Book Review: The Devil's Relics, Martin Malone

Irish soldier Emer Harte is a flawed person, which fits her well into the family of fictional characters down the years written by Kildare author Martin Malone, writes Brian Byrne. In his latest novel, The Devil’s Relics, she’s an MP serving with UNIFIL in Lebanon, job and location directly out of the writer’s own military experiences and with which his regular readers will be familiar. What is clear in the undercurrent of the story is that the author retains a very deep love of the area and its people from his several tours of duty there.

The constantly broken countries in and around the locations for The Devil’s Relics are not just places of warfare but also prime hunting grounds for those seeking to make big money. In this instance, smuggling ancient artefacts looted from the ruins of where many of our civilisations of today originated. These days we only have to read headlines and ledes in our news media of choice to have a real sense of the Lebanon-Palestine-Israel triangle of horror where the innocent are inevitably the biggest losers. A story set there is all too grimly familiar. 

The Devil’s Relics is time-lined before the current warfare between Israel, Palestine and Lebanon, but since conflict is endemic there over generations that hardly makes much difference. This isn’t a political tale or a conflict story. It’s a detective novel where these are merely the background noises. A gangland story where the bad-hats are brutal and their own personal mafia have infected the international peacekeeping operation, including the Irish contingent. 

Military police officer Emer Harte, scheduled to go home to Ireland where she’s hoping to pick up the shreds of her post-divorce personal life, is tasked to navigate the complexities of finding a missing female Irish soldier. In an environment where she doesn’t know whom to trust, either among her Irish colleagues or the security forces on different sides of the borders of where she works. The assignment isn’t made easier when she finds herself with a target on her own back.

The Devil’s Relics is not a tidy story, either in plot or outcome. The former ensures that the book is a page-turner, because we can’t easily guess what’s going to happen next. But we do want to know — I stole hours from my other work to find out for myself. The book’s last pages leave open more than a possibility that this novel is not the last time we will read about Emer Harte.

Full disclosure, Martin Malone is a friend. I first met him when he was trying to find voice and words as a writer of fiction. Never easy and rarely a viable life choice among the many who try make it so. He has struggled through the minefields of his craft for years with a similar doggedness that his Emer Harte character shows in this, his latest book. 

I know he won’t mind me saying that it hasn’t made him rich. For Martin Malone — ‘Murt’ to those who know him more closely — the most important thing has always been his compulsion to tell stories. Stories which reflect the truths he has experienced both as a citizen of Kildare and as soldier of Ireland and the United Nations. No less than any of us he is now moving on in years. He has achieved some real riches in life, loving companionship and a degree of success in his passion for telling stories. Not just for their own sake but to let the rest of us know about the peoples and circumstances which have been part of the making of his life. 

Through his decades as a writer of nine novels, several collections of short stories, radio plays and a stage play, Murt has been published by several imprints, and he has also learned the reality of being an author — that it’s a hard and lonely path where mostly only formulaic novelists achieve blockbuster status. The Devil’s Relics doesn’t run to a formula. With his wife Valerie, Murt Malone now runs his own small publishing operation, Owl Fella’s Press, both a tilt to his age and to reality. But it’s also a statement about taking control of what one does. And what might be. 

As I read and finally finished The Devil’s Relics, I was seeing the story in my mind as if it was a movie. That alone says that Murt was delivering what he set out to do. There’s a real potential here, perhaps even for a TV series. Before Netflix notices, there’s opportunity for our several and increasingly successful globally Irish film production companies to pick up an option.

It’s time Kildare’s Martin Malone got wider recognition for his storytelling skills.

The Devil's Relics is available in Woodbine Books, price €17.

READ: Martin Malone, a writer doing his best 

READ: Launch of 'warts and all' Curragh racing novel 

READ: Review: This Cruel Station 

READ: Martin Malone's 'Black Rose Days' for launch 

READ: Review: Deadly Confederacies and other stories 

READ: Review: Valley of the Peacock Angel 

READ: Kilcullen support at Kildare man's book launch 

READ: 'Rosanna Nightwalker' — first night 

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Review: Three Words for Goodbye

Historical Romance. Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb.

I have a running joke with Hazel Gaynor, that her books reduce me to tears, writes Brian Byrne. They do. Because though romance and historical fiction are not my normal read, I’m nevertheless a sucker for a happy, or sad, storyline. I’m a secret softie, really, even if a complex political thriller would be my normal books preference.

When Hazel and her sometimes writing partner Heather Webb get together to write a book, there is then a pair of them conspiring to get my face wet. With their latest co-production, Three Words for Goodbye, they did it again.

None of the foregoing is really relevant to the book, which is another professional and absorbing production from the Gaynor-Webb catalogue. Just as are the Gaynor solus volumes which have annexed an ever-increasing space on my bookshelf since Hazel started it all in 2012 with The Girl Who Came Home.

History and the world wars have been a rich vein of inspiration for her, and for the writing duo. In this story together they bring the dark tapestry of looming WW2 into a human perspective through the eyes of two sisters from America, Clara and Madeleine. They are put together on a journey through Europe by their grandmother, who wants them by proxy to tidy up affairs from her own youth. And in the process to hopefully learn more about each other. It would be unfair to say more about the story, and risk delivering spoilers. It is nicely complicated in many emotional ways, so read the book yourself to get the full enjoyment of the skilful way a short few weeks in the lives of these two young women are put together.

In addition to entertaining, Three Words for Goodbye addresses social perspectives which, while of the story's time, can still resonate more than eight decades on. The politics of the late 1930s, the business practices, the international warmongering, all have their parallels today. As do still — admittedly to less extent in more enlightened parts of the world — the constrained place and perception of women. The existence of role models who influence their possible alternative futures also remains important for women today. And how the revelations from someone else’s hidden past can change destinies is a constant in life's experience, for both women and men.

This is a 'lockdown book' and I’m fascinated about how Hazel and Heather must have put this together from their covid-restricted working desks on two sides of the Atlantic. Did each take the role of a different sister? And if so, which did who? I will in due course ask. Meantime, the deft merging of their protagonists' personal experiences in the gathering international gloom and doom is an exemplar of how properly to meld fiction and history.

Three Words for Goodbye made me once again steal time from my other activities in order to keep reading it. At the same time not wanting to reach the end. Not because I knew there would be tears, rather that when you’re enjoying something, you don’t want it to finish.

Three Words for Goodbye is available locally in Woodbine Books, and in all good bookshops here and abroad. A perfect gift for Christmas, for yourself or for someone else you know will appreciate the telling of a good historical romance story.

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Review: From Suir to Jarama

Liam Cahill is a quiet, thoughtful and considering man, writes Brian Byrne. I know that because he was so during my time in the RTE Newsroom through the 1980s. Variously the Industrial, Economics and Political Correspondent, he wore the titles lightly. He was old school journalist. He gathered the facts, placed them in context, and delivered the story making sure that he, as reporter, never eclipsed it.

Liam always stopped for a chat with whoever was in the newsroom, even with us lowly scruffs on the Radio 2 News desk when I moved there from the Radio 1 subs space. Apart from his work as a journalist, he was passionately interested in workers’ rights, the labour movement and trade unionism.

Neither of us stayed with RTE eventually, but over the decades since we have remained sporadically in touch, our paths intersecting occasionally in areas that included experimentation in internet news and blogging. Liam is also an author, his book Forgotten Revolution — The Limerick Soviet 1919 being the definitive work on an extraordinary two-week episode in that city at the beginning of the War of Independence.

All that preamble is by way of full disclosure when I’m looking at Liam Cahill’s latest book, From Suir to Jarama, which he was kind enough to send to me in advance of its publication this coming week. It also establishes his diligence in research before laying out a story.

This particular story is personal for him. And, I’d say, frustrating to some degree. It’s about the life and legacy of one Mossie Quinlan, killed in the Spanish Civil War in 1937 in the valley of the River Jarama outside Madrid. A place which became an ‘open air abattoir’ where many of the 15th International Brigade were slaughtered by the Fascists of General Franco.

I have to say that the Spanish Civil War kind of passed me by in my historical interests. But there was a very strong Irish involvement in the ‘Quinta Brigada’, a conglomerate of a variety of battalions of volunteers from various countries who headed to Spain to fight for democracy. Or to escape from their own home politics — many of the Irish there were veterans of the War of Independence and the subsequent Irish Civil War. For the record, we in Kilcullen have such a connection in Frank Conroy, whose death in that war was commemorated in the Heritage Centre in the summer of 2019.

The Quinlan and Cahill families of Waterford were connected, and I can guess that the story of Mossie Quinlan has always been haunting quietly in the back of Liam Cahill’s mind. His hope, I suspect, was to ‘find’ Mossie and exorcise that haunting.

Mossie was one of five Waterford men who fought at Jarama, and he was the one among them killed and buried in a nearby town. He came from a family of business and politics, his grandfather Maurice having owned two butcher shops and who served as Alderman and also Mayor of Waterford as well as being a contemporary of then President of Sinn Fein Eamon de Valera.

Mossie was Liam Cahill’s mother’s first cousin. Liam as a boy remembers Mossie’s father, also Maurice, as a frequent visitor to the Cahill home during the 1950s, but he never spoke about the son who had died at Jarama some two decades before. Indeed, for some 70 years after Mossie’s death, he was only mentioned in ‘hushed voices’ within the family, perhaps because of a sense of shame that he had fought beside Communists against the Fascist threat. Not something considered appropriate for a son of Catholic and holy Ireland.

And here lies the frustration I suspect the journalist Liam Cahill felt in his chasing down of Mossie Quinlan’s life and death. With so little tangible lore in the family, he had to depend on external sources. Wider family, friends, the stories from some who travelled and fought with him. Along with sparse extracts from official documentation relating to a son of Waterford who fought and died in a foreign war on a foreign soil in the British Battalion of the 15th International Brigade.

What Liam did gather was substantial detail of the prequel and sequel to the Battle of Jarama, and of the encounter itself. In presenting this, he tells the story around Mossie’s last 83 days, from the time he arrived in Spain from London until his death by sniper on 17 February 1937. Mossie himself hardly appears in the narrative, but we get the sense of what he must have been seeing, hearing, and feeling before that last moment. A last moment when, by various accounts, he was trying to rescue a fallen comrade.

In the book Liam gathers together what is known about Mossie growing up. A member of the Republican scouts Fianna Éireann, later joining the IRA. His membership of the Coffee House Lane Workers Study Group, and their subsequent abandonment of the IRA militarist positioning. Eventual emigration to London and from there to fighting in Spain. Some more detail, but not a lot before it would have to give way to conjecture.

The numbers killed at Jarama were horrific, a total of some 45,000 dead. Numbers which outpace comprehension. In From Suir to Jarama, Liam Cahill has brought that carnage into some perspective through his restoration of the memory of a second cousin who died before he was born.

It might be an imperfect perspective, given the distance in time and the paucity of direct information, but after reading this book we do have a decent sense of Mossie Quinlan. And a greater, and very accurate, sense of the times and happenings within which he lived and died, both in Ireland and Spain.

We feel the truth of the narrative, which is without embellishment or sensationalism, or judgement. A story laid out in its facts, in the way I always remember Liam Cahill doing as an RTE journalist. The book, which is short, is a service to history as much as it is to the memory of Mossie Quinlan.

From Suir to Jarama will be on sale locally in Woodbine Books, price €10..

(The Appendices in the book include extensive bibliographies and source references, a treasure chest of leads for anyone wishing to delve into Irish involvement in the Spanish Civil War.)

READ: Christy unveils Frank Conroy plaque

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Review: 100 Shades of Being is mesmerising

In the early days of the first lockdown, when I was in the 'cocooning' group, I measured my walks around the house by transferring dominos between pockets each time I completed a circuit, writes Brian Byrne. When a half-set had been transferred, I had completed four kilometres.

But that's about all of the strangeness I remember. Like I'm sure it is with most people, the days, weeks and months have all become a blur. One of mostly sameness.

The latest performance from Luna Collective, 100 Shades of Being, brings us all slam back into the first lockdown experiences. All the same, but all different too. It is 58 minutes of up close and personal with seven different people in lockdown. Which means it's intense. Very. With shades of intensity that, among other things, reflect brilliantly the multi-ethnic cast in today's different Irish spaces and right across the age demographic.

100 Shades of Being is scripted. Written from life as it has been in lockdown. But it's not only about lockdown. In the many segments, each short enough to not encumber our currently truncated attention spans, we learn in video diary flashes about the characters themselves, about others in their circle. About their feelings, fears, beliefs and prejudices, and how these can change in one way or another through the experience. We are also reminded that there's an outside world, and that our characters do sometimes think outside their lockdown. Do empathise, commiserate, get angry about. Become afraid of.

This is a very ambitious production. A very tricky one, fraught with potential failure. Yet, for all those reasons, it was the perfect one to do in the circumstances. The actors couldn't meet and perform together, on a stage or a set or a street. So each segment, each person's snatch of thought, is discrete. Individually performed without the benefit of face to face team rehearsal. That's a hard thing to pull off, but if nothing else about this pandemic, we have learned how much we can adapt, and create new ways of doing things. Not necessarily better ways, but appropriate ones for the circumstances.

The direction of 100 Shades of Being is meticulous. The passing of time in the months from March to November carefully imaged. By appropriate changes of clothes. By references to outside events. In all the clips, the characters speak to us directly, think to us out loud. Some do it throughout from the same room, but in different positions or with their possessions shifted. Others move from room to room. So there's a constant shifting of background, unlike in classic documentary where full interviews tend to be in the same place and therefore also the extracts.

It's nice too, when we have gotten so used to the often inferior videography through Zoom and Skype and Facebook, that the camerawork here is high quality. Varied in lighting to simulate household differences, but always in high resolution. Watching a screen for 58 minutes without mentally bunking off for even a few moments is not an easy undertaking. But this production is not one you can look away from once you are caught in the vortex of its intensity.

Luna Collective is a young performance art group. But its portfolio is growing fast, as is the members' confidence in pushing beyond themselves. I don't know the routes to competition in performing arts these days. But somewhere there is a big international prize waiting for 100 Shades of Being. If they can get this production before the eyes of a judging panel, they'll mesmerise them.

[VIRTUAL STANDING OVATION]

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Kilcullen and 'Rome v Republic'

From RTE's 'Rome v Republic'.

The Rome v Republic documentary shown on RTE television last week was developed and directed by a woman from Kilcullen, writes Brian Byrne.

The documentary is presented by Senator Michael McDowell and examines the Catholic Church's relations with the Irish State over the last 200 years, and directed by Niamh Sammon, originally from Nicholastown.

It begins with Wolfe Tone's ill-fated efforts to get help from France to overthrow British rule in Ireland. The founding of Maynooth Seminary in 1795, and the work to achieve Catholic Emancipation by Daniel O'Connell are reviewed. At the current end of history, interviews with Archbishop Diarmuid Martin of Dublin, a range of Irish historians and religious commentators, and former President of Ireland Mary McAleese are part of the story.

The 'Romification' of the Irish Catholic Church by Cardinal Paul Cullen, born in Kildare and achieving a position of extraordinary power in the heart of the Catholic Church in Rome, is outlined. A programme of church building undertaken by him in the mid and late 1800s included Kilcullen's Parish Church.

The use of education to further the control of the church in almost every aspect of Irish life is thoughtfully established in the documentary, and Clonliffe College, the former diocesan seminary in Dublin, also features. The relationship of the Irish hierarchy with emerging nationalism is also examined. The extensive archives for the former Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, shine more light on the retention of the church's power but also his development of social services in a poverty-stricken period in Dublin. Bringing matters right up to date, the visit of Pope Francis to Ireland last year is used in the concluding section.

The documentary was triggered by an article written by Senator McDowell in 2017 at the height of the furore from the revelation of the Tuam Mother and Babies scandal. Available on the RTE Player, as a Reel Story Production for RTE, it is a carefully researched, well written and highly illustrated piece of television journalistic work. It captures in the short space of a little over an hour a very significant part of what has made us who we are as today's nation.

For those of us who grew up through the 1950s it is both a reminder and a revelation. For those of today's younger generations who choose to view the programme, it may cause bemusement but is also likely to re-form some of their notions of Irish history. It is highly recommended, both for Senator McDowell's beautifully measured exposition and for Niamh Sammon's deft and illuminating direction.

Niamh Sammon has a solid portfolio of important documentaries for RTE, including 'Ireland's Health Divide' in 2017. Others were 'Medication Nation', also in 2017, and 'Hidden Impact: Rugby and Concussion' in 2015.

She also produced 'Fine Gael: A Family at War' and a four-part documentary about the life of former taoiseach Charles Haughey. She is currently a PhD candidate and tutor at Dublin City University and a freelance television Producer/Director.

Michael McDowell is a former leader of the Progressive Democrats, a former attorney-general and former minister for justice.


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Review: The Cottingley Secret

The Cottingley Secret. Hazel Gaynor. Historical fiction.

A magical book, writes Brian Byrne. It is, after all, about fairies. And fairies are the essence of magic.

Few of us admit to believing in them. But equally there are few who, somewhere in the depths of our childhood memories, can't resurrect some level of belief. It was a comfort when the real world was tough and gross and frightening, that we could depend on something, some beings, which we couldn't see but which were nice, and friendly, and safe.

It is precisely because the world had recently been so tough and gross and frightening almost a hundred years ago that many were ready to believe in fairies after two young cousins, Elsie, the older, and Frances, showed photographs they had taken near the stream at the bottom of their garden in a village in Yorkshire. The iconic one is Frances looking dreamily at a parade of fairies playing in the grass.

It was a prank, made possible by Elsie's skill as an artist and as a photographer's assistant. A secret meant only for their family. But, as a kindly Irish teacher in Hazel Gaynor's fictionalised account of it said, 'small villages can't keep secrets … they have a funny way of setting them free, and who knows where they'll end up?'

The Cottingley fairies secret ended up in the hands of 'important men from London' in 1920 who included the writer Arthur Conan Doyle. He and the other 'important men' declared the photographs to be genuine. After the trauma of the Great War, the nation needed something nice to believe in. And it did, mostly, when serious articles were written about the matter. The two girls later went on to live their lives separated by the Atlantic Ocean, but kept their secret until sixty years on when Elsie finally confessed in public. Though Frances's belief, that she had watched fairies at the spot ever before they went to take the pictures, never wavered to the day she died.

The story is from Hazel Gaynor's own Yorkshire, one which she grew up with and which she believes today is the reason she was meant to become a writer, so that it could be the core of what is her fourth novel. That became a magical process in its own right.

The first scatter of fairy dust was in her discovery that a daughter of Frances was still alive. Christine Lynch lives in Belfast, and was very happy to meet Hazel and, even better, to give her access to Frances's own memoir about the events.

Then there's the kind of magic which Hazel practices herself. She takes an historical nugget from the early twentieth century time that she so obviously loves, and creates her own characters to tell a story in a way far more fascinating and accessible than would dry history or contemporary journalism. She developed the technique with her three novels before this one, and in The Cottingley Secret she has added a new thread to the weave. Fairy fantasy. Or is it fantasy?

This is a book of two times. Of Elsie and Frances and their prank in Yorkshire a century ago which took in so many eminent minds of the real world of then, and of a fictional young woman in a Dublin of today who has uncomfortable personal and business decisions to make. It is in the melding of their stories through which we can perhaps properly understand what happened in that small village.

The Cottingley fairies story is well documented, and has been regularly rehearsed down the decades since the photographs were first taken — on cameras which Hazel's narrative prompted me as a photographer to research with some interest. But her interpretation of it is … well, that word again, magical.

The Cottingley Secret switches between the narrative of a young girl in 1917 heading towards her teens and that of a young woman in the time of now. Hazel has found and written the voices of both, in textures and contexts that allow us believe we are listening to — and even are a part of — their actual lives.

Hazel's ability to describe locations and timeline backgrounds have been honed through her previous books. And her Cottingley as the reader experiences in this one is its real place, with real people. Even the fictional ones don't ask us to pause and wonder where actuality and imagination merge.

As we grow older it becomes less easy to write in the voice we had when we were children. Hazel remembers that voice, and in the character of Frances we hear her in her time and mind. Equally for Olivia in today, the young woman with modern emotions and concerns is alive right through to the last page. Making this to be one of those stories that you don't want to stop reading. And yet which, when you know you are close to the end, you do stop reading so that you can save a little to savour just that bit later.

Then, there are the fairies. This thread in Hazel Gaynor's latest book doesn't offer an explanation. It is the wondering if? Suggesting that she herself is still open to the essence of her story. Were there really, or are there, fairies?

We can believe or we can wonder. And if there isn't anything to wonder about, well, life is without magic.

The Cottingley Secret is published in the UK and Ireland on 7 September. A very special Kilcullen launch will be held in Woodbine Books on 15 September.

Review: The Girl from The Savoy

The Girl from The Savoy. Hazel Gaynor. Historical romance.

As a fan of thrillers and detective mysteries, this was never going to be my kind of book, writes Brian Byrne. Romantic historical fiction just doesn’t get space on my bookshelf. So while I waited for my pre-ordered ebook edition of 'The Girl from The Savoy' to drop into my iPad last week, my main interest was because it was Hazel Gaynor's third novel, and I admire the tenacity with which she has successfully established herself as an author. I also admire her writing skill, honed initially from a blog set up after she came to live in Kilcullen, now at the level of having four completed books and achieving writer conference keynote speaker status. But the story of a hotel maid whose burning ambition is to become a dance and revue star in the Bright Young Things era of post-WW1 London was never going to be at the top of my must-read list.

Except that once started, I couldn't put it down. As it happened, the book came to me while I was on holidays, during which I had already gone through a new Vatican-themed whodunnit bought at the airport and an old Inspector Wexford mystery left in a cupboard of our holiday apartment. It wasn't that I was short of something to do, as I bring my own writing work with me on holidays anyhow, and between this and exploring new places, time is well filled. But as soon as Dolly Lane arrived, she took over. As is mentioned in the book by many of the characters, there's 'something' about Dolly.

There are three primary people in this latest story from Hazel Gaynor. Dolly, her childhood friend and husband to be but gone to war Teddy, and darling of the London and New York stages Loretta. The author adopts the technique of having the voice of each separately tell their stories in the first person, a chapter at a time. Other characters and situations that both link and divide them appear in the narratives of each, where relevant. At first, these seem like lives fairly straightforward for their times. Dolly, moving from domestic service to serving the needs of the high-flying clientele of The Savoy. Teddy, desperately trying to recover from what was then known as ‘shell shock’. Loretta, at the peak of her career and determined to help someone else emulate her achievements.

Quickly enough, we think we know each of them. And what is going to happen to them and between them. Except that Hazel Gaynor has developed a deft touch of leaving clues through her stories which can mislead as much as lead. So the lives not just of her three main characters here, but many of the peripheral ones too, can take turns just as unexpected as do many of our real lives. This is partly why I found it difficult to put down ‘The Girl from The Savoy’.

The period setting is, like her previous books, around a hundred years ago. That’s an era which fascinates the author, and it’s clear that she revels in researching the detail for the background to whatever her current writing project is. We as readers get the benefit of that in how she figuratively paints her canvas on which to allow her characters to develop. It’s the detail, not overdone but there, which brings us into that period as we read. Which involves us with the fictional people to the level that they seem real. What’s also clear is that a century later, the things that are important to people haven’t changed. The pursuit of romance, love, ambition. The attraction of charisma, of drama, of music. The wish, so often remaining as just that, to be more than what we are.

And if there was just one line to describe what goes on in ‘The Girl from The Savoy’, it’s possibly that last. Dolly and her fellow travellers in this very real fictional life, becoming more than what they are.

No, it was never going to be my kind of book. Except that it turns out that it is.

Review: Shirley Valentine in Kilcullen

Thirty years after Willy Russell wrote his one-woman play 'Shirley Valentine', the core elements portrayed of the life of an ordinary woman trapped in domesticity still ring loud and true, writes Brian Byrne.

Last night's performance in Kilcullen by local drama teacher Evelyn O'Sullivan brought that hauntingly home to a packed house. Of mostly women, it should be said. But that doesn't mean there wasn't anything there for men who are equally so trapped.

Because that's the underlying premise of Russell's play, the 'unused life' that afflicts all of us who slip into the state of forgetting that life is to be lived. And lived today. Because, as my own father always said, 'this is not a rehearsal'.

Even with all her ongoing Drama Dynamics activities, Evelyn must have burned the candle both ends to find enough learning and rehearsal time for 'Shirley Valentine', her first full-length solo stage foray. Because from curtain up at last night's performance, she was no longer the Evelyn O'Sullivan we all know, but an absolute reincarnation of Shirley Bradshaw, reached a stage of life where she only had the wall of her kitchen to talk to.

No matter how well written, words on a play script page are only words. To come to life, they need flesh and blood, tongues that speak, emotions to release. And someone to feel all that as an audience. Theatre is a team effort for all, the writer, the actor, the director, and those who have paid to come and experience the result. Last night proved just how well something can be if all of that falls perfectly into place.

Writing a monologue play where the actor has to bring a whole set of other characters alive is difficult enough, but Willy Russell had the skill and experience to do so even three decades ago. And the Shirley Bradshaw ("I used to be Shirley Valentine") in Kilcullen last night was as real as the Liverpool housewife he envisaged all that time back.

So were the other characters in Shirley's life. Husband Joe, trapped himself in the same stifling space as he kept his wife, unchanging as a beetle encased in amber. Their children, gone from home but as unseeing of their mother as was their father. Her school friends, whom she thought had advanced way beyond her. Costa, her short term lover in Greece, where she learned that the Shirley Valentine she had once been, could have a dream come true at a table beside the soft Grecian waves. And could make it come true for others too, if they were prepared to let it.

Shirley Valentine in Kilcullen last night was a helter-skelter ride between despair, humanity, love, loss, happiness, and generosity of spirit. Evelyn O'Sullivan achieved the most difficult task, keeping an audience in the thrall of her Liverpudlian character's voice and actions for the complete performance.

The standing ovation at the end, for the actor and her EvE Productions partner in the play, director Eunice Lavelle, was deserved as much as any would be in London's West End or on Broadway.

This was a quintessential tour de force, and those lucky enough to have tickets for tonight's remaining performance are in for a truly memorable experience.

(All the pictures here..)

Review: House of Cards

House of Cards. Netflix TV series. Politcial drama.

I've just got to the end of the second season of 'House of Cards', writes Brian Byrne. And it has left me wondering about myself. Probably a lot of people are feeling the same way.

No doubt about it, the Netflix-produced series has been gripping. Even for someone who saw, and enjoyed, the original mini-series on British TV a long time ago. In this version, Kevin Spacey has made the main character his own. And the writers have adapted the narrative not just well, but chillingly brilliant.

It wasn't just changing the name of the protagonist from Francis Urquhart to Francis Underwood. That was probably a necessity, as the Scottish surname wouldn't have translated well to the American political scene in which this latest 'House' has been set. It was how Spacey and the programme transformed the more urbane but equally venal English politician into a Deep South master manipulator of people, politics, and the democratic system.

Having gone through all 26 'chapters' in a fairly concentrated few bursts — the biggest gap was between the availability of the two seasons, otherwise I probably averaged three episodes at a sitting — I feel I was actually part of the whole story, which says a lot for what this kind of on-demand immersion TV viewing that Netflix has pioneered can do.

I also feel a little dirty after that immersion. And a little scared. Not because I watched too much TV at a time, but because I empathised with the main characters. The bad ones.

I won't go into the details of the series, there are probably quite a few of you out there who haven't watched any, or all of it yet. The short story is about a Member of Congress of the United States of America who feels shafted at not getting what he understood he deserved after supporting the man who became President. And how he goes about getting what he feels are his just desserts, and his revenge.

Francis Underwood and his wife and partner in scheming Claire manipulate, betray, contort, turn and return allegiances, make and lose, and even eliminate, friends without a thought, and generally are among the most vile of couples you could ever hope not to have in your circle of acquaintances. And certainly not want to have them against you in whatever is your life's direction or ambition.

Here's where my concerns about myself appear. I wouldn't want them as friends, acquaintances, or a million miles from my orbit because they could do more damage than the meteorite that triggered the wipeout of the dinosaurs on this planet. They have no conscience, are serial psychopathic, sexually predator and exploitative. And they smoke, albeit at an open window. They are also too athletic, as in running together at full belt through Washington at night, for my taste or interest.

But I couldn't help feeling something towards liking them. Knowing their absolute levels of low behaviour, and being very clear in my mind about the depth of depravity to which they had no problem reaching, I had to feel admiration for the way they (hey, they're characters, but still feel so real) operated. As individuals and as the kind of political mated team that could actually make it to the most powerful house and office in the world. I wanted them to succeed, and equally not to.

Power, or even the depiction of power and absolute power, is the ultimate seductive hormone. Which is why 'House of Cards' — even when we're involved only at the TV remote — represents what we all want, and don't want, to admit to becoming fascinated with.

Which explains why I'm a little scared of the kind of person I might be ...

Film Review: Quartet

Quartet (2012). Director Dustin Hoffman.

I have reviewed books and plays on the Diary, and of course I review cars in my 'day life', writes Brian Byrne. I haven't, however, reviewed a film before here. But I have to recommend for a complete break from the blockbuster genre that only seems to get headlines and main cinema runs these days a movie I came across on Netflix the other night.

'Quartet' is set in an English retirement country home for musicians, and its cast is an ensemble of some of the best of British actors and musicals performers of the last 50 years. I mention Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Tom Courtenay, Michael Gambon and Pauline Collins, and there is a cohort of my readers out there who will know what I mean. For the rest of you, well, tear yourselves away from Facebook and Twitter for a couple of hours and you might find something more enduring. Certainly much more entertaining.

The story is based around a trio of retired opera singers in the home, who, when the other member of the the 'Rigoletto' quartet for which they were once most famous arrives there, try to reform their performance as the finale for a Gala Concert which could provide enough funds to keep the home in existence.

It is sad, happy, unnerving, invigorating, beautifully shot, and uses all the classic small themes that make up this kind of story. And they don't appear to be cliches because of wonderful individual performances by absolutely everyone concerned. Even the passer-by parts are perfect cameos. And most of the supporting cast are themselves retired musicians, who simply perform themselves.

The filmwork in a Buckinghamshire country house is elegantly evocative, reflecting the very best of an English rural environment in a good summer. John de Borman's cinematography reaches the highest of benchmarks in this particular ambience, arguably setting its own in some parts.

Maybe it's because I'm living my way closer to the age of most of the cast, and of the director himself at the age of 75, I absolutely enjoyed this one. Perhaps it's also because I have grown up watching all of them on the silver screen, and they have each given me much enjoyment in the practice of their crafts and artistry over the decades we have shared.

I'm at a calculation of years when I'd have been expected by many to be retired. I don't plan on that for as long as I'm able to do what is my particular 'work', and clearly none of the sometimes much older actors and musicians in this production have no intention of dropping off the scene, either, for some time. So apart from being a beautiful movie, it's an affirmation that life goes on until you stop.

I smiled often while watching 'Quartet'. I laughed, sometimes winced with empathy, and I cried real tears at times, but they were happy ones. OK, maybe the the New York Times critic wasn't impressed, mumbling that it was a 'sincere, but sloppy' directorial debut by Hoffman. But this is the Diary, and I was impressed. And even if the film went to DVD only a few months after its release in January of this year, in box office returns in the USA it handsomely recovered multiples of its costs.

It also won for its director the Best Narrative Feature at the Chicago International Film Festival, Breakthrough Directing at the Hollywood Film Festival, and one of the top ten independent films in the National Board of Review in the USA. Maggie Smith was nominated for a Golden Globe, and Billy Connolly for a British Independent Film Award as Best Supporting Actor.

Highly recommended. I'll probably watch it again (any good excuse to light a fire on a windy winter night and open a bottle of Australian red ... and be helped to feel happy).

Review: Valley of the Peacock Angel

Valley of the Peacock Angel. Martin Malone. A novel of ordinary people in modern war.

In Valley of the Peacock Angel, Kildare author Martin alone has written a small masterpiece, writes Brian Byrne. Small because it isn't a very long book. Small because it is essentially about maybe a half-dozen people. But paradoxically it is very large indeed because those same characters make real a tragedy so fearsome and so complex that most of us just let it wash over our lives as a news story too far away to affect us.

Yet, of course, nowhere is too far away for human tragedy to affect us in some way. Perhaps the niggle at our conscience because we have it so much better than those affected by the likes of chemical weapon attacks. Or the increasingly intrusive security systems deemed necessary to protect our fragile 'democracy' from those who may well have gotten reason to hate us. They're all part of the 'big picture' of life on our equally fragile spinning blue globe.

Big pictures by their very nature can be hard to interpret. No more so than at that nexus of the beginnings of so many of our civilisations, around the Middle East, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq. An area seemingly forever torn by war, invasion, dictatorship and politics of the known world over the thousands of years that people have lived there. It is an area these days very well known to a couple of generations of Irish soldiers, serving as UN peacekeepers in what so often seems to be a 'fight for peace' in a place and among people who simply don't want it.

It is a place where Martin Malone most probably feels at home as much or even more so than in his native Kildare. In relative terms he spent only a small fraction of his life there, but his tours as a soldier seem to have made a deep impression. Much of the work he has produced as a writer is related to Lebanon and its surrounding areas, and always he writes with a deep compassion and empathy for the region and its people. In Valley of the Peacock Angel his story is in northern Iraq, during the tyranny of Saddam Hussein and also much more recently, for it is a story of two stories.

We have all come to know Iraq as filtered through the 24/7/365 news cycles on whichever TV channels we watch. What we don't get in all of it is the individual, his or her personal tragedies and triumphs. And this is where Martin Malone tries to focus our attention. He does so through the people, and the effects on them of a chemical weapons attack, in the town of Halabja in 1988. Unlike Srebrenica and 9/11, it is one of the forgotten massacres.

He has admitted to it being one of his most challenging efforts so far. He tried for years to write it from the perspective of an Irish character, finally realised that it wasn't an Irishman's story. It is the story of a Kurdish goatherd and his family, and of an Iraqi soldier and his conscience in a place and time when no such thing was permitted. And later, of a German TV producer with a ghost from the Holocaust sitting on his shoulder. Malone knits together masterfully how they are all connected over decades and circumstances.

The Peacock Angel in the title is a local reference to Lucifer, believed in a religion of the area to have been given dominion over the benighted land. For those who live there, it's a love-hate relationship with their dark spiritual ethos, much as it is with those who lead them in their warring nations.

In the narratives around the author's characters there is potential for a book the size of Exodus. But he resisted the temptation, if he was ever tempted. Malone works his novel like a good artist, painting in enough background that we know what is happening, then detailing the effects through the personal experiences and thoughts of those the story is directly about.

The writer has developed a deft touch with words. There aren't too many, there's no floweriness. But there are enough. More important, perhaps, is the sense that he is intimate with his characters. He knows their strengths, and their weaknesses, maybe even better than he knows his own.

This is not a pleasant book. Its theme, if not despair, is always close to it. It seems the Peacock Angel allows his people constantly to almost reach the edge of hope before they are once again yanked back towards the abyss.

There is a global moral compass here too. As a soldier, Martin Malone was in the fortunate position of being a peacekeeper rather than warmaker. In this book, he makes a plea for all of us to look at the effects of war on the receiving end, especially on those listed cruelly under the epithet 'collateral damage'. If we can see the individual, then as individual we can become angry about chemical weapons, biological warfare, and the whole idea of war itself.

As he said at his hometown launch of the book, 'we're a small country, but we have a voice'. Indeed, we have. Millions of voices. If every adult in Ireland, young and old, read Valley of the Peacock Angel, they would probably help make Martin Malone rich. He'd be much happier though, that we would all get angry, shout our anger loud around the world and gather millions of echoes, and by so doing, eventually impoverish the warlords.

A tour de force is a somewhat hackneyed compliment. But Valley of the Peacock Angel is one nevertheless.