The latest paperback releases reviewed...
Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger, Fintan O'Toole. Faber, £8.99
This searing indictment of the new aristocracy of bankers, developers and politicians whose arrogance and blind faith in the free market crashed the Irish economy has been updated to include the inequities of Nama. The author argues that the Fianna Fáil-Progressive Democrats coalition that took charge in the late 1990s had the opportunity to create a society that would be economically, socially and environmentally sustainable. But they blew it in the interests of crony capitalism. His lucid depiction of an unregulated banking system operated for the benefit of insiders and a property-developer class behaving like a latter-day landed gentry is chilling. Most worryingly, unlike most other developed western societies, in Ireland there seems to be no political or judicial price to pay. We have developed a remarkably high tolerance for all kinds of corruption. O’Toole calls on us to kick away the system that has failed us – or be doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past.
Love Me Tender,Jane Feaver, Vintage, £7.99
Shortlisted for this year’s Edge Hill Short Story Prize, Jane Feaver’s collection of interconnected stories has the resonance of a novel: the recurring characters, who often mingle in the Red Lion pub, give a sense of breadth to the rural English town of Buckleigh, where the stories take place. Not unlike Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, the characters in Love Me Tender are “grotesques”: spiritual cripples, craving, seeking and failing in their relationships. The mayor of Buckleigh falls for a tough single mother, Debbie; the mayor’s father lusts after a young girl; a farmer’s wife kills her husband and his lover. Feaver’s spartan sentences are taut and neat and utterly undermine any romantic notions of love and sex. In her descriptions of the town and its weather, however, Feaver allows a quietly poetic and pastoral voice to peek through; a thoughtful pause in the otherwise dark emotional interiors of the characters in these stories.
The Quickening Maze, Adam Foulds, Vintage, £7.99
This short but intense book is set in High Beach Asylum, near Epping Forest, in 1840. A psychotherapist called Matthew Allen is trying to treat – rather than simply incarcerate – his mentally ill patients, one of whom is the nature poet John Clare. Another patient is Septimus Tennyson, whose brother Alfred has moved into a house nearby, attracting the attention of Allen’s spirited daughter Hannah. Foulds takes a real-life vignette from literary history and invests it with the super-real ambience of a dream, or a poem. The novel is graceful, episodic, almost three dimensional as it circles from one character to another, changing perspective as it goes – even Hannah’s baby sister, Abigail, is included in the elegant rondo. It’s not as beautiful or as emotional as The Winner of Sorrow, Brian Lynch’s study of another “mad” English poet, William Cowper. But The Quickening Maze is a truly original piece of fiction that demands to be read slowly, every word savoured, and then read all over again.
Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer, Cannongate, £7.99
What is infuriating though, bizarrely, perhaps intentional about Geoff Dyer’s novel is the disparity in the quality of its two stand-alone sections. The second, in which our art-journalist narrator Jeff, fresh from a sort of mini midlife crisis in Venice, finds contentment and a form of spiritual transcendence amid the sensuous Indian city of Varanasi, is a haunting, beautifully written novella in itself. Jeff’s snapshot observances and acerbic wit paint a rich portrait of the region in all its squalor and other-worldly beauty. However, the depth of feeling and complexity of thought that characterises Jeffs awakening in Varanasi stands in sharp contrast to the vacuous, somewhat tawdry tale of lust and coke-dusted, booze-soaked excess that unfolds in the book’s first section. It may be constructed solely as an illustration of Jeff’s unconscious yearning for an existence of greater fulfilment, but in the Venice part much of the author’s humour and descriptive flair become crass and unappealing.
Love of the World: EssaysJohn McGahern, Faber, £9.99
It is a delightful surprise to feel the physical as well as spiritual heft of this posthumous McGahern volume. There are intriguing pieces here on books and reading, places and people, autobiography and religion, and Irish history and society, amid which great love for the finer things in life shines through – from delicious sandwiches in Blake’s bar in Enniskillen to perfect monkfish with wood mushrooms in Julien’s of Paris. Firm judgments abound, and the writing is regularly as fine as in the fiction itself. For fans and students this collection is a godsend – the frequent repetitions and recyclings between essays become themselves a guide to McGahern’s ceremonially regular preoccupations, always rooted in key words such as manners, tact and taste. But even if this were to be your first McGahern book you would have a rare treat in store in his profound and ubiquitous emphasis on the importance in life of one vital word and perception: the beautiful.
