Book reviews by Frank O’Shea
ATLAS. The Story of Pa Salt. Lucinda Riley and Harry Whittaker. Macmillan 2023. 767 pp. $24.99
The first thing you notice is the number of pages. If, like this reviewer, you are not used to such an accumulation of prose, you may find yourself giving this book a skip. And that would be a bit of a shame, really. The writing is sparkling, there is plenty of dialogue, the characters, with the exception of a small few, are attractive and pleasant.
For some years until her death in 2021, the author, Lucinda Riley lived in West Cork. She had written some children’s books with her son Harry Whittaker, who completed this novel after her death.
The central character has various names: Atlas, Pa Salt, Lapetus Tanit. The last of these was his birth name when he was born in 1917 in Russia as the country was degenerating into various warring factions. His father had some connection with the tsar and tried to get to Switzerland, a country of which he had citizenship. His son followed some time later, aged only eight and pursued by a kid a few years older who thought Lapetus/Atlas had killed his mother.
Aged ten, Lapetus reaches France and is taken in by the family of Landkowski, the sculptor responsible for the large Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio de Janeiro. He refuses to speak, convinced that he may somehow give a hint to the kid who is following him. For the remainder of his life, he goes from one family to another, from one country to another, at one stage finding himself running an opal mine in Coober Pedy.
Early in the story, he meets a girl named Elle, a few years older than he is and they fall in deep love. When he has to take a boat to Australia, she does not turn up and he is devastated, spending the next 40 or more years searching for her. At the very end, we learn what happened to her. Wherever he is, he is cared for by kindly and charitable people. The story shows how in time, he adopts one child from each of those families, until he has six, but is told that he is also the father of another child whom he must try to find.
The story is long, in places tedious, but it keeps you reading. Notwithstanding the extravagant number of pages, this is by some way the strongest of the four books reviewed here.
KILL FOR ME. KILL FOR YOU. By Steve Cavanagh. Hachette 2023. 353 pp. $32.99
We have met Steve Cavanagh before. He is a former Belfast lawyer who has long done better from his fiction works than from the courtroom. Like most of his books, this one is set in America, New York in this case. However, long time readers of his work may be disappointed that the lawyer Flynn he created in his earlier books does not appear here. Instead, we have a rather confusing story of people who target young children.
The first offender is a man named Crone, the son of wealthy Wall Street, who has abused and killed a young girl. That child’s mother is Amanda, one of the two central characters in the story. The other is Ruth, who has been attacked in her home by a mysterious stranger; she thinks she sees him among the many men she meets in her daily movements in New York and sets out to avenge herself on those men.
At this stage, the author pulls a fast one on his reader, who is intensely interested in the story of these two women. Ruth, it turns out, although a genuine victim, is a fake. She is a woman who has been released prematurely from a psychiatric facility, though we do not learn this for some time. She is able to persuade different people she meets and befriends in trauma and bereavement groups that they should kill someone she nominates, while she will kill the person nominated by her new friend.
The scheme appears to have been successful until Amanda is persuaded to be part of it. She pulls out or tries to pull out of her part of the contract, though the man she is supposed to kill does die of the injuries she causes. It turns out that he was not a nice person anyway. However, by the time we discover all this, a new character named Billy has been introduced and he is equally false in the story he tells.
In the end, justice appears to have been done, though the reader will not be entirely satisfied. Indeed, it would be easy to imagine that many readers would give up on the book when the many false identities come to light.
This is a clever story. In early chapters, it draws the reader in and keeps their attention. The confusions that appear in the second half appear to change it to a bit of literary chicanery. It would be interesting to have another reader’s opinion of the story; this reviewer is unable to summon any great enthusiasm for it.
SAVING 6. By Chloe Walsh. Piatkus 2023. 630 pp. $12.00
There is a trend in modern works of fiction to omit punctuation or quotation marks. Here is a book that does the opposite in that the story is told completely in the form of dialogue or short descriptive sentences. The other uncommon aspect of the story is that alternative chapters are in the first person voice of the two main characters, Aoife and Joey.
Set in the fictional town of Ballylaggin in County Cork, it is a very Irish book and in case the reader may be wondering, it includes a brief glossary of Irish words and terms – poitÍn, wheelie bin, jackeen, gobshite, craic, the Angelus – as well as the rude words for body parts that might be expected among back street youth of limited vocabulary.
In case the reader is easily offended, the book comes with the following warning: ‘because of its extremely explicit sexual content, mature themes, triggers, violence, and bad language, it is suitable for readers of 18+.’ It is unusual to come across such advice these days, but the words are entirely and most uncomfortably necessary in this case. In truth, the picture that the book paints about small-town Ireland is not especially attractive, in particular the account of the language and behaviour of the young people.
When the story opens, Aoife and Joey are beginning secondary school and the story will take them through to the Leaving Cert in sixth year (Year 7 to Year 12 in the Australian context). There is a private school nearby, but all the characters here are in the public school. Although this reviewer’s working life was spent among teenagers of the same age as the characters here, it was in all-boys schools and in situations where students might occasionally misbehave, but there was never anything like the things described here.
It would be tempting to give an indication of the story, such as it is, but the truth is that, apart from the last 50 or so pages, the reader could skip most of what is written. It reads like the kind of serial one might find in a cheap popular magazine; the reader’s reaction on finishing the book is likely to be weary satisfaction that one managed it and gratitude that one won’t have to read a follow-up.
The book appears to be one of a group about young people, all containing some number – 6 or 7 or 13 – and I seem to recall reading somewhere that there was a connection in some way with TikTok or some other online group. Surprisingly, it has been released in this country by Hachette at the unusually low price of $12. This reviewer’s opinion is that you get a coffee and donut instead.
THE WREN, THE WREN. By Anne Enright. Jonathan Cape 2023. 273 pp. $32.99
The wran, the wran, the king of all birds.
St Stephen’s Day he was caught in the furze.
Although he is little, his family is great
Rise up, landlady and give us a trate.
That was the verse we noisily sang – pronunciations as above – as we carried a dead bird of some description to our neighbour’s house on December 26. It is not clear why it is used here as the title of Anne Enright’s latest book. The central characters are Nell and her mother Carmel, daughters of a well-known poet Phil McDaragh from Tullamore Co Offaly. Many of his poems – unrhyming, of course – are about birds, which is presumably the connection with the title.
Carmel has troubles with her sister Imelda, but is loved by her father. She leads a fairly wild life, in and out of the beds of a number of men. She gives that up for three years, before starting again, this time giving birth to Nell. We travel backward and forward in time to follow Nell’s equally wild life, including a brief time in Sydney. She and Carmel get together again at the end, but it is not clear whether that is a success.
This is probably a book about relationships between mothers and daughters, but the truth is that it is difficult to make much sense of it. It is hard to imagine that you can read more than 250 pages of a novel and not know what it is about. A disappointment from Anne Enright
Frank is a member of the Tintean collective
Tinteán 