Five of the best essays on the late, great Seamus Heaney

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Irish Writing, Seamus Heaney

In preparation for our night out at the South Bank next week a reblog from the excellent Irish Writing Blog

Irish Writing Blog

There has been no shortage of published work on Seamus Heaney over the last few days. Here are some of the best I’ve read – please feel free to let me know of any other must-read reflections on the life, work and legacy of Seamus Heaney in the comments.

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Belinda McKeon (The Paris Review)

“He was loved. Beloved. Whether he was met with as a name on a page, or as a voice from a podium, or as a cherished friend or fellow artist, Seamus Heaney moved into the lives of those who encountered him—those countless lives—and he made a difference that will matter forevermore. The difference, for many, was poetry itself. The difference is in those lines, the way they come to mind at moments of worry, or of beauty, or of heartache and of sorrow; today they come to mind like prayers learned in childhood, his lines, so…

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Raffles by Victoria Glendinning

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Biography, Group Choice

This started off as a duty read, not a book I would be naturally drawn to.  It was our chosen book for 12 November so I felt compelled to get on with it and now I am glad I did.

It’s worth the effort for the introduction alone.  Glendinning’s incisive take on the context to Raffles’s life is very informative.  Apart from a shaky one-year peace in 1803, Britain was at war with France on land and at sea from the time Raffles was twelve until he was in his mid thirties (xiii)

Clearly she is a formidable researcher and she does give us every last detail of his life. Not only do we have the entrepreneurial employee of the East India Company with his liberal views on land tenure,  his facility with languages and his deep interest in natural history but the author gives us a very rounded sense of him as a son and brother and then husband (to two wives) and a parent.  There are several richly drawn instances of professional rivalry especially that between Farquhar (his co-conspirator in the Singapore project) and Raffles which was full of intrigue and nepotism.

So many parallels with our own era.  The author compares The East India Company’s arcane practices and cronyism with dysfunctional global organisations today  (xii).  And Raffles is brought low by a financial crash in 1825 in which “The Bank of England was chiefly to blame….!” (P. 287)

So what’s not to like ?  – I could have done with an abridged version of Raffles’s early time in the East Indies.  Thank goodness for the excellent maps as you’ll certainly know your Java from your Sumatra when you’ve finished.  But in fairness to the author I suspect she wants to emphasise the way he operated (largely autonomously it would seem) and that he was a very experienced and senior company employee by the time the Singapore opportunity came up, so she can be forgiven on insisting in fleshing out his back story.

Verdict : A hefty tome on a swashbuckling, adventurous life

 

American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld

Tags

contemporary American fiction, Group Choice

Unusually we have postponed the scheduled date for this book twice so I’m posting a review to give an overview.  In case we don’t get round to discussing it in person, please feel free to comment online.

I had quite a lot of resistance to overcome when I first started this book.  It was overhyped.  The gushing endorsements in the blurb – Kate Atkinson called it “my favourite book of the year” and Linda Grant was “utterly absorbed” by it, not to mention it being a “The New York Times Bestseller” so I was well prepared for disappointment. I also felt it was a cheap shot to base the story round a recent American First Lady.  And yet, ultimately it succeeded in winning me over.  This is particularly impressive as I had to leave off reading it for a month or so yet the characters were vivid enough and the plot line strong enough for me to pick up where I left off.

Structurally, the novel is divided into four key locations the main character has lived in – her childhood home, a place where she lives independently post-graduation, her first married home and finally a high profile address in WashingtonDC.  These sub-divisions flow very naturally one to the other.

I was drawn in by the first person narrative of a rather prim but sympathetic school librarian. Firstly of her mainly unexceptional childhood and then as she navigates the Republican country club set.  This is not her natural milieu and she appears to be an astute observer of the habits of the comfortably off.   “The inclination to travel great distances and invest substantial amounts of money in order to do strenuous and possibly grubby work that subsequently would make for excellent storytelling.” (P 434)

There is genuine insight into family dynamics especially Priscilla, the matriarch, with a particularly well-drawn telephone conversation between Priscilla and the main character at a pivotal point in the novel.

The plot develops slowly and the early section is the least convincing – the on-off friendship with Dena didn’t somehow ring true in places; the father’s insistence on booking a hotel for heroine and grandmother on first trip to Chicago but not bothering on the 2^nd trip was a niggling inconsistency.  But the writer is setting the seeds of later plot developments so we have to be patient with her.

The novel is well paced – so many books disappoint as the author rushes towards the end – but this one increases momentum as the story progresses.  The fourth section located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has a palpable level of tension with some neat but not implausible plot developments.

Verdict : not high art but very readable