The Last of Deeds and Love in History [Paperback]

Eoin. McNamee (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: PICADOR USA. NY 1996 (1996)
• ASIN: B000OTNZYA
• Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Two Generations of "The Troubles.", July 27, 2001

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?, September 9, 2010

By 

E. S. Charpentier (Brainerd, MN United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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?