SOUL SURMISE

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.

COLM TÓIBÍN - BROOKLYN

Browsing for summer reads, Colm Tóibín's Long Island caught my eye. I'd just finished the TV series Revenge that was set there. With tokens to spend I picked it up. Realising that it was the sequel for Brooklyn I thought I better read it first.

What drew me in further was that emigrating thing in the 1950s. My Uncle Bobby left for Toronto with a clatter of cousins around the same time as Eilis does in Brooklyn. Maybe I'd learn something about that.

I am not sure how much I did, although Tóibín does give us a feel of the early loneliness and nervousness of fitting in.

Brooklyn is the most ordinary of reads. Drama is minimal. It is an extraordinary thing that Tóibín does. He grips you with the ordinary. The very ordinary. There must have been emigrants from Ireland with bigger, more exciting or tragic stories. Eilis Lacey is just this ordinary girl from Enniscorthy, Wexford whose sister thinks she could do better in America.

We are given the networking of a Catholic Church helping their own. Fr Flood is a fine pastoral carer. The Irish networking in America certainly does get some coverage.

In the end we live through the dilemmas of  a young  girl's coming of age. With her beloved sister Rose back in Ireland she does it without people to share her excitement and doubts.

Even the love story with Italian Tony doesn't go overboard on the romantic dreams of romance. Two people find each other at a dance and slowly lean in and eventually have a very ordinary love, no less the stronger for it.

The real story of the book is internal. It is about self doubt. It is about the wrench of making big decisions. Particularly as Eilis seems to have to do all the over thinking or under thinking on her own. It didn't take me back to my Uncle's geographical journey so much as my own growing into adulthood and the decisions needed to be risked. 

It is not long before we fall in love with Eilis. We want the best for her. We feel for her. We want to enter the pages and give advice or maybe we are glad that we don't have to. We become near personally engaged with this friend going through the tunnel from innocence to responsibility.  

Whatever, though Tóibín says there was no intended follow up but in hindsight it seems that there had to be. Tóibín says that it was only when he had a the image of the beginning of Long Island in his mind that came to be. In that image there is more drama than in all of Brooklyn but I loved everything about Brooklyn. Long Island could be more heartbreaking and dramatic but without Brooklyn would that first few pages have had the same shocking impact. 

 

PAUL LYNCH - PROPHET SONG

Was it Bono who said, “We Irish don’t build huge bridges or send people into space but boy can we tell stories.” Five years after Anna Burns and Paul Lynch brings another Booker Prize home to our wee island. It suggests that whoever said it wasn’t kidding. 

The Booker is absolutely deserved, though I haven’t read all those nominated! Prophet Song is a remarkable work and hits with a serious thud of impact, not just in its entirety but on every single line. The sense of darkness as a weight weighing down on your chest. How can someone create that kinda of feeling with words on a page?

In Prophet Song the darkness swamps the nation? It covers the streets of the neighbourhood. It fills one single family house with its heaviness. It burrows into one woman’s brain, heart and soul. It is all consuming.

Lynch makes this happen with a suffocating writing style. There are no paragraph breaks or speech commas. The book is dense. There is no let up.

All of this falls on Eilish. Living in Dublin as a far right National Alliance Party clamps down, her husband Larry is quickly picked up. Gone. Eilish has to hold the family together as the nation disintegrates. Her eldest son Mark is soon gone too, maybe fighting with the rebels.

Very quickly we realise that though this might be futuristic in that Ireland seems a safe democracy, what is happening to Eilish and her family is what is happening across Syria, Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan and many other places. This brutality that families have to live in is NOW. As we read these sentences, people are suffering what we are reading. 

Every refugee you have met, staying in hotels near you have been through this. As a Church, Fitzroy has connected with Eilishs from everywhere. The book has helped me understand what they have been through. It has hiked my empathy, sympathy and compassion.

Of course, cleverly set in Dublin, Lynch is speaking to us on the island. He is quelling our prejudices as we read. Attempting to Eradicate our racism. Hoping to send us towards justice and love.

It should be posted into everybody’s letterbox.

For me, there was a horrible moment near the end. I thought that Eilish and her beleaguered family had made it into Northern Ireland. I had a second or two of joy and relief and then I had maybe my saddest moment. 

Oh no. After all that. We put them into hotels. Move them into houses far from where that hotel was. We graffiti their walls asking them to leave. We threaten some with planes to Rwanda for goodness sake. As if they have not suffered enough we are short in our compassionate response.

And Eilish hadn’t made it. There was one more corner of hell…

Prophet Song is not for that few days that you take away to rest and chill out. In such need, open a bottle and read Richard Osman instead but at some other time make sure you take the time for Paul Lynch’s classic. Good for its writing, its style and good with its message too.  

DAVID A. DUNLOP - WHEN THE LIGHT GETS IN

With authentic characters and a gently gripping plot, David A Dunlop shines a light on the golden calves of sectarianism and church legalism in rural Northern Ireland. Where I am from When the Light Gets In is an important book. Culturally insightful. Personally cathartic. Spiritually prophetic. 

The Shaw family are a common as fertile soil northern Northern Irish family. Isaac is a missionary in India, twins Joseph and Sarah are actually adopted and the intriguing oldest, Jack. 

Jack. It all begins at his funeral. He’s that old bachelor in the family. Many of us in this part of the world had them. I think of my own Great Uncle Tommy. Where my Tommy was big into church though, Jack was not. A mysterious something had come between him and God.

We are not long into the book before we sense the usual dividing lines in the small settled community. Sectarianism is innocuous but its still sectarian. The Protestant side on which the Shaws are to be found is spiritually legalistic. The rumour is that that Jack might have had issues with these lines.

The story is then an unravelling of both the lines. It is about how in one family these lines we make between us and the thran ways that we keep them can cause trauma and not scars but open wounds decades later. When we reduce relationships to mathematics and right answers we injure and hurt the very heart of our humanity. 

Before the light gets in, it is exiled. In the name of God real love is squeezed out of shape by ways to live that are written on slabs of stone and hung on our backs to keep us down. To make sure the neighbour doesn't think bad of us. To keep us right when it is doing anything but. Who said that religion is what is left when God is no longer in it. 

Dunlop tells it beautifully. The suspicion. The surprise. The shock. The sadness. The little bit of salvation. It is all set up so ordinary. Then quite suddenly it becomes a page turner. Could it be. No. Oh my. Can there be repair. The light gets in slowly, everyone hurt as they squint to see.

For me, the saddest part of reading the book was that as I was doing so I bumped into three friends from a few decades ago who shared with me how that mathematical religion had hurt them or sent them off wondering what on earth this God thing was about.  

Our Northern Irish society is coming down with people who have been spiritually abused, who have left the faith over a legalism that was judgemental and exiling. I would love to think that even now there is redemption. 

I would like to think that David Dunlop’s novel would be catharsis for such. I know that it has inspired and refuelled my own ministry to go after the hurting sheep, lost not by their own decisions but by wayward shepherds. 

When the Light Gets In is a book that needs read, heard and where possible its victims repaired!

CARA DILLON - COMING HOME

I love it when an artist stretches him or herself. Cara Dillon has done it most wonderfully on Coming Home.

Cara Dillon the poet. It begins there. Covid lockdown had many side benefits alongside the negatives we tend to be drawn to first. Artists who doodled and found something or even more exciting, something else. Dillon used the time to write poetry about home.

It all found its way onto this spoken word record that occasionally breaks to song. Dillon’s long time hubby and musical companion, Sam of the dynasty of Lakeman, then adds rolling piano and finger picking guitar, never garish - just right.

Like all such experiments, it could have tumbled down around them but quite the opposite - it lands in near perfection.

And there is more… not only an immaculately adorned album with beautiful photographs but also a hard back book that goes deeper still into each and every track and a few extras. Dillon has mastered the prose as well.

If I spoke of an artist finding her voice then it would be a perfect lead into Dillon’s north east of Northern Ireland’s accent. She’s a country girl Ms Dillon and we get it loud and clear. Of course being from just 40 miles east of her, in another accent betrayed place, I am loving it. 

Once I had heard the record I found myself hearing the prose in that voice. All about people and place, particularly family and Dungiven at the foothills of the Sperrins. Her mother is all over this and family going back in time, family around her still and family looking forward. Being Northern Irish it is very near my experience but just that wee bit different too. It all made me want to go deep diving among my own people and place.

It could be seen as a goodbye to innocence, Dillon seeing her own life through the age of her own children. It's about having a refuge when all is lonely or hurt or broken. During Covid a very needed and romantic place. Maybe heightened in our memories as such.

Yet, not all is safe. The poem Inishowen is a reminder that we all were touched by those decades of The Troubles. She tells this part of our upbringing well.

Over all I am really taken with this. I have made a spoken word record myself. Over 20 years ago I recorded an album withs singer songwriter Sam Hill Jr. We tried to keep my spoken word pieces in the discipline of the verse which Cara doesn’t often do. It makes me think there is more here. With these new strings to her bow Cara can take the writing in even more directions. 

Until then... this is an artist fulfilling her vocation. 

ROISIN MAGUIRE - NIGHTSWIMMERS

It hasn’t been the easiest six weeks for the Stockmans and so when we got away for a few days it was important what I chose as a novel. Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, with its Booker Prize and Ireland in the future focus, was a strong pull but I needed something warmer.

My prejudice made me buy Roisin Maguire’s Night Swimming. You see when I read that it was set in eastern N. Ireland I had completely dismissed that there is an east coast below Belfast and was so excited about a novel set around Waterfoot. Forgive me County Down.

Now, to be fair Ballybrady could be anywhere on the amazing coast around the entire island and Nightswimming was exactly the book I needed to be reading. There is enough grief, vocational angst and questions of the meaning of life in these pages but the emphasis is on human nature’s strengths.

In the little seaside villages full of quirks and eccentric loners, love lingers in the bay, the sea, the sand and the head land.

Evan is our townie needing away as a result of a deteriorating marriage as the result of a baby lost to sudden infant death syndrome. Then he gets caught in Covid lockdown and has to stay longer than the week he's booked in for. Many, many more weeks indeed! You are drawn immediately to his pain and vulnerability.

Our seashore culchie is Grace (well named) who is living the life of a recluse, portraying herself a little mad in the head in order to keep her privacy after a traumatic experience many many years before in London. Against all the odds of her ill mannered crabbitness you gotta love her.  

Anyway, Evan’s 8 year old deaf son Luca and Grace’s 20 year old niece Abbie with a fleeting late appearance by Evan’s wife Lorna are the main characters in the book. All are enveloped in a tiny community where everyone knows everyone’s crazy foibles. 

That part so reminded this clergyman, seeking time away from his job, of Church. This menagerie of well familiar folk meeting in the pub against lockdown laws, whose short comings are too well known but who are all loving and sticking together as genuine family when the hard times hit. 

So, I chose the gentler read. I felt warm and fuzzy so many times and not in a sweet sentimental way. The other strong character is the landscape. The wee traits of tide and the life around rock pools, the sun's light, the moon's reflections. Swimming at night, naked of worries. 

As I basked in the beauty and wonder and now as I leave it down it is filled subtlety and subversiveness about life’s important values.

Where do I point my priorities? Who or what is shaping me? How do I change to find a place of worth and contribution, to make a real contribution to the humans around me and not just some wealth generating system? 

Roisin Maguire throws herself among our growing crowd of great Northern Irish woman writers and, wherever Ballybrady is in her mind, has written something so beautiful… and utterly helpful for me at this particular time.