the psychopathology of everyday life - Adrian McKinty's blog

Coffee Madness

2012-02-02T06:01:00.000+11:00

"Our Nicole" leaving her local Nashville Starbucks where she gets filter coffee

I've been living in Melbourne for three years now and I like the place a lot. The weather's agreeable, the people are friendly and St Kilda is a Greenwich Village by the sea. One of the biggest irritations however (and if you're a regular reader of this blog you knew that that sentence was coming) is the coffee situation. In the late 1940's Melbourne had an influx of Italian immigrants who brought their coffee worshipping culture with them. In this schemata drip or filter coffee was verboten and every cup of coffee had to be individually made on an espresso machine. You could of course get an espresso itself but Melburnians became hooked on lattes and cappuccino. Gradually this sophisticated culture spread, displacing the old diners and restaurants who sold drip, filter or even instant coffee. Now you can't get American style filter coffee anywhere.
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When Starbucks announced that they were closing almost all of their Melburnian outlets it was greeted with rejoicing in the Melbourne Age and the Herald Sun. "How dare these Yanks try to impose their weak kneed filter coffee on us when we are light years ahead of them," was the tedious refrain. There are two big problems with this theory, however. If you want a standard cup of black coffee in Australia you have to ask for a "long black" which is an espresso shot mixed with hot water. This of course tastes like utter crap. The espresso and the water don't mix properly, it's grainy, either weak or too strong and it's basically inferior in every way to a good cup of filtered coffee but tell this to Australians and they will snort incredulously. The second problem is that it takes fecking forever just to get a bloody cup of coffee. Many many times I have dropped in at a busy coffee shop, ordered a long black, paid my money, got my change and waited and waited and waited. In the US or UK I would stand there for a few seconds and then someone would hand me an excellent freshly brewed cup of black coffee and I would leave. In Melbourne since you have to brew every cup individually and then clean the espresso holder and fire up the machine again it can be upwards of thirty minutes (!) to get your cup of coffee. Thirty minutes for a cup of joe? This is insanity.
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Australians really need to get over themselves with this coffee nonsense. Actually there isn't really a coffee culture here at all, it's a mannered, decadent, effete, un-Australian steamed milk drinking culture. The propaganda about drip coffee is entirely bogus. Blue collar drip coffee is better than espresso coffee. It's cheaper, faster and when its made strong enough fantastic. Did you ever go to Malaysia? There they make fricking Nescafe with condensed milk - bloody delicious, takes two seconds. Watch 30 Rock sometime, everyone's drinking those blue takeaway cups of New York diner coffee which costs 99 cents - you add sugar, half and half - again, bloody great. I'm sorry Australia, I like you, but this cult you've joined has taken you down a bad path and you need an intervention. Just try brewing a big pot of filter coffee in the morning for people in a hurry or who think "long black" tastes like shite - you might be surprised by the results.

It Was A Wandering Daughter Job - Dashiell Hammett's Influence on The Big Lebowski

2012-01-31T00:01:00.002+11:00

I'm still out of town and as a result I managed to catch The Big Lebowski on the big screen last night. First time I've seen it projected since it came out and it still holds up...Anyway I thought I'd repost this blog from a couple of years back on The Coen brothers and their links to Dashiell Hammett:
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Joel and Ethan Coen have said that the biggest literary influence on their cult stoner movie The Big Lebowski (1998) was Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. And from the title and structure of their film you can certainly see what they are talking about. Both works are classic visions of Los Angeles and both films follow similar trajectories: a foil gets involved with a disabled rich man, the rich man's daughter, and a runaway from his family who gets mixed up in pornography. Joel Coen has also said that he was influenced by Robert Altman's 1970's remake of Chandler's The Long Goodbye which gave us a slightly baked version of Marlowe played by Elliot Gould. So the Chandler influences are real and obvious but I want to argue that there's a deeper structure to The Big Lebowski which comes not from Raymond Chandler but from Dashiell Hammett.
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Let's backtrack a little first. The Coen Brothers first foray into Hammett country came with Millers Crossing. This is a fairly explicit remake of Hammett's Red Harvest which the Coens apparently became of aware through Kurosawa's version Yojimbo (which later was remade by Sergio Leone as A Fistful of Dollars and again by Walter Hill as Last Man Standing). Miller's Crossing (and Red Harvest and the others) is a classic story of an outsider playing off two rival gangs for his own benefit, however the Coens not only appropriated Dashiell Hammett's plot-line but also his entire argot: "What's the rumpus?" "She's just a twist," "The high hat," "We're not muscle we don't bump guys" etc. The Coens don't seem to have read Hammett as much digested him, absorbing his street talk, his cadences, his slang, his American tough guy voice. (As an aside here I actually think their use of "What's the rumpus?" as "hello" in Millers Crossing is a misreading of Hammett's use of the phrase in Red Harvest.) The Coens of course are suburban college boys with little experience of the actual "streets" but Hammett was a Pinkerton Detective for nearly two decades investigating murders, robberies, insurance frauds with a little union busting thrown in for good measure. The Coens seem to have used Hammett as one of their touchstones for Americana and the more you read him the deeper you see his influence on their work: Blood Simple, Fargo, Miller's Crossing, No Country For Old Men sometimes read like undiscovered Hammett screenplays; but so also do the comedies Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski. Hammett and humour don't seem to go together but he could be very funny in both his private life and in his books - The Thin Man is as witty as any PG Wodehouse and here's an experiment: try re-reading The Maltese Falcon as a black comedy and you'll get exactly what I'm talking about. Chandler has those great lines about a blonde so beautiful she would make a bishop kick in a window but Hammett has those lines too and a dark, satirical edge as well.

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Yes the Coens used The Big Sleep as their skeleton for The Big Lebowski but the irony comes from Hammett: Donny's death, The Nihilists, The Porn King, The Malibu Sheriff - these seem like straight out of Dashiell's playbook not Ray's. The eccentricity and odd digressions are more like Hammett and of course the snap of the dialogue is more authentically Hammettian too. I think subconsciously the Coens knew this and they either gave us a Freudian hint or a deliberate clue late in the film when Jeff Bridges as The Dude encounters a private detective working for Bunny's parents, the Knutsons. "Why are you doing following me?" The Dude asks. The Private Dick played by Joe Polito (who also played one of the rival gang bosses in Miller's Crossing) shrugs and explains: "It was a wandering daughter job." And of course if you know your Hammett you'll recognise that as the opening line of the great Continental Op short story "Fly Paper". The Big Lebowski was a wandering daughter job all right and ultimately the daughter stays lost, an innocent guy dies and the bad guy keeps the money, but what else would you expect in Hammett's bleak, entropic and blackly comic universe?

A Final Pitch

2012-01-29T00:01:00.002+11:00

This is going to be my last post on The Cold Cold Ground for a long while. If there's one thing I really hate doing it's shilling for myself, but I'll have a valiant last stab at it:

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While The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel it's also an attempt to capture a culture that will be completely unknown to readers who didn't grow up in Northern Ireland in the 70's and 80's. You might think you know about N. Ireland in that period but you don't. With on or two important exceptions the stuff you've read or seen has all been lies, half truths and propaganda. As far as I know this is the first book ever to look at extraordinary situation of a Catholic policeman in the RUC in the 1980's and to explore the unbelievable pressures he would have been under. No copper anywhere ever had as tough a job as that of policing Belfast in the spring and summer of 1981. (Detroit? The South Bronx? Picnics. At least once you were home you were safe.) And if you were a smart, sensitive and lippy peeler you just might have ended up like Sean Duffy in The Cold Cold Ground. If you haven't got the book yet there's nothing more that I can say to convince you, but here are representative views of some of the British and Irish press:

"If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written." --Peter Millar, The Times

"Adrian McKinty is fast gaining a reputation as the finest of the new generation of Irish crime writers, and it's easy to see why on the evidence of this novel, the first in a projected trilogy of police procedurals." --Doug Johnstone, The Glasgow Herald

"He manages to catch the brooding atmosphere of the 1980s and to tell a ripping yarn at the same time. There will be many readers waiting for the next adventure of the dashing and intrepid Sergeant Duffy." --Maurice Hays, The Irish Independent

"What makes McKinty a cut above the rest is the quality of his prose. His driven, spat-out sentences are more accessible than James Ellroy's edge-of-reason staccato, and he can be lyric. The sound of a riot is "the distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship".

The names of David Peace and Ellroy are evoked too often in relation to young crime writers, but McKinty shares their method of using the past as a template for the present. The stories and textures may belong to a different period, but the power of technique and intent makes of them the here and now.

There's food for thought in McKinty's writing, but he is careful not to lose the force of his narrative in introspection. The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel, fast-paced, intricate and genre to the core." --Eoin McNamee, The Guardian.

The Cold Cold Ground will be published in Australia next week. At the Fair Dinkum Crime Blog, Bernadette gave the book four stars, while Jon Page at Bite the Book said: "No exaggeration, this is one of the best crime novels I have ever read. McKinty’s last book, FALLING GLASS, was superb but THE COLD, COLD GROUND blew me utterly away. It is easily his best book to date."

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So that's the pitch. I know many of you reading this haven't bought the book. Well if you like what I do on this blog I can only suggest that you'll really like what I do in Cold Cold. I'm a professional novelist and I save the good stuff for the books. That after all is how I make my living.

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If you do get The Cold Cold Ground in print, e book or audio form I'd appreciate a review if you can spare the time.

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Finally I'm heading out of town for the long weekend so I wont be able to respond to comments until Monday night, but I will read all comments when I get back.

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Slainte. Go raibh míle maith agaibh as bhur gcúnamh.

Why Most Crime Novels Are Bad Part 2

2012-01-27T09:18:00.002+11:00

good role model

Last week I did a little post on why I thought most crime novels were terrible. As a sometime crime reviewer for the press I see a lot of crime fiction and most of the ones that I am forced to read are beyond awful. I do self select good novels to read on my own time but in general the books that are mass marketed to the public are artistically worthless with recycled plots, stereotypical characters, ugly prose and a depressing lack of humour. The key to these books success is heavy marketing by publishers and a supine, unadventurous public. Of course there are good novels in amongst the tat but even good novelists fall into the success trap by turning their creation into a series which eventually leads to diminishing returns. As I discovered in the comments under my post last week there are many noble exceptions to this rule and there are authors who fight the good fight and use their intelligence and creativity to keep their series fresh. But I wonder if this is really the best use of that intelligence and creativity. Instead of writing book #14 in the Bumrash and Crabby mysteries perhaps these successful novelists should take a long look in the mirror and try something original, experimental and different - something that would shake their readers up a bit and make them think. Something that would really challenge them as a writer and perhaps could be looked at 100 years from now as a really interesting
contribution to the culture.
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This thought came to me last night when I was reading the new Michel Houellebecq novel The Map And The Territory (not, alas, as funny or as biting as Atomised) when I came upon this defintion of an artist:

bad role model

To be an artist in his view, was above all, to be someone submissive. Someone who submitted himself to mysterious, unpredictable messages, messages which commanded you to take a path in an imperious and categorical manner without the slightest possibility of escape (except by losing any notion of integrity and self respect). These messages could involve destroying a work, or even an entire body of work, to set off in a radically new direction, or even occasionally no direction at all without any project or end point in mind.

I like this idea very much. Why not just say no to the publishers who want you to write a book a year for twenty years. All the worst offenders I can think of in this field are rich beyond the dreams of avarice and have provided for their kids and grandkids many times over. Why not just stop and take some time to think. Move to Alaska for a year or Detroit or India. Get away from your comfort zone. Learn a bit about the world. Learn a bit about yourself. Listen to the noise. Listen to the silence. And, to quote Mick Jagger, sometimes give the public what they need instead of always what they want.

Handicapping The Oscars

2012-01-26T00:51:00.006+11:00

I've seen most of the films up for Best Picture this year (the exceptions are The Artist and War Horse) so I thought I'd have a go at tipping the race. If you don't like the Oscars but you're a man of a certain age, you'll still enjoy the clip of Carla Bruni right.

2/5 The Artist: The five thousand crinklies who make up the Motion Picture Academy will feel good about themselves if they vote for a silent movie that has a dog in it.
3:1 The Descendants: Goerge Clooney is popular in Hollywood and Alexander Payne is a serious director. This could be the perfect pairing.
4:1 Hugo: I thought the plot was a bit iffy and the film on the slow side but its got everything an aging Oscar vote will like: Martin Scorsese, Paris, an homage to old films, a curious boy, and another dog. (And there's a blink and you'll miss it cameo of James Joyce and Picasso).
8:1 Midnight In Paris: I thought this was ok. Its essentially a piece of fluff and wouldn't have got a nomination were the director not Woody Allen. Again the Paris setting will appeal and although there's no dog there is a rather fetching Carla Bruni. Picasso appears in this one too.
10:1 War Horse: This seems like sentimental rubbish, but Spielberg made it and they love Spielberg and its got a French and English setting which is somehow considered classy. Many horses and a few dogs.
20:1 The Help: A dull witted heavy handed flick about race and class for the Oprah loving demo. I wouldn't have given this a hope in hell if the Academy hadn't once given Best Picture to Driving Miss Daisy (over Field of Dreams, if I recall correctly). A couple of cameo dogs.
25:1 Moneyball: A solid baseball movie with an excellent Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill. I'm only rating this low on the pecking order because I don't think Academy voters will understand it. Also no Paris or dogs or horses.
30:1 The Tree Of Life: I love Terry Malick and his mad mad ways but this one was too silly for me. I think Academy voters will sleep through the preview DVD. There are a couple of cute dinosaurs which are vaguely dog like.
50:1 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: a hipster wankfest that will appeal to no one living outside of Brooklyn Heights.

Hugo

2012-01-24T03:49:00.030+11:00

Yes he was the Man With The Golden Gun but he also
fought the commies in the Winter War of 1940 and was
in the SAS/Long Range Desert Group giving Rommel
a bloody nose in a little thing called WW2

Martin Scorsese's Hugo is a film for cinephile uncles who want to take their nephews to see something at the movies. If you're a movie buff or a Scorsese fanboy you'll like Hugo. If you're a kid you might be pretty bored. The film was designed to be critic proof because it's about a "neglected" pioneer of silent cinema, but that's merely a canard as the script could function without any mention of cinema at all. Hugo is an orphan boy who lives in the clock tower of a Parisian train station in the twenties. He meets a girl who helps him unravel the secret of the automaton his father found in a museum before he died. Improbably the girl's adopted father, Georges Melies, built the machine. And, er, that's about it really. Although it's based on a deep, visually arresting, award winning novel, I don't think Hugo quite works as a story and despite being shot in 3D (or perhaps because of the 3D) the film has an inert, two dimensional lifelessness about it which the 2D book somehow did not have. The saving grace for me was the acting which was pretty good. Sasha Baron Cohen stood out and it was nice seeing Christopher Lee in his 272nd film (yes you read that correctly).
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The story I suppose is the letdown. I'm willing to overlook all the enormous coincidences that kept the plot rolling along (because its a kids movie) but maybe one of those critics who raved about it on Rotten Tomatoes can explain to me how Georges Melies claimed to have died in the war but was known to have made and shown films that failed after the war...I can't understand that one at all; I may want to fake my own death eventually but I'm not going to say that I died on 9/11. This may seem like a nitpicky point but its symptomatic of the meandering, threadless plot. And really a film about a boy living in a time piece should have a script that runs like clockwork dontcha think?
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Don't please misunderstand me, Hugo is not awful (and dear God if its a choice between this and Alvin and the Chipmunks 3 pick this) but it aint the masterpiece some reviewers are sayin it is. We want all Scorsese to do well, he made Taxi Driver and Goodfellas for heavens sake, but the truth is that he hasn't made a really good film since 1995. I know the critics will tell you otherwise, but they're all wrong.
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Sir Christopher Lee's next film is Peter Jackson's The Hobbit and he's got a couple scheduled after that. Why does he keeping doing it at his age? Because he's an old school hard working badass British thesp, thats why.

The Audio Version

2012-01-22T07:39:00.002+11:00

The beardy Mr. D.

This weekend I've been listening to the audio version of The Cold Cold Ground. Normally I can't read anything I've written after it's completed but with the audio, somehow, it's different. Gerard Doyle is the narrator of Cold Cold and he's really done an amazing job differentiating the characters and coming up with voices. (His Gerry Adams impression roughly in the middle of the book is to die for.) I am not the only one to have noticed this. In the reviews of Cold Cold on Audible I've gotten a few three stars and four stars but so far Doyle has a perfect five star record for his narration. Doyle not only reads the books beautifully but he does a tremendous amount of research. I skyped with Doyle several times as a consult on Cold Cold and last time he even went as far as calling up a Professor of philology at Queens University Belfast to get the right pronunciation of words in Shelta, the language of the Tinkers. I do listen to a lot of audiobooks when I'm riding my bike around town or going to the dreaded gym (currently I'm listening to a Y/A steampunk novel called Leviathan which is narrated by Alan Cumming) but if you haven't yet got hooked on Audible I can thoroughly recommend audio listening as a benign vice.
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You can get Cold Cold Ground on Audible, here and if you do like it I'd love it if you left me a rating or even better a review. Cheers.

Why Are Most Crime Novels Bad?

2012-01-20T06:04:00.003+11:00

Because they are part of a series. And books in a series eventually run of steam. The author runs out of ideas and begins recycling old plots and old concepts and he or she doesn't really care because they know the books will sell. Publishers and bookshops love series because people buy them without thinking. And then read them without thinking. It's very rare that series titles retain quality after say book 5 or 6. They've almost certainly lost credibility by that stage because no character could possibly go through that much and not have a nervous breakdown (although clever authors include the nervous breakdown as part of the plot.)
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In an ideal world only first novels would be published. The new writer has something to say and they put everything into that one book - all their jokes, all their sylistic quirks, all the things that make them weird and interesting; the book would come out and it would either be a hit or a miss and then someone else would come along with their story. Wouldn't that be great? Readers would be continually getting new and original voices and because no one would have a reputation publishers would have to rely on a writer's talent alone. Alas that isn't how the world and especially the crime fiction world works. The books that sell a lot of copies are by established professional writers churning out series titles. Readers are reluctant to try new things and the non crime fiction reader who browses a random one of these books is put off because the novels are generally beyond terrible. When I was down at the caravan site in Warrnambool last week I talked to a bloke with the new Tom Clancy novel. "How is it?" I asked him. "It's awful, but what else am I going to read?" he said cheerfully.
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The only series I know that maintained quality throughout (except for the penultimate novel) are the Patrick O'Brian Aubrey-Maturin books. If you know of others I'd be happy to hear about them...

Learning To Love David Fincher

2012-01-18T00:33:00.002+11:00

This wont hurt a bit

On the plus side he did cut Gwyneth Paltrow's head off at the end of Seven, but on the minus side he killed Newt and Hicks at the beginning of Alien 3. I don't know if those two really cancel out, Hicks was cool.
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Fincher got his start doing FX on Return of the Jedi and after some video work he got hired to try to bail Alien 3 out of the mess the production had fallen into. He partially succeeded and Alien 3 is not the disaster some people say it is. After A3 came the creepy and stylish serial killer drama Seven whose titles alone are better than most films. Then came The Game which was a journeyman effort about Michael Douglas having a mid life crisis and falling into a paranoid conspiracy. In 1999 Fincher's reputation was sealed with the fantastic Fight Club - a film about what it means to be a man at the close of the twentieth century. If you haven't seen Fight Club you are not a hetereosexual white male 20 - 40 living in the Western World. Fincher's next film was Panic Room which I didn't care for but I thought Zodiac (the true story of the hunt for the Zodiac killer) was a return to form if not quite in the same league as Seven.
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I have not seen The Curious Case of Benjamin Button but I have to admit that it doesn't really seem like my cup of tea at all: Fincher is not Steven Spielberg and shouldn't try to be. In fact even Steven Spielberg shouldn't try to be Steven Spielberg unless its the Steven Spielberg who made Jaws. I saw The Social Network on a plane last year and I felt that it didn't really hang together - but for that I blame Aaron Sorkin's script which was full of ad hominem stuff, non sequitors and a boring court room setting that wasn't even in a court room. (Incidentally they gave Sorkin an Oscar for this script so what do I know).
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Which brings me to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. I had 4 major problems with the book: 1) As a locked room mystery it didn't work because we were not given all the information. 2) Cally Blomqvist's character seemed like nothing more than a middle aged male's wish fulfillment fantasy 3) Larsson wanted to have his cake and eat it too: deploring violence against women but giving us lots of it in lurid sadomasochistic detail. 4) The bad prose, extreme length and heavy handed cliches made the book pretty dull (I give Larsson a pass on this one because if he had lived the novel would have been given a tighter edit).
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From the opening titles of Fincher's Dragon Tattoo it becomes clear that we are not in Sweden but in that dark, weird, edgy, introverted territory that should be known as Finchlandia. The palate is muted and the furtive camera work makes even a pristine snow field seem sinister. The acting is low key but believable and always engrossing and the story has been tightened into an economical three acts. I'm not a fan of Daniel Craig but he is reasonably effective here and the actress playing Lisbeth is convincing. But for me the vibe is the star in this flick. Some of the mood seems to have been cribbed from Let The Right One In which is fine by me because I loved that creepy picture. With the right material Fincher is really able to show off his technical ability and his skill at directing actors. As the film played out I found myself forgetting the rather silly book and all the other baggage I had with Dragon Tattoo and instead I found myself falling into the story. The hooks went in and I didn't mind them being in. Incredibly this Hollywood remake of a Swedish film of a dodgy novel is Fincher's best movie in some time and although it is no masterpiece (and far too luridly violent) it is a considerable improvement over its source material.

The Times Weighs In On The Cold Cold Ground

2012-01-16T09:07:00.001+11:00

The London Times (still I think the paper of record in the UK) weighed in on The Cold Cold Ground on Saturday. The piece was written by the well read and perspicacious Peter Millar. The first line of the review is funny but its the last line that is the killer:
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Times, The (London, England) - Saturday, January 14, 2012

Author: Peter Millar
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The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty
Serpent's Tail, 352pp £12.99 £11.69
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When I was growing up in Northern Ireland there were two very rare species: Catholic policemen, and people who left as students but came back. In Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy, Ulster-born Adrian McKinty has given us a hero who is traumatised enough by "the troubles" to want to do something to stop the madness of mutual murder by two tribes who have more in common with each other than anyone else.
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But when he is called to deal with what looks like a routine murder of an IRA or UVF informer on a housing estate in Carrickfergus, he finds something else: a corpse that has been ritually sodomised and had the score from a Puccini opera inserted in his rectum. Is he on the trail of Northern Ireland's first serial killer with a sexual rather than a paramilitary motive? In a world wherein which "ordinary criminals" are scarce, the Catholic Church considers divorce and abortion crimes and MI5 muddies the waters, Duffy finds himself in a wilderness of mirrors, scared of his own reflection.
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McKinty himself left Northern Ireland and didn't come back, but perhaps that distance — he now lives in Australia — has helped him to preserve a razor sharp ear for the local dialogue and a feeling for the bleak time and place that was Ulster in the early Eighties, and pair them with a wry wicked wit.
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If Raymond Chandler had grown up in Northern Ireland, The Cold Cold Ground is what he would have written.

Catching Cold in the USA

2012-01-15T00:10:00.002+11:00

The surprising news today is that the Kindle edition of The Cold Cold Ground, is available in the USA and can be got on Amazon.com. I know Falling Glass wasn't available as a kindle (I had dozens of angry emails and comments about this blaming me personally) and so I assumed that Cold Cold wouldn't be on Kindle either. I was wrong. It is. Amazon is selling the ebook version for $9.99. And you can download it in an instant, here.
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The audiobook version of Cold Cold narrated by the wonderful Gerard Doyle is also now available from Audible.com for $7.49. Blackstone Audio and Mr Doyle have done their usual terrific job with this one. I listened to the first hour yesterday and thought the narration was amazing. I don't need to remind you, I'm sure, that Falling Glass, my previous audiobook, won Audible.com's Best Mystery or Thriller for 2011. You can get the audiobook version, here.
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And of course if you want the actual book book you can get it from Amazon.co.uk or the Book Depository.
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It'll be interesting to see how this book does in the U.S. I've been told by other authors and by many publishers that Americans don't want to read fiction set during the Troubles, because it's too confusing for them. Perhaps, but perhaps not, I think people are smarter than publishers give them credit for. We shall see. However I should warn potential readers that I have no toleration whatsoever for the Micksploitation stereotypes which American audiences have been force fed over the last few decades, and if you're searching for a story of plucky romantic rebels battling evil toffee nosed Brits, or the like, then I suggest you look elsewhere. This is a story about a young Catholic copper trying to solve a murder case in the midst of a low level civil war. Every police procedural tries to hype their hero as a "cop on the edge" or some such nonsense but I reckon no policeman anywhere ever had as dangerous a job as a peeler in Northern Ireland in the early 1980's...That's the bar from which all other 'tough guy' cops should be judged.
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Once again, if you do get The Cold Cold Ground, I'd really appreciate a review on your blog, on Audible, on Amazon or Good Reads. I need your support for this one, especially in the next week or two. What kills books isn't bad reviews but silence. Slainte.

Holmesexual Subtext

2012-01-14T00:02:00.011+11:00

The Mrs and I went to Sherlock Holmes: Game of Shadows a couple of days ago. It wasn't terrible but I don't think it had quite the same energy as the first film in this series. There was a long portion in the middle of the flick where I wanted to leave but I'm glad I hung in there because the ending was good. It's intriguing watching a new Sherlock Holmes movie at the same time as the BBC series Sherlock is running on the telly, because you can appreciate how certain ideas in the Zeitgeist have influenced two completely different teams of screenwriters on opposite sides of the Atlantic. In the original stories for example women have almost nothing to do but faint, however in both Guy Ritchie's films and the BBC series the women are somewhat more interesting and have a wee bit more to do. The drug angle is fascinating too, Robert Downey Jnr plays Holmes as a jittery coke fiend (perhaps channeling his own life in the 80's) whereas in the BBC series the dreaded drug of choice is tobacco (I'd love to see Michel Houellebecq's sarcastic commentary on that).
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Both teams of screenwriters are agreed that the gay subtext in the partnership between Holmes and Watson is ripe for humour. Purists should note that there has always been a bit of a gay subtext in the Sherlock Holmes stories. London in the 1890's was full of rent boys and readers of the Strand Magazine (where the Holmes stories first appeared) can't possibly have been the stuffy Victorian prudes we think of today. In the Guy Ritchie film Holmes drags up, tries to stop Watson's wedding, gets him in a clinch on the floor of a train and to cap it all his brother Mycroft is wonderfully played by an out and proud (in the film and real life) Stephen Fry. The BBC's treatment of the subtext is subtler and a bit funnier. Holmes is a pale, tall, handsome, aesthete and when Watson goes to live with him everyone assumes that they are a gay couple. Benedict Cumberbatch's aloof, diffident Holmes couldn't care less but Watson is continually trying to explain to people that they aren't a couple in the best Seinfeld tradition of "not that there's anything wrong with that." Martin Freeman is such a great comic actor that his discomfort cracks me up every time.
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Interestingly I was at the gym yesterday and ABC1 were showing an old Sherlock Holmes episode from the late 1980's series. I only saw about twenty minutes of it but it looked like a good "closed room" mystery. A translator for the Foreign Office gets an important treaty stolen from his office and has a nervous breakdown as a result. I'm pretty sure the villain is the guy who played Blake from Blake's 7 but I missed the last two thirds of the episode and didn't see how he actually did it. Of course in the 1980's series there is no (or very little) gay subtext at all.

Noir As The New Punk

2012-01-12T00:38:00.003+11:00

British fiction has been moribund for decades. Since at least the 70's it has been dominated by an upper class clique whose mannered, trivial novels represent nothing more than the triumph of marketing over content. Julian Barnes winning last year's Booker Prize was a little like Martin Scorsese winning the Oscar for The Departed (easily his worst film). Both men were overdue and both peaked creatively 20 years ago. The difference is that Scorsese has generally been good for American cinema whereas the damage done by the likes of Barnes, Amis, McEwan etc. has been immense. Generations of readers have been turned off as they discover that the most celebrated novels of our culture do nothing but talk down to them and present parodic portrayals of their lives. It takes a writer of genius to transcend a background of privilege and of that generation only Rushdie seems to have genius in his makeup.
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The time has come to jettison the whole lot of them. In 1976 punk did its best to kill the bloated dinosaurs of progressive rock and although that revolution was largely a failure, for a brief time it did tilt the centre of gravity away from soulless upper class music made by the likes of Genesis, towards energetic working class bands like Joy Division, The Sex Pistols, The Undertones and The Specials and towards cities like Manchester, Derry and Coventry.
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I think crime fiction can help too. Crime fiction, especially noir and hardboiled, is the literature of the proletariat. Jim Thompson, one of my own fiction role models, wrote about grifters, losers, petty crooks and bums. These were struggling working stiffs barely making it and only a wrong decision away from falling between the cracks or pushing someone else into one. Good contemporary crime fiction articulates the voice of today's underclasses in a way that is accessible for mainstream audiences. People like David Peace, Ian Rankin and Eoin McNamee can take a genre novel and use it to explore class and other ripe issues in a way that literary fiction writers often cannot. British and Irish crime fiction of course is remarkably diverse and for every David Peace or Declan Burke writing elliptical and challenging books there is a PD James churning out crowd pleasing fare like Death Comes To Pemberley. That's fine. Its a big tent. But if this is 1976 do you want to be on the side of Wings, Genesis and Yes or do you want to be at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester where only 40 people showed up but everyone of them formed a band...

The Cold Cold Ground - The Irish Independent's Verdict

2012-01-10T06:21:00.000+11:00

Castlemara Estate, Carrickfergus, 2011

Maurice Hayes reviews The Cold Cold Ground in Sunday's Irish Indy. I love the review but be careful, there are some spoilers near the end...And as usual I'd appreciate your reviews on Amazon, Good Reads or your blog. Over to you space cowboy:

Detective Sergeant Sean Duffy introduced by Adrian McKinty in the first of a trilogy of detective stories set in Northern Ireland in the middle of the Troubles, could well become a cult figure.

A Catholic member of the RUC (one of the 7pc) equally at risk of being murdered by the IRA for his profession and by loyalists for his religion, an Irish speaker from the Glens of Antrim, fluent in several languages, with a degree in psychology and an interest in opera, tempted to join the IRA after Bloody Sunday and propelled into the police by a pub bombing, courting a pathologist girlfriend among the corpses, he is a very unusual copper indeed.

McKinty has established a good track record in the genre and in his return to his native sod for he shows that he has not lost his touch or his eye for the bizarre and the macabre, or his ear for the Belfast accent and argot.

The plot has Duffy assigned to investigate what appears to be a serial killer of homosexuals who taunts the police by placing clues strewn with obscure references to operas, and the apparently unconnected suicide of the estranged wife of a hunger striker.

Set against a backdrop of riots in the middle of the 1981 hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands, McKinty creates a marvellous sense of time and place; an evocation of darkness and horror, of corruption and collusion, of the fraught life of a policeman, of the domination of areas by paramilitary groups at war with each other and with the British state but colluding on drugs and criminality, the immediacy of death and the cheapness of life.

Taken off the case when he stumbles on an IRA connection, warned off by Special Branch and army intelligence protective of their agents and informants, Duffy keeps doggedly on, defying the rules and risks to himself and his girlfriend until he secures a confession and a very rough sort of justice for the murders which turn out not to be homophobic, but an attempt by a mole to cover his tracks.

Real people walk in and out of the story.

There are a couple of nearly recognisable loyalist warlords, and a character based loosely on Freddie Scappaticci is central to the story, and the old chestnut of whether Gerry Adams might be Stakeknife.

In the speed of the action and the twists of the plot, small details do not always matter, but a few will grate with local readers.

In the main, though, he manages to catch the brooding atmosphere of the 1980s and to tell a ripping yarn at the same time.

There will be many readers waiting for the next adventure of the dashing and intrepid Sergeant Duffy.

The Cold Cold Ground - The Guardian's Verdict

2012-01-09T00:31:00.001+11:00

The brilliant, frighteningly clever, and hard to please Eoin McNamee reviews The Cold Cold Ground in Saturday's Guardian. Yes I'm stoked by his take but it's not enough, I still want to read your reviews on Amazon, Audible and Good Reads! ... Over to you Mr McNamee:
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It's 1981 and Belfast is in turmoil. It's the beginning of the end, but it doesn't feel like it. The melancholy procession of dead hunger strikers from the gates of Long Kesh has begun, and tension on the street is at breaking point. When a body turns up on waste ground, one hand severed and placed on its chest, overstretched detectives are inclined to regard it as an informer killing and consign it to the file marked unsolvable. That's until Detective Sean Duffy starts to notice errant details about the corpse, such as the fact that the severed hand deposited with the body belongs to someone else. The discovery of another body seems to confirm the existence of a homophobic serial killer. The missing wife of a hunger striker appears unrelated. But in this northern endgame the murky undercurrents flow in unexpected directions.
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The Cold Cold Ground is Adrian McKinty's 12th novel. He is one of a new generation of writers from the north who use the tools of the crimewriter's trade to examine and reshape the recent past. The detectives are wisecracking and self-aware. The material seems to lend itself to side-of-the-mouth invective, the sly one-liner. What's real and what isn't collide in the corpse-murk of hidden wars, and narratives are shaped to take account of it. Here Gerry Adams makes an appearance, a seedy loyalist takes on the persona of dead loyalist George Seawright, and its not much of a leap from McKinty's Freddie Scavanni to Freddie Scappattici, the infamous informer Stakeknife.
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It's an uneasy technique, but there is an integrity to it. Death-squad acronyms are switched from one side to the other. McKinty is pointing to the fact that perceived reality and fiction in conflict zones are equally untrustworthy. One is as manufactured as the other, and the only thing we can do is to be aware of it. Sean Duffy is an anomaly, a Catholic cop in an overwhelmingly unionist police force, but McKinty is less concerned with that than with the camaraderies of the force. And he's good on the details: life through the observation slit of an armoured vehicle. Like all good fictional cops, Duffy has a nose for the erotics of last things, and finds himself hooked up with a beautiful pathologist.
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The Cold Cold Ground confirms McKinty as a writer of substance. There's a gear shift from a crimewriter's craftsmanship when he casts his eye on the towns caught in Belfast's malign gravitational pull, such as Carrickfergus and Larne. McKinty is at home in these lost towns, with their Victoria Streets and Sandringham Terraces, their transgressive inner life at odds with street names that reveal a longing for home-counties certitudes. What makes McKinty a cut above the rest is the quality of his prose. His driven, spat-out sentences are more accessible than James Ellroy's edge-of-reason staccato, and he can be lyric. The sound of a riot is "the distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship".
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The names of David Peace and Ellroy are evoked too often in relation to young crime writers, but McKinty shares their method of using the past as a template for the present. The stories and textures may belong to a different period, but the power of technique and intent makes of them the here and now.
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There's food for thought in McKinty's writing, but he is careful not to lose the force of his narrative in introspection. The Cold Cold Ground is a crime novel, fast-paced, intricate and genre to the core. The violence is extreme and the sex is gritty. Duffy's three murder cases are isolated on the surface, but in the dark world of dirty wars, the dead are seldom unconnected, and rarely innocent as they beckon to us from the cold, cold earth.

• Eoin McNamee's Orchid Blue is published by Faber.

My Favourite Films Of 2011

2012-01-05T00:30:00.000+11:00

I knew he couldnt programme the GPS

I don't get to the movies as often as I'd like for two reasons: it costs 17 dollars a ticket in Melbourne (and yes the USD and Australian dollars are at parity) and secondly because most films are terrible. But I do love going to the pictures and here's a little list of some of my favourites of the year.
10 Bridesmaids: two very funny scenes and a lot of filler which is more than most films which are all filler.
9 Archipelago: Joanna Hogg's film about a family holiday to the Isles of Scilly. No one saw this which is a shame because it's a kind of To The Lighthouse for our times.
8 Moneyball: The true story of how Brad Pitt and a bunch of geeks turned the Oakland A's into that mighty baseball franchise it is today...oh wait, uh...
7 Cold Weather: No one saw this either. A murder mystery/family drama set in a very rainy Portland.
6 Drive: Everyone saw this. Hollywood stunt man by day gettaway driver by night. It sounds crap but it isn't.
5 Killing Bono: I haven't seen this one, but I was sold on it just by the title alone.
4 We Need To Talk About Kevin: Lionel Shriver's excellent book turned into a great movie.
3 Into The Abyss: A Werner Herzog documentary about death row not quite up there with his classics such as Grizzly Man and Encounters At The End Of The World, but still very compelling.
2 Meek's Cutoff: Kelly Reichardt's feminist, minimalist Western about a bunch of settlers getting lost on the Oregon trail. The lovely Michelle Williams stars.
1 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy: OK so I haven't actually seen this one either, but I loved the book and the BBC series and the director is the guy who made Let The Right One In which is one of my all time favourites. I know its a risk putting a film I haven't seen at number 1 but hey thats the kind of guy I am.

The Story of Nordic Noir

2012-01-01T05:51:00.003+11:00

This is an interesting BBC documentary explaining where Nordic Noir came from. The same team have also done a documentary on Italian noir. Hopefully they'll realise soon that the magnetic pole in world crime writing is gradually shifting across the Irish Sea...

The Cold Cold Ground

2011-12-31T19:08:00.001+11:00

COLD COLD GROUND is a beautiful, thrilling heartbreaker of a book, alive with the sorrow and poetry of Ireland. Adrian McKinty is one of the finest writers working in any genre. ---Tim Hallinan

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It's undoubtedly McKinty's finest novel: a visceral journey to the heart of darkness that was 1980's Northern Ireland. Written with intelligence, insight and wit, McKinty exposes the cancer of corruption at all levels of society at that time. Sean Duffy is a compelling detective, the evocation of the period is breathtaking and the atmosphere authentically menacing. A brilliant piece of work which does for the North what Peace's Red Riding Quartet did for Yorkshire.---Brian McGilloway
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THE COLD, COLD GROUND is a razor sharp thriller set against the backdrop of a country in chaos, told with style, courage and dark-as-night wit. Adrian McKinty channels Dennis Lehane, David Peace and Joseph Wambaugh to create a brilliant novel with its own unique voice.---Stuart Neville
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The Cold Cold Ground is a fearless trip into the nightmare world of Northern Ireland in the 1980’s: riots, hunger strikes, murders -- a time when every action from the mundane to the extreme is a political statement, yet Adrian McKinty tells a very personal story of an ordinary cop trying to hunt down a killer.---John McFetridge
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Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground has got to on my five best of the year [list] as it is riveting, brilliant and just about the best book yet on Northern Ireland.---Ken Bruen
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Adrian McKinty is the voice of the new Northern Irish generation but he’s not afraid to examine the past. Through Sean Duffy, his latest protagonist, he applies his unique writing skills to our troubled history expertly. This writer is a legend in the making and Cold, Cold Ground is the latest proof of this.---Gerard Brennan
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The sense of what it must have been like to live through the most explosive days of Northern Ireland’s Troubles is vivid but, more than that, convincing. This goes especially for the book's homely details and the off-hand observations by McKinty's Sean Duffy, a Catholic member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. If McKinty were a tour guide, he’d take visitors to parts of Belfast and its surroundings that no one else does. The world’s most exciting crime fiction these days comes from Ireland, the best of that comes from the North, and The Cold Cold Ground may be the best crime novel – and one of the best books, period – out of Northern Ireland.–-- Peter Rozovsky

Is Christopher Hitchens In Hell?

2011-12-28T01:21:00.002+11:00

The short answer is: of course not. Hell doesn't exist. Hell was invented in the first century AD to keep back-sliding Christian converts in line. Before then there were only vague concepts of an afterlife in the Hebrew Bible; and in the Greek and Roman mythologies Hades was a gloomy sort of half life. And how could hell actually work for humans? We evolved from arboreal lemur like creatures which in turn evolved from amphibians and if you want to go all the way back a billion years ago, our distant distant ancestors were bacteria floating in the primordial soup. Consider these bacteria. If you take penicillin to kill the bacteria in your lungs during a spot of flu do the dead bacteria go to a bacterial heaven? Do house flies and viruses go to heaven? At what point along our evolutionary journey did homo sapien heaven evolve? I hope that you can see that this is a reductio ad absurdum.
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The reason I bring this up is because of the gleeful tone of some of the Hitchens obituaries and commentary. Of course it is to be expected from irony challenged, petty crypto Stalinists such as Alexander Cockburn but it's more surprising when you encounter triumphalist bile from theologians. Islamic and Catholic apologists seem to be the most ecstatic about Hitchens's death I suppose because they suffered the most under Hitch's withering attacks. Jewish rabbis who have debated Hitchens (and mostly lost badly) have had praise for Hitch's humanism and intellect. Even the fundamentalist Protesant pastor Douglas Wilson (one of Hitch's better adversaries) wrote a thoughtful commentary on his dealings and debates with Hitch over the years. So what is the religious argument that Hitchens deserves to be in hell? From the doctrinaire Christian theologians it seems to be this: Hitchens refused to believe in a God or an afterlife that his intellect told him was completely bogus. That's it. That is sufficient reason for him to go to hell. For using his brain and following the dictates of logic and for not keeping quiet about it. Personally I'd be ashamed to make an argument like this, but I suppose that this is what passes for philosophy these days in the mighty religion of St Francis, St Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and Alasdair MacIntyre.
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A more interesting assault on the non existence of the afterlife can be inferred from the work of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom. Or in the lovely late Isaac Asimov short story The Last Answer which has been uploaded here.

The 8 Legs of Christmas

2011-12-26T00:01:00.006+11:00

It was the night before Christmas and all through the house nothing was stirring except the blood curdling scream of my oldest daughter encountering a massive spider next to the TV set in the living room. I was in the smallest room of the house hoping that someone else could deal with whatever the problem was but when my wife and younger daughter also started yelling I knew that this screaming was more significant than the normal screaming that goes on in our home. Some sort of innate fight or flight instinct kicked in; alas flight was impossible because the bathroom window doesn't open properly.
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I walked breezily - or perhaps was pushed violently - into the living room (the circumstances are still hazy) and the door was shut behind me. The spider was not difficult to spot. I have seen big spiders before. I saw a bird eating spider up a tree in Cambodia once and while my brother and I were looking at it I did a little spider dance with my fingers on the back of his neck and watched him leap a good five or six feet into the air. This spider was bigger. This spider was easily the breadth of my hand with a body the size of a Matchbox car. It was green and brown and hairy and as it hung there on the wall it seemed to be pulsing the way radioactive spiders do in 1950s science fiction films.
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Normally I don't like to kill spiders and I've got a 100% pacifist track record for this house. My technique is to trap the beasts under a plastic glass, slide a coaster under it and hey presto, caught. This spider looked too big for any of our glasses but I thought perhaps that I should give it a go. Keeping an eye on it I went to the kitchen and grabbed a plastic milk tumbler and just in case it all went wrong a metal spatula.
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Did I mention that Australia has 9 out of the 10 deadliest spiders in the world? I don't know if this is a fact as such but it's something I've heard and something Australians tell you. My adrenalin had certainly kicked in now. The TV was on, tuned to one of those music channels playing light classical. The music selection had been something rather calming from Delibes but that ended and O Fortuna from Carmina Burana began (I'm not making this up). The music was an unnecessarily dramatic soundtrack but I couldn't turn the TV off because it was too near the spider and I didn't want to startle it. I advanced towards it with my upturned cup. I felt less like one of those guys on Animal Planet and more like a bomb disposal guy in Restrepo. The spider was on the wall but near a window so there wasn't much room to manoeuver with the cup. I'd have to be fast and accurate. Close up I saw how enormous it was. I could see its eyes and fangs and the bristly hair on its legs. I hesitated for thirty seconds or so and tried remember the calming breathing exercises a nurse had told my wife to do when she'd been giving birth. I couldn't remember if it was in through the nose and out through the mouth or vice versa. "To hell with it," I muttered and then I went for it. I tried to bring the cup down quickly on the spider but I botched it. The cup hit the TV first and the spider saw what was coming and jumped off the wall onto the floor. My heart was in my mouth now and I stifled a yell. The spider jumped again and started making for the Christmas presents under the tree. That would have been a bad place to hide so I lashed out with the spatula, missed it, lashed again, hit it, squishing it flat.
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I don't know what the spider was. Probably not a dangerous funnel web, but more likely a fairly benign huntsman. I certainly have never seen one that big in the house (or any house) before and the thought I have now is: where there is one there certainly can be more.

Merry Christmas From St Kilda

2011-12-25T00:08:00.001+11:00

The Irish Crime Fiction Supergroup

2011-12-23T05:01:00.023+11:00

Guess which one is Colin Bateman

For the last year or two here on my blog I've been trying to get people interested in my books in particular and in Irish crime writing in general. It's sometimes been an uphill struggle because, compared to Nordic or English crime fiction, Irish crime writers still seem to lurk in the periphery. This is strange to me because in terms of quality and diversity Irish crime fiction is booming. I wonder if Ireland has an image problem: years of insidious and dreary cliches in what I like to call Micksploitation films have conditioned the book buying public to demand fiction that conforms to their expectations. When people think of Ireland they still think of smoky pubs, flat caps and sheep; they want their Ireland to be the Ireland of the 1950's. Working in a New York Barnes and Noble I discovered that Irish Americans are not particularly avid readers and when they do buy books it's often something ghastly thing like How The Irish Saved Civilization or The Best Irish Castles. Therefore if you want to sell books with an Irish theme in America you have to reach beyond the Irish American community but there again you are often hit by the stereotypes and imagery of what it means to be Irish. When the average American punter buys an English or Nordic mystery novel they think they're getting something that not only will entertain them but will also improve them in some way because Swedes and Englishmen seem so darn intelligent. And this I feel appeals to something deep in the American psyche - the need to better oneself.
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Irish fiction is intellectually on a par with any other literature in the world and I'd go further and say that Irish crime writing currently leads the world in diversity and richness. That such a small island can produce such a welter of talent is truly amazing. On his blog, Crime Always Pays, Declan Burke tirelessly promotes his fellow Micks and although I am not as well read as Declan, here are few authors that I have read in the last couple of years that I think you should be aware of...who knows it might even help with some last minute Christmas shopping.
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*Declan Burke: Dec's latest novel Absolute Zero Cool may be his masterpiece. Channeling Flann O'Brien Dec has an original and utterly brilliant take on the contemporary crime novel.

*Stuart Neville: Stuart's first novel The Twelve was a work of genius. Incredibly his follow up books have only gotten better. Don't let the beard fool you, he's just a kid really, and he's got a long promising career ahead of him.

*Eoin McNamee: Perhaps the most intelligent and thoughtful of this generation's crop of Irish novelists. At home in literary fiction and crime fiction, Eoin's book Orchid Blue is one of my all time favourites.

*Ken Bruen: Sir Ken of Bruen is The Man as far as I'm concerned. The Irish Elmore Leonard or possibly the Irish Michael Connolly, but, you know, funnier. He's done many wonderful books since but there's a soft spot in my heart for Her Last Call To Louis MacNeice, one of his early classics.
*Ronan Bennett: This generation's Graham Greene. As comfortable in film and television as he is in fiction. Havoc In The Third Year is one of the great novels of our time and it should have won the Booker Prize.

*Garbhan Downey: The bard of Derry. Garv hilariously unpacks the foibles and fantasies of the denizens of Ireland's most eccentric city. My favourite? War of the Blue Noses.
*Kevin McCarthy: Only got to one Kevin McCarthy book so far but that was the fantastic novel Peeler. Definitely one of those books that you'll read compulsively in one long sitting.

*Colin Bateman: Cursed by a childhood in Ireland's most boring town, Bangor, Bateman rose above the tedium of tea shops and ice cream parlours to become a best selling comic novelist. His done nothing but brilliant work since but I still love Divorcing Jack from a few years back.

*David Park: A thoughtful, intelligent, subtle novelist in the Graham Green/Brian Moore mold. More of a literary guy than a crime guy really. His masterpiece, The Truth Commissioner, is the book to read if you want to understand what happened to Northern Ireland from 1968 - 1998.

*Tana French: I was in a bookshop in Tokyo looking for something to read on the train and in among the Japanese novels was a shelf full of Ms French. I bought, I read, I loved. Now I've read them all and they're all great.

*Ruth Dudley Edwards: A true prose master. Her crime novels are fantastic but for me her book about the Omagh bombing takes us to another level. A must read for anyone who is interested in contemporary Ireland.

*Brian McGilloway: You all know Brian don't you? One of the brightest lights in all of Irish literature. Intelligent and tough with a poet's heart, he's a best seller in the UK and Ireland and he's increasingly huge in America. If you don't have a BMCG book go get one, now!

*John Connolly: How do you crack America? Well, if Brian McGilloway and Stuart Neville are the Kinks and the Stones JC is the Beatles. You crack America by writing taut, original, stylish crime fiction with a supernatural bent.

*Gene Kerrigan: I just finished Kerrigan's The Rage and I thought it was amazing. I'll definitely be reading more in the future.

*Dec Hughes: The Wrong Kind of Blood is the first in the great Ed Loy mystery series. Hughes is street wise, smart, witty and just a little bit cocky.

*Gerard Brennan: One of the new generation of N Irish novelists and playwrights. This year I read Brennan's hilarious, tight, brilliant novella The Point.

*Alan Glynn: Winterland is one of my favourite books of the last five years. I haven't read Glynn's latest but I surely will.
*Cormac Millar: Only read one CM book, The Grounds, but fortunately it was a fantastic read. Definitely adding more to my TBR pile.
*Arlene Hunt: Also only read one Arlene Hunt novel but luckily that was also pretty damn fine. It was called The Chosen and it was one of my books of the year.
*Alex Barclay: I really enjoyed Barclay's Darkhouse, one of my favourite books of 2010.
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Like I say, this list is not exhaustive. I'm not as well read as many people in this field, but if I've piqued your curiosity at all investigate the authors above and please check out Crime Always Pays and Detectives Beyond Borders for a more comprehensive look at Irish crime fiction.

My Hot Yoga Nightmare

2011-12-19T14:11:00.000+11:00

This was the fourth image that came up
on my Google Image search for Yoga

Hot yoga is the fastest growing recreation or past-time in the western world. One in four Americans under the age of twenty five has now tried hot yoga or is currently going to a hot yoga class.* I used to say "I'm as intellectually curious as the next guy" until one day the next guy was Isaiah Berlin so I've stopped saying that now, but thats not really that relevant, what's relevant is the fact that I'm a little bit curious about yoga and hot yoga in particular.
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Why? I'll tell you why. I've had a bad left knee for a long time now and in the last year it was diagnosed as a "pre arthritic condition" whatever that means. Basically it hurts in the morning and I can't really run on it or play soccer which is annoying, but I do swim nearly every day and most of the time the pain is completely manageable. So I'm not complaining but I am looking for non surgical solutions to the problem and I have tried many different things including acupuncture, massage and a variety of medications. Recently on the advice of several people I decided to try hot yoga. It was not a good experience.
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First lets understand what hot yoga is. It is NOT called hot yoga because the room is full of hot chicks. Yes the room is full of hot chicks but you can't concentrate on them because the room has been heated to 120 degrees. They have the place this temperature because, I kid you not, its hot in India and that's where yoga came from. That's the logic. On this principle bananas should only be eaten in a humidor. I have no proof of this but I'm reasonably certain that our yoga instructor spent her formative years running a V-C prison camp in Laos. She was a small, energetic woman with a powerful set of lungs and she used these to good effect. She screamed at us from the beginning of the class to the end, yelling at us not to drink water as it disrupted the timing and telling us to work harder and to hold the poses longer. After five minutes I wanted to leave but I was frankly terrified of this lady. Is it likely that she would have hurled a shuriken throwing star at my neck as I was slipping out? No. Is it impossible? Again, no.
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I quickly discovered that I was in front of one of the heaters that kept blasting hot air at me every few minutes. That plus the constant screaming and the pain of the poses and the denial of water cracked me like an egg. I would have talked. I would have told them anything. I would have signed anything. But there was nothing to sign. Just more pain and more yelling.
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An hour and fifteen minutes went by the way time goes by at a Noam Chomsky lecture. When it was finally over we were advised to rest on the mats for a few minutes and then shower but I ran into the street instead. I felt like Dieter Dengler, or maybe like someone who more than two people reading this blog would have heard of. The yoga place I went to happens to be next door to the biggest brothel in Melbourne, possibly the biggest brothel in the Southern Hemisphere, so there were quite a few dodgy characters hanging around and a desperately panting man, pouring with sweat, in flip flops & wife beater t shirt was not that uncommon a sight. I got in the car, drank my water bottle and an old one I found under the seat and blasted the aircon.
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The result? Well my knee did feel better for a day or two after the hot yoga experience but there's no way I can bring myself to go back. I'll take the bad knee over the demented V-C Colonel any day of the week.
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*None of these "facts" are remotely true and to be honest I'm surprised you even thought they were.

Hitchens On Tea

2011-12-17T12:58:00.001+11:00

As regular readers of this blog will know I am a big fan of Christopher Hitchens. His death, although not unexpected, is still something of a shock. The IQ of the planet has certainly diminished a few notches. There's a nice piece on Hitch in the New York Times here, a collection of his Vanity Fair pieces here, and his editor at Slate has put together some of her favourite pieces, here.
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I think my favourite Hitch moment was his savaging of the SDP politican Shirley Williams on Question Time following her mealy mouthed response to a question about Salman Rushdie's knighthood. His TV appearances alone would secure his place in the history of our culture. If you do go a hunting let me recommend a series of clips called HitchSlap which a youtuber has compiled of Hitch's more ascerbic moments...
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And courtesy of Slate Magazine here is his lovely essay (a tribute to his hero Orwell) on the making of the perfect cup of tea:

Now that "the holidays"—at their new-style Ramadan length, with the addition of Hanukkah plus the spur and lash of commerce—are safely over, I can bear to confront the moment at their very beginning when my heart took its first dip. It was Dec. 8, and Yoko Ono had written a tribute to mark the 30^th anniversary of the murder of her husband. In her New York Timesop-ed, she recalled how the two of them would sometimes make tea together. He used to correct her method of doing so, saying, "Yoko, Yoko, you're supposed to first put the tea bags in, and then the hot water." (This she represented as his Englishness speaking, in two senses, though I am sure he would actually have varied the word order and said "put the tea bags in first.") This was fine, indeed excellent, and I was nodding appreciatively, but then the blow fell. One evening, he told her that an aunt had corrected him. The water should indeed precede the bags. "So all this time, we were doing it wrong?" she inquired. "Yeah," replied our hero, becoming in that moment a turncoat to more than a century of sturdy Liverpool tradition.

I simply hate to think of the harm that might result from this. It is already virtually impossible in the United States, unless you undertake the job yourself, to get a cup or pot of tea that tastes remotely as it ought to. It's quite common to be served a cup or a pot of water, well off the boil, with the tea bags lying on an adjacent cold plate. Then comes the ridiculous business of pouring the tepid water, dunking the bag until some change in color occurs, and eventually finding some way of disposing of the resulting and dispiriting tampon surrogate. The drink itself is then best thrown away, though if swallowed, it will have about the same effect on morale as a reading of the memoirs of President James Earl Carter.

Now, imagine that tea, like coffee, came without a bag (as it used to do—and still does if you buy a proper tin of it). Would you consider, in either case, pouring the hot water, letting it sit for a bit, and then throwing the grounds or the leaves on top? I thought not. Try it once, and you will never repeat the experience, even if you have a good strainer to hand. In the case of coffee, it might just work if you are quick enough, though where would be the point? But ground beans are heavier and denser, and in any case many good coffees require water that is just fractionally off the boil. Whereas tea is a herb (or an herb if you insist) that has been thoroughly dried. In order for it to release its innate qualities, it requires to be infused. And an infusion, by definition, needs the water to be boiling when it hits the tea. Grasp only this, and you hold the root of the matter.

Just after World War II, during a period of acute food rationing in England, George Orwell wrote an article on the making of a decent cup of tea that insisted on the observing of 11 different "golden" rules. Some of these (always use Indian or Ceylonese—i.e., Sri Lankan—tea; make tea only in small quantities; avoid silverware pots) may be considered optional or outmoded. But the essential ones are easily committed to memory, and they are simple to put into practice.

If you use a pot at all, make sure it is pre-warmed. (I would add that you should do the same thing even if you are only using a cup or a mug.) Stir the tea before letting it steep. But this above all: "[O]ne should take the teapot to the kettle, and not the other way about. The water should be actually boiling at the moment of impact, which means that one should keep it on the flame while one pours." This isn't hard to do, even if you are using electricity rather than gas, once you have brought all the makings to the same scene of operations right next to the kettle.

It's not quite over yet. If you use milk, use the least creamy type or the tea will acquire a sickly taste. And do not put the milk in the cup first—family feuds have lasted generations over this—because you will almost certainly put in too much. Add it later, and be very careful when you pour. Finally, a decent cylindrical mug will preserve the needful heat and flavor for longer than will a shallow and wide-mouthed—how often those attributes seem to go together—teacup. Orwell thought that sugar overwhelmed the taste, but brown sugar or honey are, I believe, permissible and sometimes necessary.

Until relatively few years ago, practically anything hot and blackish or brackish could be sold in America under the name of coffee. It managed both to be extremely weak and extremely bitter, and it was frequently at boiling point, though it had no call to be. (I use the past tense, though there are many places where this is still true, and it explains why free refills can be offered without compunction.) At least in major cities, consumers now have a better idea how to stick up for themselves, often to an irksome degree, as we know from standing behind people who are too precise about their latte, or whatever it's called.

Next time you are in a Starbucks or its equivalent and want some tea, don't be afraid to decline that hasty cup of hot water with added bag. It's not what you asked for. Insist on seeing the tea put in first, and on making sure that the water is boiling. If there are murmurs or sighs from behind you, take the opportunity to spread the word. And try it at home, with loose tea and a strainer if you have the patience. Don't trouble to thank me. Happy New Year.

The GOP Field's Fiction Favourites

2011-12-13T12:32:00.000+11:00

You know I don't do politics here on the blog don't you? Growing up in Northern Ireland in the poisoned atmosphere of the 1970s and 1980s killed all interest in politics for me and on the rare occasions when I've met career politicians I have found them to be profoundly creepy, self involved and boring. I have being following the Republican fight for the Presidency in an abstract sort of way and have come to some admittedly flimsy conclusions about the candidates based on their selection of favourite novel. If I was going to pick a GOP candidate solely on this criterion this is how I'd rate them:
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7. Jon Hunstman Jnr: Couldn't find a favourite novel or book for Huntsman. He doesn't even seem to have a favourite movie unlike all the other candidates. Do the children of billionaires not read?
6. Michele Bachmann has to go in second last place I'm afraid. After a lot of searching I couldn't discover if she reads fiction. Her list of favourite non fiction books is here and its not terrible. She says she has a love/hate relationship with Garrison Keillor's works but then so say we all.
5. Mitt Romney's favourite novel is Battlefield Earth by L Ron Hubbard which is one of the worst science fiction novels I've ever read. The prose is as clunky and dull as the characters and about the only saving grace is the fact that much of it takes place in Denver.
4. Rick Perry likes the novels of Vince Flynn. I haven't read Vince Flynn but I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that he sounds like a Tom Clancy sort of guy which would really be saying something. If I'm wrong about Flynn please let me know.
3. Ron Paul likes Ayn Rand's books so much that he named his son after her. I've read Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead and strongly disliked both of them. Hate is too strong a word here, for at least I recognised them as novels but really this is philosophical fiction for light weights. If you want to read good didactic philosophy in a fictional setting try The Symposium.
2. Rick Santorum. Apparently his favourite novel is The Lord of the Rings. Nothing wrong with that. I read it three times before I turned 13 and although its not currently in my Top 20 list I hold it affectionately in my heart.
1. Newt Gingrich. Gingrich has been coy about picking just one favourite but he's got a pretty interesting list on the Freakonomics blog here. Among his novel selections are Lincoln by Gore Vidal and The Godfather by Mario Puzo, both great books. He also likes All The Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren and Shogun by James Clavell which I dug too. (Not afraid of a weighty tomb is Gingrich.) These four are all middle of the road, fairly safe choices but they are 4 books that I liked, so as far as I'm concerned Speaker Gingrich wins the contest and gets my hypothetical (I'm a registered independent) vote.
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More favourite books by famous people here.

My Favourite Books Of 2011

2011-12-12T08:57:00.008+11:00

I read 52 books this year which is a little bit above my normal average. I've posted my 10 favourites below. Not on this list are the new books by Dec Burke, Stu Neville, Eoin McNamee, John McFetridge, Brian McGilloway, Gerard Brennan and Ken Bruen which I read in manuscript last year and which were are all absolutely brilliant. (If you're not reading Irish crime fiction because you don't read crime fiction, man, are you missing out on where the real talent in Irish writing is these days.) (McFetridge, although a Canadian, counts because his antecedents are from that apocalyptic hell hole known as Larne). Also not on my list are the audiobooks I listened to this year as you can very often get a good book ruined by a bad narrator or a mediocre book elevated by superb narration and its sometimes hard to figure out whats going on. (Maybe I should do a top 10 audiobook list?) Ok, enough blather, here's my top 10.
10. World War Z - Max Brooks. I'm not really into zombies but this book had its moments of fun and fright.
9. Hollywood - Charles Bukowksi. I'm not really into Bukowski either but boy is this novel hilarious. As good a satire of Hollywood as you'll read anywhere and it's all actually true.
8. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorised History of MI5 - Christopher Andrew. All you ever wanted to know about British spies in the twentieth century. Except for the stuff that's been redacted. What's been redacted? Well we don't know because it's been redacted.
7. The City and the City - China Mieville. Two cities in Eastern Europe share the same geographic area. A detective from one is trying to solve a murder that may have been committed in the other. It gets weirder.
6. Arguably - Christopher Hitchens. The polemicist and rabble rouser's best collection of essays yet. Probably his last.
5. Master and Commander - Patrick O'Brian. This is the fourth time I've listened to this book and it's still fantastic. (Ok, so I'm breaking my self imposed audiobook rule already but this is the exception that proves the rule). One of the reasons I hated the film of M&C was the fact that it entirely missed the point of the novel which is about friendship and loyalty in the aftermath of the great 1798 rebellion in Ireland. I like the audiobook narrated by Patrick Tull, others rave about David Case.
4. The Rest Is Noise - Alex Ross. A history of classical music in the twentieth century by the New Yorker's music critic.
3. If Not Winter: Fragments of Sappho - Anne Carson. Carson translates all the bits of Sappho that have turned up over the centuries. Somehow the ellipses are as beautiful as the bits that have survived.
2. Conquest of the Useless - Werner Herzog. Herzog's account of the making of Fitzcarraldo in the Peruvian jungle. It was a nightmare and he knew it was going to be a nightmare which makes the nightmare all the more interesting.
1. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet - David Mitchell. I think this might have appeared on my list from 2010 also as I read it right at the end of the year. Mitchell's best book since his masterpiece, Cloud Atlas. The Dutch and the Japanese misunderstand each other in eighteenth century Nagasaki. There's a love story, a naval battle and the greatest Go game in the history of literature.

Falling Glass Wins!

2011-12-11T00:24:00.000+11:00

A big thank you to everyone who voted for Falling Glass as it's been awarded the Crime Always Pays, Irish crime novel of the year. As Declan Burke explains on his blog it was a bumper year for Irish crime fiction and certainly any of the terrific books in the category could have won. I think as a novel Falling Glass slipped between the cracks a little bit. It got good reviews in The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent etc. etc. but it didn't really set the world on fire. To do that I suppose you need the right zeitgeist and a little bit of luck. Still it's been the little engine that could and I'm very happy to take the CAP Irish crime novel of the year award. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the audiobook version has already been picked as Audible's Best Mystery or Thriller for 2011.
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Falling Glass is out in mass market paperback in the UK and Ireland in a fortnight and it'll be out in mass market in Australia and NZ soon after that. The cool looking German version will be out in April 2012. There is no US version, alas, because (to quote a well known US publishing house) its not commercial enough. Thank you very much to everyone who voted for me or reviewed Falling Glass online, I really appreciate it.

The Cynical Hearts of Wieden and Kennedy

2011-12-08T13:23:00.001+11:00

I remember the moment when I decided that I was never going to buy another pair of Levis Jeans. It was not, as you would expect, a midlife crisis style epiphany when I suddenly realised that I wasn't a kid anymore but a man who should be wearing cords or slacks or whatever it is that men wear. No, it was nothing like that, it was when I saw Levi's 'America' ad which had a series of images celebrating America over a scratchy recording of Walt Whitman reading his poem America that also, er, celebrates America. What got me upset was the hypocrisy of this because the ad came only a year or two after Levis closed down its last plant making jeans in America. That's the play isn't it? Move your stitching factories to sweatshops overseas, hike the prices and then hire a cool ad agency whose job it is to fool the public into thinking that nothing has changed. Wrangler, that sponsor of rodeos and bull riding and stock car races, also makes none of its jeans in America. But these great companies do.
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The Levis ad was made by Wieden and Kennedy who are also responsible for the Microsoft Ads and the Nike commercials among many others. (Mr Wieden came up with the "just do it" tag line which is enough cultural vandalism for one lifetime.) The Levis America ad is part of a new campaign for Levis called Go Forth which targets young wannabe individuals. I saw the latest commercial in this campaign in the cinema before The Ides of March (above, right). This ad has already generated some controversy. It was banned in the UK following last August's riots and nutcase/political commentator Glenn Beck saw it and said he wants to boycott Levis in protest because it will cause youth rebellion or something. The ad is a reading - by a Native American actor - of the Charles Bukowski poem The Laughing Heart. I can't believe that Bukowski would have been happy to see his poem used in this context and the idea that somehow the meaning of life can be enhanced or discovered through a pair of trousers made in a third world sweat shop surely doesn't convince even the naivest of the Millennium generation, does it?
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In the second youtube clip I've uploaded Adam Curtis explains where some of this cynical advertising stuff came from on the Jarvis Cocker Radio show.

Book Of The Year

2011-12-05T00:25:00.004+11:00

Audible.com has picked Falling Glass as its best mystery or thriller of the year. I am absolutely delighted and also amazed; there are thousands of mysteries released as audiobooks every year and if you look at who I topped in this category its quite the collection of superstars. These are big names whose publishers supported their books with massive amounts of advertising, book tours and media appearances. Because I have been unable to find a US publisher Falling Glass had zero advertising, I didn't do a book tour and I did zero media. Falling Glass got the top spot on its writing and more importantly, I'm sure, because of the excellent performance by that brilliant actor and narrator Gerard Doyle.
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I give a lot of credit to the editors at Audible who saw through the hype machines of the big publishers and picked the book they liked the best. I thank also the writers who reviewed Falling Glass on their blogs, the 207 listeners who rated the book on Audible and the people who took the time and trouble to review Falling Glass on Audible's web site, on Amazon proper and Good Reads. I really do appreciate it. I always read reviews and though I often violently disagree I take them all on board. A big thank you also to Mr Doyle and everyone at Blackstone Audiobooks.
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Despite this award and the great reviews in the British press I still don't have a US publishing house. Why? Well, the book business is an arcane world. Publishers and editors say they like to try the new and the different but in fact they don't. Apart from the rebel badasses at Serpents Tail everywhere its the same story: if you don't fall neatly into one of their genre boxes they don't know what to do with you. I've always had that problem and rather than pander to the lowest common denominator I've always wanted to write my own books in my own way. Sometimes you pay the price: Here in Australia my publishers Allen and Unwin were so unconvinced by Falling Glass they didn't email me about it or tell me when it was coming out and it was a huge surprise when I just happened to see it in my local bookshop. It's hard enough to write a book but when you struggle to get noticed even by your own local publisher you do sometimes wonder what's the bloody point.
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But maybe the struggle is the point. I bet if I put my mind to it I could write a knock off Michael Connolly or Lee Child and make boatloads of cash. But I don't want to. I'm not that much of a cynic and books are too important to me. I don't want to write for money or for the whims of editors in corner offices, I want to write the books that move me and make me think and make me excited. My readers get invested not just in the characters and the story but also in the words and sentences that make up the story. My readers like irony and judicial profanity. My readers like a good joke and a well turned phrase. My readers admire wit. My readers know who Seamus Heaney is. My readers DONT HAVE TO HAVE EVERY LAST THING EXPLAINED TO THEM. My readers aren't prudes. My readers don't have to be told why its wrong to pour a shamrock on the head of a pint of Guinness. My readers can spot the gag in the sentence that begins chapter 2 of Falling Glass. My readers can recite poems from memory. My readers aren't frightened by a page without dialogue. My readers can name the Presidents back to 1932. My readers are sometimes poleaxed but seldom banjaxed. My readers are a select group and, you know what, I'm really glad about that. Slainte.

George McFly Day!

2011-12-04T09:08:00.000+11:00

In an early Christmas pressie for me my author's copies of The Cold Cold Ground arrived today! The book looks fabulous and I'm really pleased with it. (The kids incidentally are dressed up for their school Matsuri Day.)
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Is The Cold Cold Ground any good? Well, I'm not a terrific judge of my own stuff but here are a few words from people that I admire in the crime fiction family:

COLD COLD GROUND is a beautiful, thrilling heartbreaker of a book, alive with the sorrow and poetry of Ireland. Adrian McKinty is one of the finest writers working in any genre.

---Tim Hallinan

It's undoubtedly McKinty's finest novel: a visceral journey to the heart of darkness that was 1980's Northern Ireland. Written with intelligence, insight and wit, McKinty exposes the cancer of corruption at all levels of society at that time. Sean Duffy is a compelling detective, the evocation of the period is breathtaking and the atmosphere authentically menacing. A brilliant piece of work which does for the North what Peace's Red Riding Quartet did for Yorkshire.

---Brian McGilloway

THE COLD, COLD GROUND is a razor sharp thriller set against the backdrop of a country in chaos, told with style, courage and dark-as-night wit. Adrian McKinty channels Dennis Lehane, David Peace and Joseph Wambaugh to create a brilliant novel with its own unique voice.

---Stuart Neville

The Cold Cold Ground is a fearless trip into the nightmare world of Northern Ireland in the 1980’s: riots, hunger strikes, murders -- a time when every action from the mundane to the extreme is a political statement, yet Adrian McKinty tells a very personal story of an ordinary cop trying to hunt down a killer.

---John McFetridge

Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground has got to on my five best of the year [list] as it is riveting, brilliant and just about the best book yet on Northern Ireland.

---Ken Bruen

Adrian McKinty is the voice of the new Northern Irish generation but he’s not afraid to examine the past. Through Sean Duffy, his latest protagonist, he applies his unique writing skills to our troubled history expertly. This writer is a legend in the making and Cold, Cold Ground is the latest proof of this.

---Gerard Brennan

The sense of what it must have been like to live through the most explosive days of Northern Ireland’s Troubles is vivid but, more than that, convincing. This goes especially for the book's homely details and the off-hand observations by McKinty's Sean Duffy, a Catholic member of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. If McKinty were a tour guide, he’d take visitors to parts of Belfast and its surroundings that no one else does. The world’s most exciting crime fiction these days comes from Ireland, the best of that comes from the North, and The Cold Cold Ground may be the best crime novel – and one of the best books, period – out of Northern Ireland.

–-- Peter Rozovsky

The Ides Of March

2011-12-02T00:51:00.001+11:00

cute as a baby goose: Ryan, er, Gosling

George Clooney's new political film The Ides of March may be proof that we are getting collectively stupider as a society. Compare a movie like Ides to great 1970's fare such as The Conversation, or The Candidate or All The Presidents Men and you'll see how far we've slipped. Ides of March is like the opening titles of Trumpton: clunky, slow and you can see the clockwork turning long before any of the characters. The shocking revelation at the heart of this film is that, gasp, politicians say one thing and do another. No, really, that's it. Someone once said that you will never lose a dime in Hollywood underestimating the intelligence of the public which might be true but you'll never get our respect either will you?
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As my mind drifted from the Slot A into Slot B story I wondered if Clooney is anything more than a competent director. He has a decent visual eye but he does not stir strong performances from his cast: Ryan Gosling has a one note smirk throughout, Marisa Tomei's scenes made me wince for her and asking Paul Giamatti and Philip Seymour Hoffman to play schlubby is like asking Robin Williams to "give us one more take completely over the top."
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I wonder too about the logic. Does an intelligent young woman wrestling with the decision to have an abortion really want to instigate casual sex with her good looking boss? And not once but twice? Perhaps insane women do and as further proof that all women in this man's world are either dupes or mad the young intern (SPOILER ALERT) conveniently tops herself. Sheesh, that was lucky, script wise I mean. The internal plotting and logic of this film are dubious and would not have survived the writers room on The West Wing even in its sunset season.
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Before I end this dreary topic I also want to say something about Chris Matthews, Charlie Rose and Rachel Maddow prostituting their journalistic integrity by appearing in a fictional political movie. Maybe I'm old fashioned but I hate this. I like the days when journos wore ties even in war zones and they would sue if someone put them in a TV show or a novel. Now nobody cares. Even Paxo did The Thick Of It. Look, I expect nothing less from Charlie Rose who has always been a slavering celebrity groupie of almost Liptonian proportions but I expected better of Matthews and Maddow. Sure Matthews has a man crush on handsome Irish charmers (his new JFK hagiography is one aspect of that) but occasionally in interviews he'll remember that he's supposed to be a journalist. And Maddow I don't get at all. Presumably she's immune to Clooney's baritone and that thing he does where he looks up at you from his own shoes. What happened to the pair of them? Is the fairy gold from Hollywood really that bewitching?

Irish Poem Of The Month

2011-12-01T19:18:00.000+11:00

Moneyball

2011-11-28T07:43:00.000+11:00

Nope not even Brad Pitt can pull off the AARP Visor look

The film Moneyball is the true-ish story of Billy Bean, the general manager of the Oakland A's and his conversion to the Bill James school of baseball statistics. Bill James has long held that getting on base is the most important thing a player can do and it doesn't matter how he does it. Ruth and Bonds to name but two were just as valuable for their walks as their hits. Moneyball takes us back to the 2002 season when Oakland lost Jason Giambi to the Yankees and Johnny Damon to the Red Sox. To replace these stars Bean (Brad Pitt) and a statistician played by Jonah Hill decide to ignore their scouts and dive into the Bill James world. The film follows the sacred arc of baseball movies: 1) a bunch of misfits is assembled by a general manager who wants to give them all a second chance 2) they dont gel and initially they lose a lot of games 3) the manager/general manager yells at them 4) they start to turn the season around 5) they win a lot of games 6) there is a climactic final game which they win (The Natural, Major League) or lose (Eight Men Out, The Bad News Bears).
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Despite strictly following this sacred arc or iron law of baseball films I really enjoyed Moneyball. Brad Pitt has decided to age like Robert Redford, that is, rapidly and all at once but its added character to his face and as in The Tree Of Life he turns in a first rate, thoughtful performance here. Jonah Hill is great as the soft spoken geek, Philip Seymour Hoffman is his usual fantastic self, Kerris Dorsey the girl playing Pitt's daughter, is charming and does a nice job with the song over the end credits. Spike Joynze shows up in a funny cameo as Robin Wright's new husband and as a little nod to Bull Durham they even cast Arliss Howard as John Henry at the end.
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Fine acting, a tight script, both Giambi brothers as villains, lots of baseball, what more do you want in a movie?

IQ84 Redux

2011-11-25T06:57:00.015+11:00

Haruki Murakami's IQ84 is a lush, sensual novel that uses the canyons of central of Tokyo as its canvass for a dreamy, escapist fairy tale about two childhood friends who shared a brief platonic romantic moment before separating forever. It's a book heavily informed by the films of Hayao Miyazaki and Jung's notion of the collective unconscious and it has a fantasy element straight from the pages of the brothers Grimm.
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The story of the two central protagonists, a hack writer and a yoga teacher/assassin (!) are told in successive chapters and it takes most of the book for them finally to collide. Fortunately the leads and their voyages of discovery are both equally compelling. However, as in many Murakami novels the characters in IQ84 behave in maddeningly passive, inconsistent and illogical ways and as the fantasy/fairy tale elements get more pronounced I found myself increasingly irritated by their behaviour. Although I enjoyed this book a great deal I think the critics are wrong to say that this is Murakami's masterpiece. He's clearly a very talented writer but I believe he can do better. There is a lack of discipline to Murakami's writing and if he reined in his tics and compulsions he could say something really interesting about modern Japan and the human condition. I blame the translators/editors for the laborious explanations of Western pop culture that should have been cut from the English edition of the book, but I blame Murakami for his creepy obsession with the breasts of young women and young girls; indeed although the sexualisation of prepubescent girls may be a popular trope in Japan (?) you don't have to be a bug eyed Congresswoman running for President to find it icky and unpleasantly disturbing.
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Don't get me wrong IQ84 is a beautiful, strange, interesting novel that raises a lot of questions but it's not as beautiful or as deep as it thinks it is and if its answers you're after, well, you best read something else.

This Aint Lite FM: The Cold Cold Ground - Page 1

2011-11-22T00:03:00.000+11:00

***

The riot had taken on a beauty of its own now. Arcs of gasoline fire under the crescent moon. Crimson tracer in mystical parabolas. Phosphorescence from the barrels of plastic bullet guns. A distant yelling like that of men below decks in a torpedoed prison ship. The scarlet whoosh of Molotovs intersecting with exacting surfaces. Helicopters everywhere: their spotlights finding one another like lovers in the Afterlife.
        I watched with the others by the Land Rover on Knockagh Mountain. No one spoke. Words were inadequate. You needed a Picasso for this scene, not a poet.
        The police and the rioters were arranged in two ragged fronts that ran across a dozen streets, the opposing sides illuminated by the flash of newsmen’s cameras and the burning, petrol-filled milk bottles sent tumbling across the no man’s land like votive offerings to the god of curves.
        Sometimes one side charged and the two lines touched for a time before decoupling and returning to their original positions.
        The smell was the stench of civilization: gunpowder, cordite, slow match, kerosene.
        It was perfect.
        It was Giselle.
        It was Swan Lake.
        And yet. . .
        And yet we had the feeling that we had seen better.
        In fact we had seen better only last week when, in the hospital wing of The Maze Prison, IRA commander Bobby Sands had finally popped his clogs.
        Bobby was a local lad from Newtownabbey and a poster boy for the movement having never killed anyone and coming from a mixed Protestant-Catholic background. And bearded, he was a good Jesus, which didn’t hurt either.
        Bobby Sands was the maitreya, the world teacher, the martyr who would redeem mankind through his suffering.
        When Bobby finally died on the sixty sixth day of his hunger strike the Catholic portions of the city had erupted with spontaneous anger and frustration.
        But that was a week ago and Frankie Hughes, the second hunger striker to die, had none of Bobby’s advantages. No one thought Frankie was Jesus. Frankie enjoyed killing and was very good at it. Frankie shed no tears over dead children. Not even for the cameras.
        And the riots for his death felt somewhat. . .orchestrated.
        Perhaps on the ground it seemed like the same chaos and maybe that’s what they would print tomorrow in newspapers from Boston to Beijing. . .But up here on the Knockagh it was obvious that the peelers had the upper hand. The rioters had been cornered into a small western portion of the city between the hills and the Protestant estates. They faced a thousand full time peelers, plus two or three hundred police reserve, another two hundred UDR and a battalion strength unit of British Army regulars in close support. There were hundreds of rioters - not the thousands that had been predicted: this hardly represented a general uprising of even the Catholic population and as for the promised “revolution” . . . well, not tonight.

Irish Poem Of The Month

2011-11-19T04:40:00.017+11:00

Dr Flynn not quite pulling off the Flashdance look

The Floppy Disk

Leontia Flynn

Prince among misnomers, the floppy disk
lies stranded, in drifts of dust, in the top desk drawer.
A castaway on shingly paper clips
or under an old bank statement – the small withdrawals
dwindling to little, then less, then nothing at all.

How young it is to be so obsolete.
The stainless-steel clip shines. The neat black case
still sleek as a woman’s suit or evening purse.
I will take it between my finger and my thumb
and post it with a click through the squarish slot

Of the oh-so-recent, stunningly useless past;
the moment before the moment before now
whose code is lost. The words that tapped and flashed
like a frantic bird against a window pane,
translate back to the gesture of the hand

stalled on the keys, like the spirit on the water.
Like the shouts and groans that issue from the mine
after the prop has snapped, the floppy disk
is the love-note still sealed in its envelope.
It’s the marker – blank – above its own strange grave.

IQ84

2011-11-17T07:09:00.004+11:00

I'm about half way through Haruki Murakami's IQ84 which is set in an alternative 1984 Japan. Murakami has always rubbed me the wrong way and I think he's been a bit overpraised in the past, especially by American critics. In one of the two Murakami novels I read prior to this one the Johnnie Walker walking man logo came alive and in another one there was a talking cat. This taxed my patience. I suppose it is magical realism or Kafkaesque surrealism or something. I found it intensely irritating and not at all cute. I haven't liked a talking cat since Alice in Wonderland and that kitty isn't so cute either.

...

Murakami began to turn for me when I read his non fiction book about running What I Talk About When I Talk About Running which I enjoyed very much. And I have to say that I'm liking this book quite a bit too. There are magical realism elements in IQ84 but so far they have been held in check. The plot is pacy and the characters interesting. One of the leads is a hack novelist who ghost writes a novel for a damaged young woman. The other lead is an assassin who kills husbands who beat up their wives (alas she doesn't get Sean Penn even in an alternate 84). This is all to the good. The down side is that Murakami sometimes has the tendency to over explain obvious things and when the dreaded magic element appeared it was a bit sillier than I had been expecting. Silly but also, impressively, a bit scary. The book has peculiar similarities with the other Japanese novel I read this year The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet: both have dual protagonists who tell their stories in alternate sections and who are strangely connected; and at the heart of both novels is a weird Japanese religious cult. Actually if you were to take Jacob De Zoet and mash it with the Iain Banks novel Transitions (which I also read this year) you'd pretty much get IQ84.

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More when I eventually finish this very long book.

My Favourite Albums Of All Time

2011-11-15T07:22:00.012+11:00

The cover for this album collides Arthur C Clake's best
novel, Childhood's End, with the most interesting place in
Ireland, The Giants Causeway, with the greatest band
in the world at the time, Led Zeppelin

Following on from the last post I thought I'd give you the list of my favourite albums. A list which is always changing, always evolving, sometimes devolving. At the moment the present stay of play is below and in a week or two it'll be different again. You'll notice no Beatles (not a big fan) or Springsteen (played him to death unfortunately although Nebraska might squeeze in there) or rap (I like individual songs but albums of the stuff?) or jazz. This isn't a PC list like Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums or a hipster collection like the NME list. Its merely my favourites. Old fashioned? Out of touch? Sure. Most of the albums are in that sweet spot 1965 - 1979 when books, films and records were just better.

1. The Velvet Underground - The Velvet Underground & Nico
2. Blood On The Tracks - Bob Dylan
3. Houses of the Holy - Led Zeppelin
4. Let It Bleed - The Rolling Stones
5. OK Computer - Radiohead
6. Astral Weeks - Van Morrison
7. Wish You Were Here - Pink Floyd
8. Pink Moon - Nick Drake
9. Liege and Lief - Fairport Convention
10. Franks Wild Years - Tom Waits
11. Parallel Lines - Blondie
12. PJ Harvey - PJ Harvey
13. I'm Your Man - Leonard Cohen
14. Dummy - Portishead
15. Horses - Patti Smith
16. Are You Experienced - Jimi Hendrix
17. The Undertones - The Undertones
18. Automatic For The People - REM
19. Legend - Bob Marley
20. Never Mind The Bollocks - The Sex Pistols

Synth Britannia

2011-11-13T09:37:00.000+11:00

As I said in the post below I've just finished a novel set in 1981 called The Cold Cold Ground and throughout the book the protagonist of the story, a Detective Sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary, has a few little laments about the state of contemporary music. For him and for me the golden age of pop music was the period from about 1964 - 1980 when rock and roll was diverse and interesting and the great bands were firing on all cylinders. The death of John Bonham and the break up of Led Zeppelin brought to an end the amazing period of heavy metal, John Lennon's murder closed the book on the Beatles and the implosion of the Sex Pistols took much of the momentum from punk rock. 1981 saw the rise of synth pop and this was a music that I hated. Perhaps taking my cue from Britain's vicious music press, the NME, Melody Maker etc. in my 13 year old brain these bands were 'inauthentic' upper class art school boys playing poncy songs on poncy machines. Real men played guitars, basses and drums not synths. In fact as this BBC 4 documentary attempts to show the synth bands were the real outsiders: geeky working class kids heavily into JG Ballard, computers and dystopian sci-fi movies. In other words they were quite a bit like me. "Tout comprendre rend très-indulgent," as Madame de Stael said. Indeed.

Let's Set Fire To Tears: Early Word On The Cold Cold Ground

2011-11-11T11:11:00.004+11:00

Coming in January 2012...Hey, do me a big favour, tell a friend about this book. And then tell two more friends...

It's undoubtedly McKinty's finest novel: a visceral journey to the heart of darkness that was 1980's Northern Ireland. Written with intelligence, insight and wit, McKinty exposes the cancer of corruption at all levels of society at that time. Sean Duffy is a compelling detective, the evocation of the period is breathtaking and the atmosphere authentically menacing. A brilliant piece of work which does for the North what Peace's Red Riding Quartet did for Yorkshire.

---Brian McGilloway

THE COLD, COLD GROUND is a razor sharp thriller set against the backdrop of a country in chaos, told with style, courage and dark-as-night wit. Adrian McKinty channels Dennis Lehane, David Peace and Joseph Wambaugh to create a brilliant novel with its own unique voice.

---Stuart Neville

The hunger strikes mark the bleakest period of Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’, and it’s entirely fitting that Adrian McKinty should be the writer to plunge into that darkest of hearts. It’s a rare author who can write so beautifully about such a poisonous atmosphere, but McKinty’s prose is a master-class in vicious poise as he explores the apparent contradictions that underpin Ulster’s self-loathing. Be in no doubt that this novel is a masterpiece: had David Peace, Eoin McNamee and Brian Moore sat down to brew up the great ‘Troubles’ novel, they would have been very pleased indeed to have written The Cold, Cold Ground.

---Declan Burke

The Cold Cold Ground is a fearless trip into Northern Ireland in the 1980’s: riots, hunger strikes, murders -- a time when every action from the mundane to the extreme is a political statement, yet Adrian McKinty tells a very personal story of an ordinary cop trying to hunt down a serial killer.

---John McFetridge

Adrian McKinty's The Cold Cold Ground has got to on my five best of the year [list] as it is riveting, brilliant and just about the best book yet on Northern Ireland.

---Ken Bruen

Adrian McKinty is the voice of the new Northern Irish generation but he’s not afraid to examine the past. Through Sean Duffy, his latest protagonist, he applies his unique writing skills to our troubled history expertly. This writer is a legend in the making and Cold, Cold Ground is the latest proof of this.

---Gerard Brennan

Micksploitation - The 25 Most Condescending Irish Films

2011-11-09T07:09:00.002+11:00

"My God your Irish accent is worse than Gerard Butler's"

No Irish American films here. Just ones set actually in Ireland...Many of these were very popular and some of them are good but they rubbed me the wrong way.

25. Widows Peak
24. The Van
23. Dancing At Lughnasa
22. Ryan's Daughter
21. Da
20. The Quiet Man

19. The Commitments
18. Waking Ned Devine
17. Michael Collins
16. The Wind That Shakes The Barley
15. Cal
14. The Crying Game
13. Holy Water
12. High Spirits
11. The Devils Own
10. PS I Love You
9. The Snapper
8. Irish Jam
7. Angela's Ashes
6. Darby O'Gill And The Little People
5. Far And Away
4. Hidden Agenda
3. The Match Maker
2. Leap Year
1. A Prayer For The Dying

Some good Irish films?
Bloody Sunday, My Left Foot, Hunger, The Secret of Roan Inish, December Bride among others...

Arguably - Christopher Hitchens

2011-11-07T03:09:00.051+11:00

Writing is a craft and like all crafts it takes practice to become a master. Christopher Hitchens has been writing short form essays for 40 years now and he's gotten very good at it. So good that he may be the finest polemicist working in the English language today. In the crazy circus of contemporary letters it's nice to read someone whose prose uses the right word at the right time and whose cup foameth over with intellect. Arguably, is his latest collection of reviews and longer pieces for Slate and Vanity Fair. Sometimes reading Hitch is like watching a skilled juggler wow an audience and other times we're definitely in the realm of the high wire walker. The latter comes to mind when reading Hitch's attempt to square his advocacy for the invasion of Iraq with his acerbic and angry opposition to the first Gulf War in 1991. Hitch's logic is, at best, strained: 1991 had a clear casus belli, a clear UN mandate and a very clear mission and Hitch's pitch that the case for invasion was stronger under George W. Bush is somewhat acrobatic. But that's the lowlight of the collection. As several reviewers have pointed out, the finest parts of Arguably are the sections on literature where Hitchens shines a fresh light on some familiar texts. Hitchens's enthusiasms are mostly infectious: WH Auden, George Orwell, PG Wodehouse, Gore Vidal's fictions, Philip Larkin's poetry. Hitchens is largely batting on his home field here and I wish he'd chanced his arm a bit by venturing into the rougher American terrain of Pynchon, DeLillo, McCarthy etc. But perhaps that's something that's just a bit beyond him. Although Hitchens took out American citizenship and knows the Constitution backwards no one will ever mistake the old chap for anything but an Englishman abroad.
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Apart from the stuff on Iraq the weakest essays in Arguably are where Hitchens dips his toes into the world of science and mathematics, here he is especially credulous and even a little naive. Hitch seems to believe everything the Astronomer Royal or Stephen Hawking or Richard Dawkins has told him and hasn't the intellectual background to wonder whether these men are as significant as they think they are within their own fields. (Hawking and Dawkins have never even come close to winning a Nobel Prize). Hitchens seems to think that science just exists "out there" without further need for interpretation and the work of Kurt Godel, Werner Heisenberg and Paul Feyerabend seems to have passed him by. Hitch is a little bit wide eyed when discussing people like Dawkins who aren't really scientists at all, merely science writers.
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But ultimately these are minor quibbles which irritated me but might not irritate other people. Hitch has stage IV cancer of the oesophagus and has been fading recently. I hope he's around for a long time because I sure will miss him when he's gone. I'll miss his intelligence, his humour, his honesty, his insights and most of all the fact that even when you disagree with him you are usually too bowled over by his prose to complain very loudly.

Crime Factory The First Shift

2011-11-07T01:06:00.000+11:00

Crime Factory: The First Shift is an excellent collection of noir short stories. And I say this not because of but in spite of the fact that I'm in it. My tale was an attempt to write a noir in the most unlikely setting that I could possibly think of. No not a cozy English vicarage, that's Dame Agatha's territory but that yuppie Thunderdome known as a squash court. Whether I pulled it off or not you'll have to judge for yourself.
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There are lots of great stories in The First Shift which has been brilliantly assembled and put together by the bright young things of Crime Factory Magazine. You can read a review of TFS here and another one here and you can get it on Amazon or at all quality book shops. How do you know if its a quality bookshop? Ask them if they have TFS and if they don't they're not.

An Interview With The Coolest Man In The World

2011-11-05T06:49:00.002+11:00

Having just listened to Tom Waits's excellent new album I thought I'd supply this link to an interview with Waits who, for me, is coolest man in the world. Much of the album gets played here and if you like Waits then you'll probably like this a lot. Unfortunately the interview is on NPR with Terry Gross who very much speaks with that awful, contrived, NPR voice but Waits is his usual charming self: when Gross tries to throw him with an obscure Dada reference he quotes an entire Dada poem back at her. Check and mate.

How To Read Thomas Pynchon

2011-11-04T02:00:00.009+11:00

I took time out last week to re-read the Thomas Pynchon novel Inherent Vice. I read and reviewed it in 2009 and I think then because I was writing for the newspaper I was a bit overly circumspect about the book. I liked it much better this time. The final act is a mess but there are a lot of good jokes and the first 100 pages really capture the flavour of LA in the late 60s and early 70s.
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Now don't ask me how I know but I know that a lot of you out there have never finished a Thomas Pynchon novel; you've tried but it's never quite worked out. You sat down in a comfy chair with a mug of tea and a packet of McVities Chocolate Digestives and everything was great for a bit but then you found yourself hurling Gravity's Rainbow across the room in exasperation. This is a problem for me. I like Pynchon very much and I want you to like him too so I thought I would provide you with a little reading list primer that will help you get into the books...

1. Inherent Vice: read this one first. It's a crime novel set in a slightly exaggerated version of 1970's LA. It's full of stoners, groovy language, flower power and a crazy plot and its got lots of pop culture references that everyone should get.
2. The Crying Of Lot 49: after I.V. you should be able to handle Lot 49 which is basically set in the same milieu and is only a little bit weirder and more paranoid.
3. Vineland: America in the early 80's. Reagan, Star Wars, Brock Vond. And again most people should be able to get the refs. These three books form a thematic trilogy of sorts and should be accessible to anyone.
4. Gravity's Rainbow: Pynchon's WW2 novel which won the National Book Award. His best book? Probably, yes. It's quite a difficult text but by no means impossible to read especially in a trade paperback edition with big clear print. You'll need to know your early twentieth century culture quite well to get all the refs this time.
5. V: my favourite Pynchon. A paranoid romp through the early twentieth century. Very abstract, strange and off putting for the uninitiated. But a great read once you get the momentum of the story.
6. Mason & Dixon: the story of Mason & Dixon surveying the land that will become the North and South of the USA. This is my second favourite Pynchon. It's written in eighteenth century prose so it could be tricky for some people, but not for those with Clarissa, Tom Jones or even Neal Stephenson under their belts.
7. Against The Day: This is for completists only. A dense, difficult story of turn of the century America. My favourite scenes were set in a beautifully crafted wild west Denver.
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Additionally: Mortality And Mercy In Vienna, a strange out of print novella that I read in the Columbia University stacks before it got stolen and Slow Learner a nice collection of short stories, the highlight of which is probably Entropy.

The New York Times Books Of The Year

2011-11-03T16:31:00.000+11:00

Goddamned hipsters (and no I dont get some of these labels either)

The New York Times has picked its 10 best books of the year, here. The five best fiction books are The Art Of Fielding (a baseball novel), 11/22/63 (Stephen King's time travel romp), Swamplandia (a comic first novel), Ten Thousand Saints (another first novel, this time about AIDS), The Tigers Wife (a novel about the Balkans wars). I haven't read any of these books but the baseball one seemed sort of good until I found out that it was written by a goddamned hipster from Brooklyn who went to Harvard, runs a zine and was the subject of a bidding war. Strangely though I have read 4 out of their 5 non fiction choices which I've cut and pasted below (the exception is the Malcolm X book).
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A World On Fire is a massive history book by Amanda Foreman whose father is the director and screenwriter Carl Foreman (and who wrote the classic film High Noon). I went to college with Amanda and remember several discussions with her about the Civil War and the trans Atlantic slave trade which she was obsessing about even then. Arguably is Hitch's essay collection which I loved (the Times primly avoids mentioning the best essay in the book which is about the history of the blow job). The Boy In The Moon came out in Australia last year and is a heart wrenching and very hard to take memoir about being the father of a disabled son. Thinking Fast and Slow is a terrific book about memory and perception. Missing from the Times's non fiction list is Stephen Pinker's game changing new book about violence. Anyway here's the ones I've read and the NYT take:

NONFICTION

ARGUABLY

Essays.

By Christopher Hitchens. Twelve, $30.

Our intellectual omnivore’s latest collection could be his last (he’s dying of esophageal cancer). The book is almost 800 pages, contains more than 100 essays and addresses a ridiculously wide range of topics, including Afghanistan, Harry Potter, Thomas Jefferson, waterboarding, Henry VIII, Saul Bellow and the Ten Commandments, which Hitchens helpfully revises.

THE BOY IN THE MOON

A Father’s Journey to Understand His Extraordinary Son.

By Ian Brown. St. Martin’s Press, $24.99.

A feature writer at The Globe and Mail in Toronto, Brown combines a reporter’s curiosity with a novelist’s instinctive feel for the unknowable in this exquisite book, an account — at once tender, pained and unexpectedly funny — of his son, Walker, who was born with a rare genetic mutation that has deprived him of even the most rudimentary capacities.

THINKING, FAST AND SLOW

By Daniel Kahneman. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30.

We overestimate the importance of whatever it is we’re thinking about. We misremember the past and misjudge what will make us happy. In this comprehensive presentation of a life’s work, the world’s most influential psychologist demonstrates that irrationality is in our bones, and we are not necessarily the worse for it.

A WORLD ON FIRE

Britain’s Crucial Role in the American Civil War.

By Amanda Foreman. Random House, $35.

Which side would Great Britain support during the Civil War? Foreman gives us an enormous cast of characters and a wealth of vivid description in her lavish examination of a second battle between North and South, the trans-Atlantic one waged for British hearts and minds.

The New Boring

2011-11-02T05:45:00.000+11:00

Saw an article in the Guardian last week about The New Boring. My attention span is not what it was so I forget who wrote it and what it was about exactly (something about Downton Abbey and Adele I think) but I did remember the phrase and hated it for its condescension. But then I thought better of that. Here are my nominations for The New Boring:
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1. Brooklyn. People from Brooklyn, hipsters who live in Brooklyn, stories about hipsters who live in Brooklyn, TV shows about people who write stories about hipsters who live in Brooklyn.
2. Ricky Gervais. (For his unfunny TV shows and movies not for his 'ironic' attacks on people with Downs Syndrome.)
3. Comic books: great when you're 13. Unless we're talking about 2000AD which, er, I still read.
4. Reality: Geordie Shore, Jersey Shore, The Only Way is Essex. I know we're doomed, you don't need to shove it in my face.
5. The Huffington Post: vague fake-lefty new age poorly written schlock for eejits.
6. God: both pro and anti.
7. Australian Sport: especially Netball and Aussie Rules. Netball is basketball for tall Edwardian ladies. Aussie Rules is Gaelic football with all the fun taken out of it. And since half (!) the teams in the league qualify for the post season the regular season games are meaningless as well as dull. (I except St Kilda from this rant, obviously).
8. Blogging: What the hell am I doing coming up with drivel like this when I should be off writing The Brothers Karamazov or something.
9. Zombies: Really? Come on, enough already.
10. Vampires: See #9 above.

Five Days in London

2011-11-01T00:51:00.033+11:00

Over the weekend I read a theatre review in The Daily Telegraph about a new play called Three Days In May which is about the extraordinary 72 hours in May 1940 when, after the defeat of France, the British War Cabinet debated doing a deal with Hitler. The villain of the piece is Lord Halifax representing the Nazi-loving English aristocracy who thought an arrangement could be made with the Fuhrer. The hero of the piece is Churchill who saw exactly what kind of a man Hitler was and knew that if Britain capitulated or surrendered it would become a slave state.
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The play is largely based on an amazing history book I read a few years ago called Five Days In London by John Lukacs. As Publishers Weekly explains in its summary:
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Lukacs posits that it was during those five days in London "that Western civilization, not to mention the Allied cause in WWII, was saved from Hitler's tyranny...Had Britain stopped fighting in May 1940, Hitler would have won his war...Thus he was never closer to victory than during those five days in May 1940." A quarter-million British troops were trapped by the Germans at Dunkirk. The British public, ill-informed about this reality, remained apathetic, and the War Cabinet was divided over what action to take. Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had yet entered the war, but Churchill resolved to fight "till Hitler is beat or we cease to be a state."

I don't know what the play is like but the book is absolutely riveting. You don't need to be a big fan of alternative history to posit a scenario whereby Britain makes peace with Hitler; Germany attacks Russia with the full Wehrmacht (unbogged down in Africa or anywhere else) and easily wins. In Lukacs's book the tension between Halifax and Churchill all boils down to one cabinet meeting where Churchill told his cheering colleagues that he would rather die in the last ditch than make a separate peace. The cabinet refused to make a deal, somehow a quarter of a million men got evacuated from Dunkirk and the British won the Battle of Britain. By October 1940 Britain was still alone but feeling a lot more sure of itself and any deal with the Nazis was off the cards. By June 1941 Hitler invaded Russia and by December 1941 the war was effectively lost because Zhukov beat the Germans at the gates of Moscow and Hitler foolishly declared war on the USA. I find Lukacs's view pretty compelling...if Churchill had wobbled or been less than convincing in that climactic cabinet meeting in May 1940 then perhaps the thousand year Reich would have become a horrifying reality.

Midnight In Paris

2011-10-30T00:09:00.019+11:00

Another short guy discovers that Ms Bruni doesnt take direction well

It's safe to say that Woody Allen skews to an older demographic. The missus and I went to see Midnight In Paris and we were easily the youngest people in the cinema by maybe thirty years. MIP is a time travel yarn that rips off Christopher Reeve's Somewhere In Time, setting it in 1920's Paris and 2010, er, Paris. The best thing about the film was casting Owen Wilson in the lead. With another leading actor the film would be a pretentious obnoxious mess, but Wilson's naivete and Texas charm allows us to believe in his character. This might be his best role since Dignan in Bottle Rocket. Unfortunately Wilson's surrounded by cardboard cut outs. Cut outs of Hemingway, Picasso, Scott Fitzgerald, Bunuel, TS Eliot etc. but cut outs none the less. The other bit of inspired casting was getting Carla Bruni for a small role, she was pretty good and it has to be said that the French First Lady appeals to men of a certain age.
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Midnight In Paris is harmless enough and has one or two laughs (I liked the Djuna Barnes joke) and there's some nice shots of Montmartre at night. It's all really a bit of fluff, probably best watched on DVD. I do think that it's an interesting dinner party question to ask which city in which era would have been the most fascinating to live in. Paris in the twenties does sound enticing, as does Paris in the 1950's - that's probably the one I'd pick, but I'd also be intrigued by Vienna around 1900, London in the 1590s, first century Rome and fifth century BC Athens.
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Anyway, if the last movie you saw was The King's Speech and you're itching for another flick then this is probably the film for you. Be prepared to stay until the very end of the credits because the people on either side of you will need assistance getting up.

Synonyms For Pork

2011-10-29T00:54:00.000+11:00

A peeler, two hoodies and a spide eating Monster Munch...ahh Belfast

I'm currently writing a novel about a policeman in Northern Ireland in the 1980's. In Ulster we get slang from England, America, Europe and we also have our own criminal argot, which is good for a novelist because it means there are many synonyms. Just as the Inuit allegedly have many words for snow we've got rather a lot for the police. I thought you might be interested in some of the terms available and a rough estimate of their popularity in Belfast.
1. The Peelers
2. The Police
3. Copper
4. Cop
5. The Old Bill
6. The Bill
7. The Fuzz
8. The Peels
9. The Plod
10. Black Bastards (which refers to the Police Service of Northern Ireland’s uniform not to race (although this uniform is in fact a very dark green))
11. Bobbies
12. Rozzers
13. The Filth
14. The Scum
15. The Pigs
16. The Guards (the Irish police only)
17. The SS RUC
18. The Johnnies
19. The Five O’s
20. The Stench
21. The Yardies
22. The Sweeney
23. The Kojaks
24. Bacon Sarnies
25. The Roberts
26. The Rashers
27. Peeler Pete and his Porky Pals
28. The Looney Tunes
29. The Wilburs
30. The Screws (more usually prison officers)

Duff Beer

2011-10-25T12:37:00.002+11:00

The beard is really starting to get out of control now

Homer Simpson's beer of choice is Duff. On the show it's usually characterised as a lousy product that's been shrewdly marketed to idiots. Despite this many companies have asked to license the name Duff Beer and have always been turned down. Matt Groening doesn't want Duff beer to be licensed because he says it would cheapen the fictional brand and he doesn't want to encourage under age drinking. These are both pretty good reasons if you ask me. Fox's lawyers have gone after anyone who has tried to sell Duff beer and they've shut a few operations in Australia and the US. There is a Duff beer that's made in Mexico that Fox is going after at the moment and the one I tried last night is brewed in Germany and it probably won't last too long until the lawyers close it down too.
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The big question of course is how does it taste? If Beer Rater is to be believed Duff is supposed to be terrible. But, actually, it's not that bad. For a start because it's brewed in Germany it is legally required to follow the Reinheitsgebot which guarantees certain minimum standards in German beer and although I am not a beer geek I didn't notice much difference from your bog standard lager. The head did not over foam, there was no metallic bitterness, the beer was pleasantly drinkable and the aftertaste (such as it was) had a pleasing citrus quality to it. If I was pushed I'd say that there were mild lemon notes and a slightly annoying sweetness. I've definitely had worse. Duff is a bland, harmless little beer and although I will certainly never be buying another one a chilled bottle on a very hot day wouldn't hurt at all.

Captain Burke

2011-10-18T07:34:00.000+11:00

Most books are crap. Just as most songs are crap and most restaurants are crap. Mediocre books are sometimes even more offensive than crap books because you can tell that the author is often intelligent and gifted but either through laziness or cynicism he has reined in his skills.
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That's why I loved reading Declan Burke's Absolute Zero Cool. It's not crap. In fact it's a brilliant, experimental, out of left field crime novel, very much in the tradition of Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. Now you know how much I love The Third Policeman so this is high praise indeed from me. I was lucky enough to read AZC in manuscript and I thought it was funny and outrageous and very clever. You may think I'm biased, Dec and I are mates, we did a reading together in August and afterwards he stayed with me in Carrickfergus, but you don't have to take my word for it about AZC, John Banville and John Connolly also love Dec's book and a host of other writers have blurbed or reviewed it and whose quotes you can read at Dec's famous blog: Crime Always Pays.
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Last week Dec was shortlisted in the crime category of the Irish Book Awards. His competition is stiff, but this, I feel, is his year. He certainly deserves it.

Click here to vote for Declan Burke's ABSOLUTE ZERO COOL in the Irish Book Awards

Beard Or No Beard?

2011-10-17T00:34:00.003+11:00

Next week my German publishers Suhrkamp are sending a photographer out to St Kilda to take a photo of me for the German version of Falling Glass. The problem with this is that I've been growing a beard since early September, or as I like to put it, since early September I have been liberated from the tyranny of shaving. The photograph they take is going to be on the book jacket forever and probably on all the German versions of my novels for all time. So the question is simple. Beard or no beard? At chez McKinty we are a house divided. My wife is not keen on the face fluff but my kids like it and I like not having to scrape my chin every day. The readers of this blog have already displayed their good sense and taste by coming here in the first place so I'd really appreciate your thoughts. ZZ Top or Justin Bieber?

A Rare Guy Moment

2011-10-15T08:00:00.002+11:00

I was at the Safeway supermarket in St Kilda the other night getting some supplies. Normally I'm there with my two daughters or my two daughters and my wife. But on this particular night I was on my own. I could buy anything I wanted but the question Mick Jagger posed all those years ago was what did I need. I was momentarily dazzled by all the choices and the lack of children fighting and screaming near by. It was very much like that bit in The Hurt Locker. You do see single guys in the Safeway and they're all of a type. They never have baskets or carts and they do not have a shopping list or a plan. They cover a lot of territory moving from aisle to aisle and then back to the aisle they were just at a moment ago. If they can't find something they give up rather than ask for help. Women seem to have plans and shopping carts and an iron will and they move through the supermarket with ruthless efficiency like Rommel's Panzers in the eastern desert in early 1942. I wandered aimlessly for a while and I almost got a coffee cake but it had no bar code on it and I didn't want any kind of an incident at the checkout where they have to speak into the microphone and they hold up the coffee cake for everyone to see. So, anyway, coming out of the Safeway I found that I had purchased a large frozen pizza and a bottle of tequila. I think this is a classic guy move. I don't see many women walking home through the park with a frozen pizza and a bottle of tequila. Women passing by very much gave me a pitying sort of look but the men knew. Yes, the men knew. It was like that secret male code they talk about in Spaced.

The Nick And Artie Show

2011-10-13T07:37:00.000+11:00

My new author photograph did not turn out well

Who doesn't love Artie Lange? He was the best thing about the Howard Stern Show, Mad TV and The Norm Show and his book Too Fat To Fish was funny and surprisingly poignant. Artie's story about scoring cocaine while dressed as a pig is one of the most hilarious - and disgusting - anecdotes you'll ever hear. His well known gambling, alcohol and heroin addictions led to a suicide attempt and a period in the psych ward, which he talked about on Letterman last week .
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His new radio programme which runs from 10pm - 1 am Eastern Time is a sports talk call-in show. Artie is quick witted and funny and he knows his baseball and a little bit about football and basketball. He's got a lot of stories about sports and even more about gambling on sports. His partner on air is Nick DiPaolo who I know only from an episode of Louie where he talked about his hatred of Barack Obama. DiPaolo is not as witty as Artie and his on air persona is not very attractive: an old school borderline racist Italian American who thinks political correctness is ruining the country. This is some tired schtick and although it might appeal to the geriatric Fox News or Limbaugh crowd its not really Artie Lange's audience. When he's on a roll DiPaolo sounds like Junior Soprano on a bad morning which is odd because it says on Wikipedia that he grew up in Danvers, Mass and went to the University of Maine. Hmmm. But like I say this is only his on air persona. I want this show to do well so maybe DiPaolo could tone down the pseudo Jersey Shore mook and, you know, let Artie be Artie. . .
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One very good thing about the show is that all the episodes are available commercial free on iTunes, something the Stern show never did for its loyal fans.

Bin Laden Found, Gadaffi Found, Waldo Still Missing

2011-10-13T00:34:00.000+11:00

He's a very slippery customer (hint hint).

Face Off - Breaking Bad s4

2011-10-12T07:25:00.009+11:00

The secret role model of every chemistry teacher in America.

This is a spoiler free look at the season 4 finale of Breaking Bad.
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A man who would pick a pun would pick a pocket says Stephen Maturin in one of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels. Well that's certainly one opinion. I, however, am a sucker for a good pun. Face Off is the title of this episode. Nice, Mr. Gilligan, very nice indeed.
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I liked the season finale a lot. Was it good enough to redeem a somewhat slow and patchy season? Did it make up for the creaking plot and the logic problems of the last two or three episodes? Actually, yes I think maybe it did. This episode was up there with the very best of season 1. We forget sometimes how clever Mr. White is. Neurotic, impulsive, emotional but very smart. And we also shouldn't forget that although Walter White got a degree in chemistry from the University of New Mexico a cancer diagnosis has given him a Ph.D. in advanced badassery.
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The writing in Face Off was crisp, the directing taut, the acting spot on, the element of surprise, well, surprising and it ended with a nice Norah Jones/Danger Mouse song that I wasn't expecting either.
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I'd really love them to end Breaking Bad at this point. I know that they won't but I wish they would. We don't really need to know how every little thing goes down and ending the entire series here would send the cast and the audience out on a high (no pun intended).

The Badness Of Death

2011-10-05T10:44:00.000+11:00

Yale University has put many of its philosophy courses on YouTube and iTunes for free. Professor Shelly Kagan's course on death is one of the really interesting ones. Kagan is a sort of American Bernard Williams although I don't think Professor Williams would ever have sat cross legged on his desk wearing Converses (he certainly didn't in my tutorials). In the lecture below Kagan discusses Tolstoy's classic story The Death of Ivan Ilyich and he begins to unpack the badness of death. Yes we know it's bad but how bad and why is it bad...

Irish Poem Of The Month

2011-10-04T00:50:00.000+11:00

Death Of A Naturalist
by Seamus Heaney

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

Tin Tin

2011-10-02T11:49:00.000+11:00

smart move that the poster doesn't show
Tin Tin's pale, weird, lifeless face

This is what you get when you put together the man who made Always and the man who made The Lovely Bones. Yeah they made some other stuff, I guess, but I'm not feeling in a generous mood after watching this travesty. Motion capture is a very sinister and creepy process for making films and it just doesn't work at all. I thought everyone in Hollywood understood that after The Polar Express but clearly, like the late Muamar Ghadaffi, out there they only listen to yes men. 22 year old yes men with Siri enabled iPhones and that admittedly cool ap that tells you what stars you're looking at if you point it heavenward (or even downwards to get stars in the other hemisphere)...er, what was I talking about? Oh yes. Tin Tin. The film is lifeless, silly, a waste of an amazing cast and with some shockingly bad writing. When Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright were making Spaced they would have made fun of a movie like this, instead of being in it and that my friends is what the fairy gold from LA does to you. The reviewer for The Financial Times called this the ugliest film ever made, which it isn't, but I know what she means. Take my advice, if you want to see a good Tin Tin movie just read Tin Tin in Tibet instead and avoid this cold, cynical, undead rubbish.

Coming In January 2012

2011-10-01T08:44:00.000+10:00

One Of The Greatest Nights In Baseball Ever

2011-09-30T14:41:00.003+10:00

Larry David and Bill Buckner

Ok so I wasn't there, and it was the middle of the afternoon for me, but I was watching live as the Boston Red Sox managed to pull off the greatest collapse in the history of baseball and the Tampa Bay Rays mounted one of the least likely comebacks. . .I've read a lot of stuff about the amazing turn of events last night as the Red Sox somehow lost a game they were winning 3 to 2 with two outs in the bottom of the ninth and the Rays won a game they were losing by 7 runs to zero in the eighth. No sport in the world brings out the nerdlingers and historians like baseball so what follows is a digest of the some of the less esoteric stuff:

First up is Tyler Kepner of The New York Times who explains the whole apocalyptic series of events in language that a non baseball fan can understand.

Next up is the perspective of Michael Newman a self described 'annoying Red Sox fan' who was at the Sox Baltimore game at Camden Yards (sitting directly behind Christopher Hitchens).

I thought I would shift gears here and give you the great Nate Silver's amazing blog post on the statistical improbability of last night events complete with charts and diagrams. Nate claims that the rot set in for the Red Sox when Bill Buckner appeared on a hilarious episode of Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm (David is a Yankees fan).

This link is to the Duk blogger on Yahoo Sports who gives us the exact moment where Dan Shaughnessy jinxed the Red Sox by promising the fans that the Red Sox could not fail to make the post season. They're already calling Shaughnessy the most hated man in Boston this morning.

Finally I thought I'd link to the always interesting Pete Abraham, late of the Lohud Yankees Blog, who goes against the grain of easy criticism of Carl Crawford by talking about how he at least took responsibility for his actions and answered questions like a man.

Have I been reading baseball stories all day instead of working on my new novel whose deadline is looming ever closer? Uhm...

Star Wars Still Works

2011-09-28T13:26:00.001+10:00

Lucas claims that he knew they were brother and sister
right from the start, if so. . .eeechhh.

We've been having a series of classic family movie nights and on Saturday night it was finally the big moment where we all watched Star Wars. My kids aged 5 and 9 had never seen it and my wife hadn't seen it since it came out. I, of course, have seen Star Wars about twenty times but not for a while. These are some of my impressions.
1. Star Wars still works. The narrative is solid and fast paced. The characters are well defined and interesting. I like the idea (which I think comes from Kurosawa's Hidden Fortress) of initially telling the story through two secondary characters (R2 and C3PO) and the world making setup is done in a convincing way. The kids enjoyed the film, although my 9 year old not as much as my 5 year old.
2. Coincidences. Normally I hate coincidence as a plot device and and in Star Wars it's a big ugly coincidence that the escape pod Princess Leia sends out crash lands so damn close to the farmstead of her own twin brother. BUT this only really becomes a coincidence when we learn Luke's family history in The Empire Strikes Back. In Star Wars he could be just some random kid whose father happened to be a Jedi and a pilot. OR maybe you could say it was the machinations of The Force which brought the pod so close to the Skywalker farm. (That feels like cheating to me).
3. The Special Edition is irritating. (But at least we didn't get the new and even more horrifying Blu Ray.) I don't even know if you can rent or buy the original Star Wars anymore but the one we got from the DVD shop was the remastered, "improved" special edition with lots more special effects, the appearance of Jabba The Hut and the notorious scene where Han Solo and Greedo both go for their guns at the same time but Solo is quicker on the draw (in the original Star Wars Han Solo just shoots Greedo under the table). None of this stuff is necessary and often it's invasive. The special effects done with 1990's computer technology are not that good and look pretty cheesy and the entire scene with Jabba is a bit of a disaster. These "improvements" slow down the momentum of the story and take you out of the film. Lucas should release the original print on DVD or if it's already out there make it more generally available.
4. Less Is More. In the prequels we learned that too much politics, too much Darth Vader, too much pontificating about The Force were all bad things. In Star Wars the balance is just about right.
5. The acting is good enough. Sometimes Carrie Fisher and Mark Hamill are a bit shaky but everyone else is excellent, including the many British character actors and day players.
6. The ending is great. Death Star blows up, everyone gets medals (except Chewbacca and the droids), John Williams cues the orchestra, titles. Perhaps The Star Wars saga should have ended with one film. I love Empire Strikes Back but it doesn't really end properly and I have grown to hate Return of the Jedi with its retread of SW, its Ewoks and the weird ghosts of Yoda, Obi Wan, Annakin etc. I won't even talk about the prequels because in my universe they don't actually exist (like Alien3 and Alien4).
7. Star Wars is not my favourite sci-fi film (thats probably Blade Runner) but it is a good solid, family entertainment and without doubt a classic of the form.

Richard Dawkins Is Not Really An Atheist

2011-09-27T00:44:00.007+10:00

I've said this before and I'll say it again. Richard Dawkins, the most famous atheist in the world isn't actually an atheist at all. This is what he said in an interview with the New York Times this week:
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In one essay, Professor Dyson casts millions of speculative years into the future. Our galaxy is dying and humans have evolved into something like bolts of superpowerful intelligent and moral energy.

Doesn’t that description sound an awful lot like God?

“Certainly,” Professor Dawkins replies. “It’s highly plausible that in the universe there are God-like creatures.”

He raises his hand, just in case a reader thinks he’s gone around a religious bend. “It’s very important to understand that these Gods came into being by an explicable scientific progression of incremental evolution.”

Could they be immortal? The professor shrugs.

“Probably not.” He smiles and adds, “But I wouldn’t want to be too dogmatic about that.”

This is not the first time Dawkins has said stuff like this. In a universe 13 billion years old with trillions of Earth like planets, it's not only possible that these god-like entities have evolved but it's much more probable than not that they're out there right now observing us. You can't prove that they exist but logically it seems like a safe bet. Is it beyond the realms of possibility that they have intervened in our planet's history over the last few thousand years? Not at all. Why wouldn't they? Possibly they'll intervene again. Something like prayer then wouldn't be a waste of time then would it? And belief in something like an Afterlife wouldn't be so absurd either. I am not sufficiently brilliant to understand Dawkins's parsing on this. He refuses to believe in god but he accepts the possibility, even probability, that there may be gods or god-like entities watching us. What's the difference? If a Christian were to accept that his god didn't come before the universe but evolved from it would Dawkins accept him as a fellow believer/non believer?

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I'd also like just one interviewer to ask Dawkins what he thinks of his fellow Oxford professor, Nick Bostrom's work, in which he claims that almost certainly we are living in a Sim universe.

What Good Fiction Does

2011-09-23T00:25:00.011+10:00

I caught an interview with Ricky Gervais once where he said that he didn't "read fiction because he always knew how the story was going to turn out, and could usually write a better ending in his head." Perhaps he could, but this rather misses the point of what fiction does. It's not really about racing through the pages to get to the ending. A good novel, a really good novel, enriches your existence and takes you to another place, carrying you on an emotional journey that you just can't get in other media. And it certainly shouldn't all be about the story, I get excited by beautiful or witty prose and sometimes an individual scene is so perfect that you find yourself reading it two or three times to take maximum pleasure from it, the way we all watch and rewatch Roy Batty's "Tannhauser Gate" speech at the end of Blade Runner.

I was thinking about this the other day as an entire scene from The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet by David Mitchell came suddenly back to my mind for no reason at all.
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(The next few paragraphs contain major spoilers.)
The scene I'm thinking of is the Go game at the end of the novel between the evil abbot and the magistrate of Nagasaki. The chapter is a masterpiece of tension, excitement and cold blooded revenge. When I think of that scene I am there in Nagasaki as the magistrate gradually loses the game (as he always does) and prepares to commit seppuku to appease his failure after the English invasion. The magistrate knows that the abbot is a deeply evil man who has been murdering babies and young women for decades (possibly centuries) and has invited him here to play one last game of Go, to drink sake, and to ask the abbot to carry out the merciful coup de grace. But, slowly, as we are reading this depressing scene we learn to our amazement that the magistrate has a secret plan...
...
As the magistrate and his chamberlain and then the evil abbot and his servant drink the abbot's sake we discover that the cups themselves have been lacquered with poison and that all four of them, not just the magistrate, are going to die. "Why are your hands and feet so cold on such a warm day?" the magistrate asks the abbot, who, in that moment realises that he has been outgeneralled.
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There are other highlights of Jacob De Zoet - the doomed rescue mission, the attack on the fort etc. but the Go game and its aftermath is in a class by itself. I was on the edge of my seat excited, afraid, tense, and I contend that great literature can do this to you in a way that nothing - not even the movies - can equal.

David Byrne - The Bicycle Diaries

2011-09-21T00:58:00.000+10:00

The Bicycle Diaries is the story of David Byrne's bicycling adventures around various world cities over the last two decades. Byrne has an economical, unfussy prose style and he's is a good observer which is an important thing in a travel writer. He's also pretty acute at describing what he sees, be it an urban wasteland in Detroit, a cemetery in Sydney or new developments in Berlin or Buenos Aires. Byrne is empathetic and non judgemental about what he's cycling past and this can be a bit boring after a while (the truly great travel writers like Paul Theroux and Mark Twain openly wear their prejudices on their sleeves) but it's not fatal. The bicycle was a good idea because it allows Byrne to get off the beaten tarmac and to see bits of cities that other people do not, this is especially important because Byrne is a celebrity and celebrities experience the world differently than you or me. Celebrities get their asses kissed and tend to see new places through the prism of agents, publicity people and the like, which unfortunately is what happens to Byrne in a few cities that he gets (London and Melbourne for example) completely wrong.
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I have come to realise that TV travel programmes are utterly bogus and a complete waste of time. Michael Palin, Anthony Bourdain etc. travel from fake location to fake location with a crew of eight or nine people and their trite, uniformed observations are a mockery of genuine travel writing. Byrne by travelling alone, on a bike, without a camera crew, at his own pace, at least avoids these disasters. His charm rubbed off on me and as time wore on I forgave him his naivete, political correctness and need to tell us the bleedin obvious. David Byrne is not a wanker, in fact he seems like a cool guy (he's David Byrne after all!) but that doesn't mean he can't be a bit wanky from time to time especially when he's hanging out with cool cats at private clubs, galleries and fancy restaurants. When he keeps this material in the slow lane The Bicycle Diaries is an enjoyable book but it goes over the white lines into the kill zone when he's at yet another art expo or experimental theatre show or when he says stuff like this: "you know what's more boring than watching a cricket match? listening to a cricket match on the radio."
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(Dear oh dear, the poor deprived man has clearly never spent a lazy August afternoon drinking frozen margaritas, listening to the BBC's Test Match Special as the shadows lengthen and the commentators soft conversation becomes a bridge between an unbroken past and a nostalgic present and we hear old stories and forgotten names and ancient wisdom and see that we are participating in a venerable tradition - what the philosopher Michael Oakeshott calls a living argument - the Great Conversation Of Mankind in all its quirkiness, its richness and diversity and which is surely one of the few unspoiled joys left in this vale of tears.)
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But that's an aside. On the whole I liked Bicycle Diaries, was not offended by Byrne's hipsterism and thought his advice on helmets, safety and riding in such diverse places as Bogota, Detroit and New York was invaluable.

Ost Front Fiction

2011-09-20T09:01:00.001+10:00

Much to my surprise the #1 best selling novel in the UK this week is Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate. It turns out that this is because of a brand new BBC Radio 4 adaptation starring Kenneth Branagh which has got great critical attention.
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I liked Life and Fate but I strongly disagree with the commentators who said on Radio 4's Start The Week that it's better than War and Peace. It isn't. Tolstoy had a chance to edit his novel and because of the KGB Grossman did not... Anyway it gives me a chance to repost this blog from July on Ost Front Fiction:
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This little blog post will be the story of 4 Russian war novels that I've been avoiding and reading for a few decades now: War and Peace, Dr Zhivago, Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry Stories.
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War and Peace is the easiest to talk about. I read W&P over a hot humid Massachusetts summer about fifteen years ago and I really loved it. Its emotional and dramatic and the characters are wonderfully realised and yeah the bloody coda goes on forever at the end but it's still that rare example of a "great book" that is in fact a great book. I liked W&P so much I listened to it again as an audiobook on my commute and liked it just as much the second go around.
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I did not have the same success with Dr Zhivago. Dr Zhivago was a tough read. I didn't care much about the characters, the writing was ornate and laboured and it's a bit of a surprise to discover that the central character is a "famous poet" because in the more tedious parts of the story you flick to the end papers and (at least in my volume) you can read Dr Zhivago's actual poems and they are pretty feeble stuff. I deliberately left my unfinished copy of Dr Zhivago on a flight to Detroit five years ago, tried it again last year and finally finished it last week after a bout of heroic persistence.
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War and Peace is the great Russian Napoleonic war novel, Dr Zhivago is the great Russian novel of the Revolution and WW1 and Life and Fate is the great Russian novel of World War 2. It's set in and around the Battle of Stalingrad over the summer, autumn and winter of 1942. Stalin, Kruschev, Von Paulus, Hitler are all characters along with dozens of soldiers, wives, mothers and over a few harrowing chapters the inhabitants of one box car heading towards a death camp. Life and Fate has been compared to War and Peace but it's not quite as psychologically penetrating or as rich. Vasily Grossman was a famed Jewish war reporter in Stalingrad and witnessed the horror of the Stalingrad front at first hand. Life and Fate is unflattering in its portrayal of communists and communism and was banned prior to publication with the copies being seized by the KGB. Grossman was told by the KGB Director that he had a written a masterpiece but he wouldn't be permitted to publish it for at least two or three hundred years. He died before getting a chance to revise the novel and I feel that if he had lived he might have cut some of the lesser characters and perhaps concentrated more on the central story of the battle. It must be said though that the scene of the female doctor hugging the orphaned boy in the gas chamber might be the most powerful piece of prose I've ever read.
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I should also mention Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry Stories which although not a novel is the defining account of the little known war between the Red Army and a newly independent Poland in 1920. Red Cavalry might be my favourite of all these books. Babel was a great observer of men and their deeds and his status as a Jewish reporter riding with the Cossacks gave him a unique perspective. Red Cavalry is filled with humour, salty dialogue, pathos, irony and a prose style so careful it almost puts Chekov to shame.

Irish Poem Of The Month

2011-09-19T00:36:00.000+10:00

Carol Ann Duffy is the current British Poet Laureate, she was born in the Gorbals, Glasgow in 1953. Her mother is Irish which is good enough for me.

Whoever She Was
Carol Ann Duffy

They see me always as a flickering figure
on a shilling screen. Not real. My hands,
still wet sprout wooden pegs. I smell the apples
burning as I hang the washing out.
Mummy, say the little voices of the ghosts
of children on the telephone. Mummy

A row of paper dollies, clean wounds
or boiling eggs for soldiers. The chant
of magic Words repeatedly. I do not know.
Perhaps tomorrow. If we’re very good.
The film is on a loop. Six silly ladies
torn in half by baby fists. When they
think of me, I’m bending over them at night
to kiss. Perfume. Rustle of silk. Sleep tight.

Where does it hurt? A scrap of echo clings
to the bramble bush. My maiden name
sounds wrong. This was the playroom.
There are the photographs. making masks
from turnips in the candlelight. In case they come.

Whoever she was, forever their wide eyes watch her
as she shapes a church and steeple in the air.
She cannot be myself and yet I have a box
of dusty presents to confirm that she was here.
You remember the little things. telling stories
or pretending to be strong. Mummy’s never wrong.
You open your dead eyes to look in the mirror
which they are holding to your mouth.

The Rest Is Noise

2011-09-17T08:11:00.001+10:00

Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise sets out to be a comprehensive history of classical music in the twentieth century. Ross explains the culture, the geography, the personalities, the context and even the theory in a lucid and interesting way. I particularly enjoyed the stuff on turn of the century Vienna, a milieu I knew a little bit about from the novel The Man Without Qualities. The dynamic between Mahler, Richard Strauss and Schoenberg was fascinating and the five or six pages on the debut of Strauss's opera Salome was brilliant. Like Game 7 of the 1955 World Series, it seems that everyone who was anyone was either there or later claimed to be there. (Ross is skeptical of Hitler's claims to have been in the audience.)
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A lot of the information in the book was eye opening: even after he became famous (but not well off) Philip Glass worked as a plumber and taxi driver, for whatever reason half of all the important American classical composers were gay, Thomas Mann was consistently the most important novelistic influence on composers of the century, and it seems that classical music was only really significant in four cultures: Germany, Russia, France and the US.
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After finishing The Rest Is Noise I still wasn't sure that I understood the formal difference between a musical and an opera (he doesn't discuss any of the famous musicals of the 60s, 70s and 80s) and I think Ross underplays the role of pop music but not, of course, the intellectual's friend - jazz. I was also a bit annoyed that the playlist which the publishers have promised to maintain on their website (and on iTunes) doesn't seem to be working anymore - it would have been handy to read about a composer and then hear an example of their work, but alas it was not to be.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

2011-09-17T00:00:00.000+10:00

light reduction is a big problem with 3D which is a
bit of a disaster for a 3D film set in a cave.

I finally got to see Cave of Forgotten Dreams. All six loyal readers of this blog will know that I’m a Herzog fanboy/acolyte. My favourite book of the year so far is probably Herzog’s account of the filming of Fitzcarraldo - Conquest of the Useless (and I hear there’s even an audiobook now read by Herzog which has got to be amazing).
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All this is a preface to a disappointed review of Cave. It’s a decent enough documentary but it is not up to Herzog’s usual high standards. It’s pretty obvious that Herzog just didn’t have enough material for a feature film about the Chauvet Cave and had to scurry to fill the time with archaeological finds from other caves in France and other digs in Germany, Switzerland and elsewhere. Herzog’s quirky style doesn’t really fit this material, which attempts to be a forensic documentary and at the same time a humorous look at the scientists investigating the cave. He doesn't commit to either scheme very seriously. Herzog did this sort of thing so much better in the superior documentary Encounters At The End of the World about scientists in the Antarctic - which is a must see, as is Grizzly Man, Herzog’s film about the late self styled bear whisperer Timothy Treadwell. Other recentish Herzog documentaries I'd recommend are: Little Dieter Needs To Fly, Wings of Hope and My Best Fiend which can be watched on YouTube, Google Video or, of course, DVD. Herzog's upcoming film about inmates on Death Row looks much more interesting.
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I really wanted to like Cave of Forgotten Dreams but I got bored in the middle portion and the loud angelic choirs and the camerawork eventually started to make me feel a bit nauseous. The 3D filming made the film much worse than it needed to be, indeed it is a particularly inappropriate technique for a film set inside a dark chamber. The fact that Herzog wasn’t allowed to use arc lamps, coupled with the light reduction caused by the silly 3D glasses meant that the film was very hard to see. 2D would have been better for this movie and I'm sure when I see it in 2D I will like it more. 3D as a concept is probably a busted flush: it’s a gimmick and the gimmick is wearing off again just as it did in the 1950’s and 70’s. Only teenagers and greedy executives like 3D, not adults or indeed, in my experience, young children.

Dead Sharp

2011-09-16T00:10:00.003+10:00

It's an exaggeration to say that crime fiction saved the UK publishing industry but it's not that much of an exaggeration. Half of all fiction books sold in the British Isles are now crime and mystery novels. Alan Coren used to say that the only titles that sold consistently in England were books about dogs and Nazis and so it would seem therefore that the time is ripe for a mystery novel set in Hitler's bunker starring Wolf, the Fuhrer's crime fighting German Shepherd...
...
But wait a minute, I'm getting sidetracked, that's not what I was going to talk about. What I was going to talk about is a new collection of interviews with Scottish crime writers conducted by Len Wanner and called Dead Sharp. Wanner does an excellent job coming up with questions that draw out this surprisingly diverse collection of novelists. His analyses of their fiction, motivations, characters and so on are spot on. As you would expect from Scots there's a lot of humour in the collection and much of that humour is self depreciating. All in all if you're interested in Celtic Noir I think you'll love this book. I hope there's an edition of Irish crime writing interviews brewing in Wanner's mind too - indeed if he has his wits about him he might be able to get a whole series going.

Killing Rommel

2011-09-12T00:28:00.003+10:00

Blair Paddy Mayne (DSO with 3 bars)

Killing Rommel is an entertaining novel by Steven Pressfield about a fictional campaign by the Long Range Desert Group to kill General Rommel in 1942/3. I listened to the audiobook narrated by Alfred Molina who has long been one of my favourite actors. The book is an interesting and atypical war story because it's really the story of a series of debacles, wrong turns and disasters. The hero of the book Lt. Chapman is not particularly brave or inspired or gifted which makes us like him very much. He's an ordinary bloke (allbeit one who went to boarding school and Oxford) who makes mistakes, agonises over killing people and just about rises to the occasion when he needs to. The story is nuanced and reflects the odd code of honour that existed in the African theatre in World War 2. I loved the fact that the novel is actually a series of anticlimaxes and blunders, retreats and diversions, philosophical asides, long descriptions of engine mechanics, and ruminations on writing and literature - this is not what I had been expecting from a WW2 novel. I've read that Killing Rommel is being turned into Hollywood film by Gerry Bruckheimer which doesn't bode well considering his track record and I really hope that they don't change the characters or the strange stance and episodic structure too much.
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If I have one complaint about the audiobook its over Molina's accents - his New Zealanders sounded like South Africans to me and the voice he gave to Blair (Paddy) Mayne is a bit of a travesty in the fake Oirish department. Mayne was a legendary SAS commander who drove behind enemy lines in N Africa shooting up airfields, scouting German positions and gathering intel. He was a famous rugby international before the war and one of the great characters of the desert campaign. (He really deserves a novel of his own.) Mayne was from deepest Ulster but when he appears in Killing Rommel Molina gives him the accent of a leprechaun from a Lucky Charms commercial. I'm sure very few people will notice this or care but when it happened it somewhat took me out of what is an otherwise fantastic audiobook.

Wankers On Sixth Avenue

2011-09-10T00:32:00.000+10:00

Great story in The New York Times this week about Amazon.com's new publishing arm and how it's scaring the major New York publishers. Amazon, apparently are recruiting a few big name authors as well as the self published, the unpublished and the incompetently published for its new division. This is brilliant news. The New York book publishing world is largely run by eejits who don't know their arses from their elbows. It's a hyper conservative industry whose main job is to push down our throats the latest Stephen King bollocks or chick lit crap or Eat Pray And Shite or whatever its bloody called. These people are killing reading as a past time in America because of their lowest common denominator middlebrow always the dollars attitude. I've met quite a few of these emasculated, chinless wanks and they're all pretty ghastly yes men with a staggeringly narrow frame of reference. Will Amazon.com do a better job at giving us some original voices who really reflect America? Honestly, they can't do any worse.
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If I was running Amazon.com's publishing arm these are the seven rules I'd have for my buyers. Why seven? Well by #7 I'd got this blog post out of my system hadn't I?

1. Don't publish any books that were written while the author was "experiencing real life" between terms at Harvard or Yale.
2. No books about a dog or a cat that changed the author, unless it was a cat or dog that ripped the author's face off like that monkey did to that woman a few years back. That might be ok.
3. No journeys to exotic locales to find yourself unless you find yourself becoming a heroin mule or a shoe bomber - again that might be interesting.
4. Nothing that Janet Malcolm could possibly like.
5. Nothing by bloated, pig ignorant plutocratic radio talk shot hosts who wouldn't know a fact if the fact was to wear a fact T shirt and dance around saying I'm a fact, I'm a fact, I'm a fact like that bastard annoying map in Dora The Explorer.
6. Hey do you like ALL the stuff you read in the New Yorker? You think it's funny and incisive? Do you? Yes this is a bloody test. Sorry you're not right for us chum, keeping on walking down to the bloody polo club or the yacht polishing society or wherever it is you tossers go.
7. Here's another test: how do you feel about Bono? Is he A) a talentless shortarsed hypocrite who makes you want to shed your skin from sheer embarrassment or B) a renaissance man.
8. Oh that's right it's out of my system now.

The Wrong Kind of Slow - Breaking Bad Series 4

2011-09-08T00:37:00.007+10:00

At Delphi, Apollo, the Lord of Light and patron of the Muses, urged pilgrims to "know themselves" and to "follow the path of moderation in all things." Slow is often a good thing, a useful antidote to an overheated world. Slow food, slow exercise, slow travel. You know the drill. You take the time to savour things, to enjoy the experience, the journey is its own reward...all that good stuff.
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In film sometimes the slow burn works. Barry Lyndon has often been called slow but I find it engrossing. Same thing with 2001: A Space Odyssey. It can work in TV too, especially in this age of quick cuts and jumped up phony storylines that get solved in 40 minutes. But then there's the wrong kind of slow where the director or the show runner thinks that he's such a fascinating fellow that he can do anything he likes and we'll watch engrossed...This is what happened to Sophia Coppolla in her film Somewhere and it's whats been happening to Breaking Bad. Seven Episodes in we've covered the territory that they might have covered in perhaps two and a half episodes in another year. Brian Cranston has said on the Breaking Bad podcast that this policy is deliberate and that they are trying to "teach the American viewer an entirely new vocabulary and method for watching television."
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Quite. Has social engineering been tried on American TV before? I can't imagine that this is a good idea. Breaking Bad's deliberate slowing down of the pacing has exposed a lot of the show's problems that I never noticed before. Here are some of them: 1) The plots can be shaky. Last Sunday's "we're selling drugs to get your attention" storyline was maybe the dumbest thing I've seen in four seasons. 2) Aaron Paul is a little too pretty and a tad too white collar for his role of Jessie. 3) Bryan Cranston is brilliant, as is the guy who plays Hank, but the rest of the cast (I'll name no names) are not the greatest actors working in the medium. 4) Mike's skills are increasingly supermanish and improbable. 5) All this has taken place in less than a year? It's getting like a Lee Child novel. How come everyone's not in the psych ward? (actually scratch that, that's probably going to be the slow boiling arc for next season) 6) The whole damn thing is just a little too played, no?
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For me Breaking Bad, once one of the best shows on TV, has gone the route of dare I say it, Lost, or worse Battlestar Galactica Season 4. No, I take that back, nothing could be as bad as BSG S4, but they want to watch themselves and in the words of Robyn, they want to, you know, pick it up!

How To Respond To The Haka

2011-09-06T11:56:00.007+10:00

The Rugby World Cup begins this week in the land of the long white cloud. I love rugby union and I played the game for 25 years. Despite living in a footie and rugby league town I still love watching rugby union, especially the Southern Hemisphere teams.
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I used to be a fan of the All Blacks haka but as time has gone on I'm much less convinced of its utility and I hate the throat cutting haka, kapa o pango, which is really over the top. They don't put up with this sort of thing in FIFA run soccer matches but in rugby union, rugby league and a few other sports the opposing team is forced to wait around while the All Blacks perform their ritual challenge. If you're from Fiji, Samoa or Tonga you've got a haka of your own to answer the All Blacks with but everyone else has to just stand there and bide their time until its over. Personally I like what the great Willy Anderson did as captain of Ireland two decades ago, but he received so much negative press for his move that no one (to my knowledge) has tried anything like it since. It's a shame, I hope that in this rugby world cup someone shows the All Blacks that we all have our own traditions that are worthy of respect.