Keith Maguire
A beautiful book. It addresses the historical disservice these particular women have been paid, reminding us that every person murdered is a unique individual with a lifetime of particular and specific experience. I finished it wishing that similar books were written all the other victims of 'celebrity' murderers.
This is an astonishingly rich and evocative book. It seems to contain so much more that the words could possibly hold.
It's a heart-breaking account of the experiences and the aftermath of being a prisoner of war for an Australian soldier on the Burma railway. The accounts of the conditions for the prisoners of war are extremely harrowing. The experiences are recounted in the context of a lifetime, with the time in captivity as well as characters' lives before and after plaited into a constantly shifting narrative perspective. Try to read as little as possible about it before starting - any plot summaries I've read vastly over-simplify what is happening.
A very enjoyable book set during the compiling/writing of the Oxford English Dictionary. It's a combination of very enjoyable page-turning read with a critique of the textual-evidence-based nature of the OED and the way that such an approach necessarily misses out on significant parts of the language.
A lot more enjoyable than I was expecting. The main characters are mostly incredibly grating and speak exactly as you would imagine main character written by Oscar Wilde to speak - all witty aphorisms and cynicism. They are so annoying at the start of the book it almost feels deliberately alienating. It's difficult to separate what you expect the book to be from previous knowledge from a direct experience of reading the text. It's also it is difficult to be certain what you are seeing anachronisticly and what is genuinely in the text. As with, I suspect, all Irish readers of Wilde it feels to have an undercurrent of rage and sadness at the particular rapacity of late nineteenth century Empire (1890 is 40 years after the height of the famine, or as close to the time of this book as the 1980s are to now). There is also a huge amount of what a contemporary reader can only read as a gay subtext.
What is enjoyable about the book is following a character through a disastrous implementation of a stereotypical cynical separation from the consequences of most of what people hold dear to the inevitable result. Cynicism is understood and demonstrated as destructive and pointless to life.
As Coil reminded us: Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil
