In the first novella, a young Catholic boy who is love with a Protestant girl witnesses the loss of innocence of young men with nothing to lose, and in the second novella, Americans occupy Ireland as they fight the Nazis.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Eoin McNamee's first novel, Resurrection Man, based on a true story, grippingly evoked the brutal sadism of the troubles in his native Northern Ireland. The two novellas of his new volume, each dealing with love across a mighty divide, are set in a small coastal town outside Belfast. In the first, "The Last of Deeds," a middle-class Protestant girl falls for a boy from a working class Catholic ghetto, a sectarian division more potent than that between the Montagues and the Capulets. In the second, "Love in History," which takes place during World War II, an American airman from a nearby base carries on a liaison with a local beauty. McNamee's atmospheric writing propels both stories toward inevitable tragedy.
From Publishers Weekly
McNamee made quite a splash with his first novel, Resurrection Man, about a violent, oddly noble and preternaturally astute hoodlum from Belfast. Most impressive was the young Irish author's command of a kind of poetic reverie that transformed sectarian violence and petty thievery into rituals with near-operatic grandeur. In the first of the two novellas collected here, McNamee works over much of the same ground, detailing the squalid lives of young "Taigs" (Catholics) and "Prods" caught in a death grip in Northern Ireland. The succession of betrayals and paybacks that characterize what passes for social interaction among Deeds, the Catholic narrator and the narrator's dangerous Protestant girlfriend is gut-wrenching and horrific. And McNamee, though not with the white-hot intensity of his novel, writes with originality at every turn, situating the action at a putrescent dockside that is Dantesque in its evocation of fated suffering. The second work, "Love in History," is more ambitious than the first, moving back in time to a WWII U.S. Navy barracks located in Ireland and striving for a subtler effect akin to that of the stories in Joyce's Dubliners. This sad tale of a mad priest's intercession in the affairs of local Irish women and the Yanks who love (and leave) them sometimes sends McNamee out of his element, but it also shows that he has designs, perhaps, on an imaginative landscape that harbors more than just "the Troubles" of his homeland.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Two Generations of "The Troubles.",
By David Dillon (Westford, MA USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Last of Deeds and Love in History (Paperback)
You're more likely to admire than enjoy Eoin McNamee's two novellas, "The Last of Deeds" and "Love in History." A thoughtful, oftentimes impressive writer, McNamee's considerable skills are in full display in these two stories, but the tone here is quite bleak, rather tough to take, and his storytelling skills sometimes fail him.The Last of Deeds takes place in contemporary Belfast. The story unfolds through the eyes of a young, working-class "taig," who inhabits a grubby world of waterfront warehouses, disco halls, take-away joints, and, most threatening, unfriendly "prods." It's a grim existence, and the protagonist's mates (one of whom is named Deeds, hence the title) don't help matters. Hope arrives when a middle class Protestant girl befriends our storyteller. But this is Northern Ireland, and hope appears to be a rare commodity, at least for the likes of the young people who inhabit "The Last of Deeds." McNamee has a real flair for metaphors, and he captures a sense of place that is both fascinating and deeply troubling. Yet the plotting in this relentlessly grim tale is often overtaken by an overabundance of metaphors. The result distances the reader from the characters, and the tale reamins not nearly as compelling as one would hope. Still, it's hard to be too critical of a story that concludes with the following: "...as far as I was concerned there were no beautiful strangers and the only ghosts in this town are the ones that are walking the streets." True to form, the second of McNamee's novellas, "Love in History," is no more uplifting than the first. However, this tale, set close to VE Day near an army base in Belfast, is chock full of startling passages, unexpected twists, and an overall more satisfying effect. "If you pulled down the top of Betty Grable's swimming costume, the breasts underneath would be white shaved cones with exact, graphite tips." So begins "Love in History," a romance with dark undercurrents, including, racism, religious intolerance, and the too often unreported casualties of war - women. Betty Grable's presence is everywhere in this tale, and it's the women of "Love in History" who are treated like pin-up girls. Telling the story of a US airman named Hooper, who has lost in love, and Adelene, who has spent too much time with over-sexed, over there airmen, "Love in History" sometimes suffers from overwriting, such as, "He watched her with such intensity that his eyes could have pierced immeasurable distances of war and desolation to reach the exact spot under the left breast where Betty Grable's monochrome heart pumped Pearl Harbor..." You get the point. But usually McNamee's prose is right on target, in keeping with the book's overall theme. "Across the street (Adelene) could see Betty Grable in the coming attractions case. The glass was fly-specked and the edges of the paper were beginning to curl, but her hands were outstretched, palm upwards, as if to weigh the sorrow that a war deposits in the hearts of women." Unlike the first novella, that sorrow resonates in "Love in History," and by story's end the reader is moved, much impressed with McNamee's bold take on some of WW2's forgotten casualties.
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Huh?,
By
This review is from: The Last of Deeds and Love in History (Paperback)
Two novellas set in Ireland (I know this because the back of the book told me, not because either of the novellas did) both contain a lot of senseless death and a lot of grimy sex. By 'grimy' I mean that I think everyone having sex in either story could end up catching more diseases from the places they choose to do it in than from their partner.Also, the style of the writing seems poetic for the sake of discussing terrible and gross things in the most pulchritudinous language possible. The descriptions dance around the objects they seek to identify so that each sentence is a puzzle the reader has to figure out before it makes any sort of sense. To be honest, it made my head hurt. And, once I realized what the author was saying, I didn't want to have known it. Also, some of it just never made any sort of sense to me. "A wife's kiss is the sound of Betty Grable's heart broken with frost in the night." What?
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