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Times
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Young motherhood reimagined by an exciting new literary voice
Everyone loves a young writer. They punch their way into the literary world, demanding respect for the chutzpah of penning 90,000 words in their twenties. We loved Martin Amis for writing The Rachel Papers at 23. We had hysterics when Zadie Smith published White Teeth at 21. And much of Sally Rooney's stardom can probably be put down to the fact that she was a sprightly 27 when Conversations with Friends appeared on our shelves. Now we have Saba Sams. She was just 26 when she won the BBC national short story award and the Edge Hill short story prize for Send Nudes, the titular story in her published collection. The next year Sams made it on to Granta's list of the best young
Irish Times
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Fun and Games by John Patrick McHugh: highly promising debut by a big talent
Fun and Games Author : John Patrick McHugh ISBN-13 : 978-0008517342 Publisher : Fourth Estate Guideline Price : £16.99 John Patrick McHugh's first novel begins with a teenage boy and a teenage girl, alone in the woods on a summer afternoon, engaging in what puritanical educators used to call 'heavy petting'. 'His finger was burrowing inside her. They were kissing and then they were doing this. He was the horniest, he was seventeen.' The scene is a tease, in several senses. Neither boy nor girl at this point get anywhere, so to speak ('My arm's gone dead'). And the unwary reader is led by such an overture to expect from Fun and Games a comedy about the squirm-inducing hopes and humiliations of teenage sexuality, in the vein of Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers or the TV series The Inbetweeners. But this isn't at all what Fun and Games is up to. To begin with, more than 100 pages pass before we get another sex scene – though, of course, like the teenagers we're reading about, we keep fruitlessly expecting one. The book's viewpoint character, in whose company and consciousness we spend a chunky 390 pages, is John Masterson, who is in the middle of his 'pivotal' post-Leaving Cert summer. The year is 2009. John lives on an island off the coast of Mayo. He hangs out with the lads (Rooney, Studzy), and works shifts in the local hotel restaurant, the Island Head. He has been freshly called up as half-back for the local senior Gaelic team. The girl in the woods is Amber, who also works in the hotel restaurant. Amber is 19 and appears to John's gauche male gaze enigmatic to the point of impenetrability. Will they? Won't they? [ 'It's a very hard time to be young': author John Patrick McHugh on male adolescence Opens in new window ] This is very familiar material. But the contemporary Irish novel that Fun and Games might most closely remind you of is Louise Kennedy's Trespasses , another novel that takes a suite of apparently familiar characters and a bog-standard narrative framework and subjects them to intense pressures of empathy and perception in order to produce something luminous, a carefully fashioned object. Which is to say that McHugh is no mere grey stenographer of middling provincial dreams but a stylist, a shaper of the world in prose. READ MORE Like all beginning stylists, he has his ascensions and his wobbles. But when he's good, he's great. More or less the first thing we hear about John's mother, Yvonne, is that a private photograph texted to her illicit lover has done the rounds of the whole island. Here's John's reaction: 'He had studied his mother's tits. Much like any milfy duo obtained from the internet – fingertip nipples, blue veins etched like lightning bolts – but devastatingly his mother's. John hated her, and the whole Masterson family, and for a time everyone alive.' 'Milfy duo' is good – perhaps a tiny bit too good, actually – but it's the adverb, 'devastatingly,' and the rueful retrospection of 'for a time everyone alive' that bumps this particular riff up into a space above mere cringe comedy. Here is McHugh's method in miniature: the prose fireworks are almost always at the service of the book's large project, which is to use the resources of a tightly curbed irony to usher us into the mind of a young man who doesn't yet know how to be in the world. More gorgeous touches: the 'blemished cotton' of roadside sheep; John's conception of having a future at all is 'The wrong shape, like the plug sockets in Spain'; of a local girl: 'Her mother was from somewhere not Ireland'; on the ways in which the ambient culture finds its way into your mind: 'A yellow-reg zoomed by and John thought, passively: English wanker'; a drunk John tries to express his anger: 'it was hard to fully recall the intricacies to why John was so in the correct'; a joint, burning, is 'gold, apricot'. Also remarkable is that Fun and Games is unapologetically and prismatically about being a heterosexual teenage boy: ashamed of your constant horniness, finding the remarks of women completely baffling, discovering genuinely meaningful forms of physical expression out on the pitch with the other lads, wanking over classical paintings when nothing else is available, fretting about your body more or less exactly as young women do (preparing for a night out, John inquires of his friends, 'And I don't look fat, do I?'), McHugh renders with pointillist care John's inner and outer worlds, until the character stands clear. It isn't perfect. It's too long. It veers too thoroughly away from the dangers and rewards of opening out into other minds, other worlds. There is a sense that this big talent, first time out, has bitten off slightly less than it can chew. Next time, I suspect, things will be different. In the meantime, here is a first novel by a writer with gifts to spare. Kevin Power is associate professor of literary practice in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin
The Guardian
30-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story review – engaging study of a life less ordinary
Sinéad O'Shea's documentary portrait of the author Edna O'Brien is a reminder that most writers – most people, in fact – don't have lives anywhere near as exciting or fulfilling as hers. The film, with diary entries read by Jessie Buckley, shows us that O'Brien was always a witty, generous and good-humoured interviewee over the years; this film includes an extended interview with the author herself just before her death last year at the age of 93, in which she speaks with a softly sibilant but beautiful voice, her natural prose-poetry never deserting her. This film really does have a staggering story to tell. As a young woman in rural Ireland, Edna O'Brien ran away with writer Ernest Gébler, a glamorous but authoritarian figure; their unmarried cohabitation so outraged everyone that he took her away to England where they got married and had two children. Her runaway success with her first novel The Country Girls in 1960 infuriated religious opinion in Ireland, and also Gébler, who appeared to go mad with envious rage; he became a grotesque abuser, harassing and menacing Edna and even scribbling sneering taunts in her diary. Incredibly, in those days O'Brien was obliged to sign over her royalty cheques to her husband, who allowed her small amounts of 'housekeeping' money. Finally, she refused; Gébler grabbed her by the throat and demanded her submission. In her diaries she records she said: 'Yes … yes …' and O'Shea allows us to absorb the ironic similarity to Joyce's Molly Bloom. They divorced and the children said they wanted to live with Edna – which triggered another breathtaking outburst of spite from Gébler, unforgivably targeted at the children themselves. As for O'Brien, her work continued on a book-a-year basis in an age when literary novelists were commercially viable, and a hugely lucrative Hollywood deal (writing the racy comedy Zee and Co with Michael Caine and Elizabeth Taylor) allowed O'Brien to buy a smart Chelsea townhouse. Ironically, it had been Gébler's own Hollywood deals which had probably allowed him to take his young family away to England. As the 60s wore on into the 70s, Edna had fashionable parties and affairs with unattainable and undeserving men, including a British politician who is not named. Denunciation turned occasionally to mockery of the sort that male writers didn't receive. Kingsley Amis had praised her (like O'Brien, he had a fondness for putting the word 'girl' in the title) although the film doesn't mention Martin Amis's sly digs in his own debut novel The Rachel Papers. O'Brien also dabbled with LSD and psychoanalysis with RD Laing, she experienced a creative drought, loneliness, depression, but returned with fiction that vigorously engaged with Northern Ireland and Bosnia, vibrant to the end. The film speaks to Walter Mosley, Anne Enright and Andrew O'Hagan who talk insightfully about her work, and perhaps most touchingly of all with her sons Carlo and Sasha Gébler. It's a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging study. Blue Road: The Edna O'Brien Story is in Irish and Northern Irish cinemas from 31 January, and in rest of UK from 11 April.t
