The latest paperbacks reviewed
Shade by Neil Jordan Hodder Headline Ireland, €10.99
No one could dispute Neil Jordan's ability to tell a good story, and in this dreamy, dark novel - his third in total, though it is the first he has written for a decade - he weaves a spell composed of equal parts beauty and brutality. It is a tale of friendship and class difference, of love - enduring and obsessive - and the callousness of war. It begins with an idyllic portrait of childhood in a large house near the estuary of the River Boyne, in the small delta of mudflats which one of the characters will christen "Mozambique". This being Jordan, of course, the idyll has a squishy underbelly: the beautiful only child has an illegitimate half-brother; the working-class friend is not just a gentle giant. Disaster haunts the book from the murder on page one, but it's still a page-turner of impressive power.
Arminta Wallace
The Finishing School by Muriel Spark Penguin, £6.99
Paranoid aspiring novelist Rowland Mahler runs a daft finishing school operating from a succession of European venues. Not surprisingly, he teaches creative writing, badly, while his shrewd wife, Nina, the brains of the partnership, specialises in sharing her social survival skills. Into their crazed world of indulged kids and obnoxious parents enters Chris, a 17-year-old eccentric intent on literary greatness. His clunky historical novel, based on the life of Mary Queen of Scots, sounds a mess but to a deranged failure such as Rowland, it is the masterpiece he believes he should have written. As Spark adds, he "could have stabbed the boy for his modesty and calm". More than half a century after publishing her first story, Spark again demonstrates her comic timing, satirical humour and barbed dialogue in this slight but wittily moral yarn lampooning the madness of failed ambition heightened by obsessive jealousy.
Eileen Battersby
Shooting History by Jon Snow HarperCollins, £7.99
Channel 4 newsreader Jon Snow is a kind of avuncular Jeremy Paxman, his hard-hitting questions tempered by those loud ties. This entertaining memoir reads like a journalistic Zelig, the Woody Allen film about a man who keeps popping up beside historical figures. Before he became a journalist, young Jon, son of an Anglican bishop, had encountered Harold Macmillan, Queen Elizabeth, Idi Amin, and Churchill's departing coffin. Within a few years, radicalised by a year in Uganda, he had become a foreign correspondent, surviving close, often hilarious, encounters with Thatcher, Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and Amin again. Snow frames his anecdotes in a larger historical context. He has had a ringside seat at many of the defining events of the late 20th century, and he traces a convincing line from the disastrous after-effects of colonialism to the cold war to the rise of Islamic terrorism.
Davin O'Dwyer
The Captain with the Whiskers by Benedict Kiely Methuen, £7.99
Thanks to reprints, the issuing of the impressive Collected Stories, and, more recently, a fitting RTÉ documentary, Kiely has lately been attracting new attention. Comparing his initial experience of this novel in 1960 to reading it this time round, Tom Kilroy, in his reflective afterword, emphasises the tension in Kiely's fiction between a lilting form that is rooted in the oral tradition and a "harder, more sharp-edged" content. The jaunty title refers to Capt Conway Chesney, whose tyrannical hold over his family is described by Owen Rodgers, the "normal son of a normal man". Rodgers, in a mix of private fantasticality and realist attention to local background, tells of his own growth and his relationships with the captain's two afflicted daughters. Famously compared by Heinrich Böll to Balzac, it is yet again clear from this reprint that Kiely writes like nobody else; his talent for Irish idylls aside, a quietly anarchical spirit is reflected in this brand of playful articulacy.
John Kenny
The Dictators: Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia by Richard Overy Penguin, £9.99
Overy employs a dialectical approach as he seeks to find parallels and divergences between Hitler and Stalin and their brands of totalitarianism. Although they had very different personalities (Hitler was impatient, bombastic and impulsive, whereas Stalin was reserved, calculating and duplicitous), at the heart of both their systems lay the same intolerance, which led in Russia's case to mass murder and in Germany's to genocide. Overy also points out that these crimes would not have been possible without the collusion of the cabals around each man and the assistance of the populations at large, who were willing to snitch on neighbours for their own gain and uphold the "values" of the system. This is why the book, although ostensibly about history, is also about human nature and the depths so-called civilised societies can sink to in the pursuit of an "ideal".
Ken Walshe
The Man Who Married A Mountain By Rosemary Bailey Bantam Books, £7.99
At a time when climbing mountains was seen as frivolous and dangerous by most, Count Henry Russell, a 19th-century French-Irish explorer, was among the first to scale the many peaks of the Pyrenees. The eccentric yet respected Russell inspired generations of mountaineers and documented the slopes in a prose that emphasised the beauty of what he saw, while essential supplies always included copious amounts of food and wine. Bailey retraces the life and times of the count and provides an amusing look at characters of the era. While much has changed over the past 200 years, this is a must-have for anyone who cannot resist "the Sublime, the Picturesque and the Beautiful" the region promises.
Brian Keane