RaveThe Irish Times (IRE)... a lavish processional, rich in perception and texture. There are images of unbearable beauty, and images of unspeakable depravity. There are the foul intrigues of the nobility, as careless of their adversaries as they are of the common people ... There is a restlessness to the text, a debt to beauty which engrosses. The book is perhaps half a million words; a good book is as long as it needs to be.
Michael Hughes
RaveThe Irish TimesWith Homer’s Illiad as the baseplate for this 1990s novel, Hughes reaches deep into the country and grasps something furious, elemental and dark. There’s the language to consider. The register is coarse, furious. Hughes has an ear for his own tongue, brings into it a gnawed-at vernacular of fear and savagery. It needs to be tonally on the money and it is. But underneath it and through it you hear Homer’s cadences, the long lines of chant in dactylic hexameter. He mixes Border idiom with Greek formalism ... The text drips with blood and invective. There is a fearsome capacity for violence. You think of Dante’s Ugolino latched on to the back of Ruggieri’s head, chewing at it like a dog ... Hughes isn’t trying to pull off a literary stunt. It is as intellectual and comparative ballast that the crossover succeeds ... The Homeric grants epic despair to the sequence of brutality in the recent past ... The Illiad stripped of its lyricism carries an unfading relevance. Hughes’ perception is on the money. This is a hard, rigorous and necessary book which grinds out its beauty as the song cycles of empire and resistance fall silent, choked in their own blood.
Casey Cep
MixedThe Irish TimesThere is an earnestness in Cep’s telling, a fact-checked stasis. You get a history of the insurance industry. You get a history of voodoo. On the death of Mary Lou we detour to the Scottsboro boys and the founding of the Alabama bureau of forensics, but you get the feeling that the real histories are just out of reach, undocumented in the savage reaches of the secessionist south ...There’s a tendency here to think the best of people, a mannerly distance in the prose which doesn’t quite nail Radney, whose courtroom is a place of gamesmanship and procedural browbeating rather than the elegant gavotte of morals you find in Mockingbird ... Cep writes beautifully when she steps away from what feels like mid-Manhatten house style ... You find yourself wanting more of this, you want to get closer to Willie Maxwell’s dark heart. But you are up against the undocumented, oral histories, everything sealed in the hermetics of race politics, fear and suspicion.
