The Lazy Sunday Service

My head is still reeling a bit from attending the Kildare Readers Festival yesterday. I thoroughly enjoyed the event, learnt a massive amount, and met a bunch of very interesting people. I’m still trying to decide whether it’s better to talk before or after a really great speaker. I followed John MacKenna, who writes well crafted prose and can orate it beautifully. I write functional prose and am going to have work on the reading. I went too fast and perhaps naively chose to read from the very start of the book, rather than selecting a particular passage. I also went on too long. Tricia Groves had picked three short, really strong passages to read that worked very well to give a sense of the characters and the book in general. Dermot Bolger, who hosted the panel, did a superb job of keeping things light, finding connections, throwing in amusing anecdotes, and asking good questions.

In the early evening I got to spend a bit of time chatting with John Connolly and Stuart Neville, who were both good company. And their session was great entertainment. John Connolly really knows how to work an audience, providing well thought out answers inter-dispersed with anecdotes and funny asides, and if you have the opportunity to go to one of his signings I thoroughly recommend it. He doesn’t so much present a reading as give a performance. Stuart asked some interesting questions to open things out and they had a grand old natter about ... stuff (I’m not even going to try and summarize – stuff covers it). John is probably exhausted at this stage; due to the ash cloud instead of flying to Scotland, he got a taxi at gone ten o’clock to Larne (about 3 hours drive north) for a ferry leaving at 7.15 this morning to make a lunch time gig. To my surprise I got mentioned twice, John saying that he thought that The Rule Book was a ‘fantastic read’, which really made my day – one, that he’d read it, and two, that he’d enjoyed it. After the signings, John set off and I sat in the bar until nearly one o’clock chatting to Stuart and his partner, swapping yarns. Great stuff all together.

My posts this week:
Review of The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston
Academic blogging event
Stakeout: Short Story
Dezoning disputes
Review of The People's Manifesto by Mark Thomas
Kildare Readers Festival
Promo trailer for The White Gallows
300,000 reasons to wonder about the world

Saturday Snippet: The Reapers by John Connolly

Whilst I had some issues with The Reapers, the story within the story of Louis' recruitment was superb and below is a short extract about the nature of racism in small-town, Southern US in the 1950s and 60s. It seems to hit the nail on the head to me.

But no one on either side ever forgot that the law was white. Justice might be blind, but the law wasn’t. Justice was aspirational, but the law was actual. The law was real. It had uniforms, and weapons. It smelled of sweat and tobacco. It drove a big car with a star on the door. White people had justice. Black folks had the law.

The boy understood all of this instinctively. Nobody had been forced to explain it to him. His mama hadn’t sat him down before she died and gone through the subtleties of law versus justice with him as it applied to the black community. As far as anyone was concerned, there wasn’t a black community. There were just blacks. A community implied organization, and there were a great many people who associated organization with threat. Unions organized. Communists organized. Black people did not organize, not here. Maybe elsewhere, and there were those who said that the tide was changing, but not in this town. Here, everything worked fine just the way it was.

Review of The Reapers by John Connolly, Hodder and Stoughton (2008)

Louis used to be a Reaper – an elite assassin – until he started to question who he was killing and why. His father-like handler, Gabriel, had let him walk away to start a new life with his partner, Angel. Now someone seems intent on seeking revenge for a life Louis cut short, Gabriel is back on the scene, and another former Reaper – Louie’s arch-nemesis, Bliss – has seemingly resurfaced. One of Louis’s businesses is attacked, then his apartment. A reclusive, wealthy business seems to know who the perpetrator is, a long time rival that he would also like neutralised. He points the path to a remote farmstead in upstate New York and when Gabriel is shot, Louis decides to follow the path to bring the situation to a resolution thus heading into the trap.

It had been some years since Louis and the man named Gabriel had met, but two men whose lives had once been so closely linked could never truly sever the bond between them. In a sense, it was Gabriel who had brought Louis into being, who had taken a boy with undeniable talents and forged him into a man who could be wielded as a weapon. It was to Gabriel that those who needed to avail themselves of Louis’s services had once come. He was the point of contact, the filter. His precise status was nebulous. He was a fixer, a facilitator. There was no blood on his hands, or none that one could see. Louis trusted him, to a degree. There was too much about Gabriel that was unknown, and unknowable. Still, Louis was conscious of something that resembled affection for his old master.

John Connolly’s writing flows along like a lyrical river; his narrative structure is excellent, tugging the reader from one sentence to the next. That said, whilst I like Connolly’s books - and this was no exception - The Reapers wasn’t in the same league as some of the other books in the series. The problem for me is that book is effectively the back story to Louis and Angel, the friends of his regular main character Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker – the former police detective who mourns the savage death of his wife and daughter and is inexorably drawn to trouble. The result is an in-depth explanation of Louis’s past in particular, to the extent that precious little happens for large chunks of the book. The description above is the entire plot – practically nothing happens. In the first 170 odd pages the only action is the attack on Louis’s garage business and his apartment and they only take up a few pages. Back story and in-depth characterization is fine, but as a reader I wanted story. When the action did arrive at the remote farmstead it was fairly predictable and lacked the kind of twists and turns that I normally associate with Connolly’s work. What saved this book was the quality of Connolly’s writing and the story within the story of Louis’s recruitment as a reaper, which was superb.