'Fundamental truths indicated by simple gestures or silence, rather than by any big drama'
It’s all fiction this week, and everything here is a really worthy read.
The Library of Traumatic Memory, Neil Jordan, Head of Zeus, €17.99
Writer and film maker Jordan’s latest work of fiction is part Gothic mystery, part speculative novel and part science fiction. Set in the year 2084, it focuses on librarian Christian, who curates and archives a library of painful memories. When his partner Isolde is killed in a car crash, Christian ‘resurrects’ her in secret. And by resurrection, I mean digitally speaking. He reawakens Isolde’s consciousness and, in the doing, uncovers a conspiracy that spans centuries and leads Christian into a past he has, up to now, known nothing about.
The story focuses on the Huxley Institute, housed in Huxley Manor on the Beara Peninsula and Jordan’s inspiration is an old abandoned mansion outside Castletownbere called Puxley Mansion, built on money from the local copper mines. Someone described this novel as ‘head-scratching’ and much as I love Jordan’s fiction, I agree. But it’s definitely worth reading, if only for the mix of past and future so seamlessly stitched together by a master of his craft.
The Fourth Wall, Sorj Chalandon, Lilliput Press, €16.95
Translated by Cheny Crow, this novel is set in Beirut and Paris during the invasion of Beirut by Israel in 1982. It follows Georges, who has been asked to help his old friend Samuel, a Greek Jewish theatre director, to stage a production of Antigone in Beirut among the chaos of war. Samuel’s reason for staging the production in the midst of the conflict reflects a previous staging in Paris in the middle of WWII. Georges agrees, but from the first page he is caught up in the conflict, losing a friend in a bombing. Most people would flee immediately but Georges doesn’t, intent on helping Samuel and a cast of actors from all sides – Palestinian, Christian, Druze, Shiite, Sunni, Chaldean, Armenian – united in this project of unity and tolerance amidst the destruction of war. This book was first published in France in 2013, has won numerous accolades and recalls many of Chalandon’s own experiences as a working journalist in Beirut in the bloodsoaked 1980s. Very similar to the bloodsoaked 2020s.
The News from Dublin, Colm Tóibín, Picador, €14.99
The renowned author of so many great novels has published a collection of nine short stories, covering ground in his familiar Wexford along with stories from the US, Spain and Argentina. Regardless of place, Tóibín’s fiction resonates with that understated pain and longing that we have come to expect from his characters, where fundamental truths are indicated by simple gestures, or by silence, rather than by any flourish of big drama. Most of the stories originally appeared elsewhere, in publications like The New Yorker, New Irish Short Stories and The Dublin Review. All of them are sown together with the suffering of ordinary people flung into extraordinary circumstances.
The collection opens with ‘The Journey To Galway’, set during World War I, a story about a young man’s mother travelling west to tell her son’s wife that he’s been killed in action. In ‘The News from Dublin’, a schoolteacher attempts to navigate local politics and travels to Dublin to secure a place for his sick brother on an experimental drug trial, his brother’s only hope. The fears of the undocumented immigrant in America are highlighted in ‘Five Bridges’, set in San Francisco. Three sisters, having lived for years in Argentina, return to Barcelona. But there is betrayal among them. These stories bear the burden of history, the weight of poverty and familial responsibility and a host of other kinds of anguish and distress, related in Tóibín’s deceptively simple and unadorned prose.
Communion, Jon Doyle, Atlantic, €18.99
This is a remarkable debut novel from a Welsh writer whose short fiction has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. In a wholly original plot, Mack is back in his family home in Port Talbot after spending a decade in a monastery. He returns like a ‘failed suicide’ to his taciturn father and excessively religious mother. Set against the real-life staging of The Passion in Port Talbot in 2011, directed by and starring Michael Sheen, the locals are all preparing to play their part as extras in the production, staged in among the town’s streets, from Maundy Thursday through to Easter Sunday. But many of those locals work in the local steelworks and are planning a strike for the duration of the passion play. That will cause the steelworks millions of pounds if it goes ahead.
Mack, who’s working at the steel plant as a security guard until he finds something better, is reluctantly dragged into the staged production. But he knows his old school friend Siwan, a woman with a penchant for a spot of environmental terrorism, has her own plans for Easter weekend. And Mack can’t inform the authorities about her plans, because she has told him in the confessional before he left the seminary. Addressing issues of faith, hopelessness and some kind of hobbled-together loyalty, if not love, it’s superb.
The Sam Chronicles: The Whispering Stars, John Almond, Amazon, €11
In a beautiful book for the 10+ age group, Sam Kiernan discovers an old watch in the attic of his grandmother’s house. The watch will set Sam and his friend Orla on a quest across Lough Oughter to the castle built on a crannóg in the lake. Sam and Orla’s mission is to understand a puzzle set to Sam and to his ancestors before him, involving a lining up of the planets and a gateway into another dimension. It’s an exceptional story, thoughtful and beautifully composed, so different to those celebrity-written kids’ books that neither all the king’s horses nor all the king’s editors can save from being rubbish. This book deserves some serious pot-banging.
Footnotes
The Galway Folk Festival is on from June 3 to 7 and features a huge line-up. See galwayfolkfestival.com for details.
The Dublin International Chamber Music Festival runs throughout next week, from 4th to 7th. See dicmf.com for details.