A Paragraph In A Notebook

6 years ago this week I wrote the first paragraph of what wd subsequently become book 1 of my Sean Duffy series. I wrote the paragraph in a notebook in longhand and forgot about it for about 6 months and when I found it again, I thought, I wonder what that's about and I began thinking. . .As Harold Bloom says we're all living under the anxiety of all our influences. Many influences jump out at me as I look at the paragraph. 'beauty of its own' is probably an echo of Yeats; the 2nd sentence is a deliberate homage to Gravity's Rainbow complete with the American word gasoline instead of petrol; the torpedoed prison ship is probably a reference to the sinking of Montevideo Maru; 'Knockagh Mountain' always struck me as amusing because Knockagh in Irish means 'mountain' so this is kind of a joke; the lovers/Afterlife line reminds me of a bit in Ursula LeGuin's Tombs of Atuin;  no one spoke, words...inadequate is something that Samuel Beckett said at the end of his life and of course its what Wittgenstein famously claimed; don't know where the 'God of curves' bit came from but I dig it....Anyway it all became paragraph 1 of book 1 and here it is, exactly as it appeared in my notebook:
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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.
       
       

When Satire Fails

When Peter Cook founded the "Establishment Club" - a revue bar featuring satirical humour - in London in 1968 he expressed the hope that the venue wd be "just as successful as those satirical cabarets in Berlin in the 1930s that did so much to prevent the rise of Hitler." Satire often doesn't work. The more biting and clever the satire the less effective it often is. I remember reading the reviews of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers with incredulity: respected critics didn't get that it was a satire on Leni Riefenstahl. Indeed it seems that a majority of the critics at the time didn't understand that the film was an allegory about the growth of fascism. A fortiori cinema goers - many of whom seem to have rejected the director and screenwriter's intent and imposed their own meaning on the film. In their eyes Starship Troopers was not a satire on xenophobia and fascism at all but a warning about foreigners/aliens and a trumpet blast against weak liberals who can't be trusted to keep us safe. 
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Not only does satire often fail but sometimes it does the very opposite of what it is meant to be doing. For those of you who think SNL is skewering the Trump administration, I have some news for you, I bet you, in fact, it's actually bolstering the views of Trump's supporters and fans. Malcolm Gladwell in a great podcast on satire shows how SNL's piss take of Sarah Palin actually helped Sarah Palin. Similarly the famous puppet show Spitting Imagine that supposedly mercilessly mocked Mrs Thatcher was actually a boon for Mrs Thatcher's image and reputation. And there are numerous other examples. (Listen to the Gladwell. He gets on my nerves too but he's great here.) My point is that if respected critics can't see the joke don't be surprised if a supposed 'low information' voter doesn't see the joke either. [Its rarer of course that really bad art gets thought of as 'satire' when it isn't but I assume that the occasional Springtime For Hitler situation does exist in real life too.] I wonder too if there are any anti-war satires that actually work at all? Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket - supposedly blistering anti-war bromides were in fact favourite films of soldiers and marines in the Iraq war...
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Anyway here's RedLetterMedia's recent review (below) of Starship Troopers where they point out what should have been obvious. Two of their more interesting observations are about the lighting (deliberately bland) and the casting (the leads were cast because they appeared to be 'dead behind the eyes'.) None of this, however, has stopped Starship Troopers from becoming a favourite film of skinheads and the Alt Right. Perhaps the critics weren't so naive after all....

The Australian Reviews Police At The Station

its tough to get newspaper reviews for the sixth book in what essentially is a cult series, but there have, fortunately, been a few. Here's Peter Pierce in the Weekend Australian: 

There are abundant talents in the crime fiction business, one of them an immigrant to Australia from Northern Ireland, via the US. Adrian McKinty had originally planned a Troubles trilogy, set in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and featuring detective (and sometimes inspector, depending how much strife he has caused) Sean Duffy, a bleakly joking, poetry-quoting Catholic in the Protestant-dominated Royal Ulster Constabulary.

McKinty is alert both to the deep past and the present agonies of the province. In the Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly, and it’s perhaps the best of the lot in the wit of its dialogue, inwardness with the sectarian bitterness of the damaged province, and — essentially — in having a complex and memorably flawed hero in Duffy. In a brilliant opening scene — deadly and funny — Duffy is taken into an ancient word, ‘‘a relic of the Holocene forest that once covered all of Ireland’’, where ‘‘a huge fallen oak lay like a dead god’’. His captors are an IRA hit squad intent on silencing Duffy before he detects a long-rumoured mole within the upper tanks of the RUC.The first three books were so successful that Melbourne-based McKinty has stretched to a sixth, 

As Duffy ruefully reflects, ‘‘there’s no future in this country’’. That means there isn’t one either for his partner Beth, who is writing a thesis on Philip K. Dick at Queen’s University, or their infant daughter Emma.

Meanwhile Duffy is able to skip a St Patrick’s Purgatory pilgrimage with his father because a drug dealer has been killed with a crossbow bolt on a housing estate which may be, ‘‘[an Ulster Volunteer Force-] ridden shithole filled with whores, druggies and scumbags’’. Duffy arrives at ‘‘the unhappy window between people returning from their morning dole appointments and daytime TV kicking in’’.

The novel is sympathetic, funny and despairing in depicting the social landscape that McKinty acutely recalls from his youth. Belfast is a paradigm for future cities: ‘‘mined and fractured, walled and utilitarian’’. Textile plants and shipyards have closed, and the showdown is staged in a dank, abandoned factory. Some, such as the dour, upright, hilariously deadpan Sergeant McCrabban (a triumph of the series) resist the collapse stoically.

Duffy prefers mordant wit that graces nearly every page. When the Bulgarian translator called in to help with the crossbow murder praises the local beer, Duffy reflects that ‘‘Harp was an acquired taste like coprophagia or getting pissed on by hookers’’.

More direly, he has to repulse an attack on his house, investigate the murder and find a scheme to entrap his suspect.

McKinty handles all this business with intelligence and elan. Crime is the subject, but Police at the Station and They Don’t Look Friendly will prove to be one of the best novels to be published in any genre this year. 

David Peace's New Novel

Is David Peace the best novelist in England? Yes. Yes he is. That is if he still lives in England. Sources are conflicting about that. Some people say he lives in rural Yorkshire with his Japanese wife and family (God help them) other sources say he lives in Japan. In either case he's still the most exciting contemporary English (very English in fact) novelist whose books are at the forefront of a completely new way of telling stories. Experimental, dark, weird (but not like, you know, Tim Burton weird - proper weird, weird) Peace is an inheritor of JG Ballard's trick of examining society through an exploration of psychology; but Peace, of course, looks backward into the disturbing near past not into the disturbing near future...
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Anyway, I like David Peace and it was with some small measure of excitement that I noticed this amazon.co.uk listing. Faber are not saying what this is but someone on twitter told me it might be a book about MI5 and Harold Wilson. Sounds intriguing but actually it doesn't matter what its going to be about, it's a new David Peace novel and that is cause for celebration. 

The Irish Cannonball Run

I recently read a review of one of my books where the reviewer deducted a star because I had a fictional character drive from Donegal to Belfast in 90 minutes. She said this was frankly impossible because Google had told her that that drive takes 3 hours. Hmmmm. Let me just say that I have done that journey considerably faster than Google thinks is possible. In the wee hours when the peelers are asleep is the time when you can really fly...But let's leave that to one side. Complaining about that kind of thing in a novel is rather silly to me. In the fictional universe that these fictional characters inhabit one of them drove from Donegal to Belfast in 90 minutes. It happened. It just did and it says so right there in black and white. For more on what 'mistakes' matter and won't mistakes don't matter you can read this. But that's not what I wanted to talk about here. What I want to talk about here is the Cannonball Run Record. 
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Google also tells you that the time it takes to drive from New York to Los Angeles is 42 hours. But in fact, the current holder of the Cannonball Run Record, Ed Bolian, has done it in 29 hours. Ed did this by modifying his car with a bigger petrol tank and buying sophisticated speed trap radar. The American Cannonball Run Record has a venerable tradition going back nearly 100 years but as far as I can see there is no record anywhere on the internet for the fastest crossing of Ireland, from the Atlantic Ocean to the Irish Sea. Without encouraging or condoning any illegality whatsoever and emphasising that dangerous driving can cost lives I'd like to maybe suggest a little Irish version of the Cannonball Run.  
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There are many different ways to cross Ireland from the Atlantic to the Irish Sea/North Channel. The shortest route, of course, is to cheat and go from somewhere like Ballycastle to Cushendun or Kilmore Quay to Rosslare but that's, uhm, cheating. For this to count you have to drive right across Ireland from sea to shining sea. As the inventor of this contest (again without encouraging any wrong-doing, violation of traffic laws or dangerous driving) I'm going to say that three routes and three routes only are acceptable: Bundoran to Belfast, Galway to Dublin or Tralee to Wexford (Limerick to Wexford doesn't count I think because Limerick is not really on the Atlantic). Probably the fastest route is Galway to Dublin. When I drove this route a few years ago I started by throwing a stone into the Atlantic at Nimmo's Pier, Galway and finished it by throwing a stone onto the beach at Sandymount, Dublin 2 hours and thirty minutes later. I didn't authenticate my drive the way the Cannonballers do so I'm not going to claim this as the record. And its a crap time anyway, slower even than the Google time. I drove the route in a 2009 BMW 320i, leaving Galway at 5.45 in the morning hoping to avoid rush hour traffic in Dublin (I didn't). Almost certainly you can do better.