Saturday Snippet: If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr (2009)

In the following passage Bernie Gunther ruminates on the meaning and life and death in his characteristically philosophical way, which is usually tempered by hefty dose of humourous cynicism, but not in this case. My review is here

Later on, I went out to my car and in the shifting dark I thought I saw the figure of the dead gardener, standing beside the well where he’d drowned. Maybe the house was haunted, after all. And if the house wasn’t haunted, I know I was, and probably always would be. Some us die in a day. For some, like me, it takes much longer than that. Years, perhaps. We all die, like Adam, it’s true, only it’s not every man that’s made alive again, like Ernest Hemingway. If the dead rise not then what happens to a man’s spirit? And if they do, with what body shall we live again? I didn’t have the answers. Nobody did. Perhaps, if the dead could rise and be incorruptible and I could be changed for ever in the blinking of an eye, then dying might be worth the trouble of getting killed, or killing myself.

Anonymous lobby slumming

I could be anywhere in the world since I've not left the lobby of the Marriott all day. It's a classic non-place. I could be in any Marriott anywhere on the planet given its generic nature. So far I've seen next to nothing of Yerevan (I've not been more than 400 metres from the hotel). Writing this between meetings, which have gone on all day again. Tomorrow, I'm making a presentation to the Armenian Prime Minister, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Minister for Diaspora, Minister of Economy, Minister for Finance, the Chief Economic Advisor to the President, and the Chairperson of the Armenian Central Bank. So no pressure there then! Blumming heck. I don't remember that being in the job description. All it asked for was a presentation to the board of the National Competitiveness Foundation. My hope is to try and keep my feet out of my mouth, try and say something sensible and useful, and not crumble under cross-questioning. I suspect I'll be wandering back out shell-shocked with my shoe laces dangling down my chin.

My head is overflowing ...

A very intense day today. The first meeting was at 10am and then proceeded until 9.30pm with no break. The meetings included USAID, a foundation, the Minister of Diaspora, and a former minister who is now a successful businessman. I can't remember a day in which I've learnt so much about history, cultural affairs, policy and different programmes and initiatives, and met people who are so highly motivated to make something succeed. Or had such a grilling as to our knowledge of what other countries do and our ideas about the merits of different schemes and proposals. My head is now overflowing with information about Armenia and its diaspora, which is no bad thing. We've more meetings lined up for tomorrow which will no doubt be equally fascinating. We've only seen a tiny amount of Yerevan, but it's an interesting city and I'll try and upload some pictures tomorrow (right is our hotel).

Early starts

Today started at 3.30am, with a taxi collecting me at 4am to get me to Dublin Airport for a 6.20 flight to Paris. All being well this post is scheduled to be uploaded not long after I take off from Charles de Gaulle for Yerevan (to the right), the capital of Armenia. I was hoping to catch up on some work-related reading on the two flights but I suspect it’ll be an uphill battle. I’m definitely not a morning person and I can’t sleep on planes so I’ll probably be just vegetating between bouts of trying to concentrate. I’m really looking forward to taking a brief look at Armenia. I just hope I manage to get through immigration. It’s a long way to travel to get denied a visa at passport control (which is where you apply for one). For those wondering where it is, it’s a landlocked country surrounded by Turkey, Iran, Georgia and Azerbaijan – see Wikipedia

Review of Death of a Red Heroine by Qui Xiaolong (Sceptre, 2000)

1990 and Shanghai is in a process of rapid change as China starts to embrace a new economic future whilst trying to maintain its Communist political system. A young woman’s body is found by two fishermen in a remote canal and Chief Inspector Chen of the special cases unit is assigned to investigate the murder. A successful poet and translator, with influential supporters, Chen’s career is on an upward curve. It soon becomes though apparent that the victim was no ordinary system and the case soon takes on a political dimension and when the evidence starts to point to towards the involvement of high ranking political figures Chen finds himself under threat, relying on his contacts to maintain his position. For an official on the rise the sensible route is to protect the party and pass the case over to internal security, but Chen and his assistant Detective Yu wish to see justice done even if it means endangering themselves and their families.

I finished Death of a Red Heroine a couple of days ago and its being playing on my mind a bit. It was a book I nearly stopped reading twice (once about a fifth of the way in, the other about halfway), but in the end I decided to soldier on to its conclusion. In many ways the book was interesting, detailing the political and societal changes taking place in China in the early 1990s and the nature of Chinese social and familial relations, and some of the poetry was appealing. The story itself though was fairly long winded and could have done with a bit of an edit. My real difficulties though were two-fold. First, was Chief Inspector Chen. Most of his colleagues wonder how he’d been promoted to chief inspector so quickly, especially given his relative lack of experience, and I have to say I did as well. As a detective he was fairly hopeless, missing clues that stuck out a mile and not following up on the most obvious of leads. This wouldn’t have been too bad if he’d been written as a bumbling cop in the Clouseau mode, but he’s meant to be a bit of an intellectual. Second, Chen is meant to be a busy cop investigating several cases and overseeing a specialist unit, yet he hardly seems to break sweat and has time to take things at a very leisurely pace. Overall, I just wasn’t convinced as to the main character or the investigation, which was a shame as there were many aspects of the book to like, especially the description of the history and politics of the new China.

From boom to bust

Just three years ago Ireland was the place that every developing country wanted to emulate. It had transformed itself from a poor, peripheral country on the edge of Europe (in 1987 its GDP was 67% of the EU average) to one of the richest nations on the planet (with a GDP 139% of the EU average in 2004). For over a decade GDP growth per year was over double that of nearly every other European country. Employment rose from 1.16m people in 1991 to 1.99m people in 2005, and unemployment dropped from 15% in 1993 to run at about 4% between 2000-2005. Standands of living and quality of life rose rapidly, as did propert prices, and the population grew by 17% between 1996 and 2006 (from 3.62m to 4.23m). In turn there was a cultural transformation away from social conversativism to liberalism and consumerism. Ireland seemed to be a conundrum with low personal and corporate taxes, high indirect taxes, yet with a public health system and free education at all levels - to use Mary Harney's phrase it resided 'somewhere between Boston and Berlin', blending European social welfarism with American neoliberalism. And then the global financial crisis occured and Ireland's boom rapidly heads for bust with plummeting house prices, rapidly rising unemployment, personal tax hikes, and salary cuts across the private and public sector.

In 2006 I co-edited 'Understanding Contemporary Ireland' with Brendan Bartley. The book consisted of 22 chapters examining all aspects of society and economy, written by a collection of leading social scientists, all of whom challenged the myth that the Celtic Tiger had done nothing but good and were sceptical as to government policy and the sustainability of the economy. I don't think any of those writing anticipated the wheels coming off Ireland Inc. quite so spectacularly though. We were probably all hoping for a soft landing even if we feared the worst. What we're experiencing is anything but soft, although it's still a long way from Iceland's demise (and certainly the joke that Ireland was Iceland but for one letter and six months has not come to pass). I thought it was about time I got beyond the newspaper reports and started to read some of the analysis that seeks to explain what went wrong. To that end I went and bought a number of books over the weekend (from The Reading Room) which I'll be reviewing over the coming weeks as I get myself back up to speed with the state of contemporary Ireland.







I'm also co-organising a one day workshop on Nov 23rd entitled 'Geography after NAMA' (the government's plan to buy the bad property debts off the banks) and it'll be interesting to see what other social scientists make of what is occuring.

The Lazy Sunday Service

Posts I enjoyed this week
Good writing, redux: Hooray for Hollywood - Crime Always Pays
So you want to be a crime writer - Crime Watch
It's all material - Do Some Damage
Researching place - Do You Write Under Your Own Name
Forgotten Book: Murder at the Villa Rose - In Reference to Murder
The Plundering PO8 - The Rap Sheet
The state of the crime novel - Huffington Post
Archetypes: Unvailing the mentor - Adventures in Writing
What I read in October - Big Beat from Badsville

My posts this week
Review of If the Dead Rise Not by Philip Kerr
October reviews
Necessary Evil?
Review of Rubble by Jeff Byles
What is family?
Saturday Snippet: The Rabbit Factory by Marshall Karp