Yeats is Dead! Y8s=+! (Yeats is Dead - Joseph O'Connor)

Member Name: MALU

Product:	Yeats is Dead - Joseph O'Connor
Date:	14/07/01 (152 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: FUN!

Disadvantages: none

When I was in London some time ago, YES, I WAS IN LONDON SOME TIME AGO! (the dooyooers who know me know that this fact is worth mentioning and stressing), browsing in book shops was one item on my programme.

The first book I saw in the first bookshop I entered was the one I’m going to write about here. What made me walk to it, grab it and take it to the counter? The name Yeats sprang out from the cover with a photo underneath which to me seemed to show James Joyce. Now, what was wrong? Either I had forgotten what Yeats looked like (but did I ever know?) or the book people had made a mistake (stranger things have happened!) or all Irish writers look the same anyway.

Anyway, I went nearer which proves that the cover designer, his name is Ian Bilby, had done a good job. I read: ‘A novel by fifteen writers in Aid of AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL’, edited by Joseph O'Connor. (So it's a bit misleading when O'Connor appears as the author here). As a former long-time member of that organization I felt personally addressed. AI reaches its 40th birthday this year and to celebrate this anniversary has published this novel, 1 pound from every copy sold will go directly towards the charity and all of the authors’ royalties will be used to support Human Rights Education.

The new idea here is that the charity thing is separated from the book’s plot; how many people would buy a book with, say, the history of AI, even if only the positively solved cases were included, and actually read it? I’m sure they’d rather donate the money directly. But here you can enjoy a wonderful book and feel good at the same time. If that isn’t something!


THE WRITERS


The 15 writers are: Roddy Doyle, Conor McPherson, Gene Kerrigan, Gina Moxley, Marian Keyes, Anthony Cronin, Owen O’Neill, Hugo Hamilton, Joseph O’Connor. Tom Humphries, Pauline Mc Lynn, Charlie O’Neill, Donal O’
;Kelly, Gerard Stembridge and Frank Mc Court.ble part of it.

When I look at the prizes they have collected among themselves - the Booker Prize, the Guiness Ingenuity Award, Irish Journalist of the Year, the Stewart Parker Award, the Irish Short Film Award, the Macaulay Fellowship of the Irish Arts Council, the Butler Literary Award of the Irish-American Cultural Institute, to name just a few - I can’t help feeling that these writers are, if not THE Irish Intelligentzia, at least a considerable part of it.

Now what kind of Irish stew might these literati have concocted? There’s no danger of indigestion because of ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ as they never worked together on the novel, but one after the other. Of course, the first writer had the easiest task, he started the whole thing off, the following writer had to pick up the baton, i.e., the threads and go on from there, and so on, and the last tied all the ends together and finished the story.

It took four years to write that book, the people in charge must have known that it was a difficult task, because they started on time and finished just in time for the anniversary.


THE STYLE


Do the readers notice that the novel has different authors? Yes, they do. Some writers favour description, others dialogue, varying from Dublin slang to the tough American inner city variety. It happens that characters initially introduced become sidelined and minor characters emerge from obscurity to dominance. But all these doesn’t really disturb the pleasure because Joseph O’Connor has ironed out unlikely developments and managed to balance each individual author’s creativity with the need for the smooth development of the narrative.


THE STORY


A serial novel in aid of AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL written by highly intellectual people - what kind of novel might that be? Under the details of the publishing hous
e we read ‘‘Yeats is Dead!’ is a work of comic fiction’. If you don’t know what understatement is, here you’ve got the understatement of the year, no, of the century!

If you belong to the laugh out loud, roll on the floor, wet your socks, fall off the chair and laugh your head off party, you’ll do all that while reading! The authors clearly enjoyed the fact that they didn’t have to conform to what people had learnt to expect from them, they literally wallow in sex and crime and foul language. I’ve certainly enlarged my vocabulary, if I’ve enriched it as well, is open to discussion. And then the question remains who I could use it with? If I called my student the way the characters address each other, the parents would raise hell and inform the Ministry of Education.

The book isn’t ’comic’, it’s strange, odd, bizarre, weird, black, sick - take out your Thesaurus and fill in all other possible synonyms, they’re all correct.

The story is about a small crook who, by chance, has come into the possession of James Joyce’s last manuscript (or has he?) We’re talking the very last, the one written in Zurich shortly before Joyce’s death. Two elderly, criminally minded women, Mrs Bloom (!) and her half-sister, Mrs Blixen (!) who control the underworld of Dublin feel that they should rightfully have it, copy it and sell it to whoever would be stupid enough to believe that they had the one and only original and become stinkingly rich, so that they would be able to buy the other half of the Cayman Island to add to the half they already possess. But things go wrong, the person sent to extract the manuscript from the owner by using some slight threats, kills him by accident (!). “But what could you do? You couldn’t get the staff. In the old days they had only ever worked with the very highest calibre of low-life criminal psycho scum. B
ut those happy days had faded now”.

This accidental killing leads to further five corpses. Three policemen are shot, one person commits suicide in jail, the Minister of Justice dies of natural causes. Natural causes? “Her body was so overworked and clogged up that it wasn’t using, or able to use, all of its natural outlets for waste. And so some...gaseous material accumulated in the gut and festered...the trapped substances were agitated and put under unbearable pressure on her internal organs.” “So what are you telling me? What exactly did she die of?” “In lay people’s terms - a trapped fart.”

On the way to the funeral “The hearse skidded and flipped across the road, propelling the coffin out of the back window and on to a prop truck for a Garry Hynes production of ‘Dracula’ at the Gaiety Theatre.” (Hi, sidneygee!) You get the picture?

Shenanigans, tomfoolery, pranks and mischief galore!

What I said about the story is true for the characters, too. All Dubs are nuts! (Kenjohn, cool it, this is only fiction!) There’s an Irishman, white skinned, freckled and with ginger hair who feels that deep inside there’s a ‘Rasta brudder, mon‘, who wants to get out. So he paints his skin black, dyes his hair and starts playing the drums. A slut by the name of Dymphna dresses up as a nun, a Professor of Literature and the No. 1 expert on Joyce converts her into a loving wifey by placing his nose between her glorious buttocks and humming her into ecstacy. Two sergeants of the Irish Garda have a hot love affair and...I think I’ll stop now!


POTENTIAL READERS


Who should read this book? Well, all Irish people, everyone who has at least once clicked on the weirdlist, all Joycophils, all friends of literature in general, all supporters of AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL, of course. If you feel that you don’t fall into on
e of these categories you might know someone who does. Buy the book and give it to someone fitting into one of them as a present - you’ll either have a friend for life or lose them forever.

Summary: