Customer Reviews

From hell: Being a melodrama in sixteen parts

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"Every time you weep in a theatre you're listening to a goat singing."

This is the Author, Dermot Healy, explaining through the playwright/protagonist Jack Ferris, what Jack's trade is. As I have now read this second book by Mr. Healy, after completing "Sudden Times", it also is an apt description of the Author as well. You cannot categorize nor summarize what Mr. Healy creates and then relates to readers in a word, or two, or four. Just as with the fictional Jack Harris, an explanation is needed, and not just an ordinary statement, but also a demonstration of not only the wide knowledge, but also the true understanding the Author commands of his knowledge to exacting detail. The exchange that follows is Jack's half of a conversation with Catherine who wants to know what he does. After the lines below she still has no clue, and neither did I. However by the bottom of the page not only do we learn what he does, but its origins, a bit about Greek theatre, and even that goats cannot swim.

"I do a spot of writing."

"Plays, I'm interested in plays"

"I pen songs of the buck. Billy Tunes"

"Goat Song's"

Now if this Author's prose is compared to what we normally would read, "What do you do?" I write plays, tragedies", you begin to gain an appreciation of just how special this man's literary gifts are. The example I share is not the exception with his work rather it is the rule. These are not clever sounds bites surrounded by mediocrity, this man consistently writes with a level of expertise, which is remarkable. It has been mentioned that the first section is overly long, and at first it appears to be. However once you are into the balance of the book, extending to the very end, the first section underpins the entire tale.

There is a single or perhaps singular event that symbolizes much of what takes place in the book. It is not the death that is the issue, it is the symbolism of the location, the deceased's relationship with the institutions that bracket his death, and the man, and his Daughter Catherine, who live with those realities, or will live with the lingering effects in Catherine's case, that make the event so pivotal.

Mr. Healy's created worlds and the people that inhabit them are generally not people the reader would enthusiastically change places with, if places changed at all, ever. His creations are troubled people, not necessarily in a unique manner as they are the result of a Country divided by violence, Religious based hatred, and hundred of years of pain both suffered and inflicted. In certain key events it is the characters themselves who are at the center of the violence that they and the next generation will continue to suffer for, through guilt, paranoia, prejudice, and anger that borders on hatred. As if to ensure the events can never be properly dealt with, abuse of alcohol guarantees that melancholia will be as contented as these otherwise miserable people are. Even here the abusive drinking is not just a standard Irish cliché, the author makes these characters more complex by bringing you right along side their thoughts as he always does. He lets the reader experience the mental anguish that at times borders on psychotic.

Mr. Healy has the gift of immersing the reader in a story that is not necessarily fantastic, and certainly not contrived. He continually demonstrates that the people he creates are all too familiar, that daily life is not grindingly repetitive but fascinating.

It is no wonder at all that top writers speak of this man's work in terms of absolute praise of the highest order. That they are gifted, proven writers, who praise his work above their own, make their endorsements all the more impressive.

I put off reading A Goat's Song because of what it's about. The basic story is, to say the least, unpromising, at least to me. Alcoholic playwright Jack Ferris is desperate to get back together with his actress girlfriend. He lives in a small village in the west of Ireland (uh-oh, goes my Instant Irishness Alert). He waits for a message from her. At the beginning of the book, he's got it; she's coming home. Yay for him! He waits for her to turn up. And waits. And waits.

The novel flashes back to show the whole of Jack and his girlfriend's life together, and then flashes back further to Catherine's childhood in Northern Ireland, where her father was a policeman. Gradually, in a way that I can only describe as Tolstoyan, Healy manages to cover decades of Irish history as experienced from both the centre and the edge. Catherine's father, a Protestant RUC man, takes part in suppressing a civil rights demonstration and is then shocked to see himself on telly beating a man to the ground with his truncheon. The book wheels in its remorseless course (one of the best things about it is that while it has a strong air of being at least semi-autobiographical, there isn't a shred of special pleading or sentimentality about it) until we get back to the present.

Healy is brilliant at putting you in the same room as his characters and having you think their thoughts. The accounts of Jack and Catherine's wild drinking bouts are, ahem, painfully familiar. His prose is strong and lucid without ever indulging in irritating bits of semi-poetic landscape painting in the Proulx manner. The end of the book is almost too painful to read, and yet you're left not with the sense of having been dropped in fictional muck but with a real catharsis, and a huge admiration for the art with which Healy has constructed the novel. (It's fair to compare Healy's structural ingenuity with that of Nabokov.)

Healy had written some poetry and some pretty good fiction before, but God knows where he pulled this one from. The title comes from the meaning of the Greek origin of the word "tragedy", and it's deserved. In my opinion, the most beautifully written Irish novel - without ever being pointlessly "Beautiful" - since peak-period Beckett. And I don't mean that lightly.

His memoir, A Bend for Home, is also extraordinary, and a far better-written and intelligent book than the ludicrously over-hyped Angela's Ashes.

This was such a painful book to read. Not because it reminded me of personal nightmare experiences, but because those of the characters were so real. The brutal peak into their lives was almost embarrassing -- like a car crash from which you can not turn away. A beautifully written book.

"Goat's song" is the literal translation of the word "tragedy." There is no better way to sum up this book than a beautiful, heart wrenching tragedy.

The book follows the life of playwright Jack Ferris as he loves, loses, remembers, and recounts the early life of Catherine, an aspiring actress. The tone of the book is so personal, it felt as if Healy were writing from experience. Healy writes beautifully, oftening slipping into a sort of stream of consciousness to bring the reader into the liquor induced insanity Jack so often experiences. He conveys the desperation of the characters and their emotional, almost physical, pain in such an immediate way, I felt truly depressed as I got deeper into the book. The story begins with the ending, jumps to the beginning, then progresses inexorably towards the heartache you know is to come. The book's ending is simply perfect.

An added bonus to the beautifully told story is the wonderful peek into Irish life. The book is set in Northern Ireland before and during the troubles, as well as in the Republic of Ireland, both in the city and in an ancient village. As an American, it was a delight to read the many voices of the Irish people. However, I ran into some difficulty with the politics. Healy uses RUC/Provo, Loyalist/Republican, Protestant/Catholic interchangably and without explanation, so if you have no frame of reference for the politics of Northern Ireland, it is easy to get lost in the terms. However, that may have been by design, as Healy tried to convey the subtleties and complexities of living in the midst of revolution.

I truly enjoyed the emotional ride of this book. While I quite often disliked the characters, I couldn't help but feel compassion for them.

This barely merits three stars, after hundreds of pages with a maudlin stereotype of the unlikable and boring, nearly always drunk, Irish playwright-fisherman who turns away the love of his life only to whine after her, into and out of the asylum. What kept me reading, despite the dreadful opening section, was the second part, which in markedly more controlled prose and conscientiously crafted writing, tells of an RUC policeman from the North who finds himself the televised image of the Crown's brutality as he is filmed beating a Derry Civil Rights demonstrator. Jonathan Adams' turn from tongue-tied preacher to a by-the-book constable unfolds intriguingly. The scenes when he summers with his family in the unlikely locale, given his background, on the remote Mullet peninsula off Co Mayo and the family's interaction, or lack of, with the locals and especially two Irish-language tutors make for curious if original plot contrivances.

But again, in the third section, the protagonist Jack Ferris finds himself living in Belfast as what must be the most naive "southern Irishman" ever to have survived the 70s and 80s there. All I can say is that the dole must have been generous to allow him for so long to live what seems to be a decent enough life with lots to spend on the booze with so little employment, and there's really no evidence that Healy offers to make his dramaturgical sideline sound like that of even a part-time writer able to live somewhat off of a craft that is barely evident. Healy throws off his job as a teacher of Irish, for instance, in a paragraph; surely this could have been improved as a plot element, since he gives up a theatre gig for work that never receives afterwards any mention. Too much of this section shows sloppy thinking on Healy's part as well as Jack's.

Jack's pub encounters defy credibility, although the tangential and too brief cameos by an ex-soldier Chris, an anonymous man to whom he takes his idea for a play about an IRA volunteer, and later the reminiscences of De Largey, a former IRA man, do make more recognizable figures in a section far too lazily and disjointedly conveyed in an attempt at matching a desultory form to the content, the wanderings of the feckless Jack. With his brutality and emotional "fascism," to turn a term of abuse he uses on his girlfriend, Catherine, back at him, he does nothing to arouse a reader's sympathy.

Too casual an approach shows also in twice misspelled, and once as a title of a chapter "As Gaelige" instead of "Gaeilge" as the Irish word for the language. The wonderful poet Sean O Riordain's name is also misspelled--too bad that his poetry, very suitable for this type of story, could not have been given more than a one-sentence aside here. The last section of the book does redeem itself in how it spirals back on itself, but again, the protagonist's fishing trips and endless walks and self-pitying funk fail to make his plight ultimately matter.

I had vacillated about reading this, and only did after leafing through it to find it took place on the Mullet and mentioned corncrakes, two items that I had read about on another shelf of the library only minutes before. I took this as an omen, and while I learned little about the terrain and nothing really about the endangered bird, I did appreciate more the type of writing that Beckett did about similarly lost souls. Healy does have talent but it appears in too scattered and mercurial patterns here for it to coalesce into an aesthetically cohesive or admirably rendered novel. It could have been, as another reader notes here, 150 pages with a far better result. With such a promising image as that of the goat stranded and unable to swim across, left only to sing for its mate, it's a pity that Healy did not take more time to create a satisfying story.

P.S. I do admit that although the sanitarium scenes do not equal those of Beckett's "Murphy," they do strive for a more literary and faithfully confusing ambiance than those conjured up through Kesey's McMurphy!

I am not sure why the rest of these reviews deal with a different book than what is listed above, "From Hell: Being a Melodrama in Sixteen Parts," the graphic novel about Jack the Ripper written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Eddie Campbell. Granted, we will never know the "truth" about Jack. After all, scholars cannot even agree on exactly who he killed, which you would think was a rather important starting point in constructing any sort of theory, checking alibis, and such. All that matters from a narrative standpoint is whether "From Hell" tells a compelling story. By that standard, "From Hell" certainly succeeds.

In the Appendix to each chapter Moore careful details his sources, alterations and inventions for "From Hell" on a page-by-page basis. While such elaborations will only serve to infuriate most scholars of the Ripper, they are certainly of interest to us poor neophytes who cannot help but be fascinated by the details of the unsolvable mystery. Moore is working primarily off of Stephen Knight's "Jack the Riper: The Final Solution," which advances what Casebook: Jack the Ripper (the world's largest on-line public repository of Ripper-related information) labels the most controversial Ripper theory. Known as the Royal Conspiracy theory, it does have the delicious quality of involving virtually every person who has ever been a Ripper suspect. Despite its popularity, Ripperologists pretty much universally dismiss the theory (it ranks 8th on their list, mainly because one-third rated it 10 and another one-third rated it 1). But then the most popular suspect is currently James Maybrick, brought into prominence by the "Diary of Jack the Ripper" hoax (ah, but was it really?). Given everything that is out there, it is no wonder that the most "legitimate" suspect of the day, Francis Tumblety, gets lost. But all of this just reinforces the idea that "From Hell" is not history, but rather drama. Time and time again, it is the rationale of the STORY rather than the FACTS that drive Moore's narrative.

The artwork by Eddie Campbell, aided and abetted at various times by April Post and Pete Mullins, is certainly evocative of the tale. I even think there is a point at which the reader has to be grateful that the bloodier episodes are rendered in stark black and white drawings. Campbell presents various styles at different times in the narrative, altering it to match the narrative. But it is Moore's epic story that captivates throughout as he puts his giant jigsaw puzzle together from all the evidence and his own speculations. When Moore works in the conception of Adolf Hitler, which happened in Austria around the time of the murders, as an ironic counterpart to his narrative, it is hard not to be impressed, just as we are horrified by the clinical details of the Ripper's murder of Mary Jane Kelly, which takes up all of Chapter 10. Through deduction, induction and abduction, Moore creates a compelling story and the fact that it is not what really happens has little to do with how much we enjoy "From Hell."

Do I believe that Sir William Gull was indeed Jack the Ripper? No, I do not. I have heard many theories regarding his true identity that have been plausible, at least at face value (e.g., Patricia Cornwell's case for the artist Walter Richard Sickert in "Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Riper, Case Closed"), and I am more than willing to leave it to the knowledgeable experts to argue out their respective merits. But I was not reading "From Hell" to be convinced of the guilty or innocence of any one regarding the world's first infamous serial killer. I read it because as we have known ever since Alan Moore did his own take on the Swamp Thing, one of his greatest strengths as a writer is to make us look at old things in new ways. We will have a reminder of his originality soon enough when "V for Vendetta" hits the big screen next year.

I can't believe the reviews this book has been getting. I found it to be a major waste of time and regretted reading it. My problem is with the prose style - he never uses one adjective when 4 can be used. The book is nearly 500 pages long, if it was reduced to 200 or so it could be really good. 150 pages are excellent - the rest is genuinely cringeworthy.

The plot -- alcoholic catholic playwright falls in love with northern protestant girl -- very original! His descriptions of Belfast are excellent and other sections also. The rest is overwritten claptrap, he goes off on a journey of purple, nay vermilion, prose and emotional peregrinations which seemed designed more to confuse the reader that he/she is reading some high art rather than gettin on with his book. I felt like throwing away the book in disgust several times. If this is what it takes to be praised as a great Irish writer then I'm going to write a computer program to take care of all the work, sit back and watch the reviews pour in.

Dermot Healy is defintely a very talented writer, other books (e.g. The Bend for Home) are much better. We could do without the poetic crud though.