After requesting cement from the invaders, Pol Roger promptly walled away its best bottles. Intriguing and lively, this vinous footnote to Second World War history describes the cat-and-mouse relationship between winemakers and occupiers.
Soon after the occupation, half a million bottles of champagne per week were dispatched to Germany, though makers tried to palm off their worst cuv?. After sipping one great wine, the F?r opined: “Nothing but vulgar vinegar.” Nevertheless, a vast quantity of fine French wine, both looted and paid for, was acquired by the Nazis during their occupation. Wine and War by Don & Petie Kladstrup (Coronet, £7.99, 328pp)Gobbels liked fine Burgundy, G?g preferred great Bordeaux (with a particular partiality for Ch?au Lafite-Rothschild), but famous vintages were a closed book for their boss. For all that, In the Forest, with its pungency and poignancy, makes a rich addition to the literature of the malignant.Patricia Craig’s biography of Brian Moore is published this autumn by Bloomsbury.
Demented, vicious, in the grasp of an enormous spite, O’Kane embodies terminal maladjustment to the extent that his half-baked, incoherent alienation is very hard to stomach. The charming young single mother with her long red hair, Eily Ryan in the novel, has taken the fatal step of renting an isolated house, formerly a hideout of the Kinderschreck who – watching from the undergrowth – is infatuated, then infuriated.The course of the drama is set, as in some distorted fairy tale. It gets to grips with women’s camaraderie, the colourful, slightly offbeat Ireland of the Nineties, pub sessions, Easter customs, a mildly festive atmosphere But the darkness is massing. He is left on the loose, and even helped with gifts of food, left outside as one might feed a wretched stray.This is a grim story, but the novel has a buoyancy and luminosity detached from its central desolation. It’s as if all the badness inherent in the community is concentrated in the bedevilled figure of O’Kane. He gets started on a trail of thievery, arson and destructiveness, menacing everyone and everything in sight: dogs, cars, ponies, shopgirls, retired policemen, his sister, his grandmother.
A disturbed young hoodlum, Michan O’Kane, released from prison in England, returns to the scene of his upbringing. The ravaged tapestry of its events is unfolded with tact and artistry It uses symbol, myth and local lore to the fullest extent. It adds up to a memorial to innocence and beauty wantonly destroyed, whether the innocence of the murdered young woman and child, or that of the woodland itself, contaminated beyond recovery by the horrors it encompassed.Yet In the Forest is a novel, with all the novel’s clairvoyance and power to illuminate. In this reading, any attempt to impose a fictional outline over the Cregg Wood atrocities can only stir up grief for the local community, as well as those more intimitely involved.However, the O’Brien novel, with its economy of style, its lyrical moments and inexorable drift, achieves what no journalistic lamentation or public outcry could hope to do. It’s only eight years, the argument goes, since the bodies of Imelda Riney, her small son Liam, and a local priest, Father Joe Walsh, were uncovered by horrified searchers in the dark wood where the so-called Kinderschreck, the scourge of the district, had been about his deadly activity.
The complaint about In the Forest appears to be that insufficient dust has been allowed to settle over the killings; and that, in this respect, it is unlike a work, such as Eoin McNamee’s The Blue Tango (2001), which deals, factually and imaginatively, with the Co Antrim murder of 19-year-old Patricia Curran back in 1952. 218pp Edna O’Brien has already come under heavy fire in Ireland for appropriating a shocking recent event – a triple murder in Cregg Wood, Co Clare – and re-creating it as a work of fiction without due concern for the feelings of those closest to the victims.
I read it with pleasure, and shall read it again.Paul Bailey’s ‘Three Queer Lives’ is published by Hamish Hamilton. But this is a thoughtful, warm-hearted and unobtrusively clever book. There’s a kind of cultural name-dropping – of painters, composers, and so on – that seems an instant short-cut to significance Doty isn’t entirely free from it. Yes, it’s a gay elegy, but death comes, and belongs, to everyone.My only quibble with Doty is one that I have with some other poets. This is a comic elegy, at the centre of which is a drag queen singing the great song by Kurt Weill that gives it its title Billy dies, as a gentle, exasperated, afterword informs us.
