'Like all excellent satires, it’s not just funny but also scary'
This week there’s a book on the history of wood carving and print, a shocking memoir that follows a previous shocking memoir, and three very different novels.
Ink Paper Chisel Grain, Paul Coldwell, Michael Joseph, €36
A bit of a niche book, this, but if history or woodcarving or printing are not your bag, it’s possible you know someone for whom it is, and this charming book would make a lovely gift. Subtitled ‘A Remarkable History of Woodcuts’, it is gorgeously illustrated throughout and traces the art of woodcut engraving from right back to the Chinese Han Dynasty, through the glory days of the Renaissance, up to the present day.
The author is emeritus professor in fine art at the University of the Arts London and has been an external examiner for NCAD in Dublin. He’s a sculptor, printmaker and academic who had one of the first exhibitions in the Temple Bar Gallery. And since woodcarving is the earliest form of printmaking, this book should hold a wider appeal than you might initially suspect.
The Glass Cage, John Healy, Wilton Square Books, €15.99
John Healy’s first memoir, The Grass Arena, was published by Faber in 1988. It was hailed as a masterpiece everywhere. It chronicled his years as a down-and-out or ‘wino’ as he calls himself, on the streets from the age of 15 and jailed countless times. He was eventually to get sober in jail, when a fellow inmate taught him chess, and Healy went on to be a formidable chess player on the world stage. An argument over royalties with Faber led to them taking his books off the shelves, leaving him in more or less the same position he’d held previously – poor and alone.
This, his second memoir, takes up from there and describes his life over the last three decades. He’s now in his 80s but still sharp as a tack. He is angry and embittered and so would anybody be who led his life. But it doesn’t affect the quality of his writing, which is still beautiful – really elegant – even as it describes violence, hunger, cold, fear and poverty of Dickensian measure. He has much to say about the destructive class system, which is as present here as it is in Britain, and of how those born outside the middle classes still, incredibly, have little chance of a decent life. A truly absorbing read.
A Nation Once Again, Paul Howard, Penguin Sandycove, €18
Paul Howard, aka Ross O’Carroll Kelly, has done it again with this superb satire on the state, and the absolute state of us! Retired civil servant and diplomat Fiach O’Bric has been lured out of retirement to head up a team of miscreants – other civil servants – in a shadowy department tasked with preparing for a United Ireland. I kid you not.
But Howard kids you much with this hilarious yarn. This committee of hopelessness stumble from one disastrous meeting to the next, and both sides of the Northern Question get it straight between the eyes, not least when a newly proposed capital city is suggested. It can’t be Dublin or Belfast, but must be in the centre of the island, which puts it near a crossroads in Westmeath – Castletown Geoghegan or somewhere like that is dog-eared to become United Ireland’s new mecca.
And that’s only one in a long litany of insane proposals that made this reader weep with mirth. I loved it. And if you loved TV comedies like The Thick of It and Twenty Twelve, then you’ll love it too.
Like all excellent satires, it’s not just funny but also scary.
Claws Out!, Bella Mackie, Borough Press, €15.99
There’s more social satire in Mackie’s latest novel, maybe not as full of laughs as Paul Howard’s, but amusingly full of piss and vinegar. Diana Leyland has her eye on her fourth husband-to-be, one who can keep her in the lifestyle to which she’s become accustomed. But greed feeds on itself and must always pursue the newer, shinier thing. This newer, shinier thing here is David Ferrand, Londoner and wealthy man-about-town who is rich enough to catch Diana’s attention.
The fly in the ointment is Ferrand’s adult daughter Catriona, who can spot a grifter at 100 metres and quickly has the measure of Diana, someone with whom Catriona has no intention of sharing her vast inheritance. And as Catriona digs into Diana’s past, she discovers no less than three previous husbands. Not so unusual nowadays, admittedly, but it’s very unusual that they’re all dead!
This reader really enjoyed Mackie’s previous novel, What a Way to Go, and although this is in a vaguely similar vein, it’s even sharper. Pure entertainment.
Little Spark, Jess Kidd, Canongate, €18.99
Jess Kidd is a hugely talented writer. I admire everything she has written, including her two ‘Nora Breen Investigates’ thrillers set in post-war Kent. But with this novel she returns to the era where I believe she writes best; Victorian England, in all its glory and squalor and everything in between, and the author frequently endures her tongue being firmly glued to her cheek. This is a glittering marvel, every second phrase a treasure of perfect poise. There’s nobody else around who’s producing work this finely honed.
The story centres on Bodkin Bell, described as ‘orphan, pickpocket and survivor’, a young woman who needs to wear leather gloves at all times, because she knows not the day or the hour when her hands will emit electric shocks on some poor unassuming victim. (That’s the titular ‘spark’.) After a short spell in jail, where she has been separated from her ‘guardian and gaffer’ Cornelius Bell, Bodkin is assigned as a servant to a new employer, Lady Hasely, on the vast and isolated estate of Point Mote in the Kent marshes. And from there, sparks really begin to fly.
Superlatives fail me. Kidd is such an imaginative storyteller, and anyone who still appreciates highly polished and burnished prose that dazzles can’t miss this.
Footnotes
Dingle Food Festival is on this coming weekend, October 3 and 4 and there’s lots to see and taste, including food markets, tasting events, the ‘taste trail’, children’s events and live entertainment. See dinglefood.com for details.