This page links to all the Talk about books posts for 2024. Earlier posts can be found on the archive pages for 2023, 2022 and 2020/1. The most recent posts (about a year’s worth) are on the main archive page.

One of the lucky ones: Tana French, The Wych Elm
29-Dec-2024
Tana French’s seventh novel is her first standalone: the first-person narrative of a young man who always considered himself lucky, till a vicious attack partly changed his mind.

Children (and parents) of coincidence: Paul Auster, Moon Palace
14-Dec-2024
Like Auster’s immediately succeeding novel, Moon Palace (1989) is about chance, contingency and possible coincidences. But its interest for me is quite different: it’s a novel that has absent or missing fathers at its heart.

A fancy prose style: Iris Murdoch, The Black Prince
30-Nov-2024
Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince, the narrative of a man imprisoned for murder who has previously had a sexual relationship with a much younger female character, owes something to an earlier novel. It repays the debt with interest.

Open secrets: Claire Keegan, Walk the Blue Fields
16-Nov-2024
Claire Keegan’s second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, is shorter, tighter and more mature than her first. Also, it seems to me that the strongest stories are concentrated in the first half of the book.

All honourable men: Shakespeare’s Romans
03-Nov-2024
Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Julius Cæsar, Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus are all formally tragedies. That’s not to say that they all follow a similar pattern, such as the pattern of a noble, admirable hero destroyed by a trafic flaw, which may be detectable in the first play.

Incontestable wills: Wilkie Collins, No Name
19-Oct-2024
The novel that Wilkie Collins published between The Woman in White and Armadale might at first seem less compelling than either of those but it’s a powerful tale about the response to a legal injustice.

Terrible beauty, unpalatable truth: Remarks on some of Keats’s odes
05-Oct-2024
In which I follow up a post on my personal site from a few months ago, about the regrettable narrowness of my taste in poetry, with a look at two of Keats’s odes, “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. I thought I’d fit more Keats in but there was a lot to say about these two.

Trying to keep the poetry separate: Shirley Hazzard, Collected Stories
21-Sep-2024
Shirley Hazzard’s short stories fall into two broad categories, those about working for the UN (“the Organization”), and those about men, women, relationships and social situations. This post is about the stories in the second category.

Down the country: Donal Ryan, The Spinning Heart; and Belinda McKeon, Solace
07-Sep-2024
Two novels about rural Ireland in the wake of the economic crash, published in 2011 and 2012 respectively, make for an interesting comparison both with each other and with Caoilinn Hughes second novel about which I’ve written before.

Deal with the devil: Three novels by Claire Kilroy
25-Aug-2024
Claire Kilroy published her fifth novel, Soldier Sailor, last year and it caused a stir. The three previous novels look like an unusually varied bunch but what they have in common (Faustian bargains, for a start) may come as a surprise.

Multiple endings: The linked short story collections of Melissa Bank
10-Aug-2024
Melissa Bank’s two books look like collections of “linked short stories”, but the links are deeper and the stories or episodes more tightly integrated into an artistic wholeness than that might imply.

Impeaching his own witness: Scott Turow, Pleading Guilty and The Laws of Our Fathers
28-Jul-2024
Scott Turow’s third and fourth novels are where his practice of doing something different each time, avoiding formulae and patterns, first becomes conspicuous, and they come between the two which mark the high point of his work. One is darkly playful and mischievous, the other seriously ambitious.

“I have deep longings that will never be satisfied”: Mary Gaitskill, Because They Wanted To
14-Jul-2024
Several of the short stories in Mary Gaitskill’s second collection, originally published in 1997, deal with desires that may be incapable of fulfilment, and anyway will never be fulfilled. The title story is altogether more horrifying.

Slow movements: Flux and stillness in some poems by Louis MacNeice
30-Jun-2024
A discussion, as yet unfinished, of some of Louis MacNeice’s poetry which deals with time and change, flux and stasis.

Robert Browning’s poetry about music: “A Toccata of Galuppi’s” and “Master Hugues of Saxe-Gotha”
16-Jun-2024
A look at two poems by Robert Browning in which a first-person speaker, an approximate contemporary of the poet’s, addresses and interrogates through his music a long-dead composer (one of them fictional). I intend also to write about “Abt Vogler” and “With Charles Avison”.

Everywoman in Arcadia: Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles
01-Jun-2024
Though Hardy presents his heroine as a vivid, precisely drawn individual, she seems at the same time to span historical eras and periods and to bridge social positions and functions, and to represent the entire history of a wide geographical area.

The cruel comedy of Thomas Middleton: A Trick to Catch the Old One and other city comedies
19-May-2024
A look at three “city comedies” by Thomas Middleton, in which he works clever variations on a repeated set of themes, sets up the occasional coup de théâtre and demonstrates a surprising kind of humane (but not too humane) cruelty.

Nothing to be afraid of: Seamus Heaney on the last things of Yeats and Larkin
05-May-2024
A look at a lecture that Seamus Heaney gave while he was Oxford Professor of Poetry, in which he compared Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” with two poems by W B Yeats, to Larkin’s disadvantage.

Flight from paradise: Salman Rushdie, Shalimar the Clown
21-Apr-2024
Salman Rushdie’s 2005 novel, Shalimar the Clown, is about Kashmir, the conflict between India and Pakistan over that region and the entanglement of public and private motives behind political (or terrorist) acts.

Incorrigibly plural: Lucy Caldwell, ed. Being Various
07-Apr-2024
The sixth anthology in Faber’s series of “New Irish short stories” contains 24 stories, ranging across a variety of themes and styles. I discuss four of my favourite stories from the volume, with brief notes on four more.

Caroline O’Donoghue, Scenes of a Graphic Nature
20-Mar-2024
The second of Caroline O’Donoghue’s 3 novels for adults features a filmmaker in her late 20s who visits her father’s birthplace on a small County Kerry island where, sixty years earlier, he was the only child to survive the disaster that killed his 18 schoolmates.

Taking oneself seriously: The three novels of Candia McWilliam
10-Mar-2024
Between 1987 and 1994, Candia McWilliam published 3 novels, none of them very long, which were critically very well received and won prizes. A collection of short stories followed in 1997. I’ve tried to assess the novels as a body of work.

Material particulars: Spirit and matter in Milton’s Paradise Lost
25-Feb-2024
Paradise Lost reveals Milton’s philosophical materialism, while passing over the heretical beliefs which in part flow from it.

Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series revisited
11-Feb-2024
A second look at Kate Atkinson’s series about an intermittently retired private investigator, looking in particular at the first book, Case Histories, which I couldn’t find and hadn’t reread when I wrote the first post.

Jagged and straight: Bernard MacLaverty, Blank Pages and other stories
28-Jan-2024
MacLaverty’s sixth book of short stories, the first for fifteen years, features many aging or elderly characters who are vulnerable to failing health and strength, bereavement and loneliness: threats that don’t always land where they’re most expected.

“I choose Never to stoop”: Robert Browning, “My Last Duchess”
13-Jan-2024
Robert Browning’s monologue is more effective as drama if we don’t assume (a) that the subject of the painting is necessarily the Duke’s first wife, as well as his last, or (b) that his negotiations with the Count’s emissary end in success.