a light-hearted read, perfect for those times when you fancy a giggle.

'Truth or Fiction' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - hardcover; Headline Review; 160 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Jennifer Johnston does a nice line in slightly kooky characters, and her latest novel, to be published on November 16, is no exception. Desmond Fitzmaurice, one of two main characters in Truth or Fiction, is a doddery old writer who's fallen into obscurity. He lives a rather privileged existence in a house on the Dublin waterfront, where he is waited on hand and foot by his second wife, the dour-faced Anna. For all intents and purposes he seems to be a gentle old soul prone to sentimentality and a hankering for times gone by.

But then London-based journalist, Caroline Wallace, enters his rather mundane world and this version of a polite, well-mannered chap nearing the end of his life, gets turned, ever so slowly, on its head. Caroline, who's been dispatched to interview him on the eve of his 90th birthday, isn't entirely sure what to expect. When she arrives the first thing she does is tell Desmond that:

"My editor asked me to come and interview you. She would like to bring you back to life again. She feels your work is too important to be let fade away, as it has. She would like me to reassess your work and also to do a feature on your lifestyle. How you live, how you have lived, the interlocking of your life and work."

Desmond is not entirely enamoured with the intrusion:

"You wish to take the unimportant garbage of my life and stir it in with the important, with my work. You wish to make me intelligible to the masses. I never wrote for the masses to read."

And yet, there's something about this new-found attention that wins Desmond over. Before long he is introducing Caroline to the important people in his life and confessing a succession of sordid events. But how much of what he tells her is truth, and how much of it is fiction? 

The beauty of this novel, Johnston's 16th, is not so much her typical restrained and unpretentious prose style, nor the fast-moving narrative that largely comprises dialogue, but her very human characters with their flaws and foibles. That Caroline arrives in Dublin reeling from a marriage proposal made by her partner of 10 years adds an extra layer to the story, for how much of her anger is affecting her opinion of Desmond? And why is she so angry in the first place?

Once again Johnston has delivered an entertaining and effortless read, one that can quite comfortably be read in an hour or two. It's a welcome return to form after her slightly disappointing Foolish Mortals; I only wish I hadn't raced through it so quickly, because it could be a long wait for her next one.

'Winterland' by Alan Glynn

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 480 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

I love Irish literary fiction and I'm quite partial to the odd crime novel, so when I first heard that Alan Glynn's Winterland was described as "Dublin noir" I knew I'd probably enjoy it. I was right. This is a cracking story, brilliantly told and incredibly entertaining, and I bet it won't take long before the film rights are sold and we see it on the big, or possibly little, screen some time soon.

The real strength of this story is its wholly contemporary feel. Anyone who knows anything about the Irish economy will love this book, because it so beautifully captures the murky machinations of the property bubble (before it went "pop" earlier this year), planning policy and politics. Throw in a gangland murder, a dash of violence, a smidgen of retribution and you've got all the right ingredients for a dark and thrilling read.

The book opens with a young thug, Noel Rafferty, being gunned down in the beer garden of a local pub. Police figure it's a gangland murder, because the victim is a small-time drug dealer. But later that same night Noel's uncle, also called Noel Rafferty, is killed in a mysterious car accident. Why have two members of the same family, sharing the same name, died on the same night? Coincidence? Or something more sinister?

Enter Gina Rafferty, aunt of the first Noel, sister of the second, who doesn't believe the official explanation that the car accident was exactly that -- an accident.

She begins some detective work of her own, and before long she finds herself thrust into a world of dodgy dealings involving property and politics. She learns that her brother, an engineer, was working on a huge skyscraper, the tallest of its kind in Europe, known as Richmond Plaza. He had a close working relationship with the property's developer, Paddy Norton, a greedy man intent on turning the Dublin skyline into a mini-Manhattan. Norton, in turn, has connections with Larry Bolger, a power-hungry politician with an eye on the country's top job. There's obviously some shadowy goings on between these three men, but proving it takes Gina into dangerous and uncertain territory.

To complicate the story further, enter Mark Griffin, the sole survivor of a car accident that left him an orphan more than 20 years earlier. Is he connected to the Rafferty deaths and, if so, how?

All these characters, including the lone female heroine whom everyone in authority dismisses as an airhead, might sound slightly clichéd but in Glynn's capable hands they become very real people, with foibles and flaws. He really gets into the heads of each individual character and presents their motivations and desires so intricately it's easy to feel empathy for even the most loathsome of the bunch.

The dialogue, smart and snappy (and riddled with Dublinese and obligatory swearing), moves things along at a crisp pace. There's plenty of unexpected twists and turns along the way, but apart from one over-the-top scene towards the end of the book, the whole of Winterland feels authentic and prescient. Highly recommended.

Winterland is published on November 5.

'The Space Between Us' by John MacKenna

Fiction - paperback; New Island Books; 282 pages; 2009.

At what point do you decide to abandon a book? I ask, because I came very close to abandoning this one. I struggled with the first 54 pages, not quite believing the dialogue (too verbose, too artificial) nor the characters (too one-dimensional, too false). But something convinced me to keep reading on, because who knows, maybe it would get better. And, thankfully, it did.

Reviewing this book proves somewhat problematic, however, because the plot has several key revelations which are best discovered by simply reading the book rather than reading this review. (And, whatever you do, don't read the review or "product description" on Amazon, because they're riddled with spoilers. I found this out the hard way, but even though I discovered what was going to happen, The Space Between Us still left me reeling at the end, part in shock, part in awe.)

The basic premise of the novel goes something like this.

A young architect opens the door to two police officers (or guards, as they are known in Ireland) who inform him that his wife, a solicitor, has been killed in a car crash. His reaction is not what one would expect. Instead of being overwhelmed with grief he's overwhelmed by relief -- their marriage had been floundering for a long time but neither party had had the courage to end it. Now, left alone to raise his two-year-old daughter, our unnamed narrator has been given a second chance to start afresh. When a married friend, Kate, confesses she's in love with him, there seems only one road to take...

The book then jumps ahead 17 years and we discover the narrator living in the same house, but alone. His daughter, Jane, is studying classical music at university, but comes home to spend her weekends with him and their dog, the impossibly named Rostropovich. The story then follows our narrator for a year, and in that year, we find him being tested on very many levels.

"You need to stop letting things happen to you and make them happen for you," his neighbour berates him one day.

"You need to be more passionate about life. And I'm not talking about shagging me. I'm talking about you and this way you have of sitting back and letting life wash over you. I've known you for twenty years and you've allowed yourself to just exist, you've lived without passion."

This seems to mirror something Beth, his late wife, once told him when they were on holiday in Amsterdam almost 20 years earlier. She thought a permanent move to the Netherlands would be the impetus needed to kick-start his career to the next level, "the move that gives you the grand design". But he's content designing houses in small-town Ireland and the idea doesn't interest him.

"I think you're afraid of the world," Beth said. I knew by her eyes she was serious. "I think you feel safe being the medium-sized fish in a tiny pond. But what happens if another fish appears in that pond?"

In essence this is a novel about the choices we make in life and the consequences of those choices. It's also very much about unrequited love, death, grief and the relationships between fathers and daughters. And I defy anyone not to read this and be incredibly moved by the gentle prose and the emotional story that unfolds but most of all by the powerhouse ending that turns everything else on its head. This book isn't what I expected, it's far more shocking and disturbing than I could have possibly envisaged, and I rather suspect anyone who decides to give it a try will concur.

Oh, and if anyone does read this book, please come back and let me know: I'm dying to have a proper discussion about it, as it throws up so many interesting topics and issues.

'Brooklyn' by Colm Tóibín

Fiction - hardcover; Viking; 256 pages; 2009.

Reviews of Booker long-listed novels on this site are a bit like London buses. You don't get any for ages, then two come along in quick succession.

Following on from yesterday's review of Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind, is Colm Toibin's Brooklyn, another from this year's longlist.

As long time readers of this blog will know, I have a soft spot for Irish fiction, so it was no great surprise that this would be my type of book. But what I did find surprising was just how much I liked it. I devoured it in just two sittings this past weekend.

The book opens in poor, provincial 1950s Ireland -- Enniscorthy, County Wexford to be precise. Eilis Lacey, a part-time shop girl, leaves behind her mother and devoted older sister, Rose, to immigrate to Brooklyn, USA, in search of a better life. She lives in an all-girl boarding house, presided over by the matron-like Mrs Kehoe, and spends her days working in a local department store and her evenings studying for a book-keeping qualification at Brooklyn College. Along the way she makes several friends, meets a boy and finds herself living a relatively contented life, despite the fact that she still misses her family back home.

I'm not sure I can really say anything else without giving away crucial plot spoilers, so I shall keep schutm, suffice to say this is a quietly devastating read, one in which it is completely possible to lose all track of time as you get lost in the world presented here.

Brooklyn is a gentle read, but its gentleness should not be mistaken for shallowness, because this is a story that's profoundly moving and tickles the grey matter in ways you might not quite expect. It might be set in the 1950s but it touches on universal themes that resonate today, and I've yet to read anything that so perfectly captures the profound sense of dislocation you feel when you swap one country for another and then return to your homeland for the first time.

In short, Brooklyn is a superb paean to homesickness and the émigré experience. I think I identified with it so strongly because it shows, in an understated but powerful manner, how all emigrants have to make that god-awful decision about whether to stay or go, a decision that paralysed me for years. When Eilis is confronted with this very kind of choice she is tormented because there is no one right answer: whatever she chooses will have both negative and positive repercussions for herself and her loved ones.

And while I've tried to avoid reading reviews of this book, fearful that it will put me off reading it, I'm conscious Brooklyn has drawn criticism from some quarters over Eilis's passive nature, yet I did not see her that way at all. Sure, her move to Brooklyn is organised by others, namely Father Flood and Rose, but she recognises this as an opportunity for which she should be grateful, even if she finds the prospect of leaving all she knows behind a daunting one. She's proactive enough to get herself educated while in Brooklyn, because she recognises this as another opportunity to better herself in ways which would not be possible "back home". The truly lovely thing about Eilis is that she is a good person, and she thereby attracts good people and many acts of kindness come her way, but her good manners and her unwillingness to rock the boat should not be mistaken for passivity.

Whether Brooklyn makes tomorrow's Booker cut, I cannot say, but it deserves a wide readership regardless: it's a powerful story about culture shock and the life-changing decisions we all must make as we grow up and forge our own paths. I rather suspect it's going to be one of those books that will stay with me a long time...

'Not Untrue & Not Unkind' by Ed O'Loughlin

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 288 pages; 2009.

The 2009 Booker shortlist gets announced this coming Tuesday, so I thought it was about time I reviewed one of the long-listed titles -- Ed O'Loughlin's Not Untrue & Not Unkind. I read it more than a month ago now but haven't been able to muster up enough will power to review it because, to be perfectly honest, I found this an incredibly disappointing book.

I actually bought it long before the long-list was announced, having spied it at Dublin Airport back in mid-April. I was attracted by the story of a foreign correspondent working in Africa and liked the fact that O'Loughlin was a former foreign correspondent himself, so would no doubt know what he was talking about in the novel. Anne Enright's coverline describing it as "the most exciting first novel I have read in many years" sealed the deal.

The story opens with Dublin-based journalist Owen Simmons riffling through the papers of a dead colleague and discovering a photograph that makes him reflect on his time, 10 years earlier, as a foreign correspondent in Africa. He then recounts an endless succession of events -- genocide, war, corruption -- that wouldn't be out of place in Evelyn Waugh's delicious satire about journalism, Scoop but that's about where the similarities end.

Instead of delivering a novel about those fascinating news events O'Laughlin chooses to focus the story on the people covering those events, so what we get is a kind of dry account of the camaraderie between an eclectic mix of foreign correspondents, freelancers and photographers. All of these people face enormous news-gathering challenges and experience some incredibly disturbing situations, but this tends to take a back seat to shifting love affairs and petty rivalries.

This would be perfectly fine if any of those characters were remotely interesting, but I found most of them dull, shallowly drawn and, occasionally, morally dubious.

Sadly, the narrative suffers from a lack of drive, and the only time I felt it getting exciting -- when a reporter, getting worn down by the news cycle, goes off the rails in his bedroom and throws a gorilla doll out the window in a fit of blind fury -- it slides back into its normal plodding pace, with journos lolling around hotel pools or boozing up in hotel bars waiting for the next story to break.

What this all amounts to is a story that lacks emotion, which is difficult to square given the fact it's set during some of the most devastating and violent conflicts in recent times. This is such a shame, because the book had all the right ingredients for a really powerful, hard-hitting and devastating read and what you get is something as dreary as watching grass grow.

Despite this, it's clear that O'Laughlin can write: his prose style is clear and direct, and when he describes the landscape he really comes into his own, as the following passage demonstrates:

The wind chased us to the edge of town and there it halted. It was the strangest thing. Looking back, I could see a brown spire rising over the hills and rooftops, flecked with shreds of paper and plastic, and dust devils played like stray children on the scrub at the edge of town. But ahead of us the hot vacant road shimmered in the sun and there was no wind to trouble the massive indifference of the bush.

But beautiful writing isn't enough when the story you're telling lacks oomph. The only saving grace is the twist at the end, when Owen realises that sometimes your past can come back to haunt you...

'All Names Have Been Changed' by Claire Kilroy

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 288 pages; 2009. Review copy courtesy of the publisher.

Claire Kilroy is a young Irish writer whose debut novel, All Summer, published in 2003, garnered much critical acclaim and earned her the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. It was also shortlisted for the 2004 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.

Her second novel Tenderwire (2006), a literary thriller set in New York, was shortlisted for the 2007 Hughes and Hughes Irish Novel of the Year but lost out to Patrick McCabe's Winterwood.  I read it last August and thought it was such an intelligent page-turner I was eager to read more of her work. So when I found out there was a new one on the way I asked Faber and Faber if they'd be kind enough to send me a proof copy, and they obliged.

Sadly, I found it very difficult to "get into" All Names Have Been Changed and I put it aside, hoping I might find it more rewarding if I picked it up at another time. And so it lay abandoned on my bedside table for almost two months, until I picked it up last night to give it another try. This time the book seemed more readable and I eagerly made my way through the remaining 100 or so pages, but ultimately I found it disappointing in comparison to Tenderwire.

The book is set in 1980s Dublin and is about a group of creative writing students at Trinity College who become dangerously obsessed with their tutor, the world-famous PJ Glynn. It is narrated by Declan, the only male student in the class of five, but not much seems to happen and before long, as harsh as this will sound, the reader begins to wonder whether there is any point in ploughing on.

Because this is a book about group dynamics and personalities, it seems odd that none of the characters, bar Glynn, a stereotypical drunk Irishman, and Declan, the impoverished student, are particularly memorable. Perhaps it was just me, but the others -- Antonia, Aisling, Faye and Guinevere -- seemed indistinguishable from each other, so I could never quite remember which one was the mature student, which one was the Goth and which one was rumoured to be abused by her husband. This seems a fundamental flaw given this is essentially a story about writing.

But, in a way, it is this examination of what it is to be a writer that makes All Names Have Been Changed such an interesting read. If you have ever participated in a writing class or idolised a particular author, then much of the content will resonate.

There's a lot of literary in-jokes here, too, and probably far too many of them went over my head, but it becomes apparent as the story moves on that the participants in the group find themselves acting out roles in a novel. Indeed, at one point, Declan realises that he is no longer aping Glynn but the characters in Glynn's books.

And Kilroy takes it further by giving each chapter a title taken from a real-life Irish book or song -- for example, I don't like Mondays; The Book of Evidence; The pipes, the pipes are calling; and Tarry Glynn -- half the fun of which is identifying their source.

Such a gloomy, sombre novel -- remember, this is set during a time when the length of Dublin's dole queues were notorious and the city was in the grip of a heroin epidemic -- begs for this light relief, but I'm not sure the dark humour truly works.

While Kilroy's prose cannot be faulted (the oft-used phrase "beautifully written" has never been more apt) and the tone is measured and the atmosphere suitably claustrophobic, it feels as if something is missing. I suspect it might be a tighter plot, because even as a character-driven novel I don't think All Names Have Been Changed quite pulls it off. You might beg to differ.

'In the Woods' by Tana French

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 464 pages; 2008.

When I first picked up Tana French's In The Woods at JFK airport on my last trip to New York last October I envisaged it would tread similar territory to Edna O'Brien's dark, claustrophobic In the Forest. After all, they're both Irish crime books by Irish writers (who, in my opinion, even look alike, almost as if they are mother and daughter) with much the same titles, but that's where the similarities end. 

In the Woods lacks the literary flourishes that made O'Brien's book somewhat difficult to read; instead you get a completely absorbing, rocket-fuelled narrative that zips along at Formula One pace. I read this in about two days while on a recent trip to Ireland and found myself thinking about the storyline long after I'd finished the book and repacked it in my suitcase.

The story, a police procedural, is told from the perspective of Rob Ryan, a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad (which, by the way, does not exist in real life), who has a secret past that only his immediate family knows about. When he was a young boy he was playing with two friends in the local woods, but when dusk arrived none of them returned for their evening meal and a search party was organised. Rob was found clinging to a tree with blood-filled shoes, so traumatised by whatever had happened to him and his friends that he was unable to recall a single detail. His friends were never found, and 20 years on, Rob is still unable to remember what happened.

This troubled history comes rushing to the fore, when Rob and his colleague, Cassie Maddox, are assigned a murder investigation involving a 12-year-old girl whose body is found near the very same woods from Rob's childhood. Are the crimes linked? Could the perpetrator be the same person responsible for the disappearance of Rob's friends?

This is the crux of this superbly realistic debut novel -- and to say anything more would ruin the plot for those who have not yet read it.

What I liked most about this book is that it doesn't come with a neat, well-rounded conclusion, which makes the story seem even more authentic, because how many murder investigations have neat, well-rounded conclusions? It makes you think, makes you fill in the gaps, makes you come up with your own theories and I cannot understand those readers who think they've been short-changed by this -- and judging by the reviews of Amazon there's quite a few.

My only quibble -- and it's a relatively minor one in the grand scheme of things -- is the "voice" of Rob Ryan, which didn't seem authentically male to me, but perhaps that was a deliberate device to explain why he got on so well with his female counterpart. In fact I couldn't quite work out how I felt about their platonic, almost sibling-like relationship, because as much as it provided additional depth to the storyline, at other times it came across as slightly too cloying. Had neither of these characters discovered the concept of "me time", I wondered.

In the Woods recently won the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award for Best First Novel, and I'm not surprised. It's an astonishingly well written book by a first time author, one that grips you from various different angles -- will Rob's secret be discovered; will Rob have a nervous breakdown from the emotional, psychological stress of the investigation; what happened to his missing friends that fateful day in 1984; what happened to the girl who was murdered more recently? -- and provides plenty of red herrings and dodgy clues, so that it's almost impossible to guess the outcome. And the period details -- of Ireland in 1984 and the vastly different New Ireland (before the very recent collapse of the Celtic Tiger) in 2004 -- make the story seem particularly believable.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this one, and will eagerly eat up her next one, The Likeness, which is lying in wait on my bedside table...

'Molly Fox's Birthday' by Deirdre Madden

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 221 pages; 2009.

Deirdre Madden's Molly Fox's Birthday has recently been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction 2009. I had mistakenly thought it was a story about a little girl's birthday, but the title is deceptive: the Molly Fox named here is a thirty-something woman who never celebrates her birthday and what's more we never get to meet her. Instead we come to learn of her complex personality through the eyes of her long-time friend, who narrates the story in a cool, understated manner.

This is one of those mellow, beguiling reads that sneaks up on you, worms its way into your conscience and bathes you in a kind of gentle light. I found it almost impossible to put down and read it at every opportunity: on the tube, in my lunch hour, at home curled up in bed. And when I got closer to the final pages I tried to draw it out because I simply didn't want it to end.

And yet, if I am to explain what Molly Fox's Birthday is about, I find it difficult to describe. There is no straightforward narrative. It's written from the point of view of one woman, a successful playwright, recalling her relationship with Molly Fox, an actor regarded as "one of the finest of her generation" -- how they met, worked together and became firm friends -- and it effortlessly switches from the present to the past and back again, often within a matter of pages, in tune with the narrator's memories.

The narrator also thinks about her friendship with Belfast-born Andrew, a now-famous art historian, whom she met at university, and her older brother, Tom, a Catholic priest.

And all this is done over the course of a couple of days while she stays in Molly's house in Dublin -- a small redbrick Victorian house with  "immense charm" -- while Molly is away performing in New York. When she remembers that it is Molly's birthday she contemplates much about her dear friend, including why she never celebrates her birthday and why she is so protective of her younger brother, an alcoholic prone to depression.

This is a book about friendship: how tough it can be to accept flaws and foibles; how our relationships can be plagued by petty jealousies and secrets; and how important it is to our lives. But Molly Fox's Birthday is also a book about acting: how we play certain roles at certain times of our lives, and show different facets of our personality to different people. It's also about learning to accept the past in order to move into the future. It's a wonderful, atmospheric book and it will be interesting to see whether it wins the Orange Prize when it is announced early next month.

'Time After Time' by Molly Keane

Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 247 pages; 1990.

I have Sinead Gleeson and regular commenter Tony S. to thank for my introduction to the late Molly Keane. Both suggested I try the Irish writer when I was casting about for female authors to read early last year. Two of her novels, Time After Time (first published in 1983) and the Booker shortlisted Good Behaviour, were promptly added to my wishlist.

Fast forward 15 months, and I finally got to read my first Keane a couple of weeks ago. And boy, was it worth the wait.

Time After Time is a gorgeously fun novel that seems frothy and lighthearted on the surface, but underneath there's a very dark heart forging its own steady rhythm. It's not immediately obvious but this is a story about cruelty and the nasty things people do to each other.

It's set in a beautiful but crumbling mansion in Southern Ireland where four elderly siblings reside. Each of them is eccentric, fiercely independent and set in their own ways. The only things they have in common is their love of animals -- each fusses over their own cat or dog, treating them like substitute children -- and their treasured memories of their darling Mummie. There's one-eyed Jasper, who rules the kitchen, and his three ridiculously named sisters, April, May and Baby June.

April, the only one to have married, is now widowed but still bangs on about her late husband, Colonel Grange-Gorman, and is somewhat obsessed with preserving her looks and her figure. She's stone deaf so any conversation with her is full of misunderstandings, making her ripe for comedic effect.

May is the one obsessed by handicrafts -- she's been president of the Flower Arrangers' Guild for years and instructs members of the Irish Countrywomen's Association in the art of picture-making from scraps of tweed, wool and sprigs of heather -- despite the fact she was born with only half a finger and a thumb on one hand.

Baby June is the hard grafter, the one who runs the farm with the help of a local Catholic boy, and is an accomplished horsewoman, who achieved much success in point-to-points when she was younger but now considers herself too old to ride. 

(That's all of them pictured above -- I simply love this cover, because it depicts each chacracter perfectly, right down to the types of clothes they are wearing as described by Keane in the text.)

Together the Swift siblings rub each other the wrong way. Meal times are fraught with petty squabbles and half-imagined slights. The sisters belittle each other in order to compensate for their own failings, while Jasper seeks refuge in his closely guarded friendship with a local monk.

Into this mêlée comes cousin Leda, who arrives unannounced for a short stay. Now elderly, fat, blind and widowed, Leda was once a very beautiful young half-Jewish girl with whom the Swifts lost contact during the Second World War. Indeed, the family believed she had most likely died in a concentration camp. Her visit is but the first in a string of surprises that shakes each of the siblings to the core and leaves them all wishing she really had died in the Holocaust... 

I told you there was a dark heart to it.

Time After Time is a black comedy filled with the type of people you'd never want to meet in real life. I loved every minute of it and can only imagine that Good Behaviour will dish out more of the same.

'The Secret Scripture' by Sebastian Barry

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 320 pages; 2009.

When I read Sebastian Barry's 2005 Booker shortlisted novel A Long Long Way several summers ago I found it one of the most moving books I'd ever read. There was something about the story of an Irish lad caught between two wars that really resonated with me, and I promptly ordered my father a copy because I knew he'd enjoy the Great War element. Almost three years later I still find myself occasionally thinking about this story, always the sign of a great piece of fiction.

Then, last August, I acquired a copy of Barry's 2008 Booker shortlisted novel The Secret Scripture. It languished on my bedside table unopened and unread for months, and even its triumph at the Costa Book Awards in January, where it won the Costa Book of the Year Award, didn't spur me to pick it up. Then, on my recent trip to Ireland, I discovered a copy of it in the holiday cottage I was renting and felt it was no use putting it off any longer: I had to read it to see how it measured against my very high five-star opinion of A Long Long Way.

The Secret Scripture didn't disappoint. It is a magnificent story about memory and the tricks our minds play on us, and how society has a habit of condemning the innocent to live lives of quiet desperation and unnecessary struggle.

The story is split between two narrators, Roseanne McNulty, possibly the oldest woman in Ireland who has been a patient at Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital since 1957, and Dr William Greene, the senior psychiatrist who is charged with determining which patients can be re-released into the community once the present building is demolished.

Dr Greene, an outsider (in the sense that he's not Catholic) grieving over the death of his wife, spends a lot of time with Roseanne, whom he describes as "my old friend" and the "oldest person in this place".

She has been a fixture, and not only represents the institution, but also, in a curious way, my own history, my own life.

During their sessions in which he assesses Roseanne's suitability for discharge, he finds himself confessing things to her that he would normally keep quiet. Meanwhile, Roseanne gives little of herself away, preferring to make her confessions in a secret diary that she keeps hidden under the floorboards. It is these revealing diary extracts which make up her side of the narrative.

Eventually, over the course of the book, you learn of the joys and horrors of Roseanne's life and how she came to be incarcerated in the asylum. But because she readily admits that everything she recalls "may not be real"  and that she has "taken refuge in other impossible histories, in dreams, in fantasies" you're never quite sure if she is a reliable narrator or not. Towards the end of the novel she confesses that her memories and her imaginings are "lying deeply in the same place" and that the process of excavating them is troublesome.

Dr Greene, who is not privy to Roseanne's written confessional, has his own suspicions about her inconsistent memory, which he puts down to "tangled histories":

Not only can I not get her story from herself, I have versions of her life that I think she would reject.

Eventually, these two diverse narrative threads, which dance around each other, meld together, culminating in a surprise ending, which is devastating in its impact.

Unfortunately -- and this is where I tend to agree with the Costa judges who called it "a flawed novel" -- this tightening of loose ends felt too contrived for my liking, too neat, too packaged. It didn't help that I guessed the ending but had spent the last 50 or so pages convincing myself that I had it wrong, because surely Barry would leave in the ambiguities to allow the reader to come to their own conclusions about what really happened.

Does this matter though? No book is ever perfect and while The Secret Scripture might rely on two major coincidences for its climax to work, it does not detract from the highly emotional story told in such an effortless, beautiful way. And it certainly wouldn't put me off recommending it to anyone looking for something exquisitely written, intelligent and moving.

If you liked this book, you might also like Salley Vickers' The Other Side of You which treads similar territory in terms of narrative, content and style.

'The Gates' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction – paperback; Headline Review; 167 pages; 1998.

First published in 1973, The Gates is Jennifer Johnston's second novel, although at just 167 pages in length it feels more like a novella and can be easily consumed in one sitting.

It has a very simple linear narrative in which Minnie McMahon, aged 16, returns home to Ireland, where she is in the care of her elderly uncle, "The Major", and his forthright housekeeper, Ivy. Having completed her "expensive education" in England it is now time to decide what she wants to do with the rest of her life. 

Here, free from the domineering clutches of her English aunt who keeps thinking that "if she tidies me up a bit, and shoves me into the London social whirl, some ghastly chinless wonder will lose his head and marry me," she unwittingly falls for Kevin, the local lad from a poor family who works for The Major. When Ivy points out that she's wasting her time and would be better to return to England and a secretarial college, Minnie insists that she is merely following in the footsteps of her late father, a socialist journalist, who married "beneath him" and was ostracized from the family because of it.

When she hatches a plan to help Kevin steal the extravagant gates that belong to the English Italianate-style mansion house in which she grew up you know there's a disaster in the offing...

In fact the gates are rather symbolic of her family's slide from Protestant Ascendancy, 150 years earlier, to the current situation in which The Major struggles to pay for the whiskey that keeps him functioning while the estate falls into a state of "peaceful decay":

Ornate, flamboyant, garlanded with carved flowers, they hung eight feet high between two stone pillars, topped by smiling lions. [...] Nowadays the gates hung open, pale with weather and age. The avenue that curved for half a mile under the tunnel of elms, was rutted and overgrown. The tiny pillared gate lodge had not been lived in since 1922, when it had been the scene of one of the Civil War's minor incidences. Nettles grew up now through the empty windows and in the height of summer foxgloves peered over the walls. No one any longer bobbed and smiled, or passed the time of day as the Major drove  in and out.

This is a book about youthful naivety and misunderstandings between people. But it also explores the uncertain role of the Anglo-Irish in the new independent Ireland and how they grappled with changing attitudes to religion, wealth and class.

It is far from being Johnston's most accomplished work, but it gives glimpses of her future talent and there are some passages in which Minnie talks to the ghosts of the house (a kind of metaphor for her troubled conscience) that are reminiscent of the magic realism in 1998's Two Moons.

Please note, other Jennifer Johnston books reviewed on this site include: Foolish Mortals, The Christmas Tree, The Invisible Worm, The Old Jest and The Gingerbread Woman.

'My Dream of You' by Nuala O'Faolain

Fiction – paperback; Penguin; 464 pages; 2002.

Nuala O'Faolain was an Irish journalist, who died of cancer last year, aged 68. My Dream of You was her critically acclaimed debut novel about a middle-aged woman coming to terms with her past in order to embrace her future. It's one of those big, rambunctious novels that's a bit like an onion, with layer upon layer of meaning to peel back and discover.

It's bawdy and shocking in places, but tempered by good humour throughout. The hugely complicated, multi-layered storyline never feels like hard work. And there's so much going on to provoke and challenge one's own values that I'm sure this book is going to stay with me for a long time to come.

The narrator, Kathleen de Burca, is a highly successful travel writer, who has been the "tenant of a dim basement, half buried at the back of Euston Road, for more than twenty years". When her colleague and best friend Jimmy dies of a heart attack, Kathleen's life seemingly falls apart. She quits her job and returns to her native Ireland for the first time in more than two decades, where she hopes to write a book about a divorce case from history that has long intrigued her.

The Talbot vs Talbot judgement centres on a refined English woman (Mrs Talbot) accused of having an affair with a domestic servant (William Mullan) in 1849 at the height of the Irish potato famine. While undertaking research for the book in rural Ireland (near where the Talbot's once lived), Kathleen finds herself analysing her own life: a 50-year-old spinster who has never settled down with a man, although she has had numerous love affairs and one-night stands.

Estranged from her siblings -- an older sister in New York and a younger brother in Ireland -- she also begins to look back on her family relationships and how they have shaped her personality and tough outlook on life. Her now-dead father was emotionally distant, but it was her mother, who suffered from depression and later died of cancer, with whom she struggled to understand the most.

The book interleaves these very different narrative threads together into one seamless whole. It is so ripe with meaning, you could read My Dream of You ten times and still not get to the bottom of everything buried here.

One of the big themes that runs throughout this remarkably readable novel is sexual love versus romantic love and how Kathleen's "life would be marked by my misunderstanding of passion". It is clear from the outset that Kathleen does not feel she deserves to be loved, which is why she never turns a man down when he asks for sex. But whom to blame for this attitude?

I explained what happened in different ways to myself at different times in my life. My availability, I'd call it, rather than promiscuity, was Daddy's fault for not loving me, or Mammy's fault for having sex with Daddy when they never even talked to each other, or both their faults for showing me no other version of closeness between a man and a woman except sexual closeness. It was Catholic Ireland's fault, for sending me out into the world without a shred of inner moral sense, and it was England's fault, for making me feel inferior and unwelcome except when someone wanted to fuck me. It was the fault of the 1960s, for inventing the pill and the miniskirt; and it was also the fault of history, for making a world in which everyone had to pretend to bow to the bourgeois ideal of fidelity.

There are other themes, too, not the least of which is what it was like to be Irish living in London at the height of the IRA's bombing campaign. At one point, Kathleen recalls an incident in which she was doing a piece on 'Hidden Beauties of the Peak District' for the magazine when she returned to the hotel and found the police waiting for her.  They asked her to open her bag, which was sitting on a packing case in a garage, and then told her to take the battery out of her travelling alarm clock.

Sorry about that, the senior policeman said. They don't get many Irish around here.
It was nothing, that little episode. It didn't take five minutes. They had every right to do it. But for a long time afterwards I thought, they could have set me up! God knows it had happened to other Irish people...
I learned to ask for things -- a meal, a drink, directions to a place -- in a low voice and as neutral an accent as I could manage. I learned to look up at the television -- at the pictures of tape across driveways, shoppers staggering forward with blood on their faces, white ambulances screaming around the curves of quiet housing estates -- with no expression on my face. And to read my newspaper, and smile at everyone, and say nothing noticeable.

But at the very heart of the novel is Kathleen's acceptance of herself as a good person who deserves to be happy without society judging her for it. When she meets the charming Shay, a man with whom she feels a deep affinity, the promise of a secure, loving relationship, albeit it with strings attached, beckons -- but at what price?

'The Aran Islands' by J. M. Synge

 

Non fiction - paperback; Penguin Classics; 208 pages; 1992.

At the turn of the 19th century, Irish poet and playwright John Millington Synge made numerous visits to the Aran Islands, off the west coast of Ireland. He had been encouraged to make his first visit in 1897 by his friend, William Butler Yeats, who told him: "Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression."

I wanted to read this book, because I had imagined it to be one of those oh-so authentic travelogues that would tell me what it was like to live in a remote place at a time when tourism was not commonplace. And that, my friends, is pretty much exactly what I got, along with a healthy dose of fairy stories and some wonderful descriptions of breath-taking scenery.

As Tim Robinson points out in the introduction, the book is completely self-sufficient in the sense that Synge never explains why he went to the Aran Islands nor what impact it was to have on the rest of his life. But we know now that he spent his first summer there shortly after being diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease (then completely untreatable) and that after his final visit, some five years later, he achieved extraordinary success with his play The Playboy of the Western World first published in 1907, the same year as The Aran Islands was published. He died just two years later.

The Aran Islands records the day-to-day lives of Irish peasants living in small fishing communities on one of the most rugged and windswept islands in the world. Here's Synge's first impression of the island as he wanders along its "one good roadway":

I have seen nothing so desolate. Grey floods of water were sweeping everywhere upon the limestone, making at times a wild torrent of the road, which twined continually over low hills and cavities in the rock or passed between a few small fields of potatoes or grass hidden away in corners that had shelter. Whenever the cloud lifted I could see the edge of the sea below me on the right, and the naked ridge of the island above me on the other side. Occasionally I passed a lonely chapel or schoolhouse, or a line of stone pillars with crosses above them and inscriptions asking a prayer for the soul of the person they commemorated.

But while a great deal of this book is about the landscape and the terrain and the ever-present roaring sea, it is also about the people whom he befriends along the way. And here, huddled around turf fires, he not only perfects his Irish but collects stories and folklore from local residents. On his first visit he meets a blind man who believes in the "superiority of his stories over all other stories in the world".

Afterward he told me how one of his children had been taken by the fairies.
One day a neighbour was a passing, and she said, when she saw it on the road, 'That's a fine child.'
Its mother tried to say, 'God bless it,' but something choked the words in her throat.
A while later they found a wound on its neck, and for three nights the house was filled with noises.
'I never wear a shirt at night,' he said, 'but I got up out of my bed, all naked as I was, when I heard the noises in the house, and lighted a light, but there was nothing in it.'
Then a dummy came and made signs of hammering nails in a coffin.
The next day the seed potatoes were full of blood, and the child told his mother that he was going to America.
'That night it died, and believe me,' said the old man, 'the fairies were in it.'

Synge also records the harsh conditions in which the island's tiny population lives and the difficulties that confront them in terms of feeding and clothing themselves adequately. His description of poverty-stricken villagers is, at times, heartbreaking. But he also enjoys experiencing the primitiveness of the culture, such as sailing on the ocean in a curagh -- "a rude canvas canoe of a model that has served primitive races since men first went on the sea" -- and using handmade articles from natural materials -- cradles, churns, baskets and the like -- which "seem to exist as a natural link between the people and the world that is about them". I particularly loved his descriptions of the island's fashions:

The simplicity and unity of the dress increases in another way the local air of beauty. The women wear red petticoats and jackets of the island wool stained with madder, to which they usually add a plaid shawl twisted around their chests and tied at the back. When it rains they throw another petticoat over their heads with the waistband around their faces, or, if they are young, they use a heavy shawl like those worn in Galway. Occasionally other wraps are worn, and during the thunderstorm I arrived in, I saw several girls with men's waistcoats buttoned around their bodies. Their skirts do not come much below the knee, and show their powerful legs in the heavy indigo stockings with which they are all provided.

Because Synge makes several visits over a five-year period he is able to notice small changes to the culture with each visit he makes. Take this example, written during his fifth and final visit, in which he realises that progress has made its mark, and not necessarily in a good way:

I am in the north island again, looking out with a singular sensation to the cliffs across the sound. It is hard to believe that those hovels I can just see in the south are filled with people whose lives have the strange quality that is found in the oldest poetry and legend. Compared with them the falling off that has come with the increased prosperity of this island is full of discouragement. The charm which the people over there share with the birds and flowers has been replaced here by the anxiety of men who are eager for gain. The eyes and expression are different, though the faces are the same, and even the children here seem to have an indefinable modern quality that is absent from the men of Inishman.

The Aran Islands is a fascinating account of another culture in another time confronted by development, or, as the blurb on the back of my Penguin edition so eloquently puts it, "the passionate exploration of an island community still embedded in its ancestral ways but solicited by modernism". Not necessarily an easy read, but an enjoyable one nonetheless.

If you're interested in reading the book for yourself, a free version is available online at Google Books.

'Foolish Mortals' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Headline Review; 312 pages; 2007.

If I had my wits about me I'd be reading Jennifer Johnston's back catalog in the order in which the books were written, so that I could appreciate her development as a writer. However, I'm not that well organised, and when I saw this book in Waterstone's the other day, while I was doing some last-minute Christmas gift buying, I snapped this one up for myself.

This morning, curled up in bed, I read it cover to cover and, not for the first time, wished my rating system featured half-stars. If it did, I'd probably award Foolish Mortals -- Johnston's most recent novel -- three-and-a-half stars: it's not one of Johnston's best, although it is by far her most accessible novel. The literary flourishes that characterise most of her books (or the ones that I've read so far) are not here, save for one character -- Henry -- telling his side of the story in the first person, while the rest of the story is narrated in the third person.

The book opens with Henry lying in a hospital bed, drifting in and out of consciousness. We later learn that he's been involved in a serious car accident in which his wife, Charlotte -- the driver -- was killed. Save for a lot of broken bones, he's quite okay but his memory has been shot and it takes time for him to piece the past together.

So here I sit in this hospital room broken in pieces and little by little the past is revealing itself to me. Things I want to know and things that might be better left unremembered. How great it would be if you could only remember the good bits, the noble thoughts, the generosity, all the bits we hope for ourselves. Dreams, prayers, discard the blackness, let all the muck slide away.

Henry's amnesia is a great device for Johnston to throw in the "reveals" that normally irritate the hell out of me -- see my review of Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage for my thoughts on that particular literary device -- but in this context they're appropriate and don't seem as if the author is using them to show off.

Unfortunately, because the narrative relies on the unveiling of so many "secrets" to work it means I can't say much more about the storyline without ruining the plot for everyone else. But without giving anything away, Foolish Mortals is about the coming together of a dysfunctional family -- Henry's Canada-based brother, his first wife Stephanie, his almost-grown children and his 80-something mother, the rather gloriously eccentric Tash -- with the car accident as a catalyst and everything climaxing with a wonderful Christmas dinner.

It's delightfully kooky in places, although it never strays into outlandishness. The rambling family nature of the story does bring other authors to mind -- Anne Tyler, Anita Shreve and, dare I say it, Maeve Binchy -- but it still retains that distinctly Jennifer Jonhston feel with its economical use of language, its strong female characterisation and its deft analysis of ordinary human life. It was also refreshing to read a book by this writer set in New Ireland (as one of the characters dubs it) instead of some undefined period in history. I enjoyed it as a piece of literary "fluff" but if you're looking for a serious introduction to Johnston's work, this is probably not the place to start.

'The Christmas Tree' by Jennifer Johnston

  Fiction - paperback; Fontana; 168 pages; 1982.

As I work my way slowly but surely through Jennifer Johnston's rather extensive back catalogue -- 15 novels at last count -- I'm constantly surprised and delighted by the quality and consistency of her writing. This one, first published in 1981, only serves to confirm my high opinion of her under-appreciated talents. In fact, no sooner had I finished this than I wanted to turn back to the first page and read it all over again because I so thoroughly enjoyed it.

Judging by the title alone The Christmas Tree sounds like it could be sentimental claptrap -- and the somewhat dated illustration on my cover doesn't do much to dispel that assumption. But this is truly a case of never judge a book by its cover, because what lies within is an exquisitely written tale about an Irish woman who returns home to die, and not once does Johnston resort to mawkishness or saccharine touches to achieve a deeply affecting story.

As ever, Johnston treats her readers with intelligence and lets them fill in a lot of the gaps. She's not one to spell things out -- she does a lot of show and not much tell -- and I like that kind of approach, although, admittedly, it may not be for everyone.

For most of The Christmas Tree I was trying to figure out the year in which the story was set. Beyond the odd clue here and there -- a pair of old fur-lined boots in the cloakroom "that my mother must have bought some stage during the war, when to keep warm was more important than to look elegant" and a Polish Jew whose deformed fingers were broken by soldiers who "should have really killed me too" --  I could only assume it was not long after the Second World War.

What we do know is that the London-based lead character, Constance, 45, is a failed writer and suffering from leukemia diagnosed shortly after the birth of her first child. She's returned to her childhood home in Dublin -- now lying empty after the death of both parents -- to die on her own terms. Her infant daughter is in the care of an older sister, Bibi, who is bossy, prone to fussing and can't understand her refusal to go to hospital.

Here, with a whiskey bottle for company, Constance writes to her child's father -- Jacob Weinberg, a Polish Jew she met on a sojourn to Italy -- to tell him that he now has a daughter. While she waits for his response, she arranges for a live-in carer, 18-year-old Bridie, to take charge of the house and to help her work on her final book, which she wants to be published posthumously. Meanwhile all medical care is delivered by Bill, a former boyfriend, now family doctor.

This may seem like a rather dull premise for a book, but Johnston makes it sing by employing three interwoven narrative threads that reveal little nuggets of information that make you want to read on and on. The first narrative -- told in first person from Constance's point of view -- is about her impending death as Christmas slides ever closer; the second is about her rather spontaneous romance with Jacob Weinberg in Italy; and the third is a kind of look-back on Constance's familial relationships with a kind but distant father, a cold somewhat uncaring mother, and an overbearing, but more popular, sister.

There are several themes running throughout The Christmas Tree, not the least of which is death: how we deal with losing loved ones and how we deal with our own impending expiration date.

You get the sense that Constance, a headstrong, stubborn and independent woman, is not prone to regrets, but as she reflects on her life she does wonder whether she has made the right decision to lead the rather solitary life that she has lead.

Suppose I had married Bill and we had gone to Connemara and had six children, would we have been better people? Happier? Would I have comprehended more in that isolation than I succeeded in doing in the isolation I created for myself? Would I have been able to write, in those circumstances, the books that I wanted so much to write?

A large part of Constance's history is that she does not really know or understand her coolly indifferent parents, and she tries to reconcile this as she recalls specific incidents from her troubled past.

I had always felt that after my mother's death I would find some kind of release, the awareness for the first time of an identity. It wasn't that we hadn't been great friends or even communicated with each other in any important way. On the contrary I had always seemed to be a source of great irritation to her, a curious disappointment. The fact that I had been born the wrong sex had been the first major setback, from which our relationship never really recovered.

Her father, a successful lawyer, was happy to support her move to London, but he remains largely unfathomable and she never feels that he truly loves her. Long after she's abandoned the writing career for a dead end job in an advertising agency, her father comes visiting and takes her out for a meal. He then makes an astonishing admission: he once had dreams of being a writer and had enjoyed a modicum of success writing short stories and plays when he was a student at Cambridge. He gave it all up because he "lacked commitment".

'You look at your children as they grow, mature a bit, and will, yes, will, that somehow they will succeed in having some of the attributes that you yourself regret having lacked. At least...' he flushed away the painful taste of the smoked salmon with some sherry '...some development of the qualities that you find admirable in yourself. Is it a failure of some sort if you only see your own weakness in your children? I wonder'

She felt the question was rhetorical and didn't say a word.

Can you imagine the pain of hearing that from your father? No wonder then that Constance has developed a rather spiky character -- indeed, Jacob calls her a hedgehog: "The first signs of trabble [trouble] and you roll up into a ball and put your prickles out." He also berates her for deflecting everything with humour. "Foolishness. Joking. Flippant joking. You are always joking, Constance," he tells her. "I would like to see you cry."

This is a short, all-too brief novel but all the major issues we have to confront during our lifetimes -- from choosing a career to having children, from never being able to escape the past to not ever truly knowing the people we should be closest to -- is encompassed within its 168 pages. There's no doubt that The Christmas Tree is a totally absorbing tale, but it's also one of the best I have ever read about the human condition. This is the kind of literature that makes you goggle-eyed with the sheer beauty of it. It's not exactly a festive read, but it is a memorable one.

'The Ginger Man' by J.P. Donleavy

  Fiction - paperback; Abacus; 346 pages; 1997.

For someone who has an incurable penchant for Irish fiction, I can't believe I let J.P. Donleavy slip me by for so long. But until very recently he was completely unknown to me. So when my Other Half went on a solo run to Dublin recently and bought me The Ginger Man as a gift I wasn't sure what to expect.

Funnily enough, I recognised the cover of the book, but I'm not sure why. I don't think I have ever picked it up in a book shop. But that's by the by.

The blurb on my edition waxes rather lyrical, calling it a "masterpiece" and "a triumph", but I think that's not credit enough. The Ginger Man is a thoroughly wonderful, riotously funny, head-shakingly brilliant read. I loved it from the very first line to the last.

First published in Paris in 1955, the book was banned in Ireland -- where it is set -- and the USA for obscenity. More than 50 years on, the story is still crude and ribald but certainly not as offensive as it must have seemed in more temperate times in places verging on puritan.

The story follows the adventures of Sebastian Dangerfield, an American Protestant of Irish descent, who is studying law at Trinity College just after the Second World War. Married to an English woman and with an infant daughter, Dangerfield is a chancer who shies away from any form of responsibility, preferring to hang out with his friend, fellow student Kenneth O'Keefe, rather than do any proactive study.

Obsessed with booze and women, he does everything a married man should not do: spends the couple's rent money on alcohol, staggers home drunk and acts violently towards his wife. He also has numerous adulterous affairs in which he treats the women abominably. He is, in short, a thoroughly unlikable and selfish cad. And yet, in Donleavy's hands, Dangerfield is a character you love to hate. I spent most of the time thinking this can't be true, he can't get away with this, surely the man has a conscience? And kept turning the pages, hoping to discover that the man would mend his wicked ways if only he realised his behaviour was so outrageously appalling.

The book is written in a weird mish-mash of viewpoints, effortlessly switching between first person and third person, typical of the following paragraph:

'Come here and sit beside me while I open this bottle.'
She came and sat on the mattress beside him, leaning against the wall, watching him with a flourish of wrist, pop the cork. We lay in the remnants of coal. And a pile of turf. I happen to know that dogs and cats prefer coal and turf. And I don't relish finding myself sitting in it.

There are some scenes that are laugh-out-loud funny; others so shockingly brutal you're not sure you want to read on. I found myself not knowing whether I should be grimacing or chortling throughout. But it's this very fine line between comedy and tragedy that makes The Ginger Man work -- on so many different levels. The beauty of this rather marvellous novel is that it paints a very human portrait of a man so desperately troubled -- financially, emotionally, mentally -- that it's hard not to empathise with him just a little.

For those that want to know more about J.P. Donleavy, there's a wonderful profile of him on the Guardian website. He sounds like a truly fascinating character with whom I must acquaint myself more fully!

'The Invisible Worm' by Jennifer Johnston

Fiction - paperback; Penguin; 181 pages; 1991.

Irish novelist Jennifer Johnston has, in recent times, become one of my favourite writers. This book, her ninth, was first published in 1991. The cover* of my Penguin edition (which I acquired at no cost from BookMooch) is deceptive, because this is not the historical novel I came to expect but a very modern one about the long-lasting impact of child abuse on one woman's life.

Despite the somewhat horrific subject matter, Johnston has created a delicately realised and completely unsentimental tale. In any other author's hands I'm afraid this story about a family's secret past would be elevated to melodrama, with everything spelt out in minute detail. But Johnston's strength is her ability to weave a complicated narrative using an economical palette of words. As ever, it's the things she does not say that make The Invisible Worm such an interesting, compelling read.

Set in an unspecified era -- is it before the Second World War, immediately afterwards or in the 1980s, I could not tell -- Laura Quinlan's quiet existence is shattered by the presence of Dominic O'Hara, a former priest turned school teacher, who keeps her company whenever Maurice, her busy, but rather doting husband, is away on business. It is clear from the outset that her platonic relationship with Dominic has an undercurrent of sexual tension, but she seems happy to leave it unfulfilled.

Laura is 37 and childless, though not for want of trying.

I did try to have a daughter.
I believe in continuity, the handing down of secrets; I want someone else to hear the whispers, the breaths from the past, as I have always done; someone else to be stirred by the tremors of memory.
Some of the tremors of memory.
I did try. All those seeds were rejected.

A recluse who lives in a lovely big house by the sea, she spends her days reading and gardening. Occasionally she gives dinner parties for Maurice's colleagues, where she is renowned for her "very good cake". But on the whole she seems a lonely, troubled woman who refuses to engage with other people or other places, content to stay at home and "guard this mad museum, the curator of my ancestor's folly".

When the story opens Laura is getting ready to attend the funeral of her father, a man held in such high regard by others that the Irish president and a "distinguished congregation" attend the service. But Laura's inner thoughts -- "The hole that they dig for you won't be deep enough, dear Father" -- reveal a hatred that seems slightly repellent, if intriguing, to the reader.

It's only later, when she meets Dominic, that she feels compelled to tell him a little of her dark, hidden past, as if she is confessing her sins to the priest he once was. And slowly, while the pair get to work unearthing the much-neglected summerhouse that once belonged to her long-dead mother, layers of the family's history are peeled back to reveal the rotten core. The denouement, when it comes, is heart-thumpingly shocking, matched only by the quiet devastation of the aftermath.

For anyone contemplating reading The Invisible Worm I offer a couple of caveats.

This is a simple story, but it jumps backwards and forwards in time and the lack of detail in the bare-boned prose takes a little getting used to, particularly if you are not familiar with Johnston's style.

There are little literary flourishes to contend with too, such as the constant switching between third person and first person narratives, which can make things confusing, and the sometimes ambiguous conversations between characters, full of interruptions and stilted language, can be difficult to comprehend. The secret, I have found, is to read Johnston's novels -- this one included -- in large chunks, rather than snatches here and there. You need to let the language wash over you so that you can find the rhythm of it. You will then find it difficult to let go.

* The cover shows A Summer Afternoon by Sir William Orpen, an Irish painter who died in 1931.

'Tenderwire' by Claire Kilroy

Fiction - paperback; Faber and Faber; 288 pages; 2007.

Back in January a reader of this blog emailed me to recommend Claire Kilroy's Tenderwire. "I have recommended this book to so many different types of people, young and old, male and female, and I haven't heard one negative review of it," she wrote. "In fact, friends of friends of friends and distant relatives of friends have gone out of their way to tell me how much they liked it."

I'm always partial to a good recommendation, so I looked this one up on Amazon: it ticked several boxes for me, including great reviews and a mention on the 2008 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award long list. The fact that it was written by an Irish author and set in New York sealed the deal: I "mooched" a copy from BookMooch as soon as I could hunt one out.

Last week, looking for something that would entertain me during my lunch hour, I extracted the book from my reading queue and took it to work with me. I rarely take full lunch hours these days, often scoffing a sandwich at my desk, but last Wednesday the sun was shining and so I sat outside and cracked open this book. Hooked from the start, the hour whizzed by and for the rest of the day I couldn't wait to get back to the story of Eva Tyne, an Irish violinist living and working in New York, who goes on a rather dangerous mission to buy a rare violin of dubious provenance.

Admittedly, this might not sound like a gripping story, but the first-person narrative, written in a kind of cruel, edgy and unstable voice, is the type that gets in your head and throws your world a little off kilter. You want to keep turning the pages if only to shake-off that quietly menacing monologue that so disturbs you.

Part thriller, part psychological drama, Tenderwire is set in a rather unfamiliar place in which the criminal underworld collides with the refined world of classical music. And Eva, our narrator, gets caught up in it, naively expecting that if she buys a valuable violin -- the Magdalena Stradivarius, dating from the 17th Century -- from a dodgy Russian she met in a bar there will be no repercussions and no payback.

If I bought the violin, would somebody come knocking on my door, claiming rightful ownership? Not if it had been stolen from somebody who'd stolen it themselves. And not if it had been lost; not if it had been seized from the Russian aristocracy a century ago and found its way into the hands of someone who didn't fully grasp what it was. Just another fiddle in a country full of fiddles. it was feasible Highly unlikely, but feasible.

There'd been any number of wars during the violin's lifetime, huge savage wars spilling right across Europe, in which everything had been uprooted and lost. Napoleonic wars, world wars, cold wars, a plethora of revolutions. Things had come loose from their moorings; paintings, jewels, even people. And the difference with paintings, jewels and people was that they were identifiable by sight. A violin wasn't. Not unless it had distinctive ornamentation. Magdalena had no distinctive ornamentation. At least, not that I could recall. I racked my brains, but remembered no markings at all. Only dirt, grime, the formidably all ruing patina of neglect. It was just possible that I might get away with this.

Obviously, the whole point of reading this book is to find out whether Eva does, indeed, get away with it. It's an alluring premise, because it's hard to believe that someone so fragile and mentally unstable as Eva would have the audacity to stump up $650,000 in cash to buy it. Even more intriguing when you know that it does not come with any papers and therefore cannot be authenticated. Is she merely being duped into buying a fake and staking her whole career on a possible copy?

This is a rollicking good read, with plenty of red herrings, including love affairs and concert performances, to keep you on tenterhooks throughout. There's a great cast of characters in supporting roles to give the story real depth, and the prose style, clipped and restrained, is imbued with enough paranoia to make the reader look over their own shoulders once or twice.

And for those who doubt they know enough about violins to warrant reading the book, there's plenty of background information on the rich history of violin-making to give you an understanding and appreciation of the very object that Eva becomes so passionate and obsessive about. It's an intriguing insight into a world I knew very little about.

I can see why Tenderwire is one of those books you end up recommending to others -- it's an intelligent page-turner, highly engaging and with a terrific, satisfying, ending to boot. I very much enjoyed it.