Around 80 pages into Anne Enright's The Gathering, I remarked to a friend that the experience of reading it with a heavy cold felt as enjoyable as walking up Croagh Patrick barefoot. However, just as pious pilgrims probably feel some sense of accomplishment while they gingerly massage their shredded soles after completing their climb, I did sense, upon finishing the final page of Enright's book, that the experience, while not exactly a hoot, was not absolutely pointless either.

It's certainly not a work that tries to win you over with glib similes or an appealingly wise-cracking narrator. That isn't to say that Veronica, who provides the novel's voice, is insensitive to a certain dark comedy that can be extracted from her situation. She does, after all, describe herself as named after the saint who offered a "tea-towel" to the suffering Christ.

Yet I felt that the manner in which she provides some perspective on the ways she and her large family try to come to terms with the suicide of her elder brother, Liam, sometimes segued from exasperated sympathy to boiling misanthropy (there are pages in The Gathering where Enright's narrator makes some of Houellebecq's, for example, seem like Ned Flanders.)

It's not that I don't appreciate a healthy dose of misanthropy, but it's difficult to appreciate the objects of Veronica's withering gaze as actual characters when almost the only information about them relates to how they disappoint, aggravate, or repel the narrator. Tom, Veronica's husband, is a shadow of a figure, who apparently "hates" his wife (this is, apparently, a hatred shared by all men for all women).

Veronica's mother is similarly "blurred," dismissed as a benign piece of meat. Even Liam, the cynosure of the book's grief, never, to me, becomes engaging enough for his passing to register as a loss.

But it's acrid language with which Veronica dispenses her wisdom that provides the real slap across the reader's face.

For example, she comes from a sprawling family with 12 children--a horde she seems to consider with the bemused distaste of an entomologist who loathes creepy-crawlies:

"There were girls at school whose families grew to a robust five or six. There were girls with seven or eight--which was thought a little enthusiastic--and then there were the pathetic ones like me, who had parents that were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit."

If you find the last analogy bracing, a tad unforgiving, then you might blanch in the face of Veronica's description of the activity her parents were supposedly helpless before. The book's tone seems to be marinated in a corporeal loathing, with descriptions of bodies and the moments when those bodies come into contact depicted with the sort of grimy relish you might associate with a self-flagellator of the Opus Dei variety. Some samples:

"I contemplate the spreading bruise of my private parts"; "I can sense the blood pooling in his lap; the thick oblong of his penis moving down the leg of his suit"; "her pubis like the breast of an underfed chicken"

But it is this almost-monotonous disgust at the flesh, and the book's unflagging rage, that gives it a cumulative power which the reader is ultimately obliged to acknowledge. The first-person narration might make the judgements and observations made seem close to self-indulgent tirades, but it also imbues them with honesty. (Monomania is hard to fake.)

Even if the childhood secrets that Liam's death unravels make your eyes roll with their predictable contours, Enright's dedication to revisiting this much-trampled ground also seems at one with this anti-ingratiating candour. We don't want to hear about all this again, groans the reader. But The Gathering will have none of your jaded apathy. Just because you're bored with these subjects, it seems to insist, doesn't mean they're not important, not of the utmost seriousness.

It's a serious book, The Gathering. And you can easily respect it, even when you find it impossible to like.

This morning I was unsure whether I had really heard the phrase. Perhaps I had only imagined it being uttered on last night's RTE news--such an absurdity seemed more likely to be coined during a particularly choppy REM pattern.

But no. It was confirmed, in black-and-white, by this morning's Irish Independent:

Mr Ahern said the increases [of 38K to the Taoiseach and 25K for Ministers], recommended by an independent review body, would be going ahead.

"I think for the future it should be on a three-year period. But, you know, governments can defer these things for a period and then, as they've previously done, go back and pay it all again. I mean, that's really only playing smokes and daggers with it. I mean, the fact is, this will ultimately be paid and it's better for the Government to be up front on it," he said. [Italics mine]

At least the Americans know when their language-mangling political chief executive is leaving office for all time.

Today's online version of the New York Times prominently featured a picture of Irish writer Anne Enright. It accompanies an article discussing how Enright's Booker victory stoked up a bit of storm in a teacup over an article she had written in the London Review of Books about the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. The centre of this little media typhoon was Enright's candour in admitting she had "disliked the McCanns [Madeline's parents, Kate and Gerry] earlier than most people."

Most Irish commentators argued that the sudden scrutiny of Enright's article was a typical example of British journalism's attack-dog mentality: A new figure has been thrust onto the public stage--how can we drag her down?

The New York Times piece seems to follow the same thinking, suggesting the furore was based an a selective and uniformed reading of the LRB piece:

"[W]hile she did not want to be drawn into a longer discussion, what seemed clear was that the essay was of a piece with all of her writing: a subtle and not-easy-to-summarize examination of intricate emotions that sometimes contradict one another."

But having read the article the other day, fully and in context, I have to say it's one of the oddest pieces of journalism I have come across. What I was particularly struck by was how close Enright's journalistic voice is to that of Veronica, the angst-ridden narrator of The Gathering. But while it is an accepted, indeed almost obligatory, trope for a fictional character to interpret the world in ways that make the reader uneasy about the narrator's mental state, how is one to react when the "real," non-fiction version of a writer seems to write in the same, unsettling vein?

Throughout the LRB article, I stumbled over sentences that made me wince at how willing Enright was to chronicle unattractive actions and expose her most uncharitable instincts.

For example, does the use of the word "hallelujah" strike you as magnificently inappropriate in the context of the following sentence?

In August, the sudden conviction that the McCanns ‘did it’ swept over our own family holiday in a peculiar hallelujah."

And would you be happy if your husband or wife decided to share with the world a grimy speculation that may have been made without thinking?

During the white heat of media allegations against Madeleine’s parents, my husband came up the stairs to say that they’d all been wife-swapping – that was why the other diners corroborated the McCanns’ account of the evening. This, while I was busy measuring the distance from the McCanns’ holiday apartment down the road to the church on Google Earth (0.2 miles). I said they couldn’t have been wife-swapping, because one of the wives had brought her mother along.

‘Hmmmm,’ he said.

Finally, at what point does honesty about unhealthy fascination start to creep out the reader? The next sentence did it for me:

I, for example, search for interviews with them, late at night, on YouTube. There is so much rumour; I listen to their words because they are real, because these words actually did happen, one after the other...

Poring over YouTube interviews with the McCanns late at night? Yuck.

Isn't there something to be said, even in this age of compulsive self-revelation, for keeping things to yourself? In the end, as with almost all "confessional journalism" the LRB article casts little light on its supposed object of inquiry, but tells us far more than we wanted to know about the subject pecking away at the keyboard.

The rise of "Globish"--English as it is spoken by non-native speakers--is the subject of a recent article in the Financial Times. What made the piece unusually illuminating is that it cogently challenges the complacency that native English speakers have about the world's emerging lingua franca. (In other words, in the future all we'll have to do to make ourselves clear to Johnny Foreigner will simply to speak a bit slower and a lot LOUDER.)

The kink in this account of the rise of English lies in the observation that "non-native speakers now outnumber native English-speakers by three to one."

Such numbers mean that within international organization it is frequently the case that English is the medium of verbal communication even when there no native English speakers present. Moreover, "[many] business meetings held in English appear to run more smoothly when there are no native English-speakers present."

Why?

"Native speakers are often poor at ensuring that they are understood in international discussions. They tend to think they need to avoid longer words, when comprehension problems are more often caused by their use of colloquial and metaphorical English.

Barbara Seidlhofer, professor of English and applied linguistics at the University of Vienna, says relief at the absence of native speakers is common. “When we talk to people (often professionals) about international communication, this observation is made very often indeed. We haven’t conducted a systematic study of this yet, so what I say is anecdotal for the moment, but there seems to be very widespread agreement about it,” she says. She quotes an Austrian banker as saying: “I always find it easier to do business [in English] with partners from Greece or Russia or Denmark.

But when the Irish call, it gets complicated and taxing.”

I think what our Austrian friend fails to realise is that transparency of meaning is often the last thing an Irish person is aiming for when they start to talk.

More than a week after being wrung out by the emotional mangle of its closing pages, I still find that in the mind's eye Cormac McCarthy's The Road--to borrow Philip Larkin's words--"Flashes afresh to hold and horrify." As a host of critics, from Adam-Mars Jones to Oprah, have already discussed this dark masterpiece, I won't detain you with my critique. Apart from bluntly insisting it's a brilliant work, a mesmerizing imbrication of tenderness and dread, I'd like to post two footnotes--one trivial, one slightly "deeper"--to the discussion about the book.

First, in The Guardian, George Monbiot argued that The Road is perhaps "the most important environmental book ever written."

He goes on: "Cormac McCarthy's book The Road considers what would happen if the world lost its biosphere, and the only living creatures were humans, hunting for food among the dead wood and soot.[...] All pre-existing social codes soon collapse and are replaced with organised butchery, then chaotic, blundering horror. What else are the survivors to do? The only remaining resource is human. It is hard to see how this could happen during humanity's time on earth, even by means of the nuclear winter McCarthy proposes. But his thought experiment exposes the one terrible fact to which our technological hubris blinds us: our dependence on biological production remains absolute. Civilisation is just a russeting on the skin of the biosphere, never immune from being rubbed against the sleeve of environmental change. Six weeks after finishing The Road, I remain haunted by it."

All true. I then read a rare interview with McCarthy which opens with a survey of the exterior of the Santa Fe Institute, a high-brow think-tank of which McCarthy is an incongruous faculty member:

"The parking lot at the Santa Fe Institute, in New Mexico, features rows of vehicles typical of American academia-S.U.V.’s and minivans, a few older-model BMWs and Mercedeses, a Toyota Prius, and an inordinate number of Subarus and Hondas. [...] Standing out from the crowd is a red Ford F-350 diesel pickup with Texas plates. Equipped with a Banks PowerPack that boosts the 7.3-liter engine to more than 300 hp, it has a stripped-down profile in back, like a wrecker’s, with no winch.
[...] The owner of the truck [is] the novelist Cormac McCarthy"

So McCarthy might be adept at envisaging the destruction of the biosphere but such nightmares ain't going to stop him driving a big-ass truck. (Perhaps he has to haul wood, dead game, or similar Hemingwayesque loads.)

On a slightly more serious level, in the New York Review of Books, the writer Michael Chabon pondered what might be the ultimate "message" behind the novel:

"The Road is not a record of fatherly fidelity; it is a testament to the abyss of a parent's greatest fears. The fear of leaving your child alone, of dying before your child has reached adulthood and learned to work the mechanisms and face the dangers of the world, or found a new partner to face them with. The fear of one day being obliged for your child's own good, for his peace and comfort, to do violence to him or even end his life. And, above all, the fear of knowing—as every parent fears—that you have left your children a world more damaged, more poisoned, more base and violent and cheerless and toxic, more doomed, than the one you inherited"

Again there is truth in this statement, but it also led me back to a nagging question about being a parent. It seems to me that the major contradiction of being a parent (in many, not all cases) in the affluent West is that doing "the best" for one's offspring legitimises selfish behaviour, making the world a little "more damaged, more poisoned, more base."

For example, you want to ensure your DNA carriers are safe when on the road, so you might buy an SUV (although perhaps one not quite as macho as McCarthy's). Nevermind the higher CO2 omissions, it seems you are willing to decapitate another family with your bumper in order to protect your own. And then there's the hot-button issue of schools--the ones with a dodgy reputation are abandoned by those who can make a choice, thus depriving struggling institutions of the very mix of classes and abilities needed if they have any chance of improvement. Thus the gap between the educated winners and the resentful, functionally illiterate underclass widens.

And as children mature into adulthood, the networks of nepotism and favouritism kick in when available, ensuring berths are secured for family members on the elevator going up. Those with the talent, but without the connections, find getting on board considerably less easy.

All this unfolds against a screen showing an avalanche of prefabricated entertainments, fast food, and instantly forgettable toys from the Guangdong Province--all doing little for the toxicity of a planet we are intending to "pass on" one day.


But that's not to say I won't be persuaded a buy a HappyMeal within the next few weeks.

When King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia visited the United Kingdom last month, British Foreign Minister Kim Howells stated that Britain and Saudi Arabia could unite around their "shared values."

From the BBC news site:

An appeal court in Saudi Arabia has doubled the number of lashes and added a jail sentence as punishment for a woman who was gang-raped.

The victim was initially punished for violating laws on segregation of the sexes - she was in an unrelated man's car at the time of the attack.

When she appealed, the judges said she had been attempting to use the media to influence them.

The attackers' sentences - originally of up to five years - were doubled.

According to the Arab News newspaper, the 19-year-old woman, who is from Saudi Arabia's Shia minority, was gang-raped 14 times in an attack in the eastern province a year-and-a-half ago.

Seven men from the majority Sunni community were found guilty of the rape and sentenced to prison terms ranging from just under a year to five years.

But the victim was also punished for violating Saudi Arabia's laws on segregation that forbid unrelated men and women from associating with each other. She was initially sentenced to 90 lashes for being in the car of a strange man.

On appeal, the Arab News reported that the punishment was not reduced but increased to 200 lashes and a six-month prison sentence.

It sounds as though Bono has borrowed the Taoiseach's scriptwriter:

From RTE.ie:

Bono has defended the decision by U2 to move part of the band's business from Ireland to the Netherlands to reduce his tax bill and the tax bill of the other band members.

Bono was speaking at University College Cork, where he attended a meeting of the Irish Government's Hunger Task Force, of which he's a member.

He said Ireland's prosperity had been achieved through tax innovation and it would be churlish to criticise U2 for being innovative in relation to their tax affairs when that's what people were encouraged to do and that's what made the country prosperous.

He said U2 paid taxes not only to the letter of the law but to the spirit of the law too

One of the most enlightening documentaries to run this year has been the six-part BBC4 series "The Genius of Photography," which continues its run today and Thursday. It's introduced me to a range of figures--most of whom I wasn't familiar with--that shaped a medium I don't know enough about. What more can you ask from the crystal bucket?

One figure who held my attention in particular was W. Eugene Smith, who, from the gritted-teeth accounts of him offered by his contemporaries, seemed not to be the easiest of men to work with. The information that he occasionally drank the alcoholic fluids used to develop his photos and was obsessed with William Faulkner supports the image of a fairly "volatile" temperament.

The programme also recounts how Smith nearly bankrupted the fledgling Magnum photo agency when he embarked on a project to produce 100 photographs in three weeks to celebrate the city of Pittsburgh's first centenary. This short project evolved into "a three year commitment as he attempted to describe, understand and better the world he saw around him with no less than 21,000 photographic moments."

I suppose Smith's photos resonated with me because one of them, "Dream Street" was used on the cover of an omnibus edition of John Updike's "Rabbit" novels--700 pages that capture with preternatural ability the sights, smells, and texture of American life over three decades.

Smith's images of Pittsburgh do something similar to Updike's words. Serving as a proxy for the viewer/reader, they create the definitive perception of a time and a place we were not able to witness at first hand.

For example, take a look at this superlative image of the Pittsburgh skyline at night and tell me that this isn't also your America of the 1950s?

A selection of Smith's images are available from the excellent Magnum website.

Newsweek's latest cover story sails perilously close the rocks of "advertorial" with its coverage of the new "wireless reading device," Amazon Kindle.

(On the Amazon page for Kindle, they've managed to rope in Nobel laureate Toni Morrison to help flog the $400 device--although at the rate the dollar's falling that price might not seem so steep for anyone paid in Euros.)

The Newsweek article tries to elevate the significance of its subject matter by taking a biggest-thing-since-Gutenberg slant. So (the?) Kindle isn't just another iPhone-style cooler-than-thou gadget (it's considerably uglier for starters)--it's a part of wave of technology that will change the very way we read, write, and publish. And thus, presumably, change the way we think.

But there's always the question of how filthy lucre fits into the scheme of things. The brief discussion of how digitised, wireless, "always-on," e-Ink-enabled publishing might spur new business models doesn't exactly encourage bibliophiles to ululate with joy:

The model other media use to keep prices down, of course, is advertising. Though this doesn't seem to be in Kindle's plans, in some dotcom quarters people are brainstorming advertiser-supported books. "Today it doesn't make sense to put ads in books, because of the unpredictable timing and readership," says Bill McCoy, Adobe's general manager of e-publishing. "That changes with digital distribution."

Well I suppose those brainstorming inhabitants of "dotcom quarters" are usually good at judging what the public will swallow.

Aside from baying in corporate boxes at their national rugger teams, the movers and shakers in the financial industry aren't the types to manifest patriotic fervour. In this interconnected, flattened and otherwise mangled world, to tether yourself too closely to the fate of a single nation is to risk narrowing your portfolio. Those whose careers consist of making money using other people's money are united by their ruthless internationalism--a Brotherhood of Mammon.

Or so I thought.

But according to a recent column-filling tidbit in the Sunday Indo, when the going gets the tough, the rich in Ireland are just as likely to rail against perfidious Albion as a street hawker of An Phoblacht.

"THE latest theory doing the rounds in some property and banking circles is that London hedge fund boys are having an old fashioned crack at the Mick. According to the theory, the City boys, sick of Paddy buying up key London landmarks, have seen an opportunity to put the boot in and short Irish bank shares. The result is that Anglo Irish, a bank which may announce up to 20 per cent earnings growth later this month, is trading on eight times p/e. If you believe it, it makes them a buy."

After the lightning flash of Terry Eagleton's comparison of Martin Amis's musings about Islam and terrorism to "the ramblings of a British National Party thug," the debate rumbled through The Guardian last week. First Ronan Bennett, in an article with the fingerwagging headline "Shame on us," argued that the apparent non-reaction to Amis's statements allowed the author to get away "with as odious an outburst of racist sentiment as any public figure has made in this country for a very long time."

Then Christopher Hitchens, sleek as a seal from his Vanity Fair-sponsored extreme makeover, weighed in on his old mucker's behalf, by insisting that "Martin Amis is no racist."

Both Bennett and Hitchens drew parallels between the IRA campaign in the 1970s and today's Islamic-inspired terrorism to examine notions of collective responsibility.

Bennett made his point about the inflammatory nature of Amis's comments by taking sentences attributed to the writer and replacing the word "Muslims" with "Asians", "Blacks" and "Irish". For example:

"Strip-searching Irish people. Discriminatory stuff, until it hurts the whole Irish community and they start getting tough with their children."

Hitchens, in a characteristic tactic, attempted to cast doubts on his opponent's intelligence by focusing on a point of English usage:

"Ronan Bennett's clumsy tirade against Martin Amis in G2 on Monday will not have been a complete waste of space if it allows us to revisit the words "discriminate" or "discrimination". . . Thus to accuse Martin Amis of being a racist is to say that he can't tell the difference between, say, one Irishman and another."

This last comment actually made me think of a sentence by Amis, written a very long time ago and in a very different context, that made me unsure whether he could even tell the difference between one Irishman and a piece of excrement.

From Amis's first novel, The Rachel Papers (1973), the following passage describes the down-at-heel lodgings of his erstwhile childhood Nanny:

"I looked around the room. There was only the one door off it, and we had come in by that, so it was safe to assume that these four walls (or six: the bedsitter was L-shaped) bounded Nanny's existence--apart from sorties to some rancid bathroom, which would anyway have crap and catatonic Irishmen all over its floor."

No doubt "The Hitch" would object to my overloading of the rhetorical concept of zeugma to support the claim that the above passage implies an equivalence between drunken Micks and crap. But does the sentence at least begin to challenge the impression that Amis's recent remarks about Muslims are the product of a middle-aged brain calcifying with bigotry? As the Rachel Papers was published when the writer was only 24, it might seem that Amis was never overly concerned with empathizing with either the mindset or conditions of those outside his social and intellectual circle. It's a good first book, but if you care to read it, the above quote will seem hardly anomalous. Around ten pages on, with all the pinched sarcasm marginalia allows, I annotated the following sentence with the phrase "the milk of human kindness":

"Was this the case with everyone--everyone, that is, who wasn't already a thalidomide baked bean, or a gangrenous imbecile, or degradingly poor, or irretrievably poor..."

...Angola??

Stats nerds can now download facts and figures for 80 countries from the Economist's The World in 2008 microsite.

(Ireland's GDP per head figures remain difficult to swallow.)

In one of the rituals of approaching year-end, the New York Times has unveiled its 10 Best Books of the Year. So far I've read only one, Joshua Ferris's rollicking satire of office life, Then We Came to an End (see here for my take on the novel and here for my high-falutin' reflections on the book that gave Ferris his title, Don DeLillo's Americana.)

The rest of the fiction list looks enticing: Out Stealing Horses, by Per Petterson; The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño; and the much-lauded Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson—all have been added to that congested holding pattern of books awaiting their slots with this reader.

Describing a book as "beautiful" can be dismissed as a lame start to a piece of criticism. A word more at home among the spidery handwriting of a schoolchild's book report, the self-respecting critic treats it as gingerly as someone with high blood pressure handles the salt cellar.

But (aside from the fact this is a blog, which, according to our cultural gatekeepers, is not subject to the same rigorous standards that are daily showcased in our newspapers) I nevertheless offer the word "beautiful" as being the most appropriate epithet for Giorgio Bassani's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, which has recently been reissued by Penguin in a new translation by Jamie McKendrick.

Perhaps it is because, with its near-static structure and attention to quotidian detail, the novel brings to mind a group portrait or a bleached-out photo of a long-past event. And the paradox of portraiture—capturing a particular moment for all time simultaneously underlines its transience—is strongly felt in Bassani's novel, in which the idyll of young love (even if it is unrequited) is subtly contrasted with the pitch-black fate that awaits most of the characters.

Unfolding in the late 1930s in the northern Italian town of Ferrara, The Garden of the Finzi-Continis traces how the narrator, travelling from adolescence to young manhood, falls under the spell of the eponymous family, in particular the daughter, Micòl. Both the narrator and the family belong to Ferrara's Jewish community, which during the novel's timeframe begins to be gradually undermined by Italy's Racial Laws, introduced from 1938.

The persecution experienced by the characters is handled in a low-key manner, more of an intermittent ominous chord than a persistent drumbeat. For example: The narrator is asked to leave a library, while two other characters are cheated out of victory in a tennis tournament because of their religion. But the serpent lurking in the lush grounds belonging to the Finzi-Continis need not hiss to make its presence felt—the novel's prologue already foretells doom:

Almost thirty years after the events covered in the main body of the book, the narrator visits some ancient Etruscan tombs, the sight of which stirs memories about the ancestral burial plot of the Finzi-Continis.