Just as Boiling Point lands on BBC television as a series, Sarah Gilmartin produces an equally gripping kitchen-sink drama. This is a combination of a sexual abuse narrative set against the sweaty, sweary heat of a restaurant. Daniel Costello, Michelin starred chef-owner of a Dublin restaurant, is accused of raping a waitress. Hannah, also a waitress at the same place, contributes her part of the story and Julie, the wife has her say too. The trajectory of the novel is presented in a sequence of one person narratives, each character taking up a whole chapter as the court proceedings carry on. It is very much a contemporary novel, the scenes in the restaurant at a Tiger-economic time for Dublin are fictitious, as is the court room drama for all sorts of reasons, but they are nevertheless, all too believable and horrible. Entitlement and power – a heady combination.
I first encountered John Banville when he was listed, and then won the Booker Prize for his novel The Sea. To be perfectly frank, I did not think too highly of The Sea, or not enough to think it worthy of the prize; but gave later novels my attention until I became quite a fan.
April in Spain is the second novel about the Detective Inspector Strafford, Snow being the first. The novel has a slow start and at first it is hard to link the two sections, London and San Sebastián or Donostia, which is the Basque name for that area. It gathers pace…
This is a crime novel, but not a who-done-it. All the time we know both sides of the story, we follow the criminal and the detective all the way from beginning to end. It is not until the last chapter that we understand why; Banville exploits all the tropes of the “crime genre” but twists them subtly to subvert the norm, leaving the reader with a taste for more.
There is another character that we might have met before, the whisky-soaked Quirke, Banville wrote a series of novels under a nom-de-plume: Benjamin Black. Also well worth a look.
A new novel by Anne Enright will always be something to look forward to and with her latest offering, Actress, she does not disappoint.
The book cover tells a long story. Actress is written by the ageing daughter of a famous, but not Irish, actress called Katherine Odell. At some point in her life, Katherine acquires the apostrophe, red hair and an Irish accent.
The narrator covers the ground of filial love, guilt, despair, anger and fear with a long view, beginning with her mother’s vague characterisation of her absent father – in at least one version he has died in a car crash. For Norah FitzMaurice, this has been alternately a blessing and a vacuum, which she has been able to fill with different versions: his kindness, good looks, humour and many other qualities which she would like to ascribe to herself. The car accident – was he running away, was there another passenger, was he simply returning after a long trip? Is he in fact, still alive? Norah re-runs the scenario endlessly.
Like many of her previous novels, Anne Enright does quite a hatchet job on the vagaries of family life, its good moments and its petty cruelties. In this novel, it is largely the relationship between the mother (who as an actress is in any case difficult to pin down) and her daughter (who for most of her life is the daughter of the more famous K O’D), even though she is herself a writer of some distinction, a novelist and journalist with quite a portfolio of successful works.
The novel is written as if the narrator is trying to rediscover her mother some several years after her death. In her examination she also describes her own passage through life to a successful marriage, via the most egregious bed-hopping often with her mother’s friends.
Set mostly in the 1970s, Katherine’s career is at its peak, she is successful on screen and stage. After a stint in Hollywood, she returns more Irish than the Killarney Stone and moves with Norah to Dublin. Meanwhile, the IRA is busy in the North. Bloody Sunday is rendered in a few paragraphs, but it is the casual reference that makes it so chilling.
The novel is a masterpiece of the nature and destructiveness of celebrity, seen through the eyes of the little girl in the wings, watching her mother on stage. It explores the fatal attraction of the glamour as well as the drabness of a career on its downward trajectory. The life behind the greasepaint. It is also the story of family frailties.
deborahjs 