LITERARY FICTION
PARIS ECHO
by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson, €14) BEST known for 1993’s World War I novel Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks’s more recent output has included a slice of science-fiction futurism (A Possible Life) and even a James Bond novel.
Set in Paris in 2006, his exquisite new book turns on an unlikely encounter between Tariq, a teenage Moroccan stowaway, and Hannah, an American historian researching the lives of French women during World War II, after a bruising affair with a married man.
As Tariq makes his way among Paris’s homeless after a risky journey in the back of a lorry, we expect a tale of gritty realism.
But Faulks, toggling between Tariq’s perspective and Hannah’s, takes a left turn by introducing other voices from the past, for a phantasmagorical reckoning with France’s role in the Holocaust and in conflict with Algeria.
Tonally, it’s strange — not least when Tariq gets a history lesson from a certain Victor Hugo — but the result is a deeply affecting, wholly unsolemn treatment of some of the 20th century’s darkest moments.
FUTURE POPES OF IRELAND
by Darragh Martin (4th Estate, €15) A COMIC chronicle of Irish life that starts with Pope John Paul II’s state visit to Ireland in 1979 and ends with Barack Obama’s in 2011, Darragh Martin’s bustling, bubbly debut adult novel plants a flag on terrain Roddy Doyle’s Barrytown novels made their own.
Featuring four Dublin siblings, the novel cuts back and forth in time to show the roots of a lifelong rift between big sister Peg — who runs away to New York after being caught in bed with a boy — and triplets Rosie, Damien and John Paul, raised by their grandmother after the death of their mother.
Against a backdrop of the era’s headlines, from Ireland’s penalty shootout against Romania in Italia ‘90 to the boom and bust of the Celtic Tiger years, Martin uses his characters to dramatise the country’s shifting attitudes towards a host of issues, including abortion and homosexuality.
Four coming-of-age stories for the price of one, the novel never quite adds up to a bigger picture, but offers a great deal of bittersweet fun along the way.
THE CAGE
by Lloyd Jones (Text €10.43) NEW ZEALAND author Lloyd Jones made the 2007 Booker shortlist with Mister Pip, a book about a black girl reading Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations in war-torn Papua New Guinea.
His new novel, ostensibly a plea for the humane treatment of refugees, is a trickier beast, unfolding in a dystopian Kafka-land all but bleached of drama and specificity.
Two strangers, Doctor and Mole, seemingly on the run from a nameless disaster, arrive at a hotel in an unspecified country town only to find themselves caged and gawped at by suspicious locals, as if at the zoo.
As we see the story through the eyes of the hotel owner’s nephew, the fog around what exactly Doctor and Mole have fled serves as a potent symbol of the obstacles that block communication between refugees and their hosts.
The trouble is, Jones banks so heavily on his novel’s value as an allegory that he forgets to satisfy the reader in any other way, blunting its message.