Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye over the latest batch of paperbacks.
The Parts
Keith Ridgeway
Faber & Faber, 9.99
It's a relief to read a novel set in modern Dublin that isn't too preoccupied with the changes wrought by the 1990s boom. Keith Ridgeway concentrates instead on populating the city with engaging, believable characters: a talk-radio DJ in mid-life crisis; his lonely gay producer; a filthy-rich widow and her gold-digging hangers-on, her loathsome adopted son and slothful novelist friend. All their lives are touched in some way by the most refreshing character of the lot: a thoroughly wholesome rent-boy. Ridgeway is a funny writer, with a gift for dialogue and a playful approach to syntax, specialising in long, compound sentences that dance rhythmically towards their full-stops. He has fun, too, with the milieu of modern life - conspiracy theories, sexual ambivalence, and the media - he even has the odd dig at The Irish Times - in this captivating tragicomedy.
Conor Goodman
Imprint of the Raj
Chandak Sengoopta
Pan Books, £7.99
This book traces the origins of fingerprinting, and its contested discovery, from colonial India, under the yoke of Her Majesty, into the beginning of the 20th century, and the Empire's disintegration. It is small and perfectly formed, an understated and precise account of a fascinating story that throws light on current debates. It is impossible not to draw parallels between Britain's reluctance to catalogue its domestic citizens (though the dodgy foreigners were fair game) in the 19th century and the current attempts by David Blunkett to ID- card the nation.The technicalities of finger printing are relegated rather wisely to an appendix, but it was devising a system for searching the fingerprint archive that proved the best inducement of innovation. A stylish and considered piece of revisionist history.
Laurence Mackin
The Guilty Heart
Julie Parsons.
Pan, £6.99
The fact that its title is taken from Bach's St Matthew Passion - "Grief for sin/Rends the guilty heart within . . ." - suggests that this will be a stylish thriller. And such, indeed, it proves to be. The grief in question is that of Nick Cassidy, whose eight-year-old son, Owen, disappears from the family home in Dún Laoghaire while Nick is in bed with the woman next door - which is where the sin and guilt come in. Parsons has always been adept at creating a dark, disturbing mood, and in her fourth novel she weaves themes of Internet child pornography and Bosnian refugees into a picture of suburban Dublin that is both effortlessly familiar and startlingly distorted. Above all, though, she knows how to keep those pages turning.
Arminta Wallace
The Time of our Singing
Richard Powers
Vintage, £7.99
This novel is about what happens when a Jewish, German refugee physicist marries the vocally talented daughter of an African-
American doctor from Philadelphia. As a way of evading a defining black/white experience, they educate their children at home until it is time to send their sons to Boston's Boylston Academy and to the Juilliard in New York. Their only daughter, Ruth joins the Black Panthers in the late 1960s. As an activist, she despises her father and tells him so. But, what really entrenches divisions is her allegation that the accident, which caused her mother's death in the mid-1950s, was deliberately racist fuelled. Jonah and Joseph's musical engagements are the mainstay of the novel. However, because the canvas is so enormous and the writing style so lush it is impossible to remain with the thread of the narrative. More editing would have helped .
Kate Bateman
Counties of Contention
Benedict Kiely
Mercier, 12.95
First published in 1945, this was written at a time when, as John Hume says in a new introduction, partition was still a vivid memory and "a shock and hurt" to Irish nationalists. All the more remarkable then that Ben Kiely, himself an Ulster Catholic and nationalist, could write such a constructive and thought-provoking book. Superbly written, it is full of penetrating insights. For example, Kiely is surely right when he says that Home Rule was the golden opportunity "to make a lasting peace" between Britain and Ireland. And this comment is indisputable: "The \ remained, splitting Ireland with a spiritual wound more serious than any material division, marking the limit beyond which Irish friendship for England could not and cannot go". Those involved in today's peace process would do well to read this very welcome new edition.
Brian Maye
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Azar Nafisi
Fourth Estate £7.99
Anyone who loves literature will be touched by this memoir. Azar Nafisi was a secular, cosmopolitan woman teaching literature at the University of Tehran when the Islamic Republic seized power. As Nafisi mourns the freedom stolen from her - equality before the courts, the feel of the sun and wind on her hair and skin, chats in public with male friends - her favourite novels provide comfort. Eventually she resigns her academic post but invites seven young women to meet once a week to analyse the works of Fitzgerald, Austen, Nabokov and others. This is a fascinating account of life in a theocracy, where some of Nafisi's students are executed and another sets himself on fire, where female guards scrub her face in search of illicit make-up, and where her husband mourns the bootleg vodka he will miss when they finally leave Iran.
Mary Feely