The Wren, The Wren, Suspects and The Lock-Up

 

As with all the previously novels by Anne Enright that I have read, it's the prose that really stands out. Sometimes her most recent books do drift away from the main theme with too much introspection, and I sometimes lost the thread as the story jumps around the main characters Carmel and daughter Nell. But the family here are always interesting. Nell has finished Uni and is back home with her mother Carmel. She needs to get away. But when she does, she meets Felim, the writer spends time telling us how she feels at the beginning of an affair. Now that was good.

A visit home for Nell and a superb conversation between the two, except, "I never tell me my mother anything, I'm not that stupid". But I'm not sure if she is the most reliable narrator. Not like her mother whose story revolves around her father, the famous poet. Not a nice man, although he could be. At his funeral Carmel's mother and her other daughter Imelda "were draped in matching black mantillas under which they plied little handkerchiefs with embroidered corners, while Carmel stuck to a packet of Kleenex and the truth. She was surrounded by hypocrites". Some of the chapters later on go off piste with Nell at nine years old, and a rogue chapter for Phil the poet. The book must be designed for you to read it again. And again.

I thought that this was the least successful of the five books about cinema by David Thomson that I have read. Probably because he mixed fiction with fact in his eighty five very short potted histories of some of the most iconic characters of the silver screen. It certainly helps if you are familiar with the old movies in which they appear. There were many I didn't know.

There are links between some of the characters, especially as they sometimes appear in the same movie. Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson in Chinatown) is followed by Noah Cross (John Huston) where the author introduces William Mullholland who gave his name to that famous Drive. Most of the back stories are pretty boring except, for instance, that for Joe Gillis (William Holden in Sunset Boulevard) where he needed some history given his demise in the movie. His co star Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond gives the author the excuse to talk about old Hollywood stars who started in silent films and then struggled with the coming of the talkies. How Norma comes to meet Noah Cross who cast her in his movie and bought her the mansion on that iconic road, is pure fantasy and does the book no favours.

Three characters from Double Indemnity include a back story for Harry Lime. But a lot better was that for Kay Corleone played by Diane Keaton in The Godfather, except where there is the most stupid and diabolical conceit. Then a nice imagining of Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson in The Shining) and that for LB Jeffries (James Stewart in Rear Window). Similarly Walker in Point Blank (Lee Marvin) and, of course, a longer piece for Richard (Rick) Blaine played by Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins in Psycho) gets a long back story and later there are four characters from Citizen Kane. But by then I was a bit fed up with it all.

When I checked my reviews for the previous two books in the Strafford and Quirke crime series, it was only the second (April in Spain) that encouraged me to try this one. I was not impressed with Snow, the first of this trilogy. John Banville's prose was always his strength in his earlier novels, but in detective fiction it is all plot, so no literary acrobatics here. But the writing does flow off the page so I read it quite fast.

In Dublin in the 1950's, Detective Inspector Strafford and Doctor Quirke the pathologist, do not get on, but are forced together to investigate the death of Rosa Jacobs, a young Jewish woman in a catholic country. What follows is basically a series of interviews with people who might have a connection with Rosa. And of course the catholic church is involved. The background to the crime is resolved in the end. Almost.