A Death in Summer by Benjamin Black

Richard “Diamond Dick” Jewell is found in his country home with his head blown off and a shotgun in his hands, but Dublin pathologist Quirke and the Detective Inspector Hackett quickly conclude it is a clumsy attempt to make the death look like suicide.
Benjamin Black quickly lines up a cast of suspects for the murder of the Dublin newspaper magnate and horse breeder in the fourth novel to feature Quirke.
A bitter business rival and his instantly dislikable and creepy son, a stablehand with a violent criminal record, a sullen housekeeper, the dead man’s deeply disturbed sister and his exotic French wife all enter the frame.
Quirke, as usual, is quickly out of his depth, not least because he begins an affair with the Gallic widow before her husband is even cold in his grave.
Again he is struggling with alcoholism, drinking but trying to control it, his entire body quivering for more each time he sips a glass of wine.
Over the previous novels Black has assembled a retinue of supporting players, including Hackett and Quirke’s daughter Phoebe. But stepping from the sidelines of two-dimensional bit-player to take second billing this time round emerges Quirke’s assistant pathologist, Sinclair, to become a fully rounded character with hidden depths.
Author Black spends less time than in his earlier Quirke novels establishing the time frame of 1950s Dublin, just an occasional reference to the location of a long-flattened building or now-defunct tram line.
But as before he paints a scathing picture of establishment corruption and an Ireland still dominated by the Catholic Church, which allows elements of its clergy to commit appalling crimes against children in its care.
Moreso than in his previous pseudonymously penned novels by Benjamin Black, the voice of Booker prizewinner John Banville, keeps emerging from the pages of A Death in Summer as if he wants to push aside his crime-writing alter ego and show him how things should be done.
“They left the kitchen and went back to the nook in the dining room. The night was pressing its glossy back against the window. The candle had burned halfway, and a knobbly trail of wax had dripped down the side and onto the table. Quirke lifted the bottle of Bordeaux.”
In four sentences the straightforward storytelling prose of the crimewriter Black morphs in the prosaic lyricism of Banville and back again to functional narrative.
This is an elegant novel, well-paced with dramatic twists, disturbing surprises and richly drawn characters whose actions and motives have a tangible psychological depth.
Black/Banville is well in form here, and this is probably the most assured of his Quirke novels. It can be either plunged into without any need to reference the previous three or else taken as a welcome new installment of a sequential quartet by one of Ireland’s leading contemporary novelists who barely disguises himself behind his crimewriter penname.

This review was written for an first published The New York Journal of Books.

Nemonymous Night by DF Lewis

The act of reading any novel requires a willingness on the part of the reader to submit to the author’s vision, but this novel makes demands that go well beyond what is usually expected.
To “get it” you must be totally tuned in to the frequency on which author D. F. Lewis is working. Failure to do so will leave you floundering in an undulating sea of words.
Plot? Not so much.
A couple of kids turn up missing in an unnamed English city, but then they are found. Or maybe they aren’t. The entire population has been overcome by a dream sickness in which reality and time seem to warp. And then there’s this business about a carpet, which might or might not be magic?
Okay. But . . .
Then characters swap identities and are barely rooted in one another’s perceptions, while the time streams in which they exist undulate, cross over one another, and twist back in on themselves.
Any pretense at a linear narrative into which you can place events and relate them to one another has been abandoned. As such, the terrain of Nemonymous Night seems to be the unconsciousness where dreams intersect with reality.
But whose unconsciousness? Perhaps it is a matrix where the dreams and psychic flotsam of different people mingle in an attempt to construct an agreed-upon version of reality before drifting off?
As you’ve probably figured out by now, I never quite tuned in to D. F. Lewis’s frequency.
Comparisons with Douglas Adams, Philip K. Dick, and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake suggest themselves as literary reference points, but don’t let fmailiarity with those fool potential readers into a sense of complacency.
Nemonymous Night is not an easy read; however—and here’s the rub—it’s entirely
readable. If you got through Dylan’s Tarantula and thought it was a seamless masterpiece and that Beckett’s The Unnamable is a bit light for your tastes, then by all means, give this one a try.
If you have no idea what I’ve just spent many paragraphs attempting to express, perhaps you ought to move on to another book.
This review was written for an first published on the New York Journal of Books.

Brendan at the Chelsea

"If Jesus Christ was married to you, he'd be back up that cross within five minutes, banging in the fucking nails himself."
One of the more memorable lines from Brendan at the Chelsea, playing at the newly rebuilt Lyric Theatre in Belfast.
Brendan Behan is played by the normally lithe Adrian Dunbar, whose fake beer gut struck the only false note about this performance.
The sluggish hungover movements, the drunken slabbering, the acerbic wit and cutting put downs - as evidenced in the opening line - and an easy charm are brought to life by Dunbar.
Set in New York's Chelsea Hotel in 1963, the year before Behan died, it finds the Dublin writer unable to physically write and recording his thoughts into a tape recorder.
His publisher is on his back looking for the book he has paid an advance for out of which Behan's hotel bill is being paid and which Behan is unable to deliver.
His lover - who we never see - with whom he has had a child, is urging him to break up with his wife although from the snatches of phone conversation we hear from Behan's side it doesn't seem she is fully committed to him.
His wife, Beatrice, is due to arrive in New York after finally tracking him down there two months after he fled from Dublin without telling her that he was leaving.
Behan is living in an alcoholic fug, shifting between hangover, enebriation, all-out slabbering drunkeness and delerium tremens.
An assistant, Lianne, tries to encourage him to write, gives him his medecine and puts him to bed when he can't do it himself.
A composer, George lauds his genius and tries to encourage him to seek help for his alcoholism because he is literally pissing away his talent.
The set of a hotel room with a bed, desk - laden down with papers, tape recorder, half filled glasses and medecine - and a sofa is cleverly used to flashback to the highs and lows of Behan's life.
His triumphant arrival in New York on a ship a few years earlier for the Broadway production of The Hostage, his verbal sparring with journalists at a press conference and a surreal trip into deleririum.
There were strong suggestions of Behan's rumoured bisexuality and how fame had in some ways driven him off the wagon and back to drink.
Some of the scenes were truly heartbreaking as this character who within a few minutes had endeared himself with his self-deprecation, quick one-liners and edgy charm became a drunk-sodden, snarling demon.
His body siezes up and he curls in spasms of pain at one point falling onto the floor and throwing up green bile.
Dunbar - up close in the Lyric's smaller Naughton Studio - dominated the stage and immersed himself in the character of Behan, with subtle mannerisms, cackles of laughter and, more touchingly, slapping his numbed hands that are no longer able to hold a pen and trembling uncontrollably as he tries to sip from a jug of water.
Probaly the most moving scenes are in the second half of the play when Beatrice arrives in New York and realises that her husband is not only involved with another woman but that the rumours that he has fathered a child with her are true.
This was intimate portrait, written by Behan's niece Janet Behan, that was enhanced by an intimate setting and superb sensitive acting.

Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak

Dr Zhivago is a big book, physically and in terms of its themes, multi-stranded storylines and historical backdrop. It is a character-driven novel whose subjects live intense, interweaving lives set against the great sweep of early 20th century Russian events.
At its heart is the eponymous Dr. Yuri Zhivago and his relationship with two women: his wife Tonya and his lover Lara. A supporting cast weaves in and out of the novel, manipulating, inspiring, intimidating, interacting and sometimes simply just being in the vicinity of the central trio.
Although the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, and subsequent civil war in Russia form an historical backdrop, their keynote events are hardly mentioned. It is history’s impact on individuals that concerns Pasternak.
However, Zhivago struggles to maintain his individuality at a time when individuals are regarded as canon-fodder to be sacrificed by Czarist Russia in its war against Germany while those who survive find themselves thrust into a fledgling society ruled by the Bolsheviks who regard concepts such as individualism as outdated and dangerous.
Zhivago and those close to him are mere bit-players in the huge social upheaval in which they are being swept along, but Pasternak plucks them from obscurity to dissect their psyches and put a human perspective on the times in which they live.
As millions die during wars and famine, Zhivago is torn between his love for Tonya and Lara and the betrayals that this inevitably brings. His poems, collected at the end of the novel, serve as an alternative narrative, charting his internal obsessions and yearnings.
This is a new translation by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky a novel that is already well established in the canon of great 20th century fiction. For those who have copies of the translation by Max Hayward and Manya Harari on their shelves it is tempting to occasionally compare the two versions.
A key passage is one in which Zhivago reflects on the death of the woman who raised him and how this family tragedy and the emotions it stirs in him can be transformed into something positive.
In the 1958 translation by Hayward and Harari the passage reads: “In answer to the challenge of the desolation brought by the death into the life of the small community whose members were slowly pacing after him, he was drawn, as irresistibly as water funneling downwards, to dream, to think, to work out new forms, to create beauty.”
While Pevear and Volokhonsky render this as: “In response to the devastation produced by the death in this company slowly walking behind him, he wanted, as irresistibly as water whirling in a funnel rushes into the deep, to dream and think, to toil over forms, to bring forth beauty.”
Both translations work as an image of the poet reworking a real life tragedy to write verse, but the new translation seems to suggest that this is an innate “response” by Zhivago, rather than a considered “answer.” And then there is the more psychologically nuanced image of water (experience) rushing “into the deep,” with all its inferences of the subconscious, as opposed to the water merely “funneling downwards,” while in the just-published version he “brings forth beauty (poems)” rather than simply creating them.
Perhaps such detailed comparisons are reading too much into what is simply a fresh perspective on Pasternak’s original Russian text. But then Zhivago is, as was his creator, a poet and a complex person whose story lends itself to poetic prose that brings to life the various layers of his persona and the psyche that lies behind it.
At its simplest level, this new translation, extensively annotated to explain the more obscure references, is a welcome opportunity for anyone who has already read Dr. Zhivago to revisit it and experience a richly rewarding fresh take on an epic tale. For those coming to it for the first time it is a chance to read one of the greatest novels of all times.
This review was written for and first published by The New York Journal of Books.

2017 By Olga Slavnikova

History seems to collide with the present and manifest itself physically in this novel. “Mountain Spirits” and even an occasional ghost also glide through the pages.
Olga Slavnikova’s Russia of 2017 is an ugly consumer-driven society far removed from the dream of a proletarian utopia that sparked a revolution 100 years earlier.
In 2017 everything is a commodity, even death—funerals are as much a lifestyle statement as the clothes people wear, the cars they drive, or the mobile phones they use.
The fictional Riphean region, which seems to be vaguely located east of the Urals in the Asian part of Russia, still contains vast wildernesses, but even these are suffering under the impact of human exploitation. Rivers are polluted and forests are dying, while in the cities a rich elite flourishes as a disenfranchised underclass is kept subdued on a diet of trashy television.
Krylov, the novel’s dysfunctional anti-hero, hovers between the two strands of society, born into the underclass but given access to the elite through his rich ex-wife. He tries to stay an outsider from both. “[T]he main goal of a Riphean man was not to fit into society—including female society—in a nice way. His main goal was to remain an outpost unto himself.”
Krylov is a talented gem cutter whose mentor, Professor Anfilogov, sets off to a remote river in the Riphean Mountains in search of valuable stones. The illegal plundering, cutting, and sale of these rare gems for human adornment is symbolic of humanity’s exploitation of its environment in the name of shallow consumerism, sacrificing the very soul of the Riphean mountains for the sake of vanity.
As Krylov sees off the professor on his expedition he meets a woman at the train station and they begin an affair, conducted at a series of random locations chosen by sticking a pin into a street map. Neither Krylov or his lover know each others’ true name or where one another lives and they thrive on the precariousness of their relationship and the disastrous possibility that if one of them misses an assignation they might never see each other again.
An omnipresent private detective spying on them and Krylov’s ex-wife complicate the relationship in a series of set pieces that combine surrealism and farce.
The characters and scenarios are more Borges than Dostoevsky, the plot dipping into the realms of science fiction. A scene in which White Guards and revolutionary Red soldiers appear to be playing out episodes from the 1917 October Revolution turns violent and the line between reenactment and actual historic events echoing from the past into the modern day becomes blurred.
“The virus of History, which you’d think had been suppressed long ago and barely existed anymore, was spreading freely,” writes Slavnikova.
This Russian Booker Prize-winning novel, translated by Marian Schwartz, sets out to deliberately disorient as reality and the ethereal, past and future, conscious and unconscious intersect, leaving the reader scrambling to find his bearings in Slavnikov’s dystopian premonition of Russia in the near future.
It is an unsettling but satisfying experience.

This review was written for and first published in The New York Journal of Books