Art Kavanagh

Talk about books: a fortnightly publication about things I’ve read

“Talk about books” archive

This page links to current and recent posts (about a year’s worth). Posts up to and including 23 December 2021 can be found on the archive page for the first year of Talk about books and those from 2022 on the archive page for that year. And here is 2023.

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.

Emma Healey, Elizabeth Is Missing and Whistle in the Dark

31-Dec-2023
Emma Healey’s two novels (to date) are quite different from each other but share some ideas and themes. Both focus on the relationship between sisters, and both gain a lot of their force from the idea of being buried or trapped underground in the dark and cold.

Stranger still: Sylvia Townsend Warner, A Stranger with a Bag and Other Stories

17-Dec-2023
Sylvia Townsend Warner’s collection of thirteen stories includes several which feature “strangers”, people who are in some sense out of place. Many of the stories have serious themes, some are more lighthearted but most have an element of often ironic humour.

Land and marriage: Three novels by Jane Austen

03-Dec-2023
Jane Austen’s irony includes a kind of “double vision” which enables her to consider simultaneously “The economic basis of society” (W H Auden) and the wretched, wicked inadvisability of entering into a marriage “without affection”.

The last word or the first claim: Notes on some of Seamus Heaney’s poetry

19-Nov-2023
I don’t know the poetry of Seamus Heaney (the tenth anniversary of whose death was earlier this year) as well as I ought to, and in this post I manage to prove that I don’t, though that wasn’t what I set out to do.

Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now and other stories

01-Nov-2023
This collection of 5 “long” short stories displays du Maurier’s versatility but without giving the impression that it’s a deliberate showcase or sampler. One story is spooky, one SF-spooky, one naturalistic adventure, one moralistic social satire and one mythological/mysterious.

Shifting ground: Salman Rushdie, The Ground beneath Her Feet

22-Oct-2023
Salman Rushdie’s 1999 novel marks a change of direction in his fiction, though I’m not yet sure which way it leaves him pointing. He jokes about “disorientation” meaning “loss of the East”. It’s a novel about migration, earthquakes and rock music, and a love story.

Becoming Amazons: Lisa Lutz, The Swallows

04-Oct-2023
Lisa Lutz’s novel, The Swallows (2019) successfully performs a difficult balancing act. The theme is deadly serious — sexual exploitation and abuse — while the tone and style are often comic. That’s a mixture you might find in a savage satire — but this isn’t satire, exactly.

Out of series: Liz Nugent, Unravelling Oliver (2014) and Lying in Wait (2016)

23-Sep-2023
Liz Nugent’s first two novels combine familiar, naturalistically described settings with melodramatic action and motivations that are shockingly twisted. The result is crime fiction like nobody else’s.

A double standard: Wilkie Collins, The Law and the Lady

10-Sep-2023
Valeria Woodville is advised by many wise and well-meaning people that to investigate her new husband’s hidden past can result only in misery and despair. Her husband is of the same view.

Poetic imagery: William Empson and the visual imagination in the criticism of poetry

26-Aug-2023
William Empson said that he never formed visual mental images while he read or thought. I’ve no doubt that aphantasia affects the ways one reads and reacts to poetry, but it’s not easy to say exactly what the effect is.

“What, not one hit?” Salman Rushdie, The Moor’s Last Sigh

13-Aug-2023
Rushdie’s fifth novel for adults, his next after The Satanic Verses, features one character who is a brutally unflattering caricature of a real-life Hindu nationalist leader, culminates in an apocalyptic series of explosions in Bombay and tells us what happened to the son of Saleem/Shiva Sinai, from Midnight’s Children. And a lot more besides.

“I never call it a memoir”: Mind and body in Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self

28-Jul-2023
Emilie Pine’s extraordinary collection of personal essays deals with having an alcoholic parent, childlessness and miscarriage, the body, perceived failure, being a workaholic, silence and memory.

Andrew Marvell’s objects

14-Jul-2023
A look at Andrew Marvell’s use of an unusual grammatical device in which a single verb has two objects, one abstract, one concrete (or in one case, one human, the other divine).

Cutting losses: Caoilinn Hughes’s novels

29-Jun-2023
Caoilinn Hughes’s two novels are quite different from each other and from her short stories. But both feature strained sibling and parental relations and show several different ways of dealing with the financial crash of 2008 and its devastating impact on Ireland.

Anatomy of a series: Scott Turow’s Kindle County novels

16-Jun-2023
Although Scott Turow’s novels have a number of common themes and tropes, each of them starts from a noticeably different place. The author goes to unusual lengths to avoid writing the same book twice.

Floating upwards from history: Salman Rushdie, Shame (1983)

03-Jun-2023
In Shame, Salman Rushdie’s next novel after Midnight’s Children, the author attempts to fictionalize a Pakistan that he views as already partly made up. The effect is a distancing, a flattening of emotion, which creates a considerable contrast to the earlier novel.

Short stories by Kevin Barry: Dark Lies the Island and That Old Country Music

20-May-2023
There’s a narrowing of range, and not just geographically, between Kevin Barry’s second and third collections of stories, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Two short novels by Ian McEwan: Amsterdam and On Chesil Beach

03-May-2023
Two very short novels, about the same length, published 9 years apart, are starkly dissimilar — one has been described as “brilliantly acid”, the other as a “beguiling” story of how love can easily go very wrong — but music is central to both.

“This persistent universe game”: The conclusion of Michael Dibdin’s Aurelio Zen series

22-Apr-2023
A look at the last three books in Michael Dibdin’s series (of 11) featuring the Venetian detective, Aurelio Zen. Eighteen months ago, I wrote about Zen’s declining moral trajectory in the first 8 books. In these ones he’s (broadly speaking) on his way back up.

“Fools will serve to father wise men’s children”: Thomas Middleton, Women Beware Women (c. 1621)

09-Apr-2023
Women Beware Women, by Thomas Middleton alone though he often collaborated, has two tragic plots which are tightly integrated. As is true of his earlier play, The Revenger’s Tragedy, the apparent subplot may hold more interest than the main plot.