SOUL SURMISE

MIKE CAMPBELL - HEARTBREAKER

Mike Campbell has written a rock music memoir full of grace, humility and gratitude.

Near the end of a well written, most enjoyable and gripping read, Mike Campbell describes his feelings around the time of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers’ final studio record Hypnotic:

There were moments then here I could see it all so clearly. I could close my eyes and see the whole epic story of the band, from struggling to make to all the way to the present. It almost seemed like a myth, like an ancient adventure pulling us all in its wake.

Heartbreaker tells us that epic story. About a young poor boy in Gainesville Florida who made it to the top of the world. From a freezing hut in the countryside of Florida to a beautiful house with a recording studio and animals in the garden, in the heart of LA. Mike Campbell tells rags to riches a Holywood story.

The engine of this story is the young boy’s genius. He can play guitar. However, this boy needed his friend to front the story, to drag him across the world. The Tom Petty in Heartbreaker is a complex kid to steal one of their titles. He’s full of warmth, humour and goodness but also selfish drive, totally focused commitment and a little arrogance.

Campbell’s grace made him a loyal friend to a front man who didn’t always treat him well. Whatever Petty threw at his band mates and however the rest reacted Campbell stayed true. He had a natural inferiority complex which comes across as humility and he stayed ever grateful to the life that he got to live as guitar player with Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers.

“To me, being grateful was the key to everything. It was what made it possible for me to get through the hardest times in the band. Simple gratitude. Simple thanks for the blessings I had been given. For the life. For the music. For the crew. For the fans.”

Campbell tells the story of the band’s rise with great detail. The way songs came together, how producer Jimmy Iovine worked, how tours went, the management and legal complications and the drug addictions. Closer and more devoted than Petty is, his wife Marcie who has done the entire journey by his side.

Underneath the Petty tower, Campbell became a musician in his own right. Working up tape after tape of song ideas for Petty, a few taken and many discarded he gave one to the Eagles’, Don Henley, and had a massive hit with Boys Of Summer. It all ended with him starting his own band The Dirty Knobs and becoming a guitar player for Fleetwood Mac.

In between, Mike Campbell from Gainesville met and played with all the greatest musicians ever. Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers became Bob Dylan’s band for a couple of years and this is perhaps the best writing on the inside track of that relationship. Then there is George Harrison and Jeff Lynne who became part of the family including The Travelling Wilburys. Johnny Cash, Paul McCartney, Joe Strummer… and a beautiful story of how his mother opened the door to Mick Jagger.

You get that feel for the gratitude. Michael Campbell has lived the life and his early years were not pointing to anything like this. Petty putting the old Gainesville mates together in Mudcrutch, thirty years after they broke up is an amazing chapter in the Petty career, as though he’d learned grace from his guitar player.

In the last pages of the book we have to deal with Tom Petty’s death. I hated it coming towards me as I read. There is grief. Yet, Petty’s joy on the 40th Anniversary Tour is consolation. 

Afterwards we hear about how he tried to finally sing a Petty song during a Dirty Knobs’ gig and when he broke down during Southern Accents and the crowd sang it home. Better still is when they did do a Petty Tribute evening and reaching for his lifelong guitar techie Chinner for a guitar as he introduced the next song he looks up and it’s Tom’s wife Dana handing it to him. I burst into tears!

I have admired Mike Campbell since at least Damn The Torpedoes. I knew he was so important to Petty’s sound. I knew he was a great guitar player. When I reviewed the one Petty concert that I am so grateful that I experienced. My conclusion was all about Campbell. 

Something happening on that stage was meeting me in the very depth of my spiritual life. As Mike Campbell dug his fingers deep into the fret board of one of his plethora of guitars and eked out this sound that was loud, melodic and beautifully piercing my soul was raised to a higher plain, ecstatic at living this life and energised to live it more to the full.

I too am grateful. Thank you Mike Campbell for that moment and telling me yours and Tom Petty’s story so beautifully and honestly.

JOSEPH O'CONNOR - THE GHOSTS OF ROME

Joseph O’Connor likes a drama. With the sensibilities of a thriller O’Connor has the characters of Ghosts Of Rome running across Rome, down back streets, through gardens, in and out of houses, rooms and even underground sewers avoiding the worst of the Nazis.

O’Connor does a great job of describing the claustrophobic fear of living in an occupied city, when the occupier is Nazi Germany in the depths of war. The Gestapo, personified in Commandant Paul Hauptmann, are ruthless and violent. Their only sense of discipline or value is that they don’t break the promise to maintain the neutrality of the Vatican.

This is the second book of a Trilogy of books set in 1944 in Rome six months into Nazi occupation. It is based around the Choir, the secret name for The Escape Line based in The Vatican, sneaking allies out of Rome. The first book My Father’s House was centred around Monsignor Hugh Flaherty the Irish priest who headed up the Choir. 

This one concentrates more on the heroic women in the story in general and Contessa Giovanna Landini, known as Jo, in particular. Her palazzo has been taken over by Gestapo officer Paul Hauptmann, the Choir’s Nemesis. There is a teasing that goes back and forth between them, the Contessa’s life in constant threat, showing a heroic courage. 

As well as Jo, there is an airman, badly injured, who parachuted in and is being looked after against the better judgement of some. Two young people are added to the Choir, Blon Kiernan and her friend whose studying surgery and gets her chance to practice!

As of the first book, it is a fascinating read. The reader is quickly drawn in, loving and hating the characters, intrigued by the setting, gripped by the suspense, near praying for a good ending.

When O’Connor set out on these stories he could not have imagined the swing to the right that our world would take. He couldn’t have known how claustrophobic so many of us feel at the news on our televisions or that echoes of Nazi Germany might be infiltrating the free world. It all seems to be closing in. Hope is hard to glimpse, though in the novel the Allies are slowly making headway.

Yet again O’Connor’s book preaches a hope that is brave, compassionate and determined. It would be easy in Rome’s war zone to find good reasons to pull back from the help that the Choir are giving here.

O’Connor also humanises the bad guy too. Hauptmann is nervous about what Hitler thinks of him, probably fearful too. Deeper still there seems existentialist struggles going on in his soul. This is a book of good and evil and we get to look into both; the worst of humanity in the latter but the inspiring goodness in the former!

Bring in the book 3!

GARY LIGHTBODY - THE FOREST IS THE PATH

Will Campbell College teacher Mark McKee ever get the thanks or credit he needs to be given to waking up just one teenage boy to literature? In one class, one particular year, Mr McKee read Seamus Heaney and one particular boy’s soul lit up like he had been blinded like St. Paul on the Damascus Road.

Words became the reason that Gary Lightbody had been given a space on planet earth. Many of us have been touched and blessed by the poetic songs that he has created with his band Snow Patrol. Now his first book that will be of fascination to many in so many different ways.

Unlike the vast majority of rock stars, Lightbody’s shift from lyric to prose is not a rock biography. Yet, at its very basic level fans will enjoy the Snow Patrol stories and the wee sneaks into the songwriting process of the most recent record, the book’s companion The Forest Is The Path. 

There are a few precious musical memories threaded in here. Another conversion moment for a teenage Lightbody is listening to Nirvana’s Nevermind on the day of its release. That fifteen years later David Grohl walks on to the stage and hugs him as he’s dedicating Chasing Cars to the former Nirvana man. Wonderful.

Or his dad meeting Bono at Ward Park in 2019. Priceless!

Yet, the music side of the memoir is not the raison d’être. This is a book about grief. It is all built up around his father dying and the aftermath. It has me deep in reflection about my own parents dying. They leave behind more than grief. We go on untangling the regret and love and stretch to come to terms.

In the grieving sense, I was reminded that this is the same genre as another classic on that subject by another Campbellian, CS Lewis with A Grief Observed. Like Lewis’s this makes for a very spiritual book, though not “official” spiritual as Lewis’s was.

I rarely read books twice but this one will get another intentional call, while I am on holidays this summer. I’d like to read it with more time and silence to ruminate. 

There are many little depth charges to return to. Lightbody surmises things like time, home, Belfast in fact, love of others, loving of self, the life beyond, how it might be impossible to actually grasp other people’s perspectives and things are only heavy only when we try to lift them. So much in such a small book. There will so many blogs I sense!

Most of all I am taken with Gary’s fascination with the things that need die within us to help us live:

There is a good death in the end of anger, in the end of resentment, in the end of jealousy. Dying so one can live is the best kind of death. All those things made in the fire serve us not one bit. But sometimes in my life I have felt holding onto that fire feels like the only way to stay alive. I know now I was just plain wrong. But it took me way too long work that out.

Preach it brother. This is something of what I as a preacher am on about every single Sunday. It’s simple wisdom. It is profound. I am thrilled it is here in this book. 

Yet, I am, again as ever, distraught that Gary is unaware of that Biblical idea or indeed that he never even considered looking to find it. Even with Granny Wray’s impression on his life, her life built on that Bible that Gary read at her funeral, the church has done such an awful PR job on Jesus that Gary doesn’t seem to have looked at the ancient wisdom from that resource. I don't blame him. This is a scandal and tragedy of the church.

This is a special book. A helpful book. A book to ponder… and ponder again. Thank you Gary Lightbody for being prepared, yet again, to be vulnerable and honest with us. File it under spiritual!

A COMPLETE UNKNOWN

After everyone had seemed to have seen it and asked if we had, Janice and I went to see A Complete Unknown. Even our daughter Jasmine had gone and given her opinion. Our friend Dot went twice because our other friend Brian sang the whole way through, the first time!

To clear it up at the outset, I thought it was a brilliant movie. I didn’t take my eyes or ears off it. Brilliant performances across the piece, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbara as Joan Baez and Elle Fanning as Sylvie Russo (really Suze Rotolo). Of particular wonder, Timothée Chalamet as Dylan himself. 

Of course these songs are all indelibly marked within us. I mean Blowing In The Wind, A Hard Rains A-Gonna Fall, Masters Of War, The Times They Are A-Changing through to Like A Rolling Stone. Chalamet sings so well that you forget that it’s not Dylan himself. Indeed had our friend Brian not sung along I’d have thought less of him. Janice had poke me!

Yes, Chalamet has us believing early on, against all of our thinking that that is impossible. I for sure wasn’t expecting it to so easily to fall into it. A verse into him singing Song To Woody and he was Bob Dylan. 

That same early scene, while visiting Huntingdon’s Disease ridden Woody Guthrie in Greystone Park Psychiatric Hospital, also breaks the accuracy of the tale we are going to hear. Pete Seeger is sitting with Guthrie as Dylan walks in. That didn’t happen exactly but it speeds the plot.

Stories need tied together, other things left out. The non appearance of The Byrds and The Beatles is some of the latter. This film is going to be accurate to the story but not to the detail. There are such moments throughout. 

The film was a question raiser for me, rather than one that landed any answers. In the mystery of Bob Dylan are there any answers? Do we want any? Or do we want to know him or leave him as a complete intrigue? 

I wondered about those early years, months even. Did Bob Dylan fall into the folk scene because it happened to be there and a way into making music? Did he sense political songs were a way to a wider audience? With his interest in Little Richard and Buddy Holly was the electric guitar not a later discovery but something there earlier that he set aside for this chapter of his identity? 

The playing out of Dylan’s relationships with Suze Rotolo and Joan Baez seems to tell us that Bob thinks identities shift, from before to now to later, intentionally or by other circumstances. It almost makes him free from being tied down, ever unknown. I think it is why my daughter thought he wasn’t a nice guy but maybe this is the free loving 60s getting their voice in the story.

Dylan certainly plays loose with Rotolo and Baez. The flighty affair with the latter seems opportunistic and maybe vice versa though This script’s use of It Ain’t Me Babe as a bit of a warning of who Dylan is and isn’t in romance needs noted.

Suze’s final departing, again blurry in the detail, perhaps shows Dylan at his most vulnerable. It’s the first time in the movie where there might be some emotion or sense of regret? 

That might also be why the real Bob Dylan, it seems, asked for Suze to be named Sylvie Russo in the movie. He felt she wasn’t the public figure everyone else was BUT I am afraid putting her on the cover of his first album of original songs, Freewheelin’ which must be selling well just now, had given away Suze’s anonymity a long time ago. His love for Suze might have lingered and broken into Dylan’s anarchical heart. 

If Dylan and Baez use each other then Seeger is seen to be using Dylan too. Trying to make folk music more universal and soon up against The Beatles. It is why the Judas cry goes up (wrong place but this is story not detail!!) and the music war seems lost, Seeger threatening violence on the PA. 

In the end, well at least the end of this movie, this is the cataloguing of an iconic moment in the heighty zeitgeist of the 60s. It’s a big moment in folk music. It’s a big moment in rock music. It’s a big social moment. 

This guy Bob Dylan is at the centre of the vortex, casting off identities and trying on new ones like Chelsea boots and sunglasses. He’s only 24 as he races down the road on his Triumph motor bike. The real fans in the cinema have hands over their eyes waiting for what’s next… 

NIALL WILLIAMS - TIME OF THE CHILD

With Time Of The Child Niall Williams has pushed his way through the field to become one of my very favourite novelists. Two men, whose intellect I admire, tipped me off one Sunday morning in the coffee area after Sunday Service to This Is Happiness. Oh how I enjoyed it. 

So, when I caught sight of Time Of The Child in my favourite book shop No Alibis there was no way that I was leaving without it. I gave it to Santa and as soon as we got to the coast after Christmas I was into it.

My favourite writers are Irish. I love the island that I live on. I love the art that it has inspired. I love using that art whether song, poem, play, painting, sculpture or novel to understand my place in the world and the place in the world I have to find that. Williams has opened up some of that understanding. 

This Is Happiness and History Of The Rain before it have gifted us the village of Faha, set on the River Shannon in Country Clare. The geography and the characters are so vivid. I nearly fell like I was there.

 I am delighted to hear that Williams has declared that he going to have us in Faha from the arrival of electricity in 1958 until the arrival of the internet. In this one he has started to hint at what’s to come. An added layer.

As I read Williams’ vivid and utterly beautiful poetic prose, always needing a pen beside me to underline a sharp description here (“like nature’s fresco of the heavens beseeched”), a razor-sharp cultural observation (“the land of the free proved pricey enough”) there or even a spiritual depth charge (“the father’s adage that the central challenge of life was to accept that the world is a place of pain, and yet live.”), I find myself back in our home village of Galgorm, remembering the characters and where “The Doctor’s” was. It’s like this imaginary village can help me reflect on my formative years.

The story line is on the cover. A baby is found in the cemetery during the Christmas Fair, near dead, and brought to Dr Crowe’s. The doctor brings it to life and what happens then is a beautifully gentle drama, at times it is even tense. Was it a help that I read this particular novel at Christmas. Probably but I wouldn’t wait until Advent to start reading. 

Williams has brought a few things together in such a story. A baby born looking for room and indeed born in a scandalous circumstance hints at the New Testament. A baby born in Ireland in the theocracy of 1962 has different threats than Herod. 

As if all of this is not enough Time Of A Child has given me lots of sermon material. 

He gave great wisdom around Jesus’ Sermon On The Mount:

 

“Once it had come to him that the whole history of mankind had failed the Sermon On The Mount, the bitterness of that only resolved by the understanding he came to that maybe the aspiration was more important than the realisation and Jesus knew that… “

 

Even sharper to end my own New Year sermon:

 

“what filled Jack Troy then was the fantastic idea of grace as an actual thing”

 

When the story heats up the curate asks Dr Troy what he’s trying to do. Troy responds, “That’s easy, I’m living to be a Christian, only the Church and the State are in my way.” That leads to more pause for surmise that ends in, for me, the clarity of “My understanding is He (God) sees and knows, and foresaw and foreknew, all our errors, all our wrong turns and catastrophes and still loves us. And still loves us. Not because but despite.” That might be aimed as much at a church’s wrong turns and catastrophes as much as the ordinary people of Faha.

Can you see why I loved it? I loved it this much. I don’t get to read many books so when I am at the coast I want to read fast and get a couple of books done a week. Not long into Time Of The Child I was determined to slow down, to savour, to surmise. Every book coming out this year now has to compete!

STOCKI'S FAV 10 NOVELS of 2024

10. PHIL HARRISON - SILVERBACK

Phil’s second novel takes us into the heart of East Belfast, not so much about the streets as about the male psyche. A study on the masculine intrigue and seeming need for violence.

 

9.  REV. RICHARD COLES - MURDER AT THE MONASTERY

Cole’s third Church mystery novel and his writing gets better every time. Our familiar leading man, Canon Daniel Clement takes refuge in a monastery and murder follows him in. More liturgy and Christian speak than I expected but pithy and not lacking in human insight.

 

8. SINEAD GLEESON - HAGSTONE

Island wild, rugged lusty and strangely spiritual, an artist takes work in a woman’s commune and we are led on a mysterious search for a meaningful end. 

 

7. ALAN MURRIN - THE COAST ROAD

In another year where we’ve seen the horrific treatment of women across our society Murrin writes of Donegal in the early 90s and how women were owned and betrayed.

 

6. GLENN PATTERSON - TWO SUMMERS

Loved these two half novels about 17 year old boys, particularly the one who holidays in New York City as I did at that age in Toronto. 

 

5. RICHARD OSMAN - WE SOLVE MURDERS

After cutting his chops in 4 murder mysteries set in an old people’s residential home, Osman is out and across the world, all across it actually, with a new murder solving team. He’s getting the hang of it. Funny and full of suspense.

 

4. ROISIN MAGUIRE - NIGHT SWIMMERS

In the little seaside villages full of quirks and eccentric loners, love lingers in the bay, the sea, the sand and the head land. A beautifully written novel about the search for belonging.

 

3. COLM TOIBIN - LONG ISLAND

I read both Brooklyn and Long Island in the spring and loved them both. Long Island had more drama in its first few pages than the whole of Brooklyn but I might have enjoyed Brooklyn best. 

 

2. DAVID A DUNLOP - WHEN THE LIGHT GETS IN

A powerful and important book about parochial self righteousness in a Northern Ireland village. A book that needs read, heard and, where possible, its victims repaired.

 

1. PAUL LYNCH - PROPHET SONG

Technically a 2023 book, this Booker Prize Winner is essential reading across Ireland in a year that we shamed the island with horrible unjust treatment of asylum seekers and refugees. Read, listen and understand. 

HAROLD GOOD - IN GOOD TIME; A MEMOIR

I was in my car in Ballycastle and heard the loud toot of a horn about 100 yards away. As I looked over it seems that a young fella was in a hurry out of a car park and didn’t think the old guy in front was helping that hurry. As I continued watching, the old guy gets out of his car and goes back where he has a very calm word with racer boy before getting back into his own car and, when all was clear, taking off.

I smiled to myself. Indeed, had I not my own car to manoeuvre I would have gone over and asked the young buck if he had any idea who he was messing with. 

The old guy was none other than Harold Good. The young man with the strut should know that this man that he thinks is a bit slow, maybe like his Granda, has faced down some of the world’s toughest paramilitaries bringing peace and decommissioning in Columbia and Spain, never mind here in Northern Ireland. 

It must be seven years since I told Harold that we needed his memoir to go alongside Fr Alec Reid, Ken Newell and Fr Gerry Reynolds. I guess he will say that it has come In Good Time, the book’s title.

It is a gripping memoir of a very full life. From a sickly child through thoroughbred Methodist stock Harold Good grew up to be the man in the right place at the right time at very regular intervals. 

In America he was pastoring a predominantly African American congregation when Rev Dr Martin Luther King was killed, he shortly afterwards found himself on Belfast’s Shankill Road as the first tragic events of the Troubles were unleashed. 

He worked constantly of under the radar for peace and reconciliation on an island where by family tree and his own birth made him comfortable on either side of the border. It was then perhaps a surprise at the Church Bookies (there is no such thing) when he was chosen along with Fr Alec Reid to oversee the the IRA decommissioning.  Later he was involved too with ETA in Spain and FARC in Columbia and Cuba.

It has made for a life in all its fulness and the roles he took up later in his life have made his ministry of reconciliation continue. Even now in his late 80s I’ll catch up with Harold on summer evenings, walking our dogs in our beloved Ballycastle, and he’ll be telling me what major player visited his caravan that week!

To help him write this captivating account Harold chose well, prize winning journalist Martin O’Brien. As well as cataloguing that crammed packed life of a pastor and peacemaker we are given real insight to his friendships with Fr Alec Reid, Rev Dr Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness as well as talks going on constantly in his home with his wife Clodagh showing gracious gifts of hospitality. I found some of these accounts very moving. 

In it all there is much to learn about the posture and skills of relational peacemaking. He challenges journalists, politicians and church leadership. He is honest, at times vulnerable and always full of hope in even the darkest moments. As Fr Alec reminded him again and again, we need to leave it to the Holy Spirit. Indeed, God is the obvious power and love that runs through it. 

I am at last delighted to have it. I would love to give to to the guy in the car, honking his horn at a human who if Methodists believed in sainthood…

GARDEN SONG - CLARE & MICAH HAYNS

Home is where I am who I really am. The outside world rarely sees me like my family. At home I am relaxed which means at times being short tempered, selfish and outwork all my frustrations and weariness. Home is all veneer off. The good and sadly the bad and the ugly. You should see what I wear on a snow day!

As I read Clare and Micah Hayns second book Garden Song it made me think that the Psalms are the home of the Bible. This is the book of songs and poems, reflections and prayers that gives pilgrims a place to be raw and honest. 

Clare Hayns has an understated but captivating skill for storytelling and drawing out Biblical text. As she does it with these Psalms we find pilgrims struggling with all sorts of life issues. She reveals the Psalms as a raw and honest space for vulnerability, questioning, grief and rage.

It is of course not all the gloom side of faith. Home is also a place for joy and celebration. Home is full of love and adoration and beauty. Indeed it is because it is full of all of that that we can be so honest. When we know we are loved as we are we can throw off all our pretensions.

Beauty is a good word for this book too. Micah Hayns is a talented artist and his art brings so much to Garden Song. Indeed where as Micah came in at the end of his mother’s first book, in this one he led the way. As you lift and open the book you feel that you are actually engaging with a piece of art.

The book is set out to be used as a devotional. At the end of each Psalm there are short prayers and, what I particularly love, songs to give a few moments to marinate. The range of songs is a mark of Clare’s, or maybe Clare and Micah’s musical breath and taste. It ranges from a Symphony Orchestra to Mumford & Sons with choirs, chants and worship songs in between. I discovered Ghost Ship.

You could use it communally. After Clare and Micah contributed to last year’s 4 Corners Festival in Belfast at least two groups were formed who spent time together in their first book Unveiled. Garden Song gives them more content to continue to meet.

Let me close where I opened. Near the end Clare writes, “At times all we can do is to be quiet and still ourselves, resting in the loving embrace of God, who is both mother and father to us and who calls us home…” Whatever goes on around us, God is love and hope and rescue and refuge. Home.

 

  

GLENN PATTERSON - TWO SUMMERS

In an interview with Northern Irish broadcaster Rigsy, Glenn Patterson talked about how he loves writing about 17 year olds because that is such an influential time for the rest of your life.

That intrigued me because it was the year that my life shifted seismically by discovering Jesus and travelling for a summer to Toronto.

I have a theory that the 17 year old me was a very true representation of who I was born to be. Indeed, I spent decades trying to get back to who I then was, having been encrusted by cultural and religious prejudices. 

Glenn Patterson’s new book is two novellas about Belfast boys around that stage of life. Mark gets a summer job as a ‘binman’. Gem, a better deal, is sent to New York to stay with his much older sister. 

Both had me again looking at my own late teens. One summer I had a job as a Greenkeeper at Ballymena Gold Club. Another summer I had almost Gem’s experience of a summer in Toronto, in those days, 1979, Canada was a world away. It was first flight.

So, as I look at the two stories I am more interested in Gem in New York for back then. I understood that first experience of big city streets, subways and adventuring it on your own. 

What Patterson does marvellously is bring in a side story of the 60’s girl band The Shangri Las. Being a musical nerd like myself is one of the reasons I love Patterson and this one is so nerdy. Big for a brief period in the mid-sixties, The Shangri Las attempted a reunion when Gem was in New York in 1977. Through this he meets Vivien on the street and there’s a loss of innocence for sure.

Mark only crosses the corners of Belfast but experiences a equal dose of culture shock. He discovers how the other half live. Men of all ages and form every which where become his companions for some weeks. He gets closest to Tony whose love equally shocks and surprises. 

By novellas’ end you are with these guys, holding them dear in their isolation and desire. You long to know what is next. We get a concerning clue about Mark. Gem? Who knows. You kinda hope that Vivien tracks him down to Belfast and that the Shangri Las last one secret gig was at their wedding.

Glenn Patterson at his best in a book that would go down well on any beach in the world or wherever your holidays take you. Open up a nostalgic analysis of your youth in the teenage experiences of Mark and Gem. 

COLM TÓIBIN - LONG ISLAND

 

“In the courtroom of romance

And the politics of devotion

Verdicts are more unanimous

In the absence of emotion.”

 

I wrote those words in St. Ives in May 1994. We were on holiday in St Ives with my songwriting buddy Sam Hill Jr and his lovely wife Isobel. I think I was trying to write Sam a hit lyric. I didn’t but there is something about these couplets that came back to me as I read Long Island immediately after Brooklyn. I sensed that Irish writer Colm Tóibin was opening up that idea.

Like Brooklyn, this sequel Long Island is a romantic drama based on love triangles. Eilis Lacey has returned home after 20 years. She left Enniscorthy in the 1950s and returns for her mother’s 80th birthday not having seen her in between.

In between however she has settled down as wife of Tony Fiorello with two children and living in a cul-de-sac with other houses for Tony’s brothers and mother. It becomes claustrophobically Italian and then…

Then the first few sentences of Long Island throws out far more drama than the entirety of Brooklyn. That drama throws Eilis, cracks her solid marriage and sends her home to Ireland for some respite.

Home brings all kinds of reminiscence and regret. Eilis is still wondering about that decision she made in the Brooklyn novel. We find a more stoic and strong woman in the sequel but emotion can play tricks and twists and boy they do here. Jim Farrell, who might have been, is still in town. He is still single but in a secret relationship with Nancy, Eilis’s old best friend Nancy who George has left widowed with a few kids.

This simple love triangle plot is wonderfully developed. You grow to love and be supportive of all the characters while groaning at their weaknesses. They populate the stunning backdrop of the south east of Ireland, beaches, towns and Dublin City. 

The writing is beautiful, conversations exquisite. There is more drama as I have said and much more deception and intrigue. It’s another belter of the gentlest kind. There’s no absence of emotion.