My Book Reviews

Star of the Sea by Joseph O’Connor, Harcourt Books, 2004 In this novel, we read a traditional story,  like those of Sir Walter Scott or the great Charles Dickens . Indeed, this last great novelist actually appears in  Star of the Sea . Here, Dickens is portrayed in a small cameo, where the antihero Pius Mulvey gives Charles the character of Fagan for Oliver Twist — a clever little cameo indeed. Star of the Sea is set in Black 47 or more precisely in the bitter winter of 1847, and is written in the hand of one contemporary American journalist, G. Grantley Dixon of the New York Times . The book is beautifully composed because Joe O’ Connor captures brilliantly the stylistic writing of the time, whether in novels or in the then-current newspapers. If you have read Dickens or Scott or any of the other novelists of that period and previous, you won’t be disappointed, as O’Connor has managed to convince this reader at least that the words and phraseology of the late eight...

Review of Turlough by Brian Keenan , Vintage, 2001. This is a review of a novel I have long since read. I have a hankering to revisit books I read years ago. This novel is many things at once. It is an exploration of darkness in its many dimensions. On the surface, it tells the life story of the great, famous, or even infamous, Turlough O’Carolan (1670-1735), one of the foremost Irish musicians and composers . It recounts Turlough’s struggle to come to terms with his blindness as a young man after a bad bout of smallpox .  As a historical novel, it is written against the background of the Penal Laws , which were a series of laws enacted in Ireland in the 17th and 18th centuries that imposed harsh restrictions on Catholics, and to a lesser extent, Protestant dissenters.  These laws aimed to suppress Catholicism and reinforce the dominance of the established Protestant Church.   The novel recounts the struggle of Turlough O'Carolan to make sense of his life now that h...

Review: Empire Falls by Richard Russo It is indeed one of life’s pleasures to read a really good novel.  I am currently on holiday in Calabria and picked this book from the shelves in my apartment.   It is called  Empire Falls,  a novel that was given to me some years back by a colleague who is an English teacher. He informed me at the time that one idea he had had in the past few years was to read as many award-winning novels as he could, going back over the last twenty years – all the Booker Prize and Pulitzer Prize winners. That way, he got to read the best books, he maintained. Anyway, he lent me Empire Falls as one he considered a good read.  Empire Falls was written in 2001   by Richard Russo, and it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2002. The story is set in Empire Falls, a fictional town in Maine , where the Whiting Family, owners of the once-vibrant mills and the shirt factory, have sold out to a multinational. The author, Richard Russo...

In this post, I review a philosophical tome which I had to plough through twice during my postgraduate studies some years ago.  The book in question is the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor 's magnum opus on the self :  Sources  of the Self:  The Making of the Modern Identity ( Cambridge , 601 pp., 1989).  I use the description of "ploughing" merely to inform the reader that this book is no light read and that it takes a certain commitment of time and labour to engage with the substance and central argument of the book.  I was lucky to read five or six pages per evening -- in that way, I was able to think through and digest as best as I could what the author had written.  However, the task was worthwhile as I gained not a little wisdom and information from this obviously erudite and brilliant philosopher.  In other words, the struggle with the text was a worthwhile one.  Most philosophers and theologians who have reviewed this book are lou...

In this post, I would like to review two books about walking, two books that look at this activity from divergent perspectives.  The first is entitled In Praise of Walking (The Bodley Head, London, 2019) by Shane O’Mara who is Professor of Experimental Brain Research in Trinity College Dublin , and is a Principal Investigator in, and was the Director of, the Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience from 2009-2016.  The second book is called The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. (Penguin Books, 2013) by Professor Robert Macfarlane who is Professor of Literature and the Environmental Humanities at the Faculty of English in Cambridge . He is well-known as a writer about nature, climate, landscape, people and place, and whose Mountains of the Mind (2003) I have already reviewed in these pages.  The first describes the activity of walking from a scientific, physical, neurological and psychological point of view while the second is a literary and poetic investigation of what it...

  Review of As If by Blake Morrison   Having recently reviewed Morrison’s And when did you last see your father? and Things my mother never told me, I wished to review As If also.  Finally, I found the book hidden away on a shelf in one of my upstairs bedrooms. I notice that I bought this book way back on 10/6/’99, having been published by Granta Publications the previous year.  Reading the book once again, after a gap of twenty-five years, was a worthwhile exercise as it raises profound and still disturbing questions, questions we all continue to ask about the horrors we humans are capable of unleashing on our fellows. For anyone interested in the mystery of evil in the world, in the psychology of bad behaviour and its apogee in murder, this is a book worth reading.   To further deepen the mystery, it deals with the murder of a little boy of two years old by two older boys of ten years. Again, it is written in masterful prose that becomes lyrical...