Books

THE MAGICIAN. By Colm Toibin. Viking What’s the difference between the biography of a famous person and a novel about that famous person in which the factual details are much the same as in the biography? And what can the novelist hope to achieve in seeking to enrich our understanding and appreciation of that particular […]

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MY FATHER’S HOUSE. By Joseph O’Connor. Harvill Secker. On the first page of Joseph O’Connor’s new novel we’re introduced to Delia Kiernan, who’s married to a diplomat, and already older readers may be getting echoes from her name and status – wasn’t Delia Murphy, long familiar to Radio Eireann listeners of the 1950s and 1960s […]

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HAVEN. By Emma Donoghue. Picador In June 2012, encouraged and accompanied by our daughter, we embarked on the scariest boat trip I’ve ever undertaken. The morning was stormy when we set off from Portmagee in west Kerry on our way to Skellig Michael seven miles out in the ocean and, given the sea’s turbulence, most […]

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THE GARDEN. By Paul Perry. New Island. I know very little about orchids and even less about ghost orchids. But they’re to be found in Cuba and in the Florida everglades, and the pursuit of these elusive flowers, highly prized because of their rarity, forms the subject of Paul Perry’s atmospheric and absorbing novel, which […]

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APRIL IN SPAIN. By John Banville. Faber & Faber For much of this hugely enjoyable and exciting thriller, John Banville is in playful, almost skittish, mood. It’s the 1950s and Dublin pathologist Quirke (previously encountered in the books by the author’s former alter ego Benjamin Black), has embarked on a happy second marriage. He and […]

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THE LYRICS: 1956 to the Present. By Paul McCartney. Edited and Introduced by Paul Muldoon. Allen Lane, £75 sterling From my adolescence onwards, Paul McCartney has been a constant musical companion in my day-to-day life – as he has been in the lives of so many others. And in the Lennon v McCartney debate that […]

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The decade following Philip Larkin’s death in 1985 was calamitous for his reputation. On his demise, he was the most widely loved poet of his time and his passing was mourned by people for whom his beautifully crafted and deeply felt lyrics were proof that contemporary verse didn’t have to be obscurantist and alienating. But […]

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Irish Independent, July 23, 2011 Reviewing The Secret Scripture in 2008, I described Sebastian Barry as “an unrivalled chronicler of lost lives”, and his new novel also concerns people who, disregarded by society, have never been registered in the elitist ledgers of official history. As with its predecessor, the central character is a woman whose life coincides […]

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Irish Independent, February 11, 2012 When Philip Larkin died in 1985, he was England’s most loved modern poet. Then came Anthony Thwaite’s edition of the Selected Letters and Andrew Motion’s biography and suddenly Larkin was being denounced as a racist, porn-addicted misogynist whose tainted verse wasn’t fit to be taught in schools or colleges – as if art […]

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In Claire Kilroy’s new novel, a corrupt government minister doesn’t send hirelings to collect brown envelopes for the rezoning favours he’s about to render – he brazenly turns up himself to meet the property developer at a local pub and walks away with a jiffy bag that’s bulging with banknotes. In nearly every other detail, though, Kilroy’s picaresque […]

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September 29, 2012 So was it worth all the hype? Did it merit an embargo so strictly enforced that anyone outside the author’s immediate family didn’t see the book until 8am this Thursday? And after seven Harry Potter adventures, did The Casual Vacancy reveal that JK Rowling had finally grown up? Well, to answer the last question first, […]

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Irish Independent, September 8, 2012 Christopher Hitchens revelled in doing battle with political and religious foes, but all his debating and writing skills proved no match for the most intimate and lethal enemy of all, and so the oesophagal cancer that had breached his bodily defences in 2010 killed him last December. Not that he had any time […]

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Irish Independent, February 25, 2012 The teasing main title suggests a playful putdown of misery memoirs and earnest tomes about family dysfunction, but the book’s serious thrust is indicated by the subtitle and any matricide that’s contemplated here is purely figurative. Indeed, troublesome fathers loom larger than bothersome mothers in Toibin’s loosely-linked essays on writers and their families, […]

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Irish Independent, November 10, 2012 Now in its fifth edition, David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film has long been an indispensable bible for people who love to read and think about the movies. And an idiosyncratic one, too, because, despite its dull title and dictionary format, it’s a book crammed with shrewd insights, eloquent enthusiasms and withering putdowns. […]

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Irish Independent, January 12, 2013 In the early 1970s, Peter Sheridan’s career was at a low point. Playwright, actor and brother of future moviemaker Jim, he had embarked on an arts degree in University College Dublin but, with a wife and child to support, he needed a maintenance grant from Dublin Corporation. To this end he sought the […]

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Irish Independent, May 4, 2013 When asked how he achieved his lithe and spare prose style, the great crime writer Elmore Leonard said it was really quite simple – at the end of each day he revised what he’d just written “and whenever I come across an adjective I strike it out”. Indeed, sometimes it seems that […]

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Irish Independent, December 3, 2011 Was Amanda Ros the world’s worst novelist? That was the title recently bestowed on the Co Down-born author of ‘Irene Iddesleigh’, ‘Delina Delaney’ and other late-Victorian potboilers – books so derided for their ludicrous situations and awful prose that in the 1940s JRR Tolkien, CS Lewis and other Oxford dons ran competitions to […]

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Irish Independent, February 18, 2012 The decade following a writer’s death is often the most cruel to his status. During his lifetime, Graham Greene was viewed as the most vitally topical of novelists, but on his demise in 1991 he was downgraded as too caught up in his times to be relevant anymore and his reputation has never […]

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