Review of The Day of the Jack Russell by Bateman (Headline, 2009)

The owner of the No Alibis bookshop in Belfast uses his vast knowledge of crime fiction to run a sideline private investigation service, as long as it doesn’t involve any danger or straying to far from the city. He’s hired by Billy Randall, the owner of a no-frills airline, to track down two vandals who have videoed themselves painting an enormous cock onto his forehead on a giant billboard, and then posted it up on YouTube. Accompanied by Jeff, his student worker, and Alison, his occasional girlfriend, and somewhat encumbered by his battleaxe mother, the nameless shopkeeper soon discovers who the culprits are, but shortly afterwards they are murdered. In order to prove his innocence he sets out to discover who the real murderer is, but the only clue is the disappearance of a stuffed Jack Russell dog which had a very important owner. It seems though that he is not the only person with an interest in the dog, with the police, MI5 and a Belfast gangster also in the hunt. What’s so important about this dog? And why were the two vandals killed?

It’s quite some time since I read a Bateman novel. In fact, the last time was when he hadn’t dropped Colin from his name. I think I read the first seven or eight of his books, stopping around Mohammad Maguire and Shooting Sean, which seemed a bit thin and tired compared with his earlier work. Divorcing Jack is, however, still in my top ten reads, a brilliant debut novel. So, it was a good to tuck into The Day of the Jack Russell to resample his work. As with his other novels, TDJR is a comic crime caper, laced throughout with humour, gags, and oddball characters, and I found myself laughing out loud on a fair few occasions. Bateman’s writing is witty and engaging and the pages fly by. He has a natural gift for crafting dialogue, which crackles off the page. The only thing that riled was the main character, who to put it bluntly is a bit of a wanker – a condescending, anally-retentive, know-it-all megalomaniac and hypochondriac. Heaven knows what Alison, his supposed girlfriend, sees in him. I know that’s how he’s meant to be, but as a narrator I found him all but impossible to warm to. The plot just about holds together given the madcap action and an investigation style that specialises in leaps of faith based on the plot devices of various classic crime novels. Overall, an entertaining read, and worth checking out if you like comic crime capers.

The Lazy Sunday Service

This bank holiday has take up a predictable pattern - read, throw ball for dogs, rebuild wall, check internet, repeat. Bliss. This is to be the week of trying to catch up on reviews. I've five books finished that need their review written. I hope to get three of them done today and the other two tomorrow, by which time I should have finished another book. I'm a reading roll!

My posts this week:
Some Like It Hot
Eurovision hangover
Review of A Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotta
Ireland's housing market undervalued
May reviews
Review of A Deadly Trade by Michael Stanley
Retrospective commercial rent reductions
Academic blogging: issues and challenges
Saturday snippet: Hand in the Fire by Hugo Hamilton

Saturday Snippet: Hand in the Fire by Hugo Hamilton

Hand in the Fire tells the story of Vid Cosic, a Serbian immigrant to Ireland, and his relationship with the dysfunctional Concannon family who befriend him. Binding them together in a strange and strained embrace are four violent incidents - the death of Cosic's parents in a car crash in Serbia, the drowning of a pregnant, unmarried young woman off the Conemara coast, a drunken brawl that leaves a man with a broken jaw and hip, and fists thrown in the break-up of a troubled marriage. I bought it as in impulse buy in The Reading Room in Carrick-on-Shannon based on the strength of the opening few lines. And here they are:

You have a funny way of doing things here.

Like friendship, for example.

Nobody does friendship like you do in this country. It comes out of nowhere. Full on. All or nothing. I've been to places where friendship is cultivated with great care over a longer period of time, like a balcony garden. Here it seems to grow wild.

You could say that I did him a small favour. I found his mobile phone lying in the street and contacted his girlfriend. Her name was Helen and there was a picture of her on the phone, laughing into the camera. I could have read through all her messages, but I didn't want to be intrusive. I contacted her and arranged for him to pick it up that same evening. It was nothing more than that. Anyone else would have done the same. I waited outside a late-night shop and saw him walking towards me with a big smile as though we already knew each other. He thanked me and stood there, refusing to let me go. Before I knew it, he was returning the favour, shaking hands and leading me away to a bar for a drink.

I read the story in several sittings over one day and I'll post my review sometime this week.

Academic blogging: Issues and Challenges

Yesterday I attended a symposium on academic blogging in Trinity College Dublin organised by the collective who produce Pue's Occurrences. My own contribution concerned the Ireland After NAMA blog (other blogs represented are listed below). It was fascinating to listen to the experiences of other academic bloggers and the kinds of issues and challenges that they face through blogging. I thought it might be useful to share those challenges with a non-academic audience (I've put up a very similar post on Ireland After NAMA given the completely different constituencies of the two blogs), so below is a basic summary. I'm sure many of these issues will resonate with non-academic bloggers as well.

Sustainability

• feeding the monster - need to post regularly to build and maintain a reader base
• voluntarism – relies on voluntary labour and enthusiasm of posters
• in collective blogs, getting people to contribute - people are busy; but also a lack of confidence in the credibility of the media

Academic credibility

• some contributors worried about wasting work by publishing it through a media that presently lacks sufficient academic and institutional credibility and legitimacy

Building a readership/community

• how to implement successful strategies to develop a readership base
• building trust and relationship with readers; building a community

Relationship between individual creative/academic freedom and institutional control and oversight

• to what extent does a blog represent institution? What level of control do they/should they have over it?
• To what extent are blogs experimental thought spaces for ideas and analysis as opposed to formal spaces of reporting/commentary (does it have to have the same levels of rigour and validity as that written in a journal?)

Different way of working

• a blog can drive a research agenda and not the other way
• blogging is often a process of doing and publishing research in a just in time fashion

Different way of writing/communicating

• shorter pieces in a much more journalistic style; lacks usual academic conventions
• making ideas and writing open and accessible

Editorial policy

• for collective blogs - is there a need for an editorial policy or control? Or a writer’s/reader’s charter? What happens if people post material that is inappropriate or badly written? Who takes editorial control? On what basis?

Funding

• for design, maintenance and content, for subscriptions or servers, for events, etc

Media interest

• what happens if a post goes viral and the media get interested? It can be a lot of pressure and can take up a lot of time

Dealing with negative feedback/abuse

• vested interests do not necessarily like what you have to say and can react, sometimes not through public debate by private means; how to deal with this?

Dealing with the public

• dealing with comments in a timely and informative manner; being prepared to engage beyond the initial posting.
• how to deal with people who ask you to do work on their pet projects
• discussion of work on other social media such as bulletin boards – do you engage? What happens when the material gets misinterpreted?

Dealing with conflicts of interest

• how to deal with posts on topics or expressing views that conflict with or undermine funders of the blogger's research (or someone else's in the collective)

Dealing with data issues

• publishing material that is copyrighted or used under data license; intellectual property issues in general
• maintaining links to other sites

Archiving and longevity

• what happens to the data and material being created? Long term archiving of material? Long term maintenance of material produced?

The blogs taking part were:
Pue's Occurrences
Ireland After NAMA
UCD Academic Blogging
Irish Left Archive
Come Here To Me!
Some Blind Alleys
History Compass
The Model Blog

Review of A Deadly Trade by Michael Stanley (Headline, 2009)

Jackalberry camp, a tourist retreat on a peninsula jutting out into the Linyanti River that separates Botswana and Namibia, is finding it difficult to make ends meet. Turning a poor financial situation into something worse are the murders of two guests, one of whom has been mutilated in the style of a revenge killing. Assistant Superintendent ‘Kubu’ Bengu of the Botswana CID is sent to investigate. It turns out that mutilated corpse has died before, having been recorded as slain in the Rhodesian war thirty years previously. The other dead man was an undercover police officer from South Africa. A third man is missing, having left the camp before the bodies were discovered. All of the guests and most of the staff seem to have something to hide and Kubu and his colleagues initially make slow progress. But then the remaining guests start to be murdered and somebody threatens Kubu, seeking to retrieve an impounded item. Something sinister from the past seems to be a play in the present, and if Kubu is to stop and solve the crimes he needs to unravel a deadly set of relations.

A Deadly Trade is a convoluted puzzle of a police procedural, at the heart of which is the affable and engaging character of Kubu. The writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip are particular good at creating a cast of complex and rounded characters, and the relations between them, and of evoking a strong sense of place as the investigation criss-crosses Botswana. They also do a fine job of portraying the police procedural elements without them detracting from the story. The plot for me is where the book has some niggles. There are effectively three main plots running through the story, along with a host of subplots, and at least one of the main plots could have been dropped, along with a couple of subplots. Red herrings are all well and good, but in terms of credibility for me there can’t be too many of them. Having finished the book a few days ago and now reflecting back on the story, I also find myself left with a handful of loose ends and questions, where things didn’t quite seem to add up. And in general terms the whole thing could do with a bit of tightening up. All relatively minor stuff, but I think created because there were too many threads being interwoven and some scenes were dwelt on rather than limiting the narrative to what was needed. Sometimes less is more. That said, A Deadly Trade is an enjoyable read and Kubu is a delightful character whose company I intend to share in the future. I have my eye out for the first book in the series A Carrion Death.

May Reviews

Relatively straightforward to pick a book of the month from May's reading, Charlie Huston's The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death was a blast - original, witty and smart.

Leather Maiden by Joe Lansdale ****
Roseanna by Maj Sjowall and Pers Wahloo ****
The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston *****
The People's Manifesto by Mark Thomas ****
The Devil's Garden by Ace Atkins ***
Chickenhawk by Robert Mason ****
Trail of Blood by S.J. Rozan ***
The American Envoy by Garbhan Downey ***

Review of The Goodbye Kiss by Massimo Carlotta (Europa Editions, 2006 [2000]; translated by Lawrence Venuti)

As a youth, Georgio Pellegrini was full of ideological fervour and commitment that ended with the unintended death of a night watchmen by a bomb planted outside the Industrialist’s Association. Ratted out by an ex-girlfriend, Pellegrini is forced to skip across the French border. A year later, a wanted man in Italy, he finds himself in Central America lending a hand to left wing militants involved in a civil war. When he is ordered to kill a fellow compatriot, he knows its time to leave, slipping across to Costa Rica where he spends a couple of years tending a bar and womanising, growing ever more homesick. Eventually he returns to Paris, determined to find a way to clear his name and return to Italy. His old political group finds someone already imprisoned to take the rap for the watchman’s death. He’s picked up at the border and charged with belonging to an armed group and told that they know about his deception; they’ll throw the book at him if he doesn’t name the entire network. Unwilling to serve a life sentence he cuts a deal with the police and after a couple of years he’s out of prison and looking to create a new life. But there are few opportunities for an ex-militant, ex-con with no scruples except a life of crime. Pellegrini is soon helping to run a strip joint, working various scams to supplement his living, always looking for new opportunities to make money and take advantage of weak women, in often cruel and sadistic ways. And he doesn’t care who he hurts or kills as long as he survives, but then he sees a way to reinvent himself as an honourable citizen – one last job is all that is required to set him up for life.

The Goodbye Kiss is, as one review says, ‘lean, mean and violent’; Italian noir at its darkest, placing the reader in the mind of criminal who’s prepared to do anything to get by. Pellegrini is a well formed character who is frighteningly believable, his thoughts and actions seemingly rationale and logical. He uses intimidation, manipulation and violence in a pre-meditated, calculated way to exert his will, yet he also understands his place in the wider criminal system and how to respect and work that system. Some of his actions are stomach churning and it is difficult to warm to the main character, but that is clearly the point. Criminals like Pellegrini are repulsive and, for many people, unfathomable, and Carlotto provides a window into their world. The book is written in a lucid, engaging, economic prose that keeps the pages turning, and the story is well structured and plotted, with just the right amount of backstory to give credibility. The book is short at 144 pages; and for me slightly too short. I was somewhat surprised when I turned a page to find it was the final one, with an ending I wasn’t expecting and found unsettling (I’d discuss this more, but it’s impossible without giving spoilers). Overall, well written and paced novel, that's a rewarding and disturbing read.