New Voice

Faithful  readers, I hope you can forgive the rather prolonged period since we’ve added new content to these pages. Our excuses, as usual, are many and varied. The absence of new material on the site, however, does not arise from indifference or complete laziness, though drunkenness may be a factor. We, at New Voice, do not believe in forcing out a weekly post, just for the sake of it. We are a considered, reflective bunch, and so, over the last few weeks we have been reading, reflecting, considering themes and developing a store of comment, impressions, argument and aside to which we will be subjecting the reader over the coming months.  (continue reading…)

 In a number of my posts over the last year or so I’ve mentioned the difficulties writers have combining ideas and narrative – uneasy bedfellows as Coetzee writes in Elizabeth Costello. Coetzee himself is one who combines both well, lately adopting a kind of Centre Pompidou method – exposing the ideas he is attempting to explore, rather than attempting to hide them inside fictional scenario.  J.G. Ballard is someone whose daring and vivid ideas and imagination tend to outstrip his often pedestrian, flat prose and awkward plotting. Martin Amis often talks about the need for a writer to get a character from A to B – the details of mundane logistics that a writer, carried away by staging the big set-pieces that will dramatise his ideas, often ignores or stumbles over.  (continue reading…)

Secular Sundays would like to apologise for the lengthy delay since the last posting. The usual excuses apply – laziness, drunkenness, parenthood, obsessive running, existential angst, and sport on TV. Reading, however, is the main reason, and a new DeLillo is always a valid excuse for doing nothing else. Some may claim the size of the great man’s slim new offering is not sufficient to offer up as an excuse for keeping one from anything else, but as explained in David O’Connor’s post, there is more contained in the 115 pages of Point Omega than in most 300 page novels. (continue reading…)

First of all, Secular Sundays would like to wish everyone a happy new year and all that. We dip a toe into 2010 with trepidation, here at New Voice. We can’t say we are all that optimistic, politically or economically speaking. Literature, however, is another matter, and we are prepapred to plunge into the literary waters of 2010 with the wild abandon of the Christmas Day lunatics at the forty foot, promised, as we are, new work from DeLillo and Amis. Following on from the glut of work by heavy hitters the like of Roth, Auster and Banville (though we didn’t like the Banville at all) and Carver and McGahern, released at the end of 2009, we can’t really complain, although we’d love something new from Cormac McCarthy – if anyone has heard anything on this front they might let us know. We had a moment of panic a few weeks ago when we noticed (I’m not sure why I’m sticking with the ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, the stout I’m consuming, perhaps) a headline announcing his auctioning of his typewriter for charity. Apparently somone bought him a new one, though, for a fiver or something, so hopefully we will get something before long. In the meantime, we must make do with the film version of The Road, which we await, again, with some trepidation.
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The team at New Voice would like to wish our readers all the best for the Christmas, and we hope that there was some decent literature under the tree, or at least a book voucher or two. I would also like to announce the arrival of the newest voice on the team – Ruadhán Tomás Farrelly – nearly two weeks old and already showing clear signs of being a literary genius.

I am too full of turkey, and there are too many unopened bottles of Tyskie in the fridge, (not to mention the fact of a new baby demanding attention) for me to spend too much time typing this week. In fact, I just want to alert readers to some Christmas TV – the excellent Orson Welles season on BBC 4 continues this evening and ‘The Dead’, John Huston’s fabulous rendering of, arguably, the complete (perfect?) short story is on RTÉ tomorrow evening. As Fintan O’Toole wrote last week in the Irish Times, it is impossible now to read ‘The Dead’ and imagine Gabriel as anyone other than the magnificent Donal McCann.

Finally, some words from James Joyce to end 2009 – chosen, from ‘The Dead’, for absolutely no reason other than their simplicity and beauty:

The patting at once grew louder in encouragement and then ceased altogether. Gabriel leaned his ten trembling fingers on the tablecloth and smiled nervously at the company. Meeting a row of upturned faces he raised his eyes to the chandelier. The piano was playing a waltz tune and he could hear the skirts sweeping against the drawing-room door. People, perhaps, were standing in the snow on the quay outside, gazing up at the lighted windows and listening to the waltz music. The air was pure there. In the distance lay the park where the trees were weighted with snow. The Wellington Monument wore a gleaming cap of snow that flashed westward over the white field of Fifteen Acres. (Dubliners, Triad/Grafton p230)

Regular visitors to NewVoiceBlog (and our site stats tell us that there are at least some of you out there) will have noticed, I hope, the absence of Secular Sundays over the last few weeks. This was as a result of a very busy wife needing more-or-less constant access to the laptop. The time, though, was not spent idling, or at least not all of it, but was spent trying to keep up with the spate of new books released by some of the big guns – Auster, Roth and Banville being three and a fourth, for me the biggest, albeit dead, gun, Ray Carver. (continue reading…)

We at New Voice like a good essay, and so welcomed Declan Kiberd’s essay in the Irish Times yesterday. In fact, in the ‘Weekend’ section of the IT yesterday we were treated, not only to Kiberd, but an interview with Banville and a review of Brian Dillon’s new book about hypochondria and creativity. If the book is as enjoyable, well written and interesting as the piece in the ‘Guardian Review’ the Saturday before last, it is certainly worth buying.
Back to Professor Kiberd. His essay was a riff on a theme those of us fortunate enough to have taken English in UCD over the last ten years or so will recognise. (continue reading…)

You are encouraged to take your time, to relax, to make yourself at home:
“The store has lots of fully furnished roomsets. You can try out everything, sit on the chairs, lie on the beds and let your imagination create your new home.”

Yes, I have been at the Ballard again, however, although it could well be, the lines above are not from a J.G. Ballard story. This is not a sales pitch from a store in Vermillion Sands. This is a quote from Ikea’s Irish website. (continue reading…)

This week’s effort is a long one, think of it as a double week, following last week’s absence, due to the logistical difficulty of managing a couple of weekend trips to Kerry, the first of which led to a chance encounter with a book, to which I will return.
Firstly, since the autumn I have been wondering how John Gray has not been jumping up and down screaming I told you so, from the rooftops. John Banville, in a review of Gray’s recently published selection of essays, also wondered about this. Gray, no doubt is too busy being appalled and shocked by the stubborn insistence of some to persist with the concept of the free market and global Amercian democracy, to gloat.
Gray is a thinker who has been proved correct – his analysis of the trends of contemporary governments, pre and post September 11 is very accurate, as is his dispassionate, detached analysis of contemporary thought. Fukuyama, for one, must surely have squirmed if and when he read Gray’s incredulous dismantling of his ‘end of history’ pronouncement. His assessment of the likely consequences of the various forms of utopian evangelicism – be it religious, humanistic or scientific and especially economic evangelicism (though all combine to form Gray’s overarching theory) has been almost eerily prophetic. Apologies for the cliché here, but read False Dawn, or Al Qaeda and What it Means to be Modern – I promise that you will find his predicitions, though they are not presented as such, they are presented as clear, obvious inevitable facts, prophetic, eerily so. (continue reading…)

In my last post I mentioned Lars Von Triers, and the hostility his films provoke. Bryan Appleyard, in last week’s Sunday Times, went on at length about how provoked he was by Antichrist. What quite provoked Appleyard’s hostility was a little difficult to pinpoint – he didn’t like the explicit violence, the nastiness, and he wasn’t sure whether or not it should have been given its 18 uncut rating, as he isn’t quite sure about the whole rating thing. But it wasn’t that, it wasn’t the violence that left him “insensate with rage,” although he spent quite a bit of the article talking about the violence and nastiness. (continue reading…)