Tag: literature

The River Capture by Mary Costello

Irish writer Mary Costello

This novel, The River Capture (2019), is Costello’s third published work, her second novel. The style is literary and immersed in family values, loyalty, obligation, and what happens when all of these are challenged; it is written with the sensibility and skill we associate with Irish literature. Luke O’Brien is a thirty something teacher, a Joyce scholar, who took leave to care for dying relatives but then continued his sabbatical to deal with the family land in county Waterford on the banks of the River Sullane. There he also tends to his favorite, but very old aunt, Ellen. They are very close. Luke is a man in tune with nature, not religious, but believes in the uniqueness of the individual free of labels or what any other individual may think of him. He is willing to consider that natural objects, animals, including humans, trees and water are infused with special energy and may also contain elements of memory and the future. Like all natural things, everything, including mankind, will pass to allow for what is next.

When two rivers collide due to climatic devastation, geological disruption or similar, one captures the other and a third unexpected river is born: a river capture.

A young woman, Ruth Mulvey, hears about him and his passion for animals and asks him to take over the care of a young, but abandoned dog. This meeting develops into a relationship, emotional and sexual, and is hoped by both participants to develop even further. But then Luke introduces her to Aunt Ellen. She is aware of this young woman; more significantly, she knows her father. A family secret is revealed and Ellen, his devoted aunt, places a huge burden on his shoulders and mind.

Up to this point, almost half of the way through, the format is usual and expected: literary fiction, narration of elegant language, relevant and insightful dialogue (as it should be) that builds to a tension created by the revelation. An accomplished opening.

Then things change. Not only for Luke, who is devastated, and the choice he’s given, impossible, but also for the reader: the format changes. This can be seen as a metaphor for the state of Luke’s mind. Nothing is as expected. the rest of the novel is a description of Luke’s state of mind and choice of actions, what he believes and what he doesn’t; what he does to overcome the bolt of lightning that hit him far square in his heart and mind. The revelation is so devastating that the book itself is affected. The book no longer reads like a novel.

This unique and rare literary device was not, for this reader, entirely successful. It eroded most of my emotional investment in the characters and narrative. It became, or felt like, an academic exercise, and a repetitive one, and although I read it to the end, I have to admit I skipped bits.

However, Costello is a very good writer and I look forward to her next.

Click the link for my review of her first novel, Academy Street (2014).

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The Temple by Stephen Spender

Stephen Spender (1909 – 1995)

This book began as an early attempt by the British poet to write a memoir about a holiday in Germany in 1929. It was unpublishable because of its libellous and pornographic content according to the law at the time. Many books were banned then, including Ulysses by James Joyce, The Well of Loneliness by Radcliffe Hall and paintings by D.H. Lawrence. During a particularly lean period in the early sixties, Spender, by then an established, but poor, writer, sold the first draft manuscript and promptly forgot about it. Fast forward to 1985 when a friend told him about the manuscript he had read in the rare books section of the University of Texas. Spender wrote for a xerox copy (remember Xerox?) and re-wrote it between 1985 and 1987 turning it into “a complex of memory, fiction and hindsight”. He changed his own name to Paul Schoner and faintly disguised W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood as Simon Wilmot and William Bradshaw respectively. It is, what we now call today, auto-fiction. It is also one of a rare group of autobiographies that is written in the third person. Another example of this is James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The Temple, its original title, was finally published in 1988. Germany between the wars had a reputation of being very liberal, emphasising personal freedom. Nothing at all was happening in England. Young Englishmen went to Spain for politics and to Germany for sex. The story is indeed an account of Paul Schoder’s holiday in Hamburg 1929 – 1931, the people he meets, the cafes and bars he frequents, the senses he explores, and the danger he foretells: the rise of the extreme right in the form of the Nazi Party. Only a few understand the danger; most are complacent, believing that their first parliamentary democracy, The Weimar Republic, will withstand the threat – it will pass. The parallel to our parliamentary democracy today and the rise of the Right, almost 100 years later, will not be lost on you. Part of the attraction for the young Englishman is the German youth who idolise the human body, praising it, showing it, using it, hence the title, The Temple; ironically from a biblical quote. It is full of ideas, conversations about ideas and characters and events that portray these ideas or are in contrast to them. I loved this book, and will undoubtedly read it again. There is so much to be gained from it, not just as a reader but as a writer: his use of the nameless, but god-like, narrator and his unjudgemental descriptions of feelings and experiences that are heightened, exaggerated, and sometimes invented in order to make a point, explore an idea; these are all part of the writer’s varied and colourful palette. Highly recommended.

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