Anger's Violin, by David M. Thomas Mount Eagle, £7.99
The Things that Were, by Aubrey Dillon-Malone Ashfield Press, £7.99
Danny and Clare Are Splitting Up, by Frank Coughlan Marino, £6.99
A trio from Irish publishers, male voices all. Mr Thomas is an Englishman, with Welsh and Scottish blood, who appears to have led a rather peripatetic life. His time as a tour guide has come in handy, for his protagonist here, one Owen Morgan Parry, is just that, a courier shepherding his charges from city to city on a two-week coach tour through Europe. However, as well as dealing with the asinine queries and actions of his herd of tourists, he must also deliver a mysterious parcel to an equally mysterious contact in Heidelberg. The contact turns up dead, I think - stream of consciousness meandering interweaved with more straightforward narration makes a kind of dreamscape to the novel, with the result that one is never really sure what is happening - and the coach driver is subsequently shot. It turns out that a subversive organisation is at the bottom of things, and there is a violent resolution reminiscent of Frank O'Connor's short story "Guests of the Nation". That the book is no straightforward thriller goes without saying, as the author's imagination takes him on flights of fancy involves the literature, culture and language of the various European countries he traverses. This is a tasty offering, especially as it is a first novel, and it's to be hoped it won't become buried under the mountains of drivel that are being propagated nowadays in the name of fiction.
Aubrey Dillon-Malone's The Things that Were is also a first novel, this time a more traditional "look back in anger" at the early life of its narrator, in an effort to elucidate the train of events that leads to him ending up in a mental institution as he bleeds slowly into middle-aged despondency. It is the story of a sensitive son's relationship with his overbearing father, a man who outrages small-town Irish conservatism by wearing a monocle, being responsible for his wife's death in a motor accident, and daring to write a book. The son makes efforts to break free, mostly by travelling to London and working as a barman, but the father always contrives to lure him back. There is a sister, Greta, but she manages to loosen the chains of involvement by exchanging them for the confinement of a convent. This is a powerfully written novel, but the obsessive nature of the central relationship tends to lay a patina of doom and gloom over the story that is relentless in its single-mindedness. But as a case study in the way that the familial bond can sometimes lead to waste and desolation, it is a model of its type. Danny and Clare Are Splitting Up is another study in pain, this time of the break-up of a marriage. The two people of the title meet as teenagers in Cork, Danny as a bit of a tearaway, drinking, puking, waking up in other people's beds, and Clare rather reluctantly trailing along in his wake, attracted but not knowing exactly why. She graduates and becomes a teacher, he gets a job in a bank. They carry on a courtship, eventually get married and have a son. But Danny finds it difficult to adjust to the responsibilities of married life, brings no flowers, neglects to tell Clare he loves her, with the result that she finds someone else who has heard the Barbra Streisand song and heeds it.
Of course, Danny is gob-smacked when Clare tells him she has found someone else, and the remainder of the novel is concerned with how he deals with things and the manner in which he strives to put his life back together. There is always pain in the break-up of a marriage, but here it is strangely muted, possibly because of the fact that Frank is so self-centred and Clare so sketchily realised. The two of them remain characters on a page, never evoking the surge of sympathy that a real couple would. However, Mr Coughlan, a first-time novelist also, does deal very well with the technical side of things, especially with the time-shifts from the past to the present, and he'll quite possibly go on to write more deeply involving novels than this one.
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