“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Friday, November 23, 2012

The Irish Book Awards: Yep, It’s Third Time Unlucky

Show me a good loser, as Vince Lombardi once said, and I’ll show you a loser. Which is irrefutably true. It’s also true, if we can continue the football analogy, that there’s no shame in being beaten by a better team, and BROKEN HARBOUR by Tana French was a very worthy winner of the Ireland AM Best Crime Novel award at the Irish Book Awards last night.
  I’ve said all along this year that BROKEN HARBOUR is a tremendous piece of work, and while it’s always disappointing not to win once you make it onto the shortlist - last night was my third time unlucky at the Irish Book Awards - it was no mean achievement to make it even that far, particularly when you consider some of the very fine novels that didn’t. Anyway, hearty congratulations to Tana French, and sincere commiserations to my fellow nominees Niamh O’Connor, Benjamin Black, Louise Philips and Laurence O’Bryan.
  Meanwhile, I was delighted to see Eoin Colfer win in the Young Adult section for the final Artemis Fowl novel, and John Banville win the Best Novel category with ANCIENT LIGHT. For all the Irish Book Award winners, clickety-click here

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: MORTALITY by Christopher Hitchens

“Like so many of life’s varieties of experience,” writes Christopher Hitchens in Mortality (Atlantic Books), “the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off.”
  Born in Portsmouth in 1949, author, journalist and essayist Christopher Hitchens was one of his generation’s best known intellectuals. A friend and peer of Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan, the British-born Hitchens, who successfully applied for American citizenship in 2007, famously criticised Mother Teresa and Lady Diana, harangued US President George Bush for his policies yet supported the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq, and was notorious for the strength of his convictions when it came to opposing religion - his book God is Not Great (2007) sold in excess of half a million copies.
  A regular on TV chat shows and a sought-after presence on the international lecture circuit, Hitchens contributed to a wide variety of newspapers and magazines, among them Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman.
  He seemed a force of nature, but in June 2010 his voracious appetite for alcohol and cigarettes finally caught up with him. “I have more than once in my time woken up feeling like death,” he says in the opening line of Mortality, with the deadpan humour that pervades even the darkest chapters. “But nothing prepared me for the early morning in June when I came to consciousness feeling as I were actually shackled to my own corpse.”
  Shortly afterwards, the author receives confirmation that he is suffering from oesophageal cancer with complications, and that his life expectancy can be measured in months rather than years. Mortality, which is by turns a heartbreaking and uplifting book, and which first appeared in series form in Vanity Fair, is essentially a memoir of his dying.
  It takes a rare quality of courage to look in the mirror, see death gazing back and not flinch at writing down its starkest details. Hitchens is merciless as he sketches in his own failings - the hair and weight loss, the loss of appetite that in no way diminishes his body’s fondness for vomiting, the occasional moments of existential dread. Even as he writes in his measured and urbane style, he records the increasing difficulties he is having with the physical process of writing. Even worse, for this veteran of lecture and television debate, a man with an actor’s ability to project his personality to the furthest reaches of any chamber or hall, is the prospect of the oesophageal cancer eating away at his voice. “What do I hope for?” he asks. “If not a cure, then a remission. And what do I want back? In the most beautiful apposition of two of the simplest words in our language: the freedom of speech.”
  He remains clear-eyed throughout, determinedly unsentimental, taking full responsibility for the behaviour that has brought him to this pass. “I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction,” he says, acknowledging that he has been ‘knowingly burning the candle at both ends’ for most of his adult life, “and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal it bores even me.” He mocks the temptation to feel sorry for himself. “Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? […] But I understand this sort of non-thinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.”
  Indeed, despite the physical toll exacted by the cancer and its various treatments, Hitchens remains rigorous in his thought process throughout. When one of the Christian ‘faithful’ posts a website contribution declaring that throat cancer is the perfect way for God to dispatch a man who used his voice to deny God’s existence, and that hellfire awaits, Hitchens calmly responds with a query as to why it wasn’t his thought-generating brain that God chose to destroy. He knows, of course, that he is wasting precious breath. “To them, a rodent carcinoma really is a dedicated, conscious agent - a slow-acting suicide-murderer - on a consecrated mission from heaven.”
  Meanwhile, the well-wishers are almost as draining on his emotional reserves. From far and wide, from friend and former foe alike, come heartfelt promises of prayers, prompting Hitchens to wonder why people of such faith would want to see their prayers undo God’s great plan. “A different secular problem also occurs to me,” he adds mischievously. “What if I pulled through and the pious faction contentedly claimed that their prayers had been answered? That would somehow be irritating.”
  With his mind still nimble, it’s difficult for the polymathic Hitchens to keep his eye focused on his navel for very long. A comment about his physical appearance will lead on to an extended digression about the nature of prayer in the Old Testament; when he assesses his increasingly remote chances of survival, given the development of cutting-edge techniques, it results in a disquisition on the morality and ethics of using stem-cells in cancer research.
  At 91 pages, Mortality is a short book, and even at that it feels brief - although Hitchens bubbles with such brio that it would probably have felt as such had it been three times its length. But even if it is a slim volume, it exerts a powerful gravity, drawing the reader inexorably into the heart of Hitchens’ plight and making of his own death a universal experience. The last chapter is the most unsettling, a chapter of scribblings and half-written lines and concepts that weren’t fully fleshed out in time to make the body of the book proper, so that it reads like the mental flutterings of a fading consciousness, still randomly generating ideas, memories and emotions as the life-force slips away gently into the ether.
  Harrowing at times, hilarious at others, Mortality is a delicate, profound and surprisingly tender love letter to life at the very moment of its leaving. You will hardly read a more important book this year. - Declan Burke

  This review was first published in the Irish Examiner.

Sunday, November 18, 2012

But Seriously, Folks …

I had an interview with The Artist Formerly Known as Colin Bateman published in the Evening Herald during the week. Currently promoting THE PRISONER OF BRENDA, which blends classic crime / mystery tropes with blackly comic scenarios, Bateman is a former winner of the Goldsboro ‘Last Laugh’ prize awarded at Crimefest. But is comic crime fiction taken seriously by readers? To wit:
Despite his runaway success, however, Bateman still encounters purists who object to the combination of crime fiction and humour.
  Do readers take comedy crime seriously? “I think the very few readers who buy it do,” he says. “You would guess from sales in general that readers prefer their crime fiction deadly serious and quite bloody, and that may just be the fact of it, or because that is what’s put in front of them.
  “I think that if crime that is quite serious, but happens to be funny as well -- I mean, Raymond Chandler was funny, wasn’t he? -- was promoted with a bit of muscle then it could sell extremely well.”
  For the rest, clickety-click here