Irish Times writers review recently published paperbacks, including Fintan O'Toole's Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearian Tragedy, Salman Rushdie's Fury, Ronald Hayman's A Life of Jung, Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red and The Race to the White Continent: Voyages to the Antarctic by Alan Gurney.
Shakespeare is Hard, but so is Life: A Radical Guide to Shakespearian Tragedy
Fintan O'Toole
Granta Books £6.99
This book is a brilliant and extremely readable distillation of some of the current thinking about Shakespeare's tragedies. Fintan O'Toole freely admits that he has not read much of this current thinking, but he does not need to: by definition, he is in tune with a certain zeitgeist, and this extraordinary, tips of the fingers modernity is fully in evidence here. It's not original, or radical, but what is? "The new Shakespeare" has abandoned the character-based analysis of the Victorian critics (given a ritual roasting here); it has also abandoned the image- and myth-based criticism of the 1960s. Jettisoned similarly is the theory of drama derived mainly from Aristotle's Poetics. The new Shakespeare is above all historical, focused on the playwright's world and seeing the tragedies' turbulence as reflective of the tensions of that world in a period of change. O'Toole expounds this in chapters on the big four tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. As the title indicates rather too well, the book (a revision of a work first published in 1990) is aimed at a school-leaver and student audience. Occasionally, it does become simplistic - it is over-reductive, for instance, to argue that Lear is really all to do with "the excessive wealth of the rich and powerful" - but overall the clarity and force of the writing bring many revelations.
Terence Killeen
Fury
Salman Rushdie
Vintage £6.99
In Salman Rushdie's Fury, Malik Solanka abandons his wife and child in London and heads for New York. He is 55, in a permanent rage and not attractive, yet one of the most beautiful young women in the city falls for him. His money comes from his invention, Little Brain, a doll turned chat-show host, that has the nation enthralled with her wit and depth. Rushdie crams in pop culture references, but instead of making the book seem hip and relevant, his references to Bill Clinton and that dress, and his use of street language have the same effect as watching your father disco-dance at a wedding. "The Furies hovered over Malik Solanka, over New York and America and shrieked. In the streets below, the traffic, human and inhuman, screamed back its enraged dissent." The over-wrought prose hasn't a coherent plot to hang on to and darts off in all directions. As a stab at New York, and the neuroses that go with it, the novel was supposed to be comic. Instead, this Fury is entirely flat.
Bernice Harrison
A Life of Jung
Ronald Hayman
Bloomsbury £9.99
A voracious reader, Jung became determined in his late teens to solve the mystery of life's meaning and read philosophy systematically. As a medical student, he couldn't understand why so little was known about the psyche, even though philosophers held that without it there could be neither knowledge nor insight. He chose psychiatry because it was "the field of experience common to biological and spiritual facts the place where nature would collide with the spirit". Some of Ronald Hayman's judgments are damning: "He seems throughout his life to have recoiled from physical and emotional interdependence"; he was less interested in relationships than in the development of the individual; and he thought "the prerequisite for a good marriage licence to be unfaithful". But he was a good doctor whose hallmark was persistence. His friendship with Freud ended after seven years; they disagreed about the roles of religion, mythology and sexuality in neuroses. Where Freud stressed sexuality, Jung held that archetypes shaped the destiny of the individual; the personality was not unique but the product of "a general human precondition". This book is a balanced treatment of a complex thinker.
Brian Maye
My Name is Red
Orhan Pamuk
Translated by Erdag M. Goknar
Faber & Faber £7.99
In 16th-century Istanbul the Sultan has secretly commissioned a book to celebrate his reign and employs the best artists to illuminate it in the Western manner. One of the miniaturists is brutally murdered and his body is thrown down a well. The mystery of why and by whom is at the core of this original novel, which is not just a historical murder puzzle but also a meditation on art and love and a timely exploration of the cultural differences between Islam and the West. Earthy yet delicate, bang up to date yet respectful of tradition, it has an intruiging postmodern structure and yet itself resembles a miniature with its intricate patterns and vivid colours. Pamuk's grasp of Turkish history and his lively imagination make the world he has created entirely believable. It is dense, sometimes demanding, but has humour too - the narrative is handed like a baton between the various characters, who include the corpse, a dog and a tree.
Cathy Dillon
The Race to the White Continent: Voyages to the Antarctic
Alan Gurney
Norton $15.95
Never, they say, judge a book by its cover - unless, of course, the cover sports the word "Antarctic" flanked by one of those improbable images of the Endurance perched at a rakish angle on the frozen ocean. But no: this is not simply another retelling of Shackleton's trudge through the southern snow. In fact, snow is in surprisingly short supply as the author dawdles on Pacific islands and potters among tales of whalers, cannibals, exotic plant species and even more exotic women, recreating three "farthest south" expeditions launched by the US, France and Britain at the end of the 1830s. He does so with a warmth and humour rare in exploration literature, and provides superb portraits of the expedition leaders in the process. But Gurney is more sailor than explorer. The Race to the White Continent would be worth having for its chapter headings alone - apt and quirky definitions taken from Admiral W.H. Smyth's 1867 Sailor's Word-Book - and the sea leaps, salty and dangerous, from every page.
Arminta Wallace