The Emperor Of All Maladies - Siddhartha Mukherjee

Siddhartha Mukherjee has the coolest name of any writer I've read in a long time and his book has received near universal praise, it got starred reviews in the trades, it was a New York Times book of the year, an Amazon book of the year, a nominee for many of the major non fiction literary prizes...You can see where this is going can't you? ... Yeah, I didn't like it.
...
Physician and researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee calls his work a "biography" of cancer rather than a history of its discovery and treatment and for me this is the problem. He mixes memoir with science and history and anecdote. The "biography" description is the giveaway that this book is pretty disjointed and a bit of a mess. Mukherjee makes you jump back and forth between pages to understand the chronology of the narrative and its so stuffed with info that you quickly get lost. I think the book is supposed to be organised thematically by type of cancer (although I'm not sure) so there is a lot of repetition of information and you're never clear where you are in the story. (It's also not only a very American account of the history of cancer treatment but a strangely Boston-centric one with what seems like more pages devoted to the history of the Jimmy Fund than to the entire pre twentieth century history of cancer. Boston featured so heavily in the history sections it made me wonder if Mukherjee hasn't been a bit brainwashed by his tenure at Mass General.)

...
Mukherjee is clearly a great oncologist and a wonderful physician but at the end of The Emperor Of All Maladies, I hadn't got much of anything out of his book. Beginning every chapter with a quotation is always a bad sign I think and maybe I'm a bit thick but Mukherjee's chronological time jumping and his blizzard of information left me thoroughly baffled. Mukherjee references Susan Sontag on several occasions and it's unfortunate, Susan Sontag's Illness As Metaphor is a genuine classic and a book I can return to again and again, but this...
...
Still, maybe I'm being too critical, the dude's heart is in the right place and lots of people smarter than me loved Emperor and anyway these are the times we are living in: The Huffington Post has become a paper of record, Malcolm Gladwell is hailed as some kind of genius and Roger Ebert gives Avatar a four star review. In 2011 no doubt Jonathan Franzen's overpraised novel Freedom and Mukherjee's overpraised Emperor of All Maladies will win many of the literary prizes and if that makes people happy then that's fine with me; there's no point complaining that Mukherjee is no Susan Sontag - her like we will not see again.

How We Learned To Talk

Review This Book!

Thank you to everyone who has reviewed me so far on Amazon.com, Audible.com, Good Reads and Amazon.co.uk. I also really appreciate the blogger and newspaper reviews! I know that you all have busy lives and I'm so touched when you take the time to write a review of my book. As I've said I do read every review and I learn a lot from them, even from the ones where they clearly hate my stuff.  

...

Falling Glass has been out one month and although its hard to get in the US I've got 8 reviews so far on Amazon.com, 7 on Audible, 4 on Good Reads and a slightly disappointing 2 on Amazon.co.uk.  I haven't received a bad review yet and I really think that if people learned about the novel it would be appreciated by a wider audience. The blog reviews I've found have come from Glenna, Rob, Peter, Shullamuth & Jon - if I missed you do let me know. Special thanks to everyone who reviewed me in in more than one place. I know who you are, you little devils. So again many many thanks to everyone who has taken the trouble to read me and then review me!
...
If there are any other review sites I don't know about please let me know and please if you have an Amazon.co.uk account I'd appreciate your help...it's looking a bit pathetic over there.
...
Slainte and go raibh maith agat...

National Treasures

I was reading an nterview with Judy Dench in The Guardian over the weekend and Dame Judy said that the one thing that she couldn't stand was when people called her "a national treasure". Of course, with apologies to her, she is a national treasure. Anyway I thought I would compile my own list of 10 other, N.T.'s all from the UK (the concept of national treasure somehow doesnt really work elsewhere):
1. Patrick Moore: Still presenting the Sky At Night on the BBC, as he has been so doing for the last 53 years.
2. David Attenborough: Feisty, curious and energetic as ever.
3. Christopher Hitchens: smart, funny, mad, bad and dangerous to know and STILL kicking. Even when he's way off base he's entertainingly way off base.
4. Patrick Leigh Fermor: The travel writer's travel writer. He's now well into his nineties and apparently going strong. If you haven't read A Time Of Gifts then stop what you are doing right now and order the book from somewhere.
5. Helen Mirren: she can do no wrong as far as I'm concerned. Yes, even Caligula.
6. Stephen Fry: the youngest national treasure on my list, but he is, isn't he? Bless him. He writes, he acts, he directs. My only problem with Fry is that QI programme which I find a bit obnoxious.
7. Robert Plant: utterly confounding expectations after all these years. He can't quite sing those high register Zep songs anymore so he's had to improvise, and more power to him for that. He likes what he likes and he does what he does and he's charming and funny as this little appearance on Letterman shows.

8. Michael Caine: always good even when he's bad if that makes any sense. Everybody in Britain can do a Michael Caine impersonation. Some better than others.

9. Stephen Hawking: Hawking still hasn't got a Nobel Prize, which makes me ask, what's the point of Nobel Prizes then?

10 (tied) Ruth Rendell and PD James ... the Queens of crime, par excellence.

...

Are there any American National Treasures?  I dont know if the concept really works across the Atlantic but I suppose... Gore Vidal, Jacques Barzun, Camille Paglia, Bob Barker, Werner Herzog, Bob Uecker, John Daly, Clint Eastwood...???

The Oldest Melody In The World

I stumbled across Klezfiddle's YouTube channel and on it he's put his own lute recording of the oldest melody that has come down to us from history. As Klezfiddle explains, [this was] "transcribed from the original Cuneiform text by Prof. Richard Dumbrill. The ancient text indicates the names of specific lyre strings, and Prof Dumbrill interpreted the musical intervals also notated in the 3400 year old Cuneiform text! All details in his book, The Archeomusicology of the Ancient Near East." I find this piece really eerie, but also amazing; for some reason I thought there was no musical notation before the middle ages. Klezfiddle goes a bit Jimmy Page at the end which I think might not quite be in the Cuneiform.

Literary Necrophilia

(This is an old post that I thought I'd dig up with the news that filming has finally begun today(!) on Peter Jackson's version of The Hobbit.)

If you are a literature groupie you might enjoy this list. It's my top 10 places - obviously highly subjective - where you can soak up the atmosphere of a particular writer or a certain milieu. Rather conventionally I'm giving you my list in reverse order and keen observers may note that there's actually 15 discrete locations but then math was never my strong suit.


10. The Eagle and Child Pub, Oxford, England. The bar where JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis used to go to read out loud their works in progress and get criticism and advice from their peers. Large chunks of The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books were composed here. They serve real ale and Philip Pullman and even Alan Moore have been known to pop in. Consequently it's a kind of a nerd paradise and it's where I met that lucky lass the future mother of my children.


9. Dostoyevsky's House, Saint Petersburg, Russia
Ok the whole thing's fake, the furniture isn't period and no one knows exactly what his apartment really looked like, but it is as close as we're going to get to the real McCoyski. When I was there they had a free walking tour map where you could follow Raskolnikov and other characters' routes through the city and that's a great thing to do as long as you don't kill an old lady at the end of it.


8. The Site of Pushkin's Duel in the Woods, The St Petersburg Suburbs, Russia
Since we're in Petersburg we might as well stay here. Pushkin wrote a poem about a young man who threw his life away on a pointless duel in the forest. Rather tragically he then, er, threw his life away on a pointless duel in the forest. There's a statue marking the spot which was hard to find but worth it: when I went to see it there was a beautiful blonde girl in a white dress leaving flowers for Pushkin and weeping for him as if she'd just heard the news. No, unfortunately, she wasn't the good kind of crazy.


7. The Colburn Hotel, Denver, Colorado
Kerouac, Ginsberg, Cassady and William Burroughs used to go to Ginsberg's room in the Colburn to take acid, mescaline and other pharmaceuticals and watch the sun set setting behind the Front Range Mountains. I've never enhanced my experience in such a way but the sun sets are nice.


6. Les Deux Magots, St. Germain, Paris
This cafe was the centre of the literary universe for periods in the twenties and again in the fifties. Who mooched cafe au laits and wrote here? Who didn't? Its patrons included: Scott Fitzgerald, Joyce, Dos Passos, Djuna Barnes, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Beckett and many others. I mean ok so it's an expensive tourist trap these days but you still have to go here once in your life if only to experience the rudest wait staff in the Western World.


5. The British Museum Round Reading Room, Bloomsbury, London
This is where Karl Marx wrote Das Kapital and where anybody who was anybody in British letters did their research and writing. Dickens, Trollope, Thackeray, Auden, Orwell, Waugh, Maugham, Amis etc. all used the RRR at some point. Now that the British library has moved to St Pancras anyone is allowed in to visit the RRR and if you go there early before the hordes of screaming children it can be quite pleasant.


4. The Piano Bar of the Ambos Mundos Hotel, Havana, Cuba
This atmospheric joint is where Hemingway wrote For Whom The Bell Tolls. Be warned the current pianist has an inexplicable fondness for Celine Dion.


3. The Bar of the Ritz Hotel, Paris
The Ritz Hotel was "liberated" by Ernest Hemingway and a few American infantrymen in August 1944. A massive drinking session ensued. Sergeant JD Salinger showed up and Hemingway bought him a few cocktails having been impressed by his early short stories. Oh if those old whisky bottles could talk...


2. Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts
Final resting place for Hawthorne, Emerson, Alcott and Thoreau and a short hike from Walden Pond State Park where you can visit a reconstruction of Thoreau's cabin. There are many great literary cemeteries in the world (Westminster Abbey and Highgate in London; Montmartre, Montparnasse and Pere Lachaise in Paris; the lovely Novodevichy Convent & Cemetery in Moscow) but this is a very special place. For me it's the epitomy of tranquil, quiet, autumnal loveliness and I wouldn't mind spending all eternity here myself (but not for a while yet).

1 (tied) Garcia Lorca's House, Granada, Spain
After the somewhat dull symmetries and broken fountains of the Alhambra why not walk down the hill to the home of Spain's greatest twentieth century poet. You won't be disappointed.


1 (tied) Dashiell Hammett's Apartment, Post Street, San Francisco
When I visited there was someone actually living here but he was kind enough to let me in anyway. Since this is also technically Sam Spade's apartment too it can be a big thrill for fans of The Maltese Falcon.


1 (tied) Robert Louis Stevenson's House, Apia, Samoa
I haven't actually been here but it's very high on my to do list. Mark Twain visited and was impressed and if I remember correctly Paul Theroux dropped by too. Anyway it looks charming and I'd like to go.

1 (tied) Trotksy's House & Frida Kahlo's House
Ok neither of them are really writers (though Trot had a nice turn of phrase) but these houses are definitely worth a visit. They're very close to one another in the pretty Coyacan section of Mexico City which was actually a port in the time of stout Cortez. (Mind boggling). Trotsky's house was and is like a fortress and he's buried in the front garden. Frida Kahlo's home is one of the most beautiful interior spaces I've ever been in. She turned the house into a full blown extension of her personality and her art blossoms in every corner.


1 (tied) Ernest Hemingway's House, Havana, Cuba
It's quite the scene. If you want to read about my odd adventure in the Finca Vigia then click this link to The Times.

Hope you liked my little trawl through the literary necropoli. Let's do this again sometime, I've got a great story about how I tried to beat Dylan Thomas's record in The White Horse Tavern...

The Double Slit Experiment

I recently read a book all about the double slit experiment. I understood the book but I still don't understand the double slit experiment. I haven't understood it for about twenty years. If you don't know what I'm talking about its explained pretty well in this YouTube for high school kids. (At 4.00 the real weirdness begins.)

Falling Glass - The Guardian's Verdict

From Laura Wilson in Saturday's Guardian.

Falling Glass, by Adrian McKinty (Serpent's Tail, £11.99)

LAURA WILSON

The latest novel from Ireland's more accessible answer to James Ellroy has as its central character an old associate of Michael Forsythe, antihero of McKinty's wonderful Dead trilogy. Killian, of Pavee (Traveller) stock, has been thwarted in his attempts to go straight by the demise of the Celtic Tiger and returned to his previous living as an enforcer. Tasked with finding the drug-addicted ex-wife of an Irish airline magnate who has gone into hiding with their two children, Killian soon realises that her disappearance is about a lot more than denying access. His conscience awakened, he takes her to hide among the Travellers. This is another winner, with pathos, insight, sardonic humour and lyrical descriptions that counterpoint the red-hot action sequences to superb effect.

Matsushima

All week I've been trying to discover what happened to the town of Matsushima which was in the worst hit prefecture of the earthquake and Tsunami in Japan. I spent a couple of days in Sendai and Matsushima last November and watched with horror live on TV as the Tsunami obliterated the Sendai coast and pushed as far inland as the airport. I havent heard any news coming out of Matsushima until I read a report about it in the March 18 Sydney Morning Herald where, a reporter, John Garnaut, made it into town and talked to one survivor Tetsuo who was hit by a 3 metre wave:

Tetsuo's water-logged home is in Matsushima. Matsu means ''pine'' and shima means ''island''. The town was [somewhat] protected by a stunningly beautiful maze of coves and islands, topped with bonsai-shaped Japanese pines, which kept the worst of the tsunami at bay...[But] half the town has been smashed to bits and most of the rest is still underwater. Teams of soldiers were pulling bodies from the river reeds when I cycled by. There are no food supplies, no fuel, little dry ground, and regular tsunami alerts broadcast from helicopters.

For me, last November, Matsushima was a tranquil oasis in a bustling modern Japan. I forgot my camera on the trip there but I took a couple of quick videos with the pinhole camera on my iPod nano that gives you some idea of how beautiful it was. I have no idea if it will ever be like this again.


...

Down These Green Streets

On his blog today Dec Burke announces the publication of Down These Green Streets, the definitive look at the history of Irish crime writing. For whatever reason crime fiction in Ireland today has become the dominant genre for this generation's writing talent. So called literary fiction is going through a stage of moribund middle class angst, the best Irish plays are being written by Englishmen, and contemporary Irish poetry probably peaked in the 70's with the circle around Seamus Heaney at Queens University Belfast. Almost all the exciting developments in Irish prose and certainly the most interesting Irish novels of the last twenty years have been in the crime fiction genre. Why is this the case? Read the book and you'll find out. There are essays by Dec Burke, Colin Bateman, John Banville, John Connolly, Ken Bruen, Stu Neville, Adrian McKinty, Tana French, et. al. The preface is written by one Michael Connolly and there's an afterword by Fintan O'Toole.  

Happy St Patrick's Day

How They Decided Rathlin Island Was Irish...

they brought snakes there to see if they would survive or not.

The Irish in exile again

Taradale

I was in my local Coles supermarket in Melbourne the other day when the girl at the checkout asked me if I wanted a bag. “Are you from Derry by any chance?” I asked, recognising her accent. “No,” she replied dismissively, “I’m from Letterkenny.” I thought she could have given me that one considering the fact that we were both exiles ten thousand miles from home, but, no, for her the fifteen miles separating Derry and Letterkenny was still crucially important.


Eventually it will sink in that we’re not in Ulster anymore, but perhaps it will take a while. A quick drive up the M79 from Melbourne takes you to Taradale where you’ll find yourself in an area that looks exactly like Donegal. The rolling hills are filled with sheep, the trees are thick with crows and magpies and there was so much rain this winter that the grass turned almost emerald. Of course the illusion is somewhat shattered at dusk when the big grey kangaroos come out. Still, in my neighbourhood of St Kilda there so many Irish people working in supermarkets, cafes and restaurants that Australian accents are definitely in the minority.


Irish emigration to all corners of the globe of course is not a recent phenomenon but in the last decade it did become a good bit rarer. The period 1997-2007 may well go down in history as the only time in the last two thousand years when Ireland has had both peace and prosperity. And while peace looks as if, fingers crossed, it is here to stay, prosperity has gone for the immediate future. With hindsight it is now obvious that Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy was not based on low corporation taxes and a young, highly educated workforce; rather it was a bubble dependant largely upon property speculation and ever increasing house prices. Like all great Ponzi schemes the Irish real estate boom deflated over night taking the rest of the economy with it.


Before the mid 90's, if you were jobless in Belfast or Dublin the first thing you had to do was get the ferry to Liverpool or the plane to New York, but for a while there around the turn of the millennium even beleaguered Northern Ireland had net migration as young people stayed at home and the construction industry attracted Poles, Czechs and Romanians. It was a novel situation and its all over now. There isn’t much of a construction industry these days and the young people are leaving Ireland in droves.

I was the same when I was an Irish illegal immigrant in New York in the 1990's. I didn’t mind working in pubs or in dead end minimum wage jobs because, hell, it was the Big Apple, where they made Annie Hall and The French Connection. On my first day in the job in the Upper West Side Barnes and Noble Bookstore, the wonderfully tall Carly Simon came into my section and asked me for my advice on a really good novel. (I recommended Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which in retrospect might not have been quite her thing.) In my first year in New York I mostly hung out in the Irish neighbourhoods of Queens and the Bronx but after a while I stopped going to Woodside and Riverdale and Second Avenue. My feeling was that I’d come three thousand miles to get away from dodgy pork sausages and limp soda bread. Why hang out with a bunch of pasty Micks drinking terrible Guinness, when I could be playing pick up soccer with Brazilians and Mexicans in Central Park? Why eat Irish stew when there was Peruvian lomo saltado and Korean kimchi to be enjoyed?


It’s the same Down Under. Australia is a good place to be a new Irish immigrant. The Irish are well liked and there are Irish bars, an Irish newspaper, Irish produce stores. The new wave of Irish emigrants will, I suspect, adapt pretty quickly to their straitened circumstances and the period 1997-2007 will be seen as some kind of strange aberration in the long storied history of the Irish in exile. The planet will be a better place with sunburned Paddies popping up everywhere to take your order and tell you about the specials. In any case the young and jobless have little recourse left but to go. Famously James Joyce urged the young to flee Ireland “as though from a country that has undergone the visitation of an angered Jove.” Change Jove to the bankers of the EU and IMF and you have the current situation to a tee. And if the new immigrants, like the girl from Letterkenny, are feeling homesick then some Denny’s sausages and a quick run up the M79 to Taradale might do them the world of good.

Irish Poem of the Month - March

Bagpipe Music
Louis MacNeice


It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with head of bison.


John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey,
Kept its bones for dumbbells to use when he was fifty.


It's no go the Yogi-man, it's no go Blavatsky,
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.


Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather,
Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,
All we want is a Dunlop tire and the devil mend the puncture.


The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs. Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife "Take it away; I'm through with overproduction."


It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,
All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby.


Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.


It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.


It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium,
It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums,
It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections,
Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension.


It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet;
Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever,
But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather

The Adjustment Bureau

One of these men has way too much
free time on his hands....

Matt Damon and Emily Something attempt to outwit the angels who control the universe in this pretty good romantic thriller. The story is based on a short by Philip K Dick but dont let that fool you - it doesnt really have much of an edge to it, although it was produced by PKD's daughter Isa (and some other people). On balance I thought it was a pleasing enough little time waster. Some critics have been saying that its Inception Light but actually its superior to Inception in that there's actually a sex scene and the screenplay understands that love and sex are more important to people than machine guns and explosions. Inception was a film for intelligent 13 year old boys. The Adjustment Bureau is a film for slightly less intelligent grown ups. Damon was bland but competent, Emily Something was bland and completely unconvincing as a kooky dancer.  I did learn some important things from the film:



1. God lives at the top of Rockefeller Centre, apparently



2. The many people who said that my screenplay had a hacky denouement because it ended at City Hall where one character was trying to stop a wedding while being pursued by dark forces...were completely correct. It is hacky.



3. The person who wrote the dubbing lines got the Natural History Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art mixed up. The place with the whale is the former not the latter.

4. Yes there are Angels and a heaven but crucially, yes, there is a hell too...its having to watch Emily Something doing modern interpretive dancing.  



5. John Slattery from Mad Men can also play John Slattery from Mad Men.



6. No one in the whole screenwriting and producing process thought to themselves, hey this is 2011 lets not have everything go wrong because the black guy was asleep on the job.

7. The trailer for Sucker Punch looks nine kinds of awesome.

Pay Attention 007

Let's see you get out of this one, Mr Bond...
(oops, sorry, wrong Yaphet Kotto movie) 

Fox Classics here in Australia has been showing the entire James Bond series of films in order, which gives me a chance to catch up on what once was one of my favourite franchises. There have been some big surprises. The Sean Connery films that I remembered with real affection can often be quite dull, On Her Majesty's Secret Service is much better than I recalled and only one Bond in my rating schemata gets two A's and that's Roger Moore (my least favourite!) Anyway here's my grading system A = excellent, B = very good, C = pretty watchable, D & E = sometimes watchable, F = terrible.

Dr. No (1962-Sean Connery) C  (slow start to the series but it has its moments)
From Russia With Love (1963-Sean Connery)  B  (much improved but a weak ending)
Goldfinger (1964-Sean Connery) A  (self effacing, good humoured, silly, a great theme song and a terrific climax. It also contains my favourite Bond dialogue: Pussy: "I'm Pussy Galore." Bond: "Of course you are.")
Thunderball (1965-Sean Connery) B  (pretty thin beer this, too many underwater sequences, but three gorgeous female leads)
You Only Live Twice (1967-Sean Connery) B  (I quite liked this one and it had the first classic Bond secret-fortress-explosion-denoument)
On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969-George Lazenby) B (a bit of a shocker this: Lazenby is good! Diana Rigg is great. The music is fantastic. The ending perfect)

Diamonds Are Forever (1971-Sean Connery) D  (wrong direction completely for the series here)

Live and Let Die (1973-Roger Moore) A (Moore's first. Great theme, great villain (Yaphet Kotto), great Bond girl (Jane Seymour) lots of witty scenes and stunts)

The Man with the Golden Gun (1974-Roger Moore) F (what a disaster, even with the impeccable Christopher Lee)

The Spy Who Loved Me (1977-Roger Moore) A (ever notice the connection between great opening titles and themes and the better James Bond films? - is this the best Bond theme song? The rest of the film is pretty well crafted too)

Moonraker (1979-Roger Moore) D (Yikes. They keep doing this to Roger Moore, just when he has some momentum going they stick him in a clunker).
For Your Eyes Only (1981-Roger Moore) D (Carol Bouquet is in this one which gets it above an E)
Octopussy (1983-Roger Moore) E (its starting to get embarrassing now)
A View to a Kill (1985-Roger Moore) F (the nadir)
The Living Daylights (1987-Timothy Dalton) C (Timothy Dalton gives it a shot - he's ok)
Licence to Kill (1989-Timothy Dalton) E (the poor chap looks tired and fed up all the way through)
GoldenEye (1995-Pierce Brosnan) B (new life in the franchise but I'm not really convinced by Brosnan)
Tomorrow Never Dies (1997-Pierce Brosnan) C (it's getting pretty silly already)
The World is Not Enough (1999-Pierce Brosnan) D (over the top and not very bright)
Die Another Day (2002-Pierce Brosnan) E (please stop now. Oh, they did, I see)
Casino Royale (2006-Daniel Craig) C (lots of people loved this, not me. I thought it was at least half an hour too long and often quite dull)
Quantum of Solace (2008-Daniel Craig) F (tied with Golden Gun for the worst Bond)


OTHER BONDS
Casino Royale (1967-David Niven & Peter Sellers) C
Never Say Never Again (1983-Sean Connery)  B

Yes We Have No Bananas, Yes We Have No Bananas...But We Do Have A Winner

First let me thank everyone who entered the Falling Glass freebie competition. If you didnt win, it was not a reflection on your lack of skill because really there was no way you could have worked this one out.
...
In the deleted scene from Falling Glass it comes out that Killian, an Irish Traveller, was born in England on St George's Day making him more English than the English. He's in New York for this birthday and he gets made fun of and bullied a little by the crew he's working with. Anyway I cut the scene but his birthday remains. April 23rd. The astoudingly clever/very very jammy Katherine Howell completely deduced/blindly guessed the answer and the book is on its merry way to her. 
...
Incidentally in the novel Dracula, by that other dodgy Irishman, Bram Stoker, evil things are said to happen on St George's Day..It's also Shakespeare's birthday and that of Lee Majors.
...
Normal blog service will resume tomorrow.

Competition Update

There are less than 16 hours left if you want to win yourself a free book! See post below.
...
Also, please review me! Good review, bad review, indifferent review...doesnt matter. I have only one review on Audible.com, only two reviews on Amazon.com, only two on Amazon.co.uk and NONE on Good Reads. Twilight has thousands reviews! Twilight! Come on chaps, please review me. I'm only going to do one more post about Falling Glass and thats to announce the winner of the competition tomorrow. Normal blog service will resume after that, so do me this one favour mate.

Falling Glass Freebie Competition!

Haven't got your copy of Falling Glass yet? Well your laziness/tightfistedness/lack of interest may have paid off. I have got one signed first edition copy of Falling Glass to give away to a reader of this blog! And if you've already bought a copy, firstly my starving children thank you but secondly as an added bonus I'm also going to include the first half dozen pages of the book I'm working on right now which is so secret even I don't know what the hell its about.

...
Ok so it's a pretty easy competition. Falling Glass is the story of an Irish Traveller called Killian who is in the people finding business. In a deleted chapter I had Killian flashback to a birthday party he celebrated with another old character of mine Michael Forsythe. At an early stage the editor and I agreed that the chapter slowed the book down so I cut it. I don't think the chapter ever appeared anywhere, either in an ARC or even in an internal Serpents Tail galley; therefore the only people who know the date of Killian's birthday are the editor and me.

...

This then is the question: What is Killian's birthday? It's going to have to be a pure guess - there's no way - I think - you could work it out from the novel. The person who gets closest to the actual date will win the book and the mystery manuscript. Please put your answers in the comments below along with some kind of contact info. The competition will close exactly 48 hours after the time and date stamp on this blog post. (Don't forget that's Melbourne time folks, i.e. 11 hours ahead of GMT).

...

I will give you one clue. Killian's birthday is the feast day of a well known Saint. Not necessarily an Irish Saint. But not necessarily NOT an Irish Saint either.

Falling Glass - The First Review

From the great David Park in today's Irish Times:

CRIME: Falling Glass, By Adrian McKinty Serpent’s Tail, 309pp. £11.99

ALTHOUGH IT IS the Scandinavian star that currently shines brightest in the crime-fiction firmament, Ireland continues to publish an increasingly varied and successful body of work. The North alone has contributed a growing list of titles by writers such as Adrian McKinty, Eoin McNamee, Colin Bateman, Paul Charles, Brian McGilloway, Stuart Neville, Sam Miller and Ian Sansom. In David Torrans’s wonderful No Alibis Belfast has its own specialist bookstore that offers customers not only access to a wide selection of crime literature but also the chance to hear writers with international reputations read from their work.


What has prompted this flourishing remains something of a mystery in itself, but perhaps one of the inherent attractions of the genre is that in an unresolved world it offers the reader and society as a whole a sense of resolution, a final answer to all the unanswered questions. In some of the Northern writing there is also occasionally the sense that, either consciously or unconsciously, the crime story restores a new moral order to the nihilistic chaos of the past.


McKinty was born in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, and has lived and worked in the US, but currently resides in Australia. His latest novel, Falling Glass , follows on from his successful Dead trilogy and his most recent novel, Fifty Grand , which won the wonderfully titled 2010 Spinetingler Award in the rising-star category.


It tells the story of Killian, who was born into the Irish Traveller community, and who has carved a lucrative career on both sides of the Atlantic as an enforcer, a debt collector, someone who can be relied on to get the necessary results with the least possible mess. While no stranger to violence, and not averse to using it with deadly efficiency when necessary, Killian has developed a preference for resolving outstanding issues by the application of his intelligence and his lyrical gift with words. In a world steeped in machismo Killian “had gained a rep for diplomacy”, someone who “could convince people to pay their bills and keep their beaks shut without the necessity of having to shoot them in the kneecaps”.


However, Killian feels weary at the age of 40 and knows that in his own culture, with its reduced life expectancy, he is approaching a kind of old age. He tries to change his way of life and enters university to study architecture, but even premier-league enforcers are not immune to the effects of the recession, and when his purchase of two luxury Laganside apartments leaves him significantly out of pocket he is forced to offer his services for hire once more.


This leads to his taking on the job of finding the former wife and two children of Richard Coulter, a rich Irish businessman and owner of a budget airline, who are hiding somewhere in Northern Ireland. The half-million fee offered to Killian suggests there are darker reasons why Coulter wants them back, and his search uncovers not just a frightened and desperate woman but also a disturbing web of political and sexual corruption that encompasses all the North’s key players. Killian’s search is made all the more dangerous because Rachel Coulter and her daughters are also being pursued by a Russian hitman whose ruthlessness and skills make him a formidable opponent.


McKinty is a streetwise, energetic gunslinger of a writer, firing off volleys of sassy dialogue and explosive action that always delivers what it has promised the reader. The story is skilfully constructed, and the pace is always full throttle forwards. There is one violent scene in Mexico involving a chainsaw that is definitely not for the squeamish, but it would be unfair to think of the author as someone exclusively reliant on external action.

There is, for example, an interesting psychological exploration of Killian’s re-embracing of his half-forgotten roots and the cultural values of the Traveller community. Even the dark figure of Markov, the Russian hitman, gets layered and lightened with some psychological subtleties that are the product of his relationship with his partner, Marina, and experiences of the war in Chechnya that continue to haunt him.

McKinty zaps the story across countries and continents and, either through detailed research or personal experience, renders the locations convincingly. But the bulk of the story’s setting springs from his intimately observed landscape of the North. In the strongest and most impressive part of the novel McKinty blends the landscape of an island in Upper Lough Erne, insightful characterisation and narrative in a particularly creative way.

Despite the genre’s frequent reliance on [violent] resolution, McKinty’s teasing ending deliberately withholds that very thing from his reader, and you sense that Killian may have more stories unfolding ahead of him, and still more travelling across the world’s seas, before he’s finally allowed to disappear into retirement

...Holy Crap! If only all my reviews could be like this! Thank you David Park! Mr Park of course is a New York Times editorial writer and the author of "The Truth Commissioner" one of the greatest and most important novels about the Troubles.

All Killer No Filler. . . Falling Glass

My new crime novel Falling Glass is out this week. It's the story of Killian, an Irish Traveller, a finder of lost things and people, who is set on the trail of Rachel Coulter ex wife of Richard Coulter, owner of an upstart cheapie Irish airline (not unlike Ryan Air). Rachel has gone missing with Richard's two daughters and perhaps something else...
...
There have been a few erroneous reports in the blogoverse that this is a Michael Forsythe novel. It is not. Forsythe is a character in the book and does make a cameo appearance but this is not his story. Parts of the book were based on a short piece I was going to write at one time called Scotchy Finn's Wake, which would have continued the pun of the last Michael Forsythe novel The Bloomsday Dead, but this is only a section of the novel. The emphasis is on Killian, Rachel Coulter and Richard Coulter as well as a few other crooks and ne'er do wells.
...
If you're in the UK and Ireland the book is published by Serpents Tail and you should be able to get it in most bookshops as well as on Amazon.co.uk, right here. If you live in Australia or New Zealand the book will be published by Allen and Unwin in May or if you really can't wait you can also get it at Amazon.co.uk or the Book Depository. If you live in the US, it isn't available in the bookshops and it isn't on amazon.com yet so you'll have to get it from amazon.co.uk or the book depository. (That goes for the rest of the planet too) You can also get Falling Glass from the Serpents Tail website where they offer free worldwide shipping. (Just to thoroughly confuse you I think the E version is available at Amazon.com).
...
Finally audio. The audio version of Falling Glass has been narrated by the wonderful Gerard Doyle and is available now on Audible.com or iTunes or direct from Blackstone Audio. That one you might also be able to get on Amazon.com.
...
If you do get the book and you like it I would really appreciate it if you could give me a review on Amazon or Audible or Good Reads or your blog. I do try to read every single review I get, even the bad ones. I don't, like Liberace, cry all the way to the bank, but I do agree with Borges when he says "Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself."

The Biggest Upset In The History Of World Sport

At the cricket World Cup yesterday, Ireland beat England. In Ireland there are a few hundred cricket players. There is no professional or even semi professional league. In England it is the national game. There are a million schoolboy, amateur and county players. Is the current England team good? Well they just won the Ashes in devastating fashion against Australia. Did Ireland have a chance of winning? The bookies didn't think so. Ireland were 400:1 against outsiders. That famed South African team that beat New Zealand in the 1995 world cup were 3:1 outsiders. The odds against Seabiscuit beating War Admiral were a measly 2:1.

...

How did it happen? Surprisingly England played quite well. They did not choke. It was just that Ireland played astonishingly. Kevin O'Brien scored the fastest hundred ever in the history of the cricket world cup and the rest of the team kept their nerve to win the match with five balls to spare. You can read the Guardian's live blog here. It's entertaining stuff. Smyth and Gardner start off assuming an easy victory, then they begin to get a sense that something is up. By the final few overs the bloggers are convinced that they're watching the greatest one day cricket match that there has ever been. I'd go further. I can't think of a bigger upset in the century and a half of world sport. Is Kevin O'Brien a hero in Ireland? Well the new Prime Minister called him and he made the front page in all the papers. As one of the bloggers said, I'd be very surprised if O'Brien ever has to buy another round of drinks in his life.

The World's Best Bookshops?

An eccentric list of the world's greatest bookshops here at: BBC Travel. It doesn't include Foyles or The Strand or Square Books in Oxford, Miss, but it does have a bookshop in Beijing where you can't get anything that hasn't been approved by the Communist Party. Hmmmm. The best bookshop in the world they say is City Lights in San Francisco, which I did a reading at once so I'm not complaining about that, but still I am curious about what criteria they used to compile this wilfully strange selection. Of course you're wondering what I'd pick (or at least in my solipsistic imagination I think thats what you're wondering)...well, off the top of my head, I'd say:
1. Foyles, London
2. The Strand, New York
3. No Alibis, Belfast
4. City Lights, San Francisco
5. Square Books, Oxford, Miss
6. The Poisoned Pen, Scottsdale, Az.
7. The Tattered Cover, Denver
8. Blackwells, Oxford, England
9. Shakespeare and Company, Paris
10. The Educational Bookshop, Jerusalem 

Ronan Bennett

I just watched Michael Mann's Public Enemies starring Johnny Depp and scripted by Ronan Bennett. I liked the movie, I don't think its Mann on top form but it isn't terrible. Anyway it gives me a chance to republish this review of Bennett's Havoc In Its Third Year from a couple of years ago:
...
Ronan Bennett’s HAVOC, IN ITS THIRD YEAR is set in the north of England in the 1630s. It is the story of John Brigge, a respectable county civil servant who is also a covert follower of the “old religion”. Brigge is the parish coroner, and the book begins with his investigation into a local woman who appears to have murdered her baby. There may be more to the story than meets the eye or it could be that Brigge’s compassion towards the desperate wretches that appear before him day-in and day-out has clouded his judgement. In either case, Brigge raises suspicions among some of the local townsfolk and his life, complicated already by his own wife’s pregnancy, takes a dramatic turn for the worse.
...
Bennett skilfully portrays a man on the edge and a country at the cusp of a disastrous civil war; among many remarkable passages he gives us Brigge’s dreams that mix murderers, wives, victims, secret priests and unborn children in a swirling whirlpool of guilt and fear. Brigge is ultimately betrayed as a Catholic by a jealous clerk and he and his family go on the run through a nightmare landscape no less vivid than the dreamscape.
...
Ronan Bennett and I were born only a few miles and a few years apart but we’re from different cultural and political universes. Bennett was radicalised in the early seventies and apparently he has lost none of his righteous indignation. He has got himself into passionate debates with Martin Amis and Christopher Hitchens and he has said unfortunate things about the Omagh bombing - things which he has since recanted. But surely no one can fault Bennett’s fury at our contemporary scene, and his prose tells us something about the writer behind the disputes: clinical, dispassionate, ironic, intelligent, careful and ultimately incendiary. His plots move, his writing pulses, and his characters live and breathe and disagree with each other and often him. He takes his time with his protagonists, allowing them psychological and spiritual depth and yet he understands that characters alone aren’t enough; for a book to succeed it must have a strong, well planned narrative. Bennett’s novels are structurally sound and that hardest of combinations: unpredictable, yet completely convincing.
...
Bennett is a profound writer in the tradition of early Le Carré or middle period Greene. He takes his job seriously and never underestimates the intelligence of his readers. And, speaking of Greene occasionally the British press will play the perennially popular game of wondering who “the new Graham Greene” could possibly be. A few – almost always English – authors are often tossed out and then summarily critiqued and dismissed as mere pretenders. No dauphin has yet been found, but if Ronan Bennett keeps on going the way he’s been going, I’d say the contest is over, the new Graham Greene isn’t an Englishman at all – he’s a fearless, gifted, Irishman from Newtownabbey