The Goat's Are Singing - Long Time, No See

The Goat's Are Singing
Long Time, No See - Dermot Healy

"It's a terror to hear a sound that is not there. Have you ever heard a sound that is not there?"

Long Time, No See, barring an unexpected posthumous work, is Dermot Healy's last published novel. All of his other three novels were set in multiple locations and the characters were often running away from or towards somewhere but here the main characters are all deeply rooted in the small rural enclave of Ballintra on the west coast of Ireland. This time the world comes to the characters, rather than the other way round.

The Goats are Singing - Sudden Times

The Goats are Singing
Sudden Times - Dermot Healy

"The regrets come with a vengeance. The want of revenge comes with a vengeance."

Sudden Times seems to me to be the most concentrated and controlled of Healy's books. The narrative voice is carefully and shaped and the structure is that of a thriller, with details being drip fed to us to let us know that there will be a revelation by the end. For a long time we are not sure what that revelation will be, and it leaves us feeling unsure as to how to judge the narrator. Is he suffering from grief or guilt? Or both.

The book comprise of a series of very short chapters titled rathered than numbered. Some are no more than a sentence. The titles are sometimes gnomic, often comic and always in dialogue with their respective 'chapters'. Healy's skills as a poet and playwright are in evidence throughout.

The Goats are Singing - The Bend for Home

The Goats are Singing
The Bend for Home - Dermot Healy

My enjoyment of re-reading Healy's sparkling and generous memoirs has been enhanced by reading it alongside his other books. It is possible to see how many of the incidents outlined here have metamorphosed into parts of his fiction.

The forces that create the writer are at the very heart of this book, with even Healy's birth connected umbilically to the well of fiction. The book opens with the story of his birth, or at least the story he long believed was of his birth. The mix of humour and contrariness reminded me of Laurence Sterne, and also of Monty Python.

The Goats Are Singing - A Goat's Song

The Goats Are Singing
A Goat's Song - Dermot Healy

They say that character is fate and that that is the key to great tragedy. A Goat's Song has a character damaged by sobriety and one damaged by drink. The real tragedy, though, is not to be found in character but in a country, divided.

If you want to see a character fall you have to walk him over the edge and Jack Ferris, playwright, fisherman, drunk and lover does just that. Healy, who lived where Jack lives, on the western edge of Mayo, seems to have had an instinctive understanding that the marginal sees clearest, and while Jack feels the pull of Belfast and Dublin, it is the sea that hauls hardest and he always returns to the peninsula and the fishing boats.

The Goats are Singing - Fighting with Shadows

The Goats are Singing 
Fighting with Shadows, or Sciamachy - Dermot Healy

Fighting with Shadows, published in 1984, was Dermot Healy's first novel. It would be ten years before his second, A Goat's Song, hit the shelves. In many ways Fighting With Shadows has the mark of a first novel. It covers a huge amount of ground and seems almost overcome by all the things it has to say. However, it does say a lot and Healy's talent, already clear from his short stories, was confirmed by this novel.

The focus of the novel is on the Allen family, three generations of whom are featured. They are from the town of Fanacross, situated on the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland. The influence of the border is referred to on the first page: "The lorry-loads of watchful pigs descending the mountains by night to a slaughter house in the South. How the cattle get dizzy crossing the border for the grants in the North and back again for the grants in the South."

The Goats Are Singing - Banished Misfortune (5)

The Goats Are Singing 
Banished Misfortune (5) - Dermot Healy

I've been stumbling slowly through the works of Dermot Healy for the past month, my reading somewhat ahead of my writing, but not too far.

I have been getting very tired, something which may be somewhat down to increasing myopia, which has led me to finally start wearing the glasses which made so little difference when I got them a couple of years back.

Here are some thoughts on the final five stories in Banish Misfortune.

The Goats are Singing - Banished Misfortune (4)

The Goats are Singing
Banished Misfortune (4) - Dermot Healy

Further thoughts on Dermot Healy's debut collection of short stories.

Blake's Column
Mr Blake is a "well known" newspaper columnist who is also a dramatist. He has moved into the country with his wife and son but they have since left and he is isolated and somewhat bitter. It is near the place where he was born but he has been living in Dublin for a long time. In many ways he prefigures the narrator of A Goat's Song, who is similarly a rural dramatist separated from his ex-partner and living in isolation.

The Goats are Singing - Banished Misfortune (3)

The Goats are Singing 
Banished Misfortune (3) - Dermot Healy

The third story in Banished Misfortune is The Island and the Calves, a story that I found it harder to find my feet in than the first two.

It takes place in England during Easter Week to the soundtrack of Haydn's The Seven Last Words of Jesus Christ and is suffused with religious imagery. The world seems not yet to have solidified, and there is a sense that what is important are the things that can't be pinned down - "History became the studying of disappearing softness, for hardness always remained, the most accessible material of man."

The Goats are Singing - Banished Misfortune (2)

The Goats are Singing - 
Banished Misfortune (2) - Dermot Healy

Thoughts on the second story in Banished Misfortune, Dermot Healy's book of short stories published in 1982  and featuring stories from the preceding decade.

A Family and a Future
This is an odd story which is redolent of the sexual repression and abuse which overshadows Ireland's recent past. Set in the sixties, its main character is a woman called June who blithely satisfies her sexual desires with many men, and boys. The narrator is somewhat involved in the action early on, having an early (and somewhat traumatic) sexual experience with June, who is three years older.

Young Skins

Young Skins - Colin Barrett

With the release of Young Skins Colin Barrett seems to have attracted the 'new Kevin Barry' tag. It's never easy having to wear someone else clothes and Kevin Barry probably thinks it's a bit early for a new him as well. Barrett has gracefully acknowledged Barry's influence and Barry has anthologised Barrett so the town seems big enough for both of them.
I find it difficult at times to write about short stories. I tend to read collections over a long period and indeed, I have many that I have dipped into on numerous occasions without finishing and often return to favourite stories again and again. Plans to cover my short story reading have yet to come to fruition. One of the problems is that it can be very easy to give away too much about a story, it's not like a novel where you can tell a lot without really giving anything away.

Flann O'Brien Documentary

Flann O'Brien Documentary
"a real writer, with the true comic spirit" - James Joyce

Here is a treat, a documentary on the wonderful Irish writer Flann O'Brien a.k.a. Brian O'Nolan, writer of two of the greatest Irish novels: At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman. He also produced one of the greatest satirical newspaper columns ever - An Cruiskeen Lawn.

In some ways he is the Irish Orson Welles, starting off with such great masterpieces that everything else is seen by some as a disappointment. And there is no doubt that he descended from those heights and suffered from frustration and alcoholism.

Thanks to Mick Mahon, who edited this documentary, for sharing.

Death of the Heart

Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen

This has been on my TBR list for a long time. I was finally encouraged to pull it from my shelves by a list by author Yiyun Li of five books that she rereads.  It seems to me to be a masterpiece, an essential book. I have read The Last September and thought it great but this is even better. At times the writing is exhilarating in its cumulative virtuosity, even when the insights are speculative and eccentric. Or maybe because they are eccentric and speculative.

The book tells of a period of time in the life of the orphaned Portia Quayne,  a sixteen year old girl who is staying with her half-brother Thomas and his wife Anna, who have no children of their own and little time or sympathy for Portia. Portia was born when Thomas and Portia's father had an affair which brought an end to his marriage, after which he and Portia's mother lived in a succession of second rate accommodations around Europe. Thomas remembers her as a young girl who "stared at him like a kitten that expects to be drowned." It was their father's deathbed request that Thomas take Portia for a year. They feel that it would be bad form not to accede to a dying man's wish.

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing

A Girl is a Half-formed Thing - Eimear McBride
[The Vapour Trails Book of the Year 2013]

"I know. The thing wrong. It's a. It is called. Nosebleeds, head aches. Where you can't hold. Fall mugs and dinner plates she says clear up. Ah young she says give the child a break. Fall off swings. Can't or. Grip well. Slipping in the muck. Bang your. Poor head wrapped up white and the blood come through. She feel the sick of that. Little boy head. Shush."

The quote above is a full paragraph from the first page of one of my books of the year. Like a mash up of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Boy and The Country Girls written by Kathy Acker this is an intense, dark and stylistically exhilarating book.

Solace

Solace - Belinda McKeown

Solace is a beautifully crafted book, reminiscent in its way of the work of John McGahern. Character and place are carefully and convincingly delineated, as if they really mattered.

The story: Mark, who is (fitfully) writing a PHD on Maria Edgeworth in Trinity College meets Joanne, a trainee solicitor who like Mark is from the environs of Edgeworthstown in rural Longford. They get together and quickly and unexpectedly have a child on the way. Mark's father Tom and Joanne's (deceased) father were on both sides of a feud to do with property so the relationship is not popular with Tom.

Tom is a small farmer and wants Mark to spend more time on the farm which causes a different kind of tension between father and son. Communication is usually moderated by Tom's wife/Mark's mother Maura. Joanne has an uneasy relationship with her own mother and siblings and despite having fallen out with her father before he died, she was left a house in Dublin in his will. Any more would start to give away too much.

City of Bohane

City of Bohane - Kevin Barry

"This is the Bohane river we're talking about. A backwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin' wastes and the city was spawned by it and was named for it: city of Bohane."

I came to City of Bohane on the back of some strong recommendations, some great short stories and its success in winning the International Impac Dublin Literary Award. High hopes are often hard to live up to but this book both managed to satisfy and surprise.

The book is like a film noir firework show, words and phrases going off like Catherine Wheels and Roman Candles, Rockets and Spinners, Fountains and Mines. Amoung the blast and whistle of the verbal pyrotechnics are passages that hang, burning themselves quietly into your cortex, like Chinese Lanterns.

Seeking Mr Hare

Seeking Mr Hare - Maurice Leitch

This is the third Leitch novel that I've reviewed on this blog and I aim to make it through his life's work, which currently stands at ten novels. I was very pleasantly surprised to find a review copy of this just released novel on the shelves of a charity shop in Dublin. The three I've read suggests that the novels add up to a portrait of Belfast and the surrounding countryside through different strata of time. The first one I read The Eggman's Apprentice is set pre-troubles and the second Silver's City is set at a time when the 'Troubles' were in full flow.

This digs down a few more years to the 1820's but already there are many pointers to the situation that pertained in more recent times, and still does.

Propaganda identifying the Irish as a sub-race was already there. Defining the enemy as different and in some way sub-human was of first importance. It still is. However, phrenology has had its day other than providing colour to mantelpieces. "What you see before you is a typical example of the Celtic sub-race. Ireland, indeed, has the largest head size of any equal land area in Europe, the cranial vault low and domed, nose long, large and high bridged, the lips thin to medium and  a little everted, skin colour pale white, sometimes ruddy, often freckled, hair dark brown, or medium brown, red, rarely black."

Words for Seamus Heaney

For Séamus Heaney 
13 April 1939 – 30 August 2013

To call this a poem would not serve the memory of a master craftsman but here are some words that emerged on a day when poetry and one very special poet was constantly on my mind. Séamus Heaney was as close as this island had to a spiritual leader, as he carefully negotiated the gulfs between modernity and tradition, republican and unionist, and showed us that these and other gulfs were merely cracks. He led us halfway to healing.

I somehow feel that I knew him, both through his poetry and his sons, who were in college when I was and were warm, intelligent and generous men.

My thoughts are with them and all his family.

Stone
(for Séamus Heaney)

"Ah, no; the years, the years
Down their carved names the rain-drop ploughs" (Thomas Hardy)

You made rubbings
of the marks of death.
easing them carefully
onto the page

worn words rising
sharp
from crumbling stone.

The strong hands of death
ease you
into the earth
but your careful marks
will outlive
stone

Troubles

Troubles - J.G. Farrell
(Winner of the "Lost Booker' awarded in 2010 to novels from 1970 that had been denied a shot at the award because of changes in the dates for eligibility.)

This is the second book from J.G. Farrell's "Empire Trilogy' that I have read after The Siege of Krishnapur. It is just as impressive and I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for the third book in this trilogy, The Singapore Grip (or anything else by Farrell). Rather than follow each other in any plot driven way the books cohere thematically around the crumbling of English colonialism.

In Troubles we follow the journey of Major Brendan Archer from London to a massive old hotel on the coast of County Wexford, in Ireland. He is badly shaken by his experiences in the trenches during World War One and goes to Wexford to see Angela Spencer whom he met during a break from the war and believes that they became engaged. He is familiar with elements of the hotel and the life within from the stream of letters he received from Angela but is surprised to find that some things have been left out of the letters and that Angela is very serious and withdrawn. This is not what he expected. In fact so withdrawn is she that his decision to break off the engagement can't be carried out as he never sees her after the first couple of days. Her father Edward is a man being consumed from within by rage. He sees English rule as being responsible for whatever civilisation there is in Ireland and the rebellion as a damned impertinence.

Let the Great World Spin

Let the Great World Spin - Colum McCann

It is hard to avoid cliches when talking about this. It invites the automatic blurb generator to cough and splutter into action:
"a dizzying achievement"
"a high wire act"
"poise and balance"
"vertiginous"

The book circles Philippe Petit's astonishing high wire walk between the two towers of the World Trade Centre in 1974, a feat that induces vertigo even thinking about it. It was also the subject of the hugely successful documentary Man on Wire, which I have yet to see.

The Little Hammer

The Little Hammer - John Kelly

When I read that John Kelly's new (third) novel coming out on Dalkey Archive Press I thought that it must finally be time to take down his first book for a read.

John Kelly is a rather wonderful dj and the presenter of Ireland's premier TV arts shows for a number of years. As presenter of The View he often had (then) aspiring novelists Belinda McKeown and Peter Murphy as panelists. I have both of their novels in my to be read pile so expect a complete panel of reviews sometime in the next few years.