This week's paperbacks
John the Revelator
Peter Murphy
Faber Faber, £7.99
The divine St John was the one in the Bible who had visions: Gog, Magog, the beast coming up out of the sea, and all that bloodthirsty jazz. John Devine has visions too, but his are more rooted in the landscape of rural Ireland – a dishevelled crow flaps into his dreams on a regular basis. The eponymous narrator lives with his chain-smoking, Bible-toting mother in a kind of poverty-driven quasi-isolation. When Jamie Corboy moves into town, armed with attitude and bad jokes and French poetry, John gets a tantalising glimpse of teen spirit, and the freedom it might bring. The debut novel by Hot Presswriter Peter Murphy is funny, clever and beguilingly readable. Its references are contemporary, its themes timeless – loyalty, friendship, the power of the imagination, the nature of reality. Murphy weaves snippets of legend, scraps of received scientific wisdom and self-contained short stories by Jamie into a satisfying whole; and as if all that weren't enough, his affectionate portrait of this unlikely 21st-century Madonna and child is a real treasure. Arminta Wallace
Biography: A Very Short Introduction
Hermione Lee
Oxford, £7.99
An impressive feat of compression this, achieved by an authority on the subject of literary biography. Biographer, critic and scholar Hermione Lee gives a crisp distillation of many years’ reflection on a genre (“life-writing”) that is increasingly receiving academic attention in university courses. Considering its origins, development, purposes, ethics and value, she provides a biography of biography in notably fewer pages than the cradle-to-grave door-stoppers published every year. “There is no such thing as a definitive biography,” she writes, before teasing out biography’s relationship to history and philosophy.
Deserving a place on bookshelves for its bibliography alone, this is a succinct survey of the questions – psychological and aesthetic – that arise in any attempt to capture the essence of a life within a narrative frame. But for a richer investigation, and a masterclass in the biographer's art, Lee's own study of Virginia Woolf's life and work is unsurpassed. Helen Meany
The Builders: How a Small Group of Property Developers Fuelled the Building Boom and Transformed Ireland
Frank McDonald and Kathy Sheridan
Penguin, £7.99
Such a bizarre cast of personalities fill this book. Helicopters, humble beginnings and wealth-accumulation are common biographical details, along with lifelong devotion to the Fianna Fáil cause. The Builderstend towards patriotism too, never slow to remind the public that the expansion of their fortunes is in the national interest. Ireland's elite property developers are colourfully rendered by the descriptions and anecdotes that the authors have gathered. "Put them into a boardroom and they look like muckers, but they'd annihilate you."
It is fascinating to learn the background of many local developments. The "Battle for Ballsbridge" chapter works as a climax, describing how Seán Dunne's passion for buying up Dublin 4 led to a situation where the stakes were so high that the city planners were expected "to overturn nearly two decades of planning policy in Dublin, in order to avert a bank collapse." Colm Farren
Michael Davitt
Carla King
UCD Press, €17
This short biography by Carla King, who has written extensively about Davitt elsewhere, is in the Historical Association of Ireland's commendable new Life and Times series. One of Davitt's major achievements was his leadership of the Land League, where he managed "to weld together the disparate social elements behind the movement". Apart from the land struggle, his other main preoccupation was opposition to British rule in Ireland. Here, he turned away from his early physical-force Fenianism in favour of non-violent political protest (King describes his nationalism as "non-sectarian and inclusive"). A skilled journalist and writer, he was more radical than most of his fellow nationalists, favouring land nationalisation, cooperation between the labour movements in Britain and Ireland, and votes for women. Brian Maye
Open-handed
Chris Binchy
Penguin Ireland, £7.99
There's a surprising seductiveness in a story that takes place in a balmy Dublin where rain isn't all-pervasive. It grabs your attention, something Chris Binchy is good at, regardless of the weather. His latest novel is partly a tale of shady financial dealing, partly a narrative of the service industry as you might not have thought of it before (chain-smoking night shifts, backhanders, sleep deprivation, life lived in the shadows). Pared-down prose cuts through the melancholy of lives that are undeniably tough, getting to the characters' motivations without fuss, reminding us what simple creatures people can be. Those who complicate their lives may fall foul of their machinations, and Binchy takes his time leading us to the denouement. The starkness of Open-handedis softened by tales of love and betrayal, but it is often grim and requires the reader to make an effort to engage. Small price to pay for a vision of Dublin in the tropics, in all its seedy glory. Claire Looby