This week: a book subtitled 'The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed'
This week there’s a history of the Kennedys from a particular perspective that’s a hot potato. There’s also romance, historical fiction, family, betrayal and friendship, and there’s the latest from maestro Donal Ryan.
Ask Not, Maureen Callahan, Mudlark, €18.99
Subtitled The Kennedys and the Women They Destroyed, this book is a scorching exposé of a family drunk on their own power (and also just drunk), who abused their women folk in every possible way. The Kennedys could do anything they wanted, so they did. This book is, remember, a history book and not a rant. Everything Callahan has documented is backed up with a comprehensive bibliography as well as myriad interview excerpts and it is truly unbelievable.
I’m old enough to remember the pictures that hung on the walls in old people’s houses way back when. There was always a Sacred Heart image and not too far away would be a picture of John F Kennedy. To read about what he did to women, just like his brothers, his father, his son, is deeply disturbing. The current Kennedy presidential candidate, a loon both stupid and insane, is by comparison a pussy cat.
Meeting Mae, Karen O’Connor, Poolbeg, €16.99
Old ladies are enjoying a moment in fiction these days, with Erica Waller’s brilliant tragicomedy, Goodbye Birdie Greenwing, published in early summer and Graham Norton’s latest, Frankie, on the way. Meeting Mae is in a similar vein, in that Mae is in her 80s and one should never judge an octogenarian by their cover. Susan is in a troubled spot, her latest attempt at IVF having failed, and although she’s already got two kids, she wants more. She’s feeling pretty sorry for herself when she almost runs over Mae in her car. Soon after the near-accident she runs into (as opposed to over) Mae and is anxious to make amends. Mae reciprocates and a relationship ensues. They become close friends and the age gap bothers neither woman. But when Susan decides to interfere in Mae’s life, full of all those good intentions with which the road to hell is paved, the results are catastrophic. This is a novel about family, about loss and sorrow, and particularly about the transcendent power of friendship.
Bright I Burn, Molly Aitken, Canongate, €19.99
You can’t get far in Kilkenny city without tripping over Alice Kyteler in some form or other, either as a wall mural or a story told by every tourist guide in the place, or even in those tacky tourist mementos we all seem to like. Alice may have been a murderess or she may have been a victim, but either way she outlived four husbands and got richer after every bereavement. But she wasn’t a witch, despite the trumped-up charge she faced, a charge backed by the local bishop. Churchmen in particular had an extraordinary fondness for watching ‘witches’ burn alive.
Alice didn’t burn. Her lady-in-waiting, a Meath woman, was burned instead when they couldn’t find her mistress. But it’s Alice who remains the first woman in Ireland to be charged with witchcraft. This reimagining of Alice’s life is graphic and disturbing, in keeping with the savage times in which she lived, and it’s written with surety and real craft. It’s a second novel from Aitken and if you enjoy this, you should check out Niamh Boyce’s second novel, which coincidentally is also about Alice Kyteler, titled Her Kind. Boyce’s novel, like Aitken’s, is absorbing. There could be fisticuffs in your local book club on a ‘compare and contrast’ night involving both books…
The Lost Lover, Karen Swan, Macmillan, €21.25
The third novel in Swan’s historical fiction series about life in the remote Scottish island of St Kilda’s follows the fortunes and heartbreak of Flora McQueen, already betrothed to her American boyfriend. But tragedy strikes soon after the island’s residents are evacuated. Flora must do her bit to support her family, now on the mainland, and her beauty sees her becoming the toast of Paris; a very far cry from the wild and unspoilt St Kilda’s. But trouble seems to follow Flora and her life is far from happy, though nothing can prepare her for the scandal that breaks back home. Opening in 1929, the third novel of this quartet by Swan has historical romance fans swooning.
Heart, Be at Peace, Donal Ryan, Doubleday, €17.99
Ryan’s first novel, The Spinning Heart, was to shoot the fledgling author into longlists and shortlists and adulation, a life he couldn’t have dreamt possible. Everything he’s published since has been received with deserving critical fanfare. Here, he returns to Nenagh and its hinterlands where The Spinning Heart was set, and rouses its chorus of 21 voices, most of them unreliable narrators, a decade later to relate how things have both changed and stayed the same. Bobby is now settled in his own thriving building business. But his recent reluctant journey to Amsterdam with a raucous stag party will have its consequences.
In the meantime, drugs not only saturate the streets of Nenagh but every back lane and ditch on its outskirts and since the guards won’t do anything, Bobby is determined he will. What transpires is a story, cleverly unspooled by its 21 disparate voices, revealing the best and worst of the human race, it’s seething ugliness alongside its persistent, radiant hope. Ryan is one of our national literary treasures and it’s rare that an author who’s as prolific as he is can, time and time again, produce work of such polished and stylistic perfection.
Footnotes
Don’t forget Culture Night, September 20. Keep an eye on local press in print and online and if there’s nothing near home you fancy, take a trip to Dublin where you’ll be spoilt for choice.
If you don’t feel like taking a trip, the National Library have online exhibitions and events held via Zoom throughout the month. See nli.ie for details.
The Galway Oyster Festival is taking place at the end of the month, September 27 to 29 and promises to be the best yet. See galwayoysterfestival.com for programme and details.
Mildred Anne Butler: At Home in Nature, is a new art exhibition opening in the National Gallery on this coming Saturday, the 14th. Presented by gallery curator Niamh MacNally, it will run until early January.