Kilcullen support at Kildare man's book launch

At the launch of Valley of the Peacock Angel were Senator John Whelan, Monica Martin of Kilcullen, author Martin Malone, John Martin of Kilcullen, and Garreth Byrne, home on holiday from Changchun, China.

"The problem was, how do I get inside the head of an Iraqi Kurd, and inside the head of a German TV producer?"

Those were just a couple of the challenges related by author Martin Malone, when his new novel was given its home-town launch in Kildare Library last night, writes Brian Byrne.

In Valley of the Peacock Angel, the former soldier's inspiration was a drive through an empty town in northern Iraq a quarter of a century ago, and the horrible realisation that many of the population of Halabja had been killed by a nerve gas attack.

"This is a story that needed to be told. It's the 25th anniversity of an atrocity and there hasn't been a murmur in the media about it. The woman sitting in her office in the Twin Towers, and the woman cutting her carrots in Halabja, both had a right to life, a right that was taken away from them.

"Rightly so, we will mark the 25th anniversary of 911 when it comes along, but today in Halabja, the gas is still wreaking havoc, especially in congenital birth defects because the water is still poisoned. So war has a long reach, and when a war ends it leaves a legacy. When a region slides into a pattern of war, it's very difficult to slide out of it."

He noted that land mines still kill people 25 years later in former war zones, often children and teenagers who hadn't even been born at the time. "I wanted to show how war is probably the worst human instinct we have."

Saying that he had tried writing the story from an Irish person's perspective, he found that he 'had no business going there' because he hadn't lived in the town. But coming from an island with its own recent past of conflict, he hoped that a 'shared identity' would be apparent between Irish readers and the characters in the book.

Senator John Whelan, a longtime friend of the author, described the book as 'engaging and provocative' though the subject matter is not enjoyable.

He recalled his own father having served with the UN in the Congo and noted that 'fighting for peace' and trying to keep warring factions apart is no easy task. "Many colleagues and friends throughout this community have served with great courage and dignity in places like Lebanon, Cyprus, Eritrea and more, and now more men and women are going from here to serve in Syria, to the Golan Heights." He said that Martin Malone, a former peacekeeper, continues as an author to 'fight for peace' with powerful words.

Senator Whelan said writers ask us to reflect what's on the inside rather than just what is reported on the outside in journalism. "Writers like Martin Malone bring to us, not in a confrontational way but with compassion, the true horrors, the true individual tragedies that lie behind the headlines and the body counts that sometimes desensitise us to the individual stories."

He compared the story in Valley of the Peacock Angel to the Srebrenica Massacre in 1995, an event when the UN hadn't exactly covered itself in glory. "Martin is challenging us not to turn a blind eye, his book is asking us to say if this is what we would stand for, if this is what we would tolerate?"

Valley of the Peacock Angel is published by New Island Fiction and sells for €14.99.