You're likely to relish Joshua Ferris's acclaimed debut novel, Then We Came to The End, if you enjoy narratives that revoice the 19th century's omniscient narrator as a sardonic first-person-plural Greek chorus in the style of The Virgin Suicides.

Even if you don't fall into that audience category, anyone who's ever worked in an office "environment" might find themselves annoying their bedside reading companion by yukking with laughter every 7 minutes while racing through this slick text.

Just as the substance of one's 9-to-5 dramas seems opaque (or worse, pathetic) to those not immersed in those particular office politics, the texture and the humour of Ferris's book might seem flat or contrived if quoted out of context--the context here being the increasingly unhinged behaviour of a group of work-shy advertising peons in the wake of the dot-com crash.

For example, the decision of one character to speak to his colleagues for a month using only quotes from the Godfather movies (I and II but not III, obviously) might seem too cute pitched cold. But it is, I promise, funny on the page.

Similarly, could someone unfamiliar with the book grasp why Ferris's characters initially detest the slightly senior Joe Pope, with the rationale for their loathing focusing on Pope's habit of wheeling his bike into the office and then locking the front wheel to the frame, as though "beset on all sides by thieves and barbarians"?

But of course you can. You've worked in an office.

It's been reported that J.K. Rowling has now pledged a "staggering" sum to the reward for the safe return of Madeleine McCann, the four-year-old English girl who was abducted in Portugal 12 days ago.

This sum is in addition to the $3 million already raised, in part due to contributions from such notoriously media-shy figures as Sir Richard Branson, Simon Cowell, and Sir Philip Green (the mesomorphic billionaire head of the Top Shop Empire.)

Moreover, David Beckham has recorded a televised appeal along with two Portuguese players in the Premiership: Manchester United‘s Cristiano Ronaldo and Chelsea‘s Paulo Ferreira.

Texts are popping up on mobile phones around the world (including Ireland) asking the recipient to light a candle for the missing girl.

All the while, Sky News and BBC News 24 maintain their 24/7 vigil, under the Portuguese sun and the hired klieg lights.

On an individual level--on the level of the family in the eye of the storm--this event is nigh impossible to conceive. Nightmarish is too consoling an adjective.

But on a macro level, the coverage has all the hallmarks of whipped up hysteria--there's more than a whiff of the kind of emotional fascism that characterized the Soham case, and, further back, those bizarre days after the death of Diana. You must be distraught is the unspoken commandment.

But does anyone seriously think lighting a candle, or getting David Beckham to make a TV appeal, will have the slightest affect on the (darkening) outcome? I suspect that all this "concern" really achieves is to make our own lives and families seem more stable, more sensible (what is the real story behind the family's perfect facade?, the muttering goes) as we warm ourselves against the blazing spectacle of another person's tragedy.

"I confess I had no desire to die in a Southeast Asian rice paddy," wrote John R. Bolton in his Yale 25th Reunion Book. Despite this personal aversion to the dirty business of combat, the former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations--a man who is (to paraphrase an AA Gill quote) to diplomacy what boxing gloves are to onanism--seems to have little compunction about sending other Johnnies marching off the war.

Covering a recent speech by Bolton, the Daily Telegraph reports him claiming that "a nuclear Iran would be as dangerous as 'Hitler marching into the Rhineland' in 1936 and should be prevented by Western military strikes if necessary." It seems that Bolton assumes his audience has the recall of goldfish or is simply lobotomized, expecting people to be flabbergasted by the freshness and audacity of the parallels. Gee, I suppose when you think about, that Iranian guy Ahmed Dinnerjacket and Adolf are kinda similar. . . But didn't we just kill some other Nazi?

If the Bush Administration has already decided to bomb the crap out of Iran, it and its PR people(the three stooges of Hitchens, Kristol, and Krauthammer, for example) might have to freshen up their war mongering to prevent the uncomfortable Saddam query being raised. To help lift them out of a rhetorical rut, I suggest avoiding the following "crutch" words in the run-up to pushing the boulder away from some new hell-mouth:

Munich
Hitler\the Nazis
Neville Chamberlain\Winston Churchill
The tiles of any books by the latter figure
Appeasement
Czechoslovakia
Poland
The Rhineland
The League of Nations (esp. in comparison with the UN)
1936
1938
1939

You don't think comparing the Iranian president to Kaiser Bill is a runner? You could use the whole Dreadnought race as your WMD metaphor. Any takers? Is that the Weekly Standard calling?

The American author Richard Ford is scheduled to give a reading at Dublin's Abbey Theatre on June 6. I'm currently immersed in his latest novel, The Lay of the Land, a real baggy monster whose narrative leisurely meanders, with plenty of oxbow digressions, through the fertile mind of Frank Bascombe, the realtor familiar to readers from the earlier installments of this post-hoc trilogy, The Sportswriter and Independence Day. I've reached page 340 (out of the hardback total of 485) and not that much has really happened. Much of the "action" actually unfolds in recollection, experienced in the cabin of Bascombe's Chevy Suburban while he potters around suburban New Jersey on errands of questionable utility (then again, one of the recurring themes of this work seems to be the nagging sense that almost everything that occupies our time and attention is, in the end, not especially important).

But from such superficially thin material great books can be made. Ulysses, for example, managed to get some mileage from the humdrum observations of a commercial man and Ford's book shares with Joyce's book a fascination with how the educated mind draws on a myriad of referents, both high and (obscurely) low, as it struggles to process the senses' inputs. (Ford also shares with Walker Percy a habit of gleefully comparing walk-on characters in his story with appropriately B-list figures from the Hollywood and TV firmament. For instance, a wannabe property developer is granted a "a Neville Brand stolidness" and during a bar-room scuffle Bascombe's inept assailant lets out a "Gildersleevian 'Oooomph' when kneed in the groin.)

Above all, what makes Ford's long novel worth sticking with is the laughter generated as Bascombe struggles to maintain his "Permanent Period" equanimity in the face of prostate cancer and a succession of people who could best be described as assholes. And Bascombe is very good at describing them. Here he is giving the lowdown on Thom van Ronk, the new boyfriend of Frank's daughter, the formerly lesbian Clarissa:

"Tall, rangy, long-muscled, large-eyed, smooth-olive-skinned Amherst or Wesleyan grad--read Sanskrit, history of science and genocide studies, swam or rowed till books got in the way; born "abroad" of mixed parentage (Jewish-Navajo, French, Berber--whatever gives you charcoal gray eyes, silky black hair on the back of your hands and forearms); deep honeyed voice that seems made of expensive felt; intensely "serious" yet surprisingly funny, also touchingly awkward at the most unexpected moments (not during intercourse); plays a medieval stringed instrument, of which there are only ten in existence; has mastered Go, was once married to a Chilean woman and has a teenage child in Montreal he's deeply committed to but rarely sees. Worked in Ghana for the Friends Service, taught in experimental schools (not Montessori), built his own ketch and sailed it to Brittany, wears one-of-a-kind Persian sandals, a copper anklet, black silk singlets suggesting a full-body tan, sage-colored desert shorts revealing a shark bite on his inner thigh from who-knows-what ocean, and always smells like a fine wood-working shop."

I can sense Frank and Thom will not bond over the organic Thanksgiving turkey.

With the media moratorium on election coverage due to fall like a sheet over a disfigured corpse, it is time to reflect, even if it sets your teeth on edge, on the campaigns that are rapidly winding down. Alas, it was far from an electrifying spectacle. If the politics of ideology is a thing of the past--with all parties agreeing on not just the same destination but the same road to take (it's their opponents driving skills that the candidates question)--the politics of personality have come to the forefront. The hitch is that you have to have politicians with some personality to make such a substance-free proposition work.

I exaggerate slightly--there are some "personalities" in the Irish parliament. Like this one. And he has a good chance, just like this chancer, of getting back in. Or even, God help us, of holding the balance of power.

As for me, I shall unenthusiastically opt for the Blueshirt option. Not because I'm itching to sign Enda Kenny's contract but would dearly love to hand Bertie, Cullen, Roche, Hanafin, and Cowen their P45s. Such an outcome is not looking likely at 8.45 PM, May 22, but I can't handle the prospect, just yet, of listening to, say, Martin Cullen defend the relaunch of electronic voting in 2011.

We all make mistakes. Lord knows, I do (having noticed this morning that I spelt the surname of the man who I sort-of-hope will be the next Taoiseach as "Kenney"!). But in this "knowledge economy" there's now money to be made, and lots of it, from slips at the keyboard. Take the rather noisome figure of Kevin Ham, a Canadian of Korean parentage who has made a fortune from Internet domain names.

One wheeze Ham has exploited to build his estimated $300 million dollar "empire" is based on something as basic as wrongly entered URLs. Business 2.0 magazine explains:

"[W]hat few people know is that he's also the man behind the domain world's latest scheme: profiting from traffic generated by the millions of people who mistakenly type ".cm" instead of ".com" at the end of a domain name.

Try it with almost any name you can think of -- Beer.cm, Newyorktimes.cm, even Anyname.cm -- and you'll land on a page called Agoga.com, a site filled with ads served up by Yahoo (Charts, Fortune 500).

Ham makes money every time someone clicks on an ad -- as does his partner in this venture, the West African country of Cameroon. Why Cameroon? It has the unforeseen good fortune of owning .cm as its country code -- just as Germany runs all names that end with .de.

The difference is that hardly any .cm names are registered, and the letters are just one keyboard slip away from .com, the mother lode of all domains. Ham landed connections to the Cameroon government and flew in his people to reroute the traffic. And if he gets his way, Colombia (.co), Oman (.om), Niger (.ne), and Ethiopia (.et) will be his as well."

What seems particularly galling about Ham's scam is that the perpetrator apparently sees himself as a committed Christian, a man who "steers conversations about business back to the Bible." As if the shell-game of "typo-squatting" is all part of the Lord's way.

To quote Dick Tuck, who spoke on the occassion of losing the race for a California Senate Seat, "The people have spoken, the bastards."

In my constituency, Conor "Kebabs" Lenihan has just got in on the first count.

The champagne's being put back into cold storage. Just like all those voting machines. Martin Cullen is now back in.

It's beginning to feel like a bad zombie film...

Stalled in a traffic jam snaking up one of the M50's off-ramps this morning--only in Ireland do road planners think motorways and roundabouts mix--I caught the tail-end of RTE's Morning Ireland. It featured a report on the canonisation of the 19th-century priest Fr. Charles of Mt. Argus, due to take place this weekend in Rome*. (The Sunday Business Post report on this event seems a bit ahead of itself, with its reference to the "canonisation of St. Charles of Mt. Argus.")

To attain the status of beatification, let alone that of canonisation, "one miracle must be proven to have taken place through the intercession of the person to be beatified, though this requirement is waived for those who died a martyr." (I'm quoting from that esteemed theological source, Wikipedia, here.)

On the subject of miracles, the Morning Ireland report featured a story of a boy who had supposedly lost the power of his legs but was soon up and running around after by being blessed by Fr. Houben. Interestingly, the reporter referred to this incident as "one of many miracles that happened here [Mount Argus church]," without hedging "miracles" with the usual weasel words, such as "alleged" or "reported."

Presumably, these adjectives are reserved exclusively for murder suspects and payments to senior politicians.

Reflecting on Fr. Charles's restoration of ambulatory powers got me to thinking about French writer Emile Zola's observation about the shrine at Lourdes. Looking at the hundreds of abandoned crutches lining the avenue to the grotto, he is said to have asked where were all the wooden legs.

*Joe Walsh Tours has thoughtfully organized a hassle-free package deal for eager pilgrims.

I was sufficiently impressed by Joshua Ferris's debut, Then We Came to the End, to check out the book that inspired that somewhat sales-unfriendly title, Don DeLillo's first novel, Americana (opening line: "Then we came to the end of another dull and lurid year". DeLillo, whatever his limitations, has an undeniable knack for the arresting curtain-opener--check out the site Don DeLillo's America for evidence.)

That same site's page on Americana references a less-than-stellar review by Martin Levin, which appeared in The New York Times exactly 36 years ago (May 30, 1971):