Category: Literary criticism

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

Irish-Canadian writer Emma Donoghue

This novel, The Wonder (2016) is set in rural Ireland in the 1850s. There is no descriptions of daffodils under the trees, clouds in the sky or ravens in the belfry to begin this story. Donoghue jumps right in. The plot begins in the first sentence. Nurse Lib Wright is on a train to a new and very unusual job to the town of Athlone slap bang in the centre of Ireland, something the locals are very proud of.

I was not aware of the nature of the job when I started reading. Therefore, I’m not going to tell you, so you too will discover the strange job it is just like I and Nurse Lib did. I will say though that there is a lot of waiting and looking.

Mrs Lib Wright, a widow, is a very proud nurse since she was chosen and trained by the then and now iconic carer, Florence Nightingale. The parents, the maid, the doctor, the priest, a nun and a reporter complete the list of characters who all, as far as Nurse Lib is concerned, get in her way. The parents and maid because of their ignorance; the doctor and priest because they are not telling Nurse Lib everything she needs to know and Lib Wright needs to know a lot; the nun because she hardly says anything at all and the reporter because he can sniff a story. A story that Nurse Lib cannot tell.

Emma Donoghue, an Irish-Canadian writer, has written sixteen novels, the most famous of them is Room (2010) which was subsequently and successfully filmed in 2015. Donoghue received many awards for writing the screenplay and was nominated for an Oscar.

The most remarkable aspect of Donoghue’s writing here is that although, as I have said, the story revolves around a lot of waiting and looking, it’s a very engaging read. The theme is belief, whether you have it or not and Nurse Lib, although baptised as a protestant, has a very flimsy belief in Christianity. The various levels of belief of the other characters go quite a long way to supplying the story with tension and propulsion.

In 2022 The Wonder was filmed starring Florence Pugh and directed by Sebastián Lelio. Emma Donoghue contributed to the screenplay along with the director and Alice Birch. You can find it on Netflix.

One of the great attributes of fiction is that it can take you to worlds and people you would never meet in a million years. And they can be with you in your reading chair. I hope you will love this story-rich book as I did.

by Categories: Historical Fiction, Irish literature, Literary criticismTags: , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

The Sea by John Banville

Irish writer John Banville

If you are looking for a definition of literary fiction, this 2005 Booker Prize winning novel is it. I know that may put some people off; it seemed to have put John Banville off too; from 2006 Banville began writing crime novels, featuring the pathologist Quirke (no first name ever mentiuoned), under the name of Benjamin Black right up until 2021 when the Quirke novel, April in Spain, was released under his own name. Since then his Quirke novels, beginning with Christine Falls (2006) have been released under his name as well.

An elderly man, Max Morden, returns to a seaside house where his family used to holiday when Max was a child. We meet the Grace family, parents and the children Myles and Chloe, from that time and the inhabitants of the same place, now a rundown boarding house, all those years later. These two time frames, and the people in them, are woven tapestry-like to create a picture of Max’s current demeanour.

This is a slow burn of a book. It creeps up on you, but you need to stay with it. I got to a stage where I could not pinpoint what was wrong but I knew that there was something definitely not right, either about what happened in the past or what was going to happen in the present. It’s about capricious memory and self-awareness and, more importantly, about that slippery slope between behaviour and intention.

Someone once wrote, memory is like an oven. You put something in, close the door, wait a while, open it, and there it is, something different.

I’m now searching for the Quirke novels. When a writer of this skill-set takes on the ubiquitous crime genre there has got to be reading richness to discover.

Give it a go.

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Time of the Child by Niall Williams

Irish writer Niall Williams born 1958

“From the reeds a second rain dripped harder than the first and the brim of the doctor’s hat released it as a third.” So, the poor doctor had three curtains of rain to deal with: from the skies, from the roof and from his hat before he made it to the back door. This descriptive layered richness of detail is the William’s trademark and peppers a simple scene with verbal interest and understanding of place and character. This latest novel Time of the Child (2024) from the Irish writer is again set in his mythical town of Faha on the western edge of Ireland making the third in what has become known as the Faha Trilogy. The first two being The History of Rain (2014) and This is Happiness (2019). The most notable feature of Faha is rain. Even when it stops, rarely, it is still on everyone’s mind; it will surely start again any minute.

There is not a lot of dialogue in William’s novels. The characters don’t talk much, hence many plot points rely on misunderstandings both comical and tragic. People understand each other by the nod, the look, the shrug, but ironically despite the lack of talking gossip spreads like a virus.

It’s coming up to Christmas 1962 and doctor Jack Troy and his eldest and unmarried daughter Ronnie are presented with a child, a foundling. Ronnie immediately loves it and names her Noelle. Keeping the child cannot happen without a man, husband and father to go with it and keeping it is exactly what Ronnie is determined to do. Jack Troy knows of a possible contender for the role of husband/father but he is in America, but conscious of his own failings and mis-steps as a father hatches a plan to bring happiness to his daughter.

It is not necessary to have read the first two to enjoy the third. Each novel is self-contained. The characters and culture of Faha are in themselves a story and you are presented with a rich tapestry of both before the child is found in a graveyard. The enjoyment of reading Williams is not just because of the plot – his focus he admits – it’s his writing style and his uplifting of daily detail to importance in the local’s lives but in rich and lyrical language. I loved this book. Highly recommended.

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the Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng

Malaysian/British writer, Tan Twan Eng

A Straits Chinese retired judge, Yun Ling Teoh, returns to spend her last days in a house in the Cameron Highlands in Central Malaya during the Communist guerrilla war with the British in the early 1950s. It was here, as a young woman, she was apprenticed to Aritomo, a famous Japanese gardener, who once was the gardener of the Emperor of Japan. This back story, their working and emotional relationship with the backdrop of WWII and the Malaya Communists against the Japanese, is THE story.

This is the second novel by Tan Twan Eng after his successful debut, The Gift of Rain (2008) which was long-listed for the Booker. His third novel, The House of Doors (2023), was also long-listed for the Booker. This one suffers from the cliched ‘second novel syndrome’. In this case, not as original and complex as the first, and not as imaginative and assured as the third. This is a personal opinion despite it being short-listed for the Booker. I enjoyed reading it but without that thrill of attachment. Like all three Tan novels, they transport you to a time, place, threats, joys and sensibilities that are completely alien, but therefore fascinating, to a contemporary reader. Of course, the raw human emotions we all know about. This one also has that Eastern flavour of wisdom and sage-like belief in elements of the world that we can’t quite grasp but which may guide or steer us in directions we haven’t planned.

Her sister, enamoured by Japanese gardens, disappeared during the war and Yun Ling wants to built a Japanese garden in her honour. Aritomo refuses to design one but offers to teach her how to design it herself. Yun Ling’s internment by the Japanese, her apprenticeship to Aritomo and her relationship with him form the spine of the narrative. The events, conversations and relationships appear ‘soft’ and incidental. I knew this work had been made into a movie in 2017 and although my interest wavered I reasoned that if there was cinematic interest in this work there must be a pay off. I continued reading and I am so glad I did. This is a ‘slow burn’ of a book … war, imprisonment, romance, intrigue, a tattoo! – there is so much I haven’t mentioned – but all will be revealed in a very satisfying climax. Highly recommended. I wait patiently for book number 4.

Here is a short video of Tan Twan Eng talking about this book.

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The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt

Stephen Greenblatt, Professor of Humanities, Harvard University

It has been suggested, more than once, that the greatest thought that mankind has ever made is that matter is neither created nor destroyed, it is just rearranged … endlessly. In other words, there is a finite number of atoms but an infinite number of their combinations. One of those combinations is you. This is one of the ideas of the Greek philosopher, Epicurus (341 – 270 BCE) and he got the idea from someone a little bit older, his teacher, Democritus (c. 460 – c. 370 BCE). It’s been around a very long time.

I’m a fiction nerd, but every now and again a non-fiction work, catches my eye. The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began (2012) is the story of Poggio Bracciolini (POH joh BRA cho LEE nee), a papal secretary, scribe and book-hunter, who in 1417 discovered a manuscript called De Rerum Natura (Of the Nature of Things) written by Lucretius around 55 BCE. It had been lost for over 1500 years. It was, is, an elegant and beautifully written poem describing the natural world in strong Epicurean ideas.

  • The Universe has no creator or designer; everything comes into being as a result of a swerve, which is also the source of our free will
  • Nature ceaselessly experiments ( this is the idea at the heart of Darwin’s theory of Natural Selection)
  • Humans are not unique
  • The soul dies and there is no afterlife; death is the cessation of all feelings, including fear
  • All organised religions are superstitious delusions, which are invariably cruel
  • The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain and the greatest obstacle to pleasure is delusion
  • Everything is made of minute, invisible and eternal particles, atoms, floating in a void (scientifically proved by Jean Perrin, via John Dalton, Robert Brown and Albert Einstein, in 1909)

Like any passionate book-hunter, Poggio was ecstatic. He had it copied – he is also credited with designing the font we know now as Roman – and circulated. Of course, only to people who could read sophisticated Latin and that meant highly educated people who invariably were clergymen. In a world where all aspects of life: commerce, travel, governance, art, architecture, music and science were dominated by the Catholic Church, the discovery of this poem was like a bomb going off … slowly.

It influenced writers and thinkers for centuries: Leonardo di Vinci, Thomas More, Shakespeare, Milton, Spencer, Montaigne, Voltaire, Isaac Newton, Ben Johnson, Copernicus, Galileo, Thomas Jefferson, (he owned 5 Latin editions of the poem) to name a few. But the incredible impact of Lucretius’s poem is not only measured by the influence it had on writers and thinkers but, more importantly, by the multiple efforts the Catholic Church created to oppose it.

Greenblatt has used novelistic techniques to tell the story not only of Poggio and his discovery but also of the characters he interacted with and the times in which he lived and worked. This is not a dry academic tome. It is a lively account of how one lived and worked in the early years of the Renaissance. For example the Council of Constance was arranged to end the Western Schism (1378 – 1417): three men had claimed simultaneously to be Pope. It is estimated that over 100,000 people descended on the small German town, Dukes, royalty, administrators, ambassadors, cardinals, archbishops each with his own retinue of servants, cooks, maids, scribes as well as opportunists, singers, actors, barbers, acrobats and over 700 whores. It is an engaging and wondrous read.
Lucretius wrote that atoms did not move in a straight line but they randomly changed course. He called it a swerve. According to Greenblatt that is exactly what Lucretius’s text did: its trajectory was a straight line to oblivion, but it swerved and was found. Thousands of fragments and editions exist today all over the world.

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All That Man Is by David Szalay

Hungarian-British writer David Szalay

Since Szalay has won this year’s Booker with his latest novel Flesh, I saw I had this 2016 Booker shortlisted novel on my bookshelf and hadn’t read it. So I did, before I reach for the new one. His title makes you think he is referring to mankind. However, a more apt title would be All That Men Are. And my response? Not much. I mean the men, not the book. The book is great! This is not a novel but nine unrelated short stories about nine different men. Their only connection is that they “are facing the same question” so says the blurb on the back. Several of these men are rudderless, inarticulate but all of them need a good shaking while you scream, ‘Get over yourselves!’ Most are losers, some are manipulators, two of them are waiting or wanting to die. One, a Hungarian called Balázs is all muscle and ‘I don’t know’s and his understanding of ambition revolves around how long it might be until his next cigarette. What is remarkable about this book is that Szalay, a master of language, manages to make these men’s stories fascinating. Can’t wait to get my hands on Flesh! And the more I read about it, it seems to concern the 10th man that didn’t make it into this 2016 book. I’m not going to let his choice of characters deter me, and neither should you; he writes about people like us: unremarkable, but with compassion and skill that is surprising and utterly enjoyable.

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Intermezzo by Sally Rooney

Irish writer Sally Rooney

A few hundred pages into the novel I was struck by the narrative format; actually Rooney employs two narrative formats.

This is the story of two brothers and their bumpy relationship following the death of their father.

Peter, 32 is a lawyer and Ivan, 22 is, well, nothing much but a wiz at chess but scraping a living from his checkered passion is not easy.

Peter has two girlfriends; Ivan has one. Peter seems happy but Ivan is happy. I feel sorry for Peter but I love Ivan. 


Sally Rooney is quite a literary phenomenon. Most of the action goes on in her character’s heads. She is a digger of truth about what goes on in the human mind which is often at odds with the way people behave. Especially men. So eager is she to explore our mental shenanigans, she sometimes overdoes it a bit. That’s a minor criticism.  

But back to the double narrative styles: for the chapters about Peter the narrative is almost stream-of-consciousness. Short sentences. Shorter phrases. Even just one word followed by a full stop. They all tumble over each other. It pretty much reflects Peter’s state of mind: full. His two girlfriends, his high pressured job, what to do about his under-achieving brother, and did he love his father. Enough? Ivan’s chapters are more conservative, the third person narrator is more conventional: long sentences, precise grammar, at a slower pace. This is Ivan. He’s a simple soul not much concerned with material matters but he knows love when he feels it. Although I’m not a fan of stream-of-consciousness narration it works here; it works for Peter. Another grammatical technique binds the narratives together. The dialogue, there’s a lot, isn’t punctuated. A modern trend. But it is easy to follow. When you listen to an audio book – another modern trend – the punctuation is not read yet it is always clear who says what to whom. 

I am almost to the end so I cannot tell you what happens. It’s a great read. I’m loving it. If you haven’t already give it a go.    

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Wifedom by Anna Funda

Australian writer, Anna Funda.

Yes, Wifedom (2023) is about George Orwell’s largely forgotten wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, and the important, yet unacknowledged role, she played in his life and work, but it is more than that. It is an excoriating assessment of the general neglect of women who are gathered by artistic men for their own personal and artistic betterment.

A high-wire act is not awe-inspiring if you can see the wires. Invisible and unacknowledged, a wife is the practical and often intellectual wiring that allows the act to soar; and for it to be truly astonishing, the wires, and the wife need to be erased both at the time, and then over time.


Her portrayal of George Orwell – real name, Eric Blair – reveals him to have been cantankerous, needy, useless at any manual work, generally ill and egocentric without anything, except his writing, to be egocentric about. A sexual predator and a misogynist: he treated women as mere service providers. Also, Funda doesn’t hide her mild contempt for Orwell’s many biographers, all men, for erasing Eileen O’Shaughnessy from their books just as Orwell did from his work, like some male club of matedom keeping it all in house, slaps on the back and “Well done old chap!” But remember, in the mid twentieth century, patriarchy was still the dominate force.

Funda has come under some criticism for ‘trashing’ a famous writer’s reputation, but as she explains in the text, a ‘good’ book can be written by a ‘bad’ man. Understanding more about him, his wife and marriage doesn’t lessen her admiration for Orwell’s work – she may not now love the man but she still loves his writing.

I read Funda’s first book, Stasiland (2002) and loved it for telling compelling untold stories of life behind the Berlin Wall. I read All That I Am (2011), her first novel, and remember nothing about it. Here, Funda, has audaciously combined biography, memoir, polemic, social commentary and imagined conversations: fiction – it’s a heady mix and a great one – to create a truely memorable world of a forgotten woman who contributed much to the artistic output and fame of her husband. Her life with Orwell was one of poverty, struggle, sacrifice and determination but with an unwavering belief in his art and the ultimate success of it.

She followed him to Spain where he wanted to fight against Franco. He didn’t do much; she did a lot; she worked for the political organisation he was fighting for. After Franco’s victory she, her colleagues, and Orwell were in danger. She narrowly escaped imprisonment – when some of her colleagues did not – and, along with her own, saved his life. In his Homage to Catalonia (1938), his account of his experiences in the Spanish civil war, which she edited and typed, she is never mentioned.

He needed her but she didn’t deserve him.

So women are said to have the same human rights as men, but our lesser amounts of time and money and status and safety tell us we do not.

Animal Farm (1945) and 1984 (1949) are now classics, his most famous works, and rightly so, but both had great input from the writer’s wife, not only as editor, typist, and researcher, but also as a contributor and sounding board, sometimes in bed, for his ideas, slip-ups, and decisions.

Funda reprints Eileen’s letters to friends where you can hear her whimsical tone, sense of humour and self-deprecation which are characteristics of the ensemble of characters in Animal Farm. You can ‘hear’ Eileen’s influence.

The golden age of feminist literature may be over but here’s one that should, and probably will, be added to that lexicon. It’s a great and uplifting read. Highly recommended.

Here is a fascinating interview with Funda by Sarah Ferguson on the 7:30 Report from July 2023.

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Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Australian writer Charlotte Wood

This is a book about memory and how, as we age, we grow to understand our former imprecise and naive selves as we try to make sense of the world around us.

The narrator, an environmental activist, wife, mother, and atheist leaves her life and family behind to live in a remote religious community of nuns in the Monaro region of Southern NSW where she grew up. It’s a penny-watching community, understandably, viewed with suspicion by the locals, especially women, but where a local man helps out with the more physically demanding chores. Once the narrator is settled and eventually pleased with the decision she had made her life and that of the community is visited by three challenging occurrences: the return from overseas of the remains of a long lost, and murdered, nun from the community, a high-profile nun who was once the narrator’s schoolmate but an outsider due to poverty and public violence, and a mouse plague. All three interruptions spark questions about death, choices, what is sacred, commitment, parents, especially mothers, the truth about childhood events, forgiveness, and prayer.

‘I shovelled the compost and spread it, shovelled and spread, preparing the soil and waiting for things to make sense. Tried to attend, very softly and quietly, which is the closest I can get to prayer.’

Prayer isn’t an email to god seeking answers or gifts; it’s a form of meditation where the pray-er tries to make sense of what they believe.

Although the narrator is an unbeliever she joins in with the daily religious observances and finds solace in the routine and order they give her life. In fact the easy reading of it has a meditative effect, a consequence I particularly welcomed.

The book is also a testament to the emotional strength of simple clear and uncluttered language especially since it made the short list of this year’s Booker Prize. The format is similar to a diary, anecdotal, episodic, where daily actions are recorded juxtaposed with daily memories in an attempt to ‘work them through.’

I don’t think this book would appeal to young people as the attraction here is thoughtful consideration of a past life in order to come to an understanding of the kind of person you are and to forgive yourself for missteps in thinking and actions which were not entirely your fault.

Here is a short but succinct video of Charlotte Wood talking about this book.

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The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng

Malaysian/British writer, Tan Twan Eng

This book is the best of what fiction can do: it takes you out of your time, your place, your beliefs, your expectations, and your complacency. Its appearance of truth, verisimilitude, is so strong it’s hard not to feel that this is memoir – how does he do that? – yet Tan Twan Eng, the Malaysian / British author, was born in Penang 30 years after the action, 1941-46.

The novel is written in two parts. The first and longer is a slow burn of friendship, self-awareness, family, and discovery. The second is a rollercoaster ride as WWII decimates the contented and almost healed world of the protagonist, Phillip Hutton, the Chinese / British son of a wealthy English businessman whose completely English family seemed complete before he came along.

Phillip’s Chinese mother was his father’s second wife. Although the youngest, he feels he is in the middle: in the middle of everything, being pulled this way and that, fielding heavy demands on him from every angle: the Malay locals, his Chinese forebears, his English father, and, most importantly, his Japanese instructor in the ancient Japanese martial art of aikijutsu, testing his loyalty, his responsibilities, his obligations, and his sense of self. Phillip gathers all these strands of himself into one comprehensive knot and so is able to finally understand himself and his place in the world, or so he believes. Then the war arrives in December 1941 and everything unravels. But young Phillip discovers that all those strands of his life that he thought were fighting him, pulling him, were actually teaching him; he does the unthinkable, then recants, then … no, no spoilers here.

For anyone interested in the mysterious art of writing fiction don’t bother with all those vlogs on YouTube giving free writing advice from ‘experts’ most of which look like they’re just out of high school; you’ll find out more about writing fiction by reading this book, but read it like a writer: search for the ‘way’ and ‘how’ he writes and understand how he makes it so real.


The Gift of Rain (2007) was Tan Twan Eng’s debut novel, and it was long listed for the Booker Prize as was his most recent, The House of Doors (2023). I’m now searching for his second, The Garden of Evening Mists (2011), also a prize winner – it won the Man Asian Literay Prize – and which has been adapted for big screen by HBO.
Highly recommended.

Here Tan Twan Eng talks about the perils of being a new writer.

Listen to Tan Twan Eng’s advice to new writers here.

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