MORE GREAT READS FOR JULY, 2017
Himself, by Jess Kidd
Mahony sees ghosts.
Not because he wants to, but because they want to reveal
themselves. To him. Whether he likes it
or not. Mahony is an orphan, having been
left as a baby on the steps of a Dublin Orphanage run by the Nuns. His Catholic education was strict; In the 1950’s Irish Catholic institutions were
long on God’s punishment and short on His Grace, and His mercy was in equally short
supply: Mahony was a child deemed to
have the devil in him and regular beatings were required to remove Satan from
his wicked little soul – not that the holy chastisement worked, for Mahony has
an incorrigible lightness of spirit; a joie de vivre about him that is
unquenchable – and fatally attractive to women (with the exception of those in
holy orders), as he discovers when he reaches eighteen and can finally leave
his childhood prison.
He also discovers, through a letter left with him when he
was a foundling and given to him as he departed that his given name is Francis
Sweeney, and his late mother, Orla Sweeney, came from Mulderrig, a small
village in Ireland’s West. In the first
heady rush of freedom from his captors, it was not a top priority of Mahony’s
to check his family’s origins, and it is not until 1976 when he is twenty-four
and going nowhere (except to prison if he is not careful) that he decides it’s
time to go somewhere, specifically
Mulderrig, to start asking questions about his ancestry, to find out if there
are any family members left who could answer the Million Dollar question: who is his Daddy?
And he soon finds that Mulderrig is the most secretive
place of all: the locals will reveal
nothing to him, except to say that Orla left the village with her baby when she
was sixteen, and good riddance! She was
a wild one who deserved everything that happened to her. But what
happened to her? The more Mahony
investigates, the less is revealed, especially in the forest on the outskirts
of Mulderrig, where he meets the ghost of a little six-year old girl, whom
everyone believes was killed in a car accident, but was murdered because she
saw something she shouldn’t. The dead
are the only ones who want to communicate with him, but the living are the ones
in the know.
This is Ms Kidd’s debut novel, and it succeeds brilliantly
on multiple levels: it’s a thriller, a
mystery, a mini family saga – and it contains some of the best comic writing
I’ve read in ages; all the characters
are larger than life, and so they should be, from the ancient and brilliant
retired actress who once trod the boards at the famed Abbey Theatre; the
unscrupulous village priest – forced into the vocation because his father
thought he would be no good at anything else;
and the flint-hearted wealthy widow with the cast-iron perm who, in her
former life as a nurse in a rest-home, euthanised her patients because she
didn’t like the elderly. There is Irish
humour at its most beguiling, boisterous and rollicking – but Ms Kidd can also
‘make a glass eye cry’: animal lovers be
warned. You’ll need the tissues. She can be beautifully lyrical and darkly
tragic in a heartbeat, but always captivating.
Fair play to you Ms Kidd, fair play.
FIVE STARS.
The
Supremes Sing the Happy Heartache Blues,
By
Edward Kelsey Moore
Odette, Barbara Jean and Clarice have been friends since
childhood, and are known as the Supremes for their steadfast loyalty to each
other. They are now grandmothers (with
the exception of Barbara Jean) but still all meet after Sunday Church at Earl’s
All-You-can-Eat Diner with their respective spouses to swap gossip and watch
the more outrageous customers in the sure knowledge that they will live up (or
down) to their notoriety and cause a stir better than any TV Soap.
The Supremes’ lives are going well: Odette has reached her five-year clearance
after her bout of cancer; Barbara Jean
has married her teenage love Ray Carlson, ‘ the King of the Pretty White Boys’
(see review below) and Clarice has just embarked on her rejuvenated musical
career after abandoning her early promise as a prodigiously talented pianist
for marriage and motherhood. Their
friendship is as strong and important to them as ever – in fact, none of them
can see a single cloud on their collective horizon – until they attend a
wedding where part of the floor show is an old Blues man, playing his guitar
and wailing his songs of love and tragedy with such glorious feeling that his
audience is transfixed – that is everyone except State Trooper James, Odette’s
cherished husband.
Odette has always known of James’s impoverished
upbringing, how he and his mother were deserted by their feckless junkie father,
but not before James was slashed with a knife across his face by his dad – it
was a terrible mistake, but James’s father was aiming the knife at his mum,
because she had hidden his stash. Someone was destined to be hurt, but the
world of pain, physical, mental and spiritual caused by the act had just worsened
for them all.
When it is revealed that the great wedding entertainer is
James’s father, Odette does her very best to act as an agent of reconciliation,
not because she has any feeling, let alone admiration for her father-in-law,
but because she feels that her beloved husband will be better off eventually if
he can divest himself of all that heart breaking baggage and gain peace of mind
through forgiveness. Yeah, right. James has always been a ‘Still Waters Run
Deep’ kind of guy, and that which is swimming in his depths is terrible indeed. It is up to the Supremes in their individual
ways to try to offer support and change the situation, but how? And when?
Mr Moore writes of his characters with grace and
unflagging humour (tall thin James and short fat Odette are told they look like
a perfect 1o. Fair enough!), but he
tells a serious story, a story of tragedy, its sister dire poverty, cruelty,
and souls lost and redeemed – a classic Blues story that belts out its music on
every page: this little book is a
gem. FIVE STARS
The
Supremes at Earl’s All-You-Can-Eat, by Edward Kelsey Moore
This is not a recent
novel; it was published in 2013, but it
is new to our library – and all I can say is:
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER!
This little story could be called a heart-warmer, but
that hoary old cliche doesn’t do it sufficient justice, for the characters and
events are portrayed so lovingly and well that they don’t deserve to be
consigned to a genre, for the Supremes and their friends and family are a force
of nature, bowling over the unsuspecting reader with their sheer zest for life.
First, we have Big Earl, owner of the All-You-Can-Eat
Diner and his wife Miss Thelma, two mighty pillars of black society in the
small Indiana town of Plainsview. Their
rock-solid and silent support has helped many a needy person on the path to
future stability: those that can’t or
won’t be helped still know that Big Earl and Miss Thelma will never give up on
them regardless, which in itself is an source of enormous comfort.
The Supremes are next, called that because the trio have
been together since Grade School; now
they are in their fifties and two of them are grandmothers. They have endured heartbreak, infidelity and
despair but their friendship, their sisterhood is as strong as ever. Odette, the most fearless of the three (and
the fattest; she loves the
All-You-Can-Eat for obvious reasons) has had reason lately to worry: she has not been feeling great and puts it
down to The Change, but more concerning are the conversations she has been
having with her sassy and irreverent old mama lately, who has taken to visiting
any old time of the day and offering up her five cents worth whether Odette
wants it or not. The big problem with
these visitations is that that’s what they are:
visitations. Odette’s mama has
been dead for six years.
Supreme # Two Clarice showed great promise as a classical
pianist when she was a girl, but love in the form of the local football hero
got in the way; marriage and children
followed – not that Clarice minded exchanging her musical dreams for family and
becoming the local piano teacher instead,
but she minds very much being wed to a serial cheater. Something will have to give, and it won’t be
her!
Barbara Jean is the beauty of the three, also the most
disadvantaged by having an alcoholic mother who died at a very young age. Fortunately, after a series of horrible
experiences, Barbara Jean is taken in by Big Earl and Miss Thelma: stability at last! Until she meets another of Big Earl’s waifs
and strays, Ray Carlson, a young white boy who has been beaten and brutalised
by his racist brother, his only relative.
He works as a busboy for Earl and lives in the storage shed. Everyone is
intrigued (but not surprised) that Earl has given him shelter, for that is what
Big Earl does. The Supremes – like all
his customers – are fascinated by Ray, not least because he is so handsome and
it doesn’t take them long to come up with the right name for him: The King of the Pretty White Boys. And Barbara Jean and The King of the Pretty
White Boys eventually fall in love, setting the scene for heartbreak, for
Indiana in the 60’s is not the place for interracial love.
How the Supremes and
their friends and family (not to mention the ghosts!) deal with the
thunderbolts that God, ‘that Great Comedian’ sends them during their lives is
beautifully recounted by Mr Moore;
throughout his lovely story the twisted thread of racism, subtle or
overt is always present but never triumphs - and the very best thing? Mr Moore has written a sequel, ‘The Supremes
Sing the Happy Heartache Blues’. Lead me
to it! FIVE
STARS.
Summary
Justice, by John Fairfax
John Fairfax is the pen name for William Brodrick, a
British barrister who gave up the law to become a full-time novelist. And what a successful transition he has made,
especially as knows what he’s talking about!
In this story he has constructed the classic courtroom
drama, not usually expected to engender suspense in the heart of the reader,
but the defence of a young woman ‘guilty as sin’ in a seemingly open and shut case
of murder becomes the classic WhoDunnit when her lawyer, himself tried
successfully for murder sixteen years before, exposes great holes in the
prosecution’s case against her.
Will Benson has come a long way since finishing his
eleven year sentence – and against daunting odds. Very few people with the exception of his
family believe in his innocence, and his wish to study law is roundly derided –
except for an anonymous donor who pays for his tuition, and his original
defence lawyer who believes in him and helps him through the labyrinthine paths
of qualifying as a barrister (against huge legal opposition) so that he can
eventually set up shop on his own – with the help of another ex-guest of HM
Prison system as his law clerk, and Tess de Vere, a young woman whose idea it
was originally for him to study law, as his solicitor. It is a bold and headstrong move, with no
guarantee of success – or any income at all – until Sarah Collingstone, accused
of the murder of her employer James Bealing sacks her legal team and hires
Benson - because she’s innocent, as he
was.
Benson is a very damaged man. His years in prison have not been kind to
him, and his release has thrown up new problems: physical and mental harassment from the
family of his ‘victim’. They never
relent and he can never retaliate; the
terms of his release mean that anything physical visited upon anybody
by him result in a quick trip back to prison. He is powerless – until he returns to the
very same courtroom where he was sentenced, to defend to his utmost, steadfast
ability a woman whose innocence he believes in utterly.
Mr Fairfax paints a clever picture of the various class
structures in Britain, particularly in its ancient and venerable legal system,
a system as exclusive and secret ‘as a Masonic handshake’, and impregnable
against those who have admitted guilt for a major crime, as Benson was forced
to do so that he could at least begin
his law studies in prison. And, as this
tightly controlled and complex plot advances, it is very satisfying to know
that the young woman is indeed innocent – but if she didn’t do it, THEN WHO
DID?!
I certainly had no idea, and I pride myself on figuring
out who the evil ones are, but not this time.
This is a very competently-written introduction to what I hope will be a
series; the protagonists have left a
number of questions unanswered, so fingers crossed. FOUR STARS
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