John Kelly, From Out of the City. Dalkey Archive Press, 2014.
Click here to read the first chapter at Numero Cinq
www.thisisjohnkelly.com/writer
This intriguing novel brings us to a future in which electricity is scarce and Dublin has gone to seed. Hawk-eyed octogenarian Monk is keeping assorted desperate characters under strict surveillance -- among them Schroeder, recently sacked from Trinity College, now stalking a reporter in the days leading up to the visit of the U. S. President. When the unthinkable happens and the President is assassinated, Monk sets about discovering what's happened to those in his care and, along the way, to the late President -- but this is not, he insists, the story of an assassination. Nor is it a thriller. It's the truth.
The city is Dublin, the year 2040. Out in the bay the USS John Barry is a permanent fixture. Sandymount Strand oozes toxins and is the ideal spot for self-immolation; town is largely the resort of junkies, whores and international flotsam and jetsam. Forces of the government of Taoiseach Domhnach Cascade shoot demonstrators on sight. And Richard Rutledge Barnes King, pill-popping, alcoholic American president, is killed at a Dublin Castle do. It is to be sure “a time when dysfunction . . . pervaded all”. It’s only 25 or so years away, and at times it feels closer.
But John Kelly has other fish to fry besides the “three-eyed mackerel” of dystopia. His arresting pictures of the urban scene are by no means to be dismissed. For one thing they’re sharply entertaining, and conveyed with a winning blend of verve and exasperation – verbal facility shadowed by a sense of cultural dismay.
But if all this novel had to offer was a series of set pieces depicting a polyglot crowd at Tara Street station, or the blocks at Grand Canal Docks where the second generation of “urban culchies” live, or the security rite of passage required to get beyond the gate at Trinity, shades of a Blade Runner remix would not be long in suggesting themselves. Especially as such scenarios – the black site at Shannon; the conversion of much of the park into Fort Phoenix – have the context of some fairly predictable takes on Ireland’s soul-destroying client relationship with the US, the world bully. But sci-fi is a red herring; the presidential killing doesn’t cue Tom Clancyoid kerfuffle.
Kelly's inventive, overwritten tale of double-dealing and moral vacancy unfurls amidst a backdrop of Machieavellian politics in a broken Dublin, 10 years after the Jerusalem War. The President of the United States, a drug-fueled libertine in love with his cockapoo, Elvis, has been shot dead at a dinner in his honor. On a dilapidated street in the town of Dún Laoghaire, we meet a trifecta of pitiable characters whose lives are indirectly upheaved by the aftershock of the assassination. There's our pleonastic, senescent narrator, an isolated voyeur with a surveillance headquarters in his attic, his main target, Schroeder, a former wunderkind turned drunk academic obsessed with the busty TV news reporter Paula Viola; and Walton, a porn-addicted hermit strapped to a wheelchair. This oddball ensemble unfortunately lacks sufficiently developed motivations, which in turn plot the course of this uneven story. The narrator's jarring interventions do the novel a further disservice: "I appreciate that there are elements of the thriller now creeping into the narrative…" he explains, "and indeed there will be more heightened scenes soon." Kelly proves himself as an imaginative storyteller with a keen eye for the absurdly depraved, but the overall result of the novel is scattershot. - Publishers Weekly
John Kelly knows his onions. That much is certain from the first sentence of From Out of the City. The novel opens about fifty years or so in the future, in a Dublin hot as the tropics, and reeking of waste and crime. An American president has just been murdered, and Monk, an eighty-four-year old who has been secretly surveilling his deadbeat neighbors, is intent on unveiling the true story behind the presidential assassination.
Through Monk's playful, gloomy, and outright unpredictable reportage the reader is transported through an underworld of negligent espionage, deceitful porn stars, and all manner of self-medicating, naval-gazing manic-depressives. Despite Monk's determination to not write a thriller, the book's as thrilling as they came, disturbingly relevant and unexpectedly moving. Underneath the baroque prose, the serpentine plot and the experience-violated (to borrow a Monkian term) anti-heroes, courses a powerful moral stance orchestrating the whole symphony like an undercover conspiracy. John Kelly doesn't just know his onions, he knows what to do with them.
In a way, our present situation is perfectly suited to our subject, my being in the US and your being in Ireland, our having this exchange over email. How likely do you think it is that our emails -- which, considering your book, will almost certainly touch upon the assassination of the president of the United States, espionage, religious extremism, suicide bombs, great white sharks off the coast of Kerry, the Devil himself, and a vast conspiracy aimed at undermining the anhedonic state of the leaders and constituents of our flailing nations -- how likely do you think it is that these emails will be intercepted and flagged as dangerous by either your government or mine?
Well, actually, I hadn't thought of that at all. It seems like a bizarre question but then, of course, we live in a very bizarre world. But surely there are thousands of novels, film scripts, newspapers, and magazines -- not to mention political, historical or academic tomes -- that contain some reference to any or all of the above? They can't all be setting off false alarms, can they? Anyway, this is a novel. It's a fiction that is extremely speculative about a future that might not be too far ahead. But you've got me thinking now. Of course, I can't speak for America but when I consider some of the Irish political leaders I've known over the years, about the only thing they'd be capable of intercepting would be a passing waiter with a tray of canapés.
But I should perhaps emphasize that my book is not actually about the assassination of a U.S. president. Yes, this is a terrible incident that happens in the book or, rather, has already happened when the action begins, but it's not about that. What it's actually about is dysfunction. Firstly, there is personal dysfunction -- which may be physical, sexual, emotional, or whatever, and then there is a civic, national, global, and possibly even cosmic dysfunction. That's what was preoccupying me as this book came into being -- dysfunction. I guess I was a real hoot to be around! In fact the working title was Everything is Broken.
I knew I didn't want to write was a book that was just about bad relationships, unhealthy sexual attitudes, and the trains not running on time (although that's all in there too), and so, in order to heighten things, I went into the territory of what might be seen as the ultimate dysfunctional act -- the killing of another human being. And then, by making that human being a global figure, everything takes on an even more shocking significance. Now, you have read the book, and you know that there's yet another element at work that I don't wish to reveal here. No spoilers, please. But I wandered off into the future, not into the realms of sci-fi but just far enough for things to be radically different and yet, in many ways, exactly the same.
Furthermore, the idea of an American president being assassinated in Dublin has an added potency. It would represent a most extraordinary breakdown, not just for American society but for Irish society too. I mean, we have a thing about U.S. presidents in Ireland. So many of them came from here -- immigrant's sons -- and great pride is taken in that. I should tell you that my mother's name is Kennedy and that I grew up with a picture of JFK and Jackie on the wall. So what I'm saying is that the relationship between Ireland and the U.S. is very deep and very real. And in my novel, the effect of such a traumatic event happening in Ireland -- an act not just against the order of things but also against history and even kinship -- is that it throws the narrative into a very dysfunctional world where, some years from now, things have altered in very significant ways and unthinkable things are happening. And having set things up in this way, the narrator then introduces himself and the characters who are living their various lives in the middle of it all.
You know, for all the dysfunction, the novel sincerely is a hoot to read. A large part of that hoot for me was the liveliness of your prose. Take a few sentences from the first paragraph of the prologue:
Crimson soaked purple into black and dignitaries screamed at the sight of presidential brains lashed across the broad white britches of George III. There were summer blossoms on the tables, potatoes in their jackets and shattered crystal in the Wicklow lamb.
In addition to being beautiful, and often hilarious, your sentences, I find, are very welcoming -- much more Flann O'Brien, I think, than either Joyce or Beckett. Even more than your prose exhibits your obvious intelligence and impressive savoir-faire, it feels imbued with warmth, care, and maybe most of all a sense of joy. Can you tell me a little about your craftsmanship? What was it like for you to write this book?
Well, thank you. Perhaps I should quit while I'm ahead? Flann O'Brien sets the bar very high indeed. As do the other two lads. But to be honest I'm not, personally, all that conscious of the spirit of Flann in the book, apart from a slight nod in that direction when the two pantomime policemen turn up. But no doubt you're right. When I was teenager, I read and loved everything Flann O'Brien wrote. He came from Tyrone, a neighboring county to my own, and that kind of language and humor came very naturally to quite a few of us. Surreal conversations were commonplace but they tended to get more Beckettian as the night went on. It was perhaps inevitable that when I wrote my first fiction it really was sub-Flann stuff, but I'd say this book is much less so. In fact, I think the book that may have sparked it in some indefinable way might have been Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. I think it might have nudged me into a certain mood. I can't be sure. And of course the people you have mentioned are always going to be there -- a hundred floors above me, as Leonard would say.
You're very kind about my language, and perhaps I should say that my narrator, Monk, is the way he is because I really wanted to get deep into language. I wanted (needed) to have fun, and so I created a character who would use a word like pandiculation. And maybe that's a Flann O'Brien thing? He'd find a word like that very comical -- and so do I. I don't think there are many actual jokes in the book -- if any -- but I guess what I'm hoping is that everything -- the humor, the unease, even the distaste in places -- comes from the language itself. That's why the book is packed with detail, place-names, street-names and the Latin names for garden birds. Because my narrator is the sort of person who would know such things. He's a fact collector, after all, and he inhabits the city of James Joyce. What can possibly go wrong?
There seems to be a great deal of fact collecting in From Out of the City, not just the main characters, but a plethora of spies, newscasters, and obsessive collectors of porn star trivia. But it seemed like you were often in some way, opposing mere fact collecting with truth-telling. Like when Monk (who repeatedly emphasizes the fact that he is not weaving together a story, but simple telling the truth) parenthetically mentions that he has corrected the spelling in a series of emails he has intercepted between two of his drunken neighbors -- a hilarious moment, but also a telling one, as though to tell the truth one has to correct, or distort the facts in order to make them legible. As someone who has done quite a bit of fact collecting, in radio, journalism, and TV, I'm wondering what draws you to writing fiction.
Well, I guess many people, nowadays, take (and should take) an active interest in how information is delivered. And, of course, consumed. I'm not talking about propaganda or other methods of, to use Monk's words -- "pronouncement, obfuscation and spin" -- I mean basic knowledge. "Facts" are now readily available on any topic you can think of, but, of course, this availability should never be mistaken for reliability. I could hit you, right now, with all sorts of facts on a given subject, and it might imply some expertise on my part but, of course, it could well be a bluff. I mean, I'm connected to the net and I could just grab a few words here and there, a few scientific terms and I could then translate them into Mandarin. And yet it would be a posture and nothing more.
More worrying to me is that it's quite conceivable that, at some point, we might no longer need to know anything much in terms of information. Why bother? What would be the point when all you have to do is look something up on your phone, or on your glasses, or on the chip in your tooth? I studied law and, even then, I realized that there was an issue there. I was obliged to commit vast amounts of material to memory in order to pass exams, but, in the real world, I would be consulting the actual books themselves, the statutes, and in fact it would be irresponsible not to. So why learn things off when there's no actual need to? Why not keep that brain-space for something else? Now, maybe I'm being a little facetious, but actually I've been writing something about a world where the systems fail and very few people are left who actually know anything about anything. They become so crucial -- and potentially dangerous -- that they are rounded up. The last repositories of actual knowledge or expertise. If I can relate the question to my own job as a music broadcaster who programs his own music, yes, I agree that every piece of music that I keep on a shelf at home is also in some computer database somewhere but the reality is that you still need a human being to know that a certain piece of music actually exists in the first place. I guess I'm old school in this regard, but I place huge value in expertise, experience and study -- in knowing your onions.
Maybe I'm going off track a little here, so to get back to what you asked about the truth and fiction. Well, I do believe, for all my own regard for and pleasure in facts, that fiction can do a job that any amount of factual work cannot. Is there a better portrait of Dublin than Ulysses? I don't think so. Read Ulysses and you'll get more than you'll ever get from any amount of history books. And that reminds me of something James Ellroy has said many times about verisimilitude. I love his books. Fiction, yes, and very heightened, but it gives us so many truths. I interviewed him once and he talked about the need for a "reckless verisimilitude." I like that idea.
In any case, I distrust reality. When I was at school the priest used to hand out a religious magazine called Reality -- and it was an outrageous misnomer. It had as much to do with reality as Walt Disney. It was an example of language used incorrectly and yet being accepted without remark. But look, language will always be under that sort of threat. I hear gobshites on the radio every morning -- PR people, spokespeople, politicians -- people trained in the dark arts of lying. And lying to your face, even when they know that you know they are lying. It's shameless stuff. A perversion of language. But of course, almost everything is propaganda because, by now, we all know how to use it. And maybe everything I'm saying in this interview is propaganda on behalf of the book I have just written. I hope not.
And so, moving along swiftly -- and this is something touched upon by Monk when he insists that his version of events is the truth -- the thing about historical detail, or what becomes historical detail, is that it never tells us the really important stuff. I'm a believer in that theory about old songs -- traditional Irish songs, say. Yes, they may not tell us exactly what happened in a particular period of our history, but what they will tell is how people felt.
You seem to have a tremendous respect for other people's music, or, more broadly other people's voices. As a world-renowned broadcaster and interviewer, you're obviously a master at inviting other people to speak and inviting other people's songs to play. I see this in your novel as well -- without spoiling anything, I think I can say, that Monk regards this thing he's writing as a prelude or a question, something to be referred to and used in a piece of fiction another character will one day publish. What are some of the most useful -- for lack of a better word -- tactics you've developed in programming music and interviewing people? Did these tactics come into play in the process of writing this novel?
Well, there you go! The propaganda must be working. You and I have never met, and I'm sure you never heard of me before you read my book, and yet you describe me as "a world-renowned interviewer." Well, of course I'm not a world-renowned anything and yet, somehow, as a result of what various websites, including my own, no doubt, report, that particular notion seems to have been transmitted. It just goes to show how facts (actual facts) can be presented, only to add up to something else entirely. The reality is that it's the people I have interviewed who are, in some cases, world renowned -- and not me. In fact, I doubt that the guys in my local pub have much of an idea of what it is I do.
But in terms of what you ask, in terms of interviewing people, I always start from the position that the person I'm interviewing is more interesting than I am. It seems like a daft thing to say -- of course David Bowie is more interesting than you are -- but some interviewers just can't manage to properly adopt that position. And if you are the sort of person who thinks yourself cleverer than Seamus Heaney, say, or Paul Auster and you'd like to attempt to prove your theory on TV or radio, then you're in the wrong job.
Now, I appreciate that I'm in quite a unique position. I'm not working in print these days and I was never a critic so I do enjoy a rather different role. A print journalist might get ten pages out of someone like Lou Reed not cooperating, but my job is to make sure the person talks -- and so I'm lucky. In many ways, I'm a facilitator as much as an investigator and I'm certainly not there to showboat and be a wise-ass. Again, simply because my role doesn't call for aggro. I'm not, after all, grilling politicians or world leaders. I'm talking to artists and I genuinely want to hear what they have to say about the work, about the creative process. So I just talk, try to extract the wisdom and, with any luck, we all might learn something.
And again, to go back to your question, because of my job, yes I do come into contact with people for whom I have a huge regard. I did a public event a few years ago with Peter O'Toole and one critic said that I sounded a little in awe of him. Well, yes, I was in awe of him. I make no apology for that. I was also in awe of the performance this man was putting in right in front of me -- and I was very happy to let him at it, to tee up his punch lines and generally be the straight man. And it all made for very good radio too... Come to think of it, everyone in the room was in awe of O'Toole that day. Except, of course, the critic.
I'm not sure what any of this has to do with the book, except for the fact that, over the years, I have received a great education simply by having the privilege of sitting down and having uninterrupted conversations with some great people -- and some great intellects -- where sometimes I'm pedaling very hard to keep up. I suppose what it might mean is that I have been exposed to a lot of thought -- to a lot of ideas, processes, tales of the creative life. And that amounts to exposure to quite a lot of intense experience and I guess some of that experience must come out in my own writing somewhere -- but I can't actually specify where and when. But, in truth, I really do see the two activities as very separate. Broadcasting is the day job and my writing is something else. It goes on regardless and often in spite of everything. The writing is what happens when you're on your own, not trying to make sense of someone else's life and experience but, rather, trying to make sense of your own. And that's the real pancake, right there.
Monk has medication that keeps him writing and figuring out his experience: Presbutex, a miracle pill for preventing Alzheimer's -- "also a rumored cure for any creative mind allegedly blocked or otherwise incapable of telling the truth." What is your Presbutex? I don't mean meds necessarily, but some source of inspiration to keep you from being blocked, to keep you glued to the pursuit of telling the truth, despite present day dysfunctions.
I'm not so sure that truth-telling is my motivation. I have written a fiction after all and I'm someone who takes great pleasure in making stuff up. Not that I find it easy. As Pete Hamill said, writing is the hardest work you can do that doesn't involve heavy lifting, and I'm with him on that. I find it very tough actually. But then, if I'm not writing I'm deeply unhappy. That why I make the time actually do it, to fit it in around work -- very early starts, the odd all-nighter and perhaps two or three weekends of total immersion through the course of the year. That's the only way I can manage with the day job. But of course it's like that for any writer.
What keeps me going, what enthuses me, is talking to other writers, reading as much as I can, and accepting the odd boost if it comes along. Believe me, there have been times, over the years, when it might have seemed a much wiser policy not to exhaust myself trying to push on as a writer. But, as I say, all writers seem to go through very similar experiences but the important thing, if you really are a writer, is not to give up. And just get up at five a.m., if that's what it takes. Just get on with it. You can sleep when you're dead. And the people who rejected you or dropped you or whatever, don't even ignore them. Do your best work. That's the only thing that counts.
As for my inspirations, I was greatly inspired by Kjersti Skomsvold. I was also seriously encouraged by the success of Kevin Barry. Kevin is a genius, a great guy too, and to see successful books which were not quite in the mainstream of what the Irish novel had become, well that gave me a real boost. There were also writers much younger who gave me a real lift too -- just seeing what they were capable of -- Colin Barrett, Donal Ryan, and many more. Reading these people, talking to them, sharing experiences, it all helps to create the right mood and provoke the right energy. It was also very important for me to see writers of a slightly earlier vintage, people like Keith Ridgway and Mike McCormack very much back on the block. All of these things were pushing me and I'm very grateful. Of course, beyond that, beyond the buzz of all that, you're totally on your own again. But you're stronger. More able.
How about music? The book makes reference to many musicians: Thelonious Monk, Pere Ubu, Stravinsky, to name a few. If you were to compose a soundtrack to accompany the reading of your book, what are some songs you would include?
It's odd. I'm not sure music played any actual part in either the inspiration or the writing. In fact, I need silence to write. If there's going to be any music in the background it has to be Steve Reich, J.S Bach, or Brian Eno -- and that's not to disrespect their music in any way. That said, when I'm not writing, it could be anything -- from Dock Boggs to Sonny Rollins to Daft Punk. Yes, there are references in the book that might well suggest a soundtrack, but I was not at all conscious of that. I think, in fact, that the music mentioned might have suggested itself. Certain characters, certain sounds. I probably did have in mind the question of what music will people be listening to in the near future. And, of course, what will be long gone, like snow off a ditch. But if anybody was to make a movie of From out of the City -- and good luck to them! -- I'd like them to lay on plenty Elvis Costello & The Roots. Wise Up Ghost was my CD of last year. That would work. As the Shangri-Las put it -- Past, Present, and Future.
Now that I think about it, the medium with the more ambiguous presence in the novel is not really music, but the novel itself. In the future most people don't seem to read many novels. And yet on the other hand, there's a sense of immense, almost religious significance placed on the societal function of novels -- Monk and Schroeder both mention, for instance, that publishers insist on novels including a sense of redemption. How did you come to speculate that future publishers will insist on this, and how do you think this speculation reflects on the current condition of the novel?
That insistence on redemption is not actually a reference to the future at all; I think that's the way things are right now. Mainstream literary publishing seems, for the most part, to work off a checklist of what are seen as the vital ingredients of a book that will sell in massive numbers -- the main one being the desire that a manuscript closely resembles something that already exists and is already a proven seller. But that's okay. The mainstream has its own business to attend to, whether it's books, music, the movies, or whatever. Let them at it. It's just that it doesn't particularly interest me. The best music, as far as I'm concerned, is on indie labels and, increasingly, all the best books. I think more and more writers, even established ones, have realized this in the last ten years or so.
But in truth, I don't feel much qualified to talk about the novel or its condition -- basically I don't have the language for it, and I'm not a critic. But as a reader, I have a fair bit of experience, and as a writer who has been published and rejected -- sometimes by the same publishing house -- I do have a view on it. Basically, as I've just said, I think that the success of certain novels has created a situation where, unless you write in a similar mode, you'll find things very difficult in terms of publishing. But let's leave that to one side. I now have the best publisher I could possibly have -- I only wish we'd met each other fifteen years ago.
And when I got to know the Dalkey list I realized that, yes, indeed there are all sorts of ways to write a novel, and I was thrilled and relieved to discover that all sorts of very interesting things were still being done. And what's more, that there was an interested readership out there, those who also wanted a bit more from their literary fiction.
Let me refine my last question a little bit: I guess what interests me about these publishers of the future isn't so much their insistence on novels fulfilling a checklist (though this is interesting too), so much as the fact that redemption is on that checklist. Maybe I'm thinking of a different idea of redemption than you had in mind, but mainstream publishers today don't strike me as being particularly interested in redemption -- I think they're, as you said, focused on turning a profit that means repeating old forms and ideas, not overturning or redeeming them. I find it extremely compelling that to a certain extent Monk succumbs to the publishers' insistence on redemption (as do you, for that matter) and that what he writes becomes, I think, both more complex and audacious as a result. This is the ambiguity I wanted to ask you about: that in your book, literature seems to have become both more marginalized and more important than ever. Is this a trend you see developing today?
The redemption that seems to interest publishers and moviemakers is one contained entirely within the story itself. Basically, what they want is a happy ending and, failing that, one that is deliciously sad, which is just another kind of happy ending. But again, as with music and indeed the visual arts, the mainstream and the comfortable don't appeal to me at all. You can get called a music snob for preferring Little Richard to Pat Boone, but there it is. But it's the once marginalized stuff that lasts, and it lasts because it has actual meaning. Anyway what I'm saying is that nice things don't much appeal to me. My whole education was about the mainstream -- appreciating nice music, nice landscapes, nice poems -- everything had to be nice to have any value. Well, I don't buy that at all. Give me Bartók over Mozart any day. And give me Lou Reed over any of them.
I agree that, in my book, literature is presented as both marginalized and more important than ever. There's a throwaway line about people still reading novels in Canada -- and Monk, who is obsessed with information and knowledge, has very little time for novels, as such. He keeps insisting, for example, that this is no thriller. But of course the story he's telling is actually an absolute blockbuster -- except that he's refusing to go there. I guess that's where this all began for me. A dramatic, traumatic event -- the very stuff of a bestseller or a blockbuster movie -- but with much of it perversely backgrounded when told by a very particular narrator, and written by someone who was, when he began the book, rather disillusioned with the way publishing seemed to be going.
Anyway, so this is the book I wanted to write. I wasn't guided by anyone, I wasn't trying to second guess anyone. It was a solo run, completely solo, and with little hope. But then when I collapsed in a heap at the end of it, there was Dalkey Archive -- unexpected, unforeseen and ready to go after reading the first ten pages. I don't think the redemption word was mentioned at all.
But yes, Monk, for all his protestations, starts to play the game, experimenting with the possibility of the best, the appropriate, maybe even the nice denouement, even examining the word to see what it actually demands. And yes, there actually is redemption here and it comes from unlikely sources. But then maybe there's always some trace of redemption in any human story -- whether it's on the checklist or not? Even when a character in a book, or a writer of a book, is dead set against it. - Interview by Jesse Kohn
John Kelly is an Irish radio DJ, the presenter of the Irish equivalent of ‘The Review Show’ and, also, a writer of some achievement. His previous novels have defined the life (and preserved the schoolboy slang) of Enniskillen teenagers while his memoir, Cool About the Ankles, is as good a book about Northern Ireland as has been published.
From Out of the City has wider ambitions, broader influences and driven by an outraged wit it has a broader appeal. Our narrator, Monk, is in his eighties, living just outside Dublin in the mid-twenty-first century occupying his time by keeping surveillance on his neighbours and, even, monitoring the security services that have made Dublin their base (and home to one of their prisons). He reflects on the consequences of Ireland’s economic woes of the early part of the century, “a place so deep in debt that all sovereignty has been gone for years.” Ireland is now “a place neither utopian nor dystopian”, Dublin a “rundown wreck of a capital … now little more than a mix of Camden Market and old Philadelphia” and run largely by the American security services.
Monk’s surveillance focuses on his neighbour, Anton Schroeder, a failed novelist and academic who, inadvertently, stumbles into a loose association with the death of the American President who is on a State visit to Dublin. That is the plot, though it has to be remembered that plot is also a synonym for conspiracy. Unravelling one conspiracy is the centre of the novel but set in the decayed future that William Gibson has made his own, and revolving around characters watching (and informing on) each other in a society where “no conspiracy too small”, amid all manner of personal and cultural corruption, From Out of the City is a startlingly energetic and vivid novel.
Recalling the work of Flann O’Brien, a considerable compliment (there are even jokes about comic policemen here as funny as any by O’Brien), Kelly’s language is a torrent of comic inventiveness that makes it a joy to read. The language plays with an Ireland that has been cut off from its past, a society that no longer knows the history behind its street names though a psychogeographical continuity means that Temple Bar retains its atmosphere of “threat and decay”. Economic failure has led to cultural loss, the constant surveillance of its people maintains the dislocation of a people who no longer have “even the slightest clue of the ghosts which surround them as they sleep.” What does the city lose, John Kelly asks, when its inhabitants no longer know the history behind its street names: “Dawson Street, named for Joshua Dawson, Collector of Dublin, Secretary of Ireland and Member of Parliament for County Wicklow”?
Kelly’s writing has its echoes of all that has gone before. From Joyce and O’Brien, even a touch of Beckett’s Murphy in the opening pages, Ireland’s trilogy of modernist writers and their legacy has inspired From Out of the City but it is a novel with a voice of its own. Among the echoes, perhaps, is the refrain of a Bob Dylan song, “Everything is broken”, and it’s a rare novelist that can hold his own with a comparison to the best of Dylan, this is one.
Any Cop?: An excellent novel that plays as much with the possibilities of language as the satirical portrait of a financially-crippled country culturally enthralled to America. - James Doyle
“Often
the prose often becomes functional, leaden—rhyming off lists, dates in
history, naming streets—but this serves to accentuate the more lyrical
passages, the flecks of gold glinting in this uneven but ultimately
rewarding read.”
Like a literary alchemist John Kelly throws in sprinkles of history, social commentary, sketched-out lives, psychological insights, and an abundance of place names into his crucible. What emerges is not necessarily a gold nugget, but a few flecks do glitter along the way.
Set in 2040, in From Out of the City the meanderings of main character Schroeder around a dystopian Dublin inevitably suggests a nod to Ulysses. George Orwell’s 1984, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and even Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle also come to mind, as does the metafiction of Flan O’Brian.
Using his narrator, Monk, to interpose his authorial voice Kelly writes: “This is an honest and faithful record of breakage and distress at a time when dysfunction was everywhere and anywhere.”
The plot, which limps along slightly in the first half but kicks into gear for the finale, is centred around the assassination of U.S. president Richard King: “A proud Memphian, he was a cigar smoker, a pill popper and an alcoholic.”
King is in Dublin to visit his daughter, Princess, who is studying at Trinity College which has become a fortress surrounded by armed guards and missile launchers to protect the president’s daughter.
Monk watches events from his rundown garret in Dún Laoghaire, spying on the main protagonists, hacking into their computers, phones and Dublin’s network of CCTV cameras to witness events unfolding.
He pays particular attention to Schroeder, a former Trinity lecturer and author of Lucky’s Tirade (ah yes Beckett is in there as well).
Schroeder is badly messed up, imbibing a daily cocktail of pills, alcohol and the noxious polluted air of a globally warmed Ireland. The waters of Dublin Bay, where a U.S. warship is permanently anchored, are poisonous, the Emerald Isle is, like Shroeder, falling apart.
The body count mounts, a femme fatale enters the story as an earlier love interest departs. Betrayals, kidnappings, societal breakdown and Ukranain porn stars weave in and out of the narrative.
There is high comedy here but often the tone of From Out of the City is despairing, a prophetic warning of how Kelly sees Ireland mutating and pointing the finger at those who are to blame.
On a train Schroeder sees “. . . a huddle of schoolboys on the platform. School uniform from the waist up and, from the waist down, shorts, bare legs and the dried rugby-mud of privilege. Little tadpole lawyers and doctors—perfect cross breeds between the cheekboned princesses of Southside Dublin and the gormless gods from across the avenue. All of them complicit in what is happened. In sucking the soul out of the place. The nation. In capitulating to vulgarity at every turn. In raising the accountant above the medic, the socialite above the poet, the general above the pianist, the professional shit above the man who might possibly fix your head.”
The truth behind the assassination of President King and how Schroeder is linked comes as an ingenious twist to the tale, shifting all that went before into a new perspective. A second revelation on the relationship between the voyeuristic narrator Monk and those he is monitoring is not really that big a revelation once it is named but helps put his spying into context.
The prose often becomes functional, leaden—rhyming off lists, dates in history, naming streets—but this serves to accentuate the more lyrical passages, the flecks of gold glinting in this uneven but ultimately rewarding read.
Like a literary alchemist John Kelly throws in sprinkles of history, social commentary, sketched-out lives, psychological insights, and an abundance of place names into his crucible. What emerges is not necessarily a gold nugget, but a few flecks do glitter along the way.
Set in 2040, in From Out of the City the meanderings of main character Schroeder around a dystopian Dublin inevitably suggests a nod to Ulysses. George Orwell’s 1984, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and even Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle also come to mind, as does the metafiction of Flan O’Brian.
Using his narrator, Monk, to interpose his authorial voice Kelly writes: “This is an honest and faithful record of breakage and distress at a time when dysfunction was everywhere and anywhere.”
The plot, which limps along slightly in the first half but kicks into gear for the finale, is centred around the assassination of U.S. president Richard King: “A proud Memphian, he was a cigar smoker, a pill popper and an alcoholic.”
King is in Dublin to visit his daughter, Princess, who is studying at Trinity College which has become a fortress surrounded by armed guards and missile launchers to protect the president’s daughter.
Monk watches events from his rundown garret in Dún Laoghaire, spying on the main protagonists, hacking into their computers, phones and Dublin’s network of CCTV cameras to witness events unfolding.
He pays particular attention to Schroeder, a former Trinity lecturer and author of Lucky’s Tirade (ah yes Beckett is in there as well).
Schroeder is badly messed up, imbibing a daily cocktail of pills, alcohol and the noxious polluted air of a globally warmed Ireland. The waters of Dublin Bay, where a U.S. warship is permanently anchored, are poisonous, the Emerald Isle is, like Shroeder, falling apart.
The body count mounts, a femme fatale enters the story as an earlier love interest departs. Betrayals, kidnappings, societal breakdown and Ukranain porn stars weave in and out of the narrative.
There is high comedy here but often the tone of From Out of the City is despairing, a prophetic warning of how Kelly sees Ireland mutating and pointing the finger at those who are to blame.
On a train Schroeder sees “. . . a huddle of schoolboys on the platform. School uniform from the waist up and, from the waist down, shorts, bare legs and the dried rugby-mud of privilege. Little tadpole lawyers and doctors—perfect cross breeds between the cheekboned princesses of Southside Dublin and the gormless gods from across the avenue. All of them complicit in what is happened. In sucking the soul out of the place. The nation. In capitulating to vulgarity at every turn. In raising the accountant above the medic, the socialite above the poet, the general above the pianist, the professional shit above the man who might possibly fix your head.”
The truth behind the assassination of President King and how Schroeder is linked comes as an ingenious twist to the tale, shifting all that went before into a new perspective. A second revelation on the relationship between the voyeuristic narrator Monk and those he is monitoring is not really that big a revelation once it is named but helps put his spying into context.
The prose often becomes functional, leaden—rhyming off lists, dates in history, naming streets—but this serves to accentuate the more lyrical passages, the flecks of gold glinting in this uneven but ultimately rewarding read.
Like a literary alchemist John Kelly throws in sprinkles of
history, social commentary, sketched-out lives, psychological insights, and an
abundance of place names into his crucible. What emerges is not necessarily a
gold nugget, but a few flecks do glitter along the way.
Set in 2040, in From Out of the City the meanderings of main
character Schroeder around a dystopian Dublin inevitably suggests a nod to
Ulysses. George Orwell’s 1984, Franz Kafka’s The Trial, and even Philip K.
Dick’s The Man in the High Castle also come to mind, as does the metafiction of
Flan O’Brian.
Using his narrator, Monk, to interpose his authorial voice
Kelly writes: “This is an honest and faithful record of breakage and distress
at a time when dysfunction was
everywhere and anywhere.”
The plot, which limps along slightly in the first half but
kicks into gear for the finale, is centred around the assassination of U.S.
president Richard King: “A proud Memphian, he was a cigar smoker, a pill popper
and an alcoholic.”
King is in Dublin to visit his daughter, Princess, who is
studying at Trinity College which has become a fortress surrounded by armed
guards and missile launchers to protect the president’s daughter.
Monk watches events from his rundown garret in Dún
Laoghaire, spying on the main protagonists, hacking into their computers,
phones and Dublin’s network of CCTV cameras to witness events unfolding.
He pays particular attention to Schroeder, a former Trinity
lecturer and author of Lucky’s Tirade (ah yes Beckett is in there as well).
Schroeder is badly messed up, imbibing a daily cocktail of
pills, alcohol and the noxious polluted air of a globally warmed Ireland. The
waters of Dublin Bay, where a U.S. warship is permanently anchored, are
poisonous, the Emerald Isle is, like Shroeder, falling apart.
The body count mounts, a femme fatale enters the story as an
earlier love interest departs. Betrayals, kidnappings, societal breakdown and
Ukranain porn stars weave in and out of the narrative.
There is high comedy here but often the tone of From Out of
the City is despairing, a prophetic warning of how Kelly sees Ireland mutating
and pointing the finger at those who are to blame.
On a train Schroeder sees “. . . a huddle of schoolboys on
the platform. School uniform from the waist up and, from the waist down,
shorts, bare legs and the dried rugby-mud of privilege. Little tadpole lawyers
and doctors—perfect cross breeds between the cheekboned princesses of Southside
Dublin and the gormless gods from across the avenue. All of them complicit in
what is happened. In sucking the soul out of the place. The nation. In
capitulating to vulgarity at every turn. In raising the accountant above the
medic, the socialite above the poet, the general above the pianist, the
professional shit above the man who might possibly fix your head.”
The truth behind the assassination of President King and how
Schroeder is linked comes as an ingenious twist to the tale, shifting all that
went before into a new perspective. A second revelation on the relationship
between the voyeuristic narrator Monk and those he is monitoring is not really
that big a revelation once it is named but helps put his spying into context.
The prose often becomes functional, leaden—rhyming off
lists, dates in history, naming streets—but this serves to accentuate the more
lyrical passages, the flecks of gold glinting in this uneven but ultimately
rewarding read.
Tony Bailie’s third novel, A Verse to Murder, is available
as an ebook on Kindle. His previous two novels, ecopunks (2010) and The Lost
Chord (2006), both Lagan Press, are available as paperbacks. He has also had
two collections of poems published: Coill (2005) and The Tranquillity of Stone
(2006), both with Lapwing Publications. He works as a journalist in Belfast. - Tony Bailie
At Dublin castle, the most powerful man on the planet, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States – the President himself, Richard Rutledge Barnes, King of the Memphis Kings – lies dead on the carpet of St Patrick’s Hall, a bullet in his brain. The scene is set for a zany whodunit.
In the wider 21st century world, there is continuing tension in the Middle East following the Jerusalem War. A bomb has gone off in Rome and a chemical hoax causes commuter chaos in Prague. In the Amazon basin, 22 more species have become extinct.
The European Union is now the European Alliance, while the CIA has been replaced by the UIA, an unofficial body which allows its agents to operate freely across all borders. It is, says the book’s narrator, Monk, a time of personal, local, national, global and cosmic dysfunction.
The main protagonists are the three male inhabitants of 28 Hibernia Road, Dun Laoghaire, a suburb south of Dublin City. At the top of the house lives octogenarian Monk, named after the jazz icon Thelonius, who spends his time monitoring, observing and analysing the movement of the other occupants, Big Brother style.
Devoted to the truth, he reassures the reader over and often that his is an honest and faithful account of real events, real thoughts and real behaviour. Whether or not we should believe him, only time will tell.
40-year-old Anton James Schroeder, meanwhile, was the first new millennium baby to be born in the city, pipping the post to another contender in a neck and neck race. He is the author of a flawed novel entitled Lucky’s Tirade, and excessive drinking has just cost him his job as a lecturer in the English department of Trinity College.
Finally, confined to a wheelchair, Louis Walton – perpetually drunk or fried on painkillers – is fixated with Jakki Jack, a blond porn star from Kiev.
Schroeder’s girlfriend, Francesca Maria Maldini, works in PR, speaks many languages, makes frequent trips to China and listens to the Kronos Quartet on her headphones. When she leaves him unexpectedly, Schroeder stalks Chantal – chic in a French beret, as she cycles around the streets of Dublin – unaware that she is, in fact, following him, whether as herself or Margaret Lynch or Taylor Copland, an American agent.
Shroeder is equally preoccupied with television news reporter Paula Viola, who announces the president’s death to the world. Princess King, daughter of the dead president – depicted as a beauty and brainbox – is studying creative writing at TCD, where she is locked up for her own safety along with the Book of Kells, and Beckett’s cricket bat.
In the curious capital that is Dublin circa 2040, we learn that the citizens think neither crooked nor straight. It seems that the only enduring features are the street names, among them Westmoreland Street, named for John Fane, 10th Earl of Westmoreland and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and Grafton Street named for Charles Fitzroy, 2nd Duke of Grafton, wayward son of the illegitimate son of Charles II.
Far be it from me to spoil the reader’s fun by revealing how this raucous tale ends, but I can confirm that Kelly – who, as they say in these parts, has a real gift of the gab and a feeling for the music of language – employs his considerable arsenal of colloquialisms (ballyhoos, baloneys, blootereds), popular sayings and erudite smatterings of Latin and Irish to enliven the narrative.
In the opening chapters, as I reach for the dictionary to decipher words like jaglion, retromingent and brobdingnagian, I can’t help but feel that the worthy author is establishing his credentials as a chronicler of a city so ably evoked by Joyce, Beckett, Donleavy and others.
However, Kelly comes into his own when the action moves to Liddley’s pub on Nassau Street. Here, Schroeder meets Jules Roark, author of a book about the death of Catholicism. As more and more drink is consumed, the pair spar with each other and with the very tall Senegalese bartender named Paddy, after his fellow countryman and footballer, Patrick Viera.
Schroeder cures his hangover with a Turkish coffee that could kill a horse, and by the time he arrives at Reddings Hotel to meet an old school friend, Father Claude – pronounced ‘Clod’ not ‘Clode, who might as well be Father Ted – I find myself laughing so hard there are tears streaming down my cheeks.
When Walton somehow makes it to the Paradiso where his sex star idol, Jackie Jack, is due to make a special appearance, the tongue in cheek, whimsical dialogue becomes positively slapstick.
Somewhat abruptly, the mood changes with a lyrical passage about stars – there has been a power cut in Dun Laoghaire and, as Monk surveys the skies from his back garden, he reminisces about the constellations he studied as a boy.
Back then he was able to see the morning star with his naked eye, and the moons of Jupiter with the aid of binoculars, and through a telescope he viewed the deserts and polar caps of Mars. Those days are long gone.
By the end of From Out of the City, Monk has not moved from his eerie in Dun Laoghaire, where he sits on a sofa with a stoli in a highball minding his own cheese and biscuits. Readers will, of course, discover who killed President King and judge the whole for themselves, but for this reviewer the book’s creator deserves five stars and a hearty bravo. - Jenny Cathart
John Kelly sets up shop in 2040 Dublin, 13 years before Bohane, but where Barry bludgeons the west, Kelly lacerates the Fair City. Barry scraps technology whereas Kelly gaily satirises the warpings of internet culture and globalisation gone too far.
Kelly has sculpted a place of anarchy and environmental disarray within a puppet police state and a muscular “European Alliance”. Monk (named after ivory maestro Thelonious) is our octogenarian narrator, eavesdropping and spying on Schroeder, a sacked Trinity lecturer getting sucked towards the shooting of a US President during a State visit to Dublin. This is Monk’s confessional, and persistent reminders come that “this is no thriller or makey-up tale of suspense”, and is simply the events as they played out, “when dysfunction was everywhere and anywhere”.
Subsisting on Stolichnaya and pills, Schroeder is powerless in the path of conspirators, touts, secret agents and bad sorts who may have a stake in the shooting. Femme fatales, like mysterious Chantal and seductive reporter Paula Viola, torment his loins enjoyably.
US kowtowing has led to an aircraft carrier setting up residence in Dublin Bay, to the point that it is “as normal as the Sun”. Temple Bar is a no-go-zone of cutthroat bars, drug and smut snake pits. Protestors are mowed down by troops outside Leinster House and ‘Fort Phoenix’ now a US military base has lost all its deer to a deranged marine with a machine gun.
If Dublin doesn’t degenerate into Kelly’s devilish cesspit, you can imagine this taking on classic status. The One City, One Book committee may even look at Kelly’s hugely entertaining literary cartwheel and decide that if ever there was a writer who put their own stamp on this town of love and hate, it was him.
- www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/book-reviews/books-john-kellys-devilish-cesspit-of-love-and-hate-30335321.html
Ireland, not three decades from now, and Dublin is a fetid swamp of danger and despair. The President of the United States, Richard Rutledge Barnes King, over here for a visit to the “old spawning grounds”, has just been assassinated.
An eighty-year-old man called Monk sits at the centre of a spider’s web of surveillance, watching everything and following especially the every drunken, druggy move of his neighbour, a man half his age, a former Trinity lecturer by the name of Schroeder.
The murder of America’s potentate, the most potent potentate potential, and the search to find his killer in the violent and steaming ruins of Dublin, would surely make for a mighty thriller. But this is to be no thriller, mighty or otherwise, as its ancient narrator keeps assuring us and this book is not and will not be allowed to be about the regicide of President King. This is to be a catalogue of dysfunction in a world gone wrong and any intrigue or heart-pounding, page-turning dread is your own business.
John Kelly‘s new novel was once going to be called “Everything is Broken” and that is a theme which resonates throughout. Systems, relationships and people, everything is indeed broken. “From Out Of The City” is a densely-packed work, bristling with ideas. In a world of exponentially-increasing connectivity, does privacy even exist? What happens when the tabloidization of the media intersects with the pornification of popular culture? With the sum of all human knowledge instantly knowable, what is the point in actually knowing anything?
This is a beautifully-written book, cerebral, erudite and immersive, but it’s more than that too. Using the conceit of a novel-within-a-novel and an almost but not quite omniscient narrator, Kelly slyly subverts the reader’s prejudices at almost every page’s turn. He writes lyrically, understanding that words are the same as music and his tune is very sweet indeed. And just in case he feels tempted to lose the run of himself, he lets the main characters rip the living piss out of him at the first sign of Notions.
This is speculative fiction, rather than science fiction. Or, as Kelly puts it, “no robots or flying cars”. It’s the kind of book that gets into your head. Well, that’s what I’m crediting for the apocalyptic dreams of surveillance and seabirds anyway.
One more thing to say: it’s hilarious. Laugh-out-loud funny and laced with the kind of humour which leaves you smiling an hour later. I cannot recommend “From Out Of The City” highly enough. But don’t trust me. Trust yourself. Read the first chapter. It’s brilliant. Here. - Donal O’Keeffe
John Kelly, Sophisticated Boom Boom. Jonathan Cape, 2003.
In Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh, in the
seventies, nothing happens. Every day. Teenagers Declan Lydon and his
trusted friend Spit Maguire stand under lampposts waiting to be
overtaken by some hormonal storm, to be enveloped by strange women, to
finally make some connection with the glorious, glamorous world they
know is out there somewhere. Their salvation comes through music. When,
miraculously, Thin Lizzy come to town, Declan goes in to the concert in
his brown cardigan and emerges wearing a black leather jacket...
Sophisticated Boom Boom is a tender, hilarious account of the agonies and absurdities of growing up in a backwater of pebbledash and Space Invaders. Crucially, though, this is a love letter to the period and the place, and to the liberating, healing power of music that galvanises and transforms.
Sophisticated Boom Boom is a tender, hilarious account of the agonies and absurdities of growing up in a backwater of pebbledash and Space Invaders. Crucially, though, this is a love letter to the period and the place, and to the liberating, healing power of music that galvanises and transforms.
Irish writer Kelly pays homage to the music of his youth in this
light, affectionate tribute to the power of rock 'n' roll. In the early
1980s, best friends Declan Lydon and Spit Maguire are always complaining
that nothing ever happens in their small town of Enniskillen, Ireland;
in fact, family and church members are forever warning them to stay away
from things that are never available in the first place. Their yearning
for connection to a larger, more glamorous world is realized through
their worship of the rock band Thin Lizzy, especially the group's
charismatic front man, Dublin native Philip Lynott. When the band is
actually booked to play in their town, the teens are beside themselves
and see the event as a demarcation point. Everything would be different
now: "No more medals, no more cups, no more songs about fairies. It was
time to go electric." The author's unabashed fondness for the music and
the era is infectious; for a deeper, more literary take on rock music,
see Max Ludington's Tiger in a Trance (2003). - Joanne Wilkinson
I'm deeply suspicious of books where chapters open with song
lyrics or quotes from characters other than those featured in the text.
So when I perused through John Kelly's "Sophisticated Boom Boom" and
noted Elvis Costello quoted here, Al Green quoted there and Brian Eno
quoted somewhere else, I knew we were in for something either very good
or downright trashy. Actually, Kelly's book is neither but alludes to
both. "Sophisticated Boom Boom" is set in seventies Enniskillen, a
rites-of-passage fictional biography of Declan Lydon who uses
contemporary music of the time as his A-Z. It probably isn't the best
guide to depend on, as we find when Declan's first imaginary experience
of the Sex Pistols finds him kissing the floor with a split head and
spew holding him fast to the deck. Kelly writes with a humorous style
not dissimilar to Colin Bateman. To read Samuel Beckett described as a
"wiry hore" with looks "like the Hangin' f***** Rock. even when he was a
chile he looked like a quarry" is funny indeed, and more than a little
accurate! Declan and his friend Spit are great muckers and this is their
story of a few miserable years in Enniskillen, coloured with sparkling
observations and wicked wit. "Sophisticated Boom-Boom" has its jarring
moments - fictional punk bands' names that don't ring true, those
quotes, the local history lessons, but for all that it's a
well-travelled journey, made with critical references to Horslips, Thin
Lizzy and Van the Man, that many will empathise with and remember it
themselves. - Harry Doherty The genre is already well established, and you might have heard it all before, but there's nothing tired or derivative about this fictional memoir of a young life patterning itself out under the heady influence of rock, blues, jazz and - finally and defiantly - country music. Set mainly in Enniskillen in the late 1970s and early 80s, Sophisticated Boom Boom is a witty, inventive, exhilarating novel which marks out its own territory with confidence.
Enniskillen in the 1970s was, at least in the view of narrator Declan Lydon, "a place where nothing ever happened". In a certain sense, the narrative demonstrates the truth of this: Lydon and his friends spend most of their time hanging out in their bedrooms or under the streetlamps, "waiting to be older, to be freer, to be grown up". But there's a compensatory energy at work in the lives of these bored adolescents, lifting them out of the banality of their surroundings and into a world of heroic myth and fantasy. Little more than children at the start of the story, they are already reinventing themselves, and in one of Kelly's wonderful pinch-of-salt set pieces we see Lydon's friend Ignatius "Spit" Maguire - "the best spitter in the country" - standing "like Spartacus in the middle of Darling Street", picking off swifts with well-aimed gobs while appreciative spectators, bussed in from the countryside, line the footpath.
But it's music which provides the most potent and pervasive myths. The explosive opening chapter shows us Lydon swept into edgy confrontation with his punk namesake at a 1977 Sex Pistols gig, before sustaining a hero's injuries in collision with a lighting rig as he pogoes ecstatically heavenward. Another defining moment for Lydon sees him standing outside a neighbour's house as he hears for the first time the music of the Bothy Band. The experience makes him feel "as if condensation was clearing on a window"; each fresh musical epiphany serves to sharpen and refine his early understanding that "music might be the most important thing on earth and maybe even further afield".
Essentially upbeat and often extremely funny, Sophisticated Boom Boom nevertheless reveals an appropriately complex understanding of its subject's darker aspects. Music, notes its narrator, charting his own developing awareness, "could make you feel nervous and unloved. It could even make you afraid." The observation has a general application but is here closely linked to a description of the Orange drums hammering out a message which has the disturbing power to make young boys shiver with cold in the heat of summer. This, after all, is Ireland, a country in which wise mothers warn their growing children that singing the wrong song in the wrong place can have serious consequences.
And the darkness deepens towards the novel's conclusion as Lydon and Maguire move away to continue their education in the tense atmosphere of 1980s Belfast. As their bus approaches the city, it is flagged down by soldiers, one of whom boards the vehicle and moves slowly down the aisle, bristling with menace, oversized hardware and twiggy camouflage. Just routine, perhaps; but Spit returns the soldier's stare and is drawn into high-risk dialogue, culminating in a small but significant victory for Fermanagh youth. "Wheyyou facking from?" asks the soldier. "I'm from here," says Spit, half-echoing Leopold Bloom. "Where are you from?"
Like so much else in the book, the scene is superbly handled, sensitively registering both the comedy and the tragedy of modern Ireland, the small absurdities played out against a backdrop of terror. Beyond the time-frame of the central narrative lies the 1987 bombing which would confer a terrible fame on Enniskillen, and our reading is shadowed by this knowledge unavailable to the protagonists. But the music is always there as accompaniment to the unfolding personal and national history, hinting at the possibility of redemption. Out in Belfast, Lydon finds himself inspired by yet another musical discovery; and it's not merely a Van Morrison song but the spirit of music itself which, as he puts it, "seemed to have seeped into the very walls of this tuneless, murderous place and was making it liveable again".· Jem Poster
John Kelly, The Little Hammer, Vintage, 2001.
In a paint-splattered room, a young and successful Irish painter confronts his shocking and murderous past - a dark day on the beach at Bundoran, Co. Donegal, when, at the age of nine, he quietly dispatched a palaeontologist with his own geological hammer.His life is further disrupted by the beautiful Billie Maguire, an Ingrid Bergman lookalike who leads him all the way to Prague and involves him in yet another grievous crime. Struggling to keep reality and unreality apart, he wishes only to be taken seriously - as sinner and lover, artist and murderer.
'Would you believe me if I told you that I was only nine years of age
when I killed him?' In a paint-splattered room, a young and successful
Irish painter confronts his shocking and murderous past- a dark day on
the beach at Bundoran, Co. Donegal, when he quietly dispatched a
palaeontologist with his own geological hammer. His life is further
disrupted by the beautiful Billy Maguire, an Ingrid Bergman lookalike
who leads him all the way to Prague and involves him-and his beloved and
devoutly paranoid grandmother-in yet another grievous crime. Struggling
to keep reality and unreality apart, he wishes only to be taken
seriously-as sinner and lover, artist and murderer.Featuring cameos from
Elvis Presley, Shirley Temple and the Pope, the Little Hammer is a
triumph of linguistic brio, dark imagination and wild wit from one of
Ireland's most exciting new talents.
John Kelly, Cool About the Ankles, Blackstaff Press, 1997.
From a hotel room high above snowy Manhatten, John Kelly considers life, the universe and Lower Lough Erne. Part diary, part travel book, part memoir, 'Cool about the ankles' is a new sort of book from a new sort of voice- Irish but cosmopolitan, funny but reflective, lyrical but immediate, modern but profoundly influenced by the popular culture of the past. Jazz, soccer, hares, Woody Allen, coal sheds, controlled explosions, tin whistles, the Great White Way- generously open to all impressions and wonderfully adept at expressing their impact, John Kelly has written a candid, witty and bravely personal book for our times.Part diary, part travel book, part memoir, this book was written from a hotel room high above snowy Manhattan, where John Kelly considers life, the universe and Lower Lough Erne. Subjects include: jazz, soccer, hares, Woody Allen, coal sheds, controlled explosions and the Great White Way.
