First Chapter: A trip down memory lane, but without the rose-tinted glasses

BOOKS with ANNE CUNNINGHAM

Dolly Considine’s Hotel - Eamon Somers

Unbound €12.99

In June 1983, young Paddy Butler is waiting in Busáras for the feeder bus to take him to the ferryboat and on to London. Through a series of accidents, Paddy’s bag gets mixed up with that of a young IRA activist and Paddy is destined to spend the summer in Dublin, but not at home in Cabra. He gets a live-in job in Dolly Considine’s hotel, changes his name to Julian Ryder and the caper begins.

Dolly Considine inherited the hotel in the 1950s and it’s been a haven for actors and TDs ever since, with the antics of the parliamentarians putting the bohemians to shame. She is the daughter of a Fianna Fáil TD and so she’s done what women like that do – married another Fianna Fáil TD. It’s the summer of the Pro-Life Amendment campaign and also the one where Julian finds his feet as a writer and as a young gay man.

It’s quite a tome, this Bildungsroman, and quite the literary feat. Somers’ depiction of 80s Dublin is pin-point accurate. But this is no hymn of affection for the rare oul’ times, rather it’s a portrait of Ireland at the very pinnacle of its hypocrisy. And while it’s extremely well-written, I found nobody I could, as Kurt Vonnegut recommends, ‘root for’. Everyone is tainted in this story, including both protagonists, who are surely just playing the world at its own game, but this leaves the reader with nobody to like. There’s a seam of bitterness, lodged as firmly in Dolly as it is in Julian, as well as in all of the big players within the church/state battleground. It’s a trip down memory lane, but without the rose-tinted glasses.

Violeta - Isabel Allende

Penguin Random House €23.79

Violeta is one hundred years old, born during the Spanish Flu pandemic and on the point of death during Covid-19. She writes her life story in the form of a long letter to her grandson, whom she has raised alone after his mother died a drug-addled death. And so, in a lifetime sweeping an entire century, the reader is taken through a very personal history of Chile. Violeta was born into aristocracy but the effect of the Great Depression sees her family, both parents, her five older brothers and herself a small child, moving from their privileged life in the city to a rural backwater in the south of the country. The fall from grace is too much for her father and it’s Violeta who finds his body after his suicide.

The story passes through the terrifying dictatorship years in the seventies, which saw Pinochet gain power and thousands of ordinary citizens murdered, tortured or ‘disappeared’. Through these years Violeta is raising her wayward grandson, a terror himself in his teenage years although he ends up a priest. Her first and only marriage is to an agronomist who bores her half to death and she takes up with an English RAF pilot, by whom she becomes pregnant, but this relationship is an abusive, violent disaster.

Allende says she has based the character of Violeta on her mother, who died in 2020, aged 98. She says she saw her mother’s circle of friends dwindle down to nobody, as one by one they died off, and the novel observes how loneliness is an ever-present ghost, waiting patiently to haunt us all as we get older. Allende can hardly write her autograph without an instant translation popping up (she writes in Spanish) and this translation by Frances Riddle is impeccable.

The Winter Guest - W.C.Ryan

Zaffre €14.99

The plethora of centenary commemorations marking the troubled birth of our state seems never-ending and they’re not finished yet. But just as I was losing

interest, along came this gem of a novel, set in the West of Ireland in 1920, right in the middle of the IRA/Auxiliaries conflict. The story opens with the shooting by the IRA of RIC Inspector James Teevan and his companion in the car he’s driving, an ex-British army officer named Harry Cartwright. Another passenger in the car, Maud Prendeville is also shot. Maud is ‘big house’ aristocracy but also a committed republican and was an activist in the 1916 Rising. The IRA didn’t shoot her. As they fled the scene, a lone gunman approached the car and shot her at point blank range. Tom Harkin, insurance inspector (but actually an undercover republican) is sent from Dublin to find out who killed Maud Prendeville, a woman who was his fiancée once upon a time.

Tom Harkin was a captain in the British army who fought in WWI and is still haunted by what he witnessed in the trenches. Now he’s a secret republican with vital links to the landed gentry who support the cause of independence. Ireland is a hotbed for both sides, with tit-for-tat atrocities escalating rapidly. And although the War of Independence is intrinsic to the novel’s plot, it is essentially a backdrop. This novel is as much about a haunted man chasing his own ghosts as it is about the ghosts who haunt the Prendeville demesne, Kilcolgan House. It’s beautifully written, stitched through with the sadness of a man who’s been reluctantly involved in war, one way or another, for more than six years. If you’re a fan of John Banville’s crime novels, you will love this.

Footnotes

County libraries right across the country are continuing to host online events for adults and children throughout February and March. Check your county library’s website or Facebook page for details.

The Irish Writers Centre in Dublin’s Parnell Square have just announced their Spring writing courses, starting next month. Places book up fast, so if you’re in the mood to spend two hours a week honing your craft, check out their website, irishwriterscentre.ie. Well worth a weekly trip to the capital.

Email: Anne at anne.cunningham@meathchronicle.ie anf follow Anne on Twitter @anniecrecipes