So. I know what you’re thinking. You’re looking at those Rotten Tomatoes reviews and the trailer and thinking, “This is going to be AWESOME! BRING IT ON!”

But you are going to be sorely, sorely disappointed. You are going to sit through the first few minutes of the film, hoping, praying, though you don’t often pray, that it will get better. Time will appear to slow down. This is, in part, due to the cameraman following the lead character for every single step of her foot race with a villain. You may not know this, but watching every single step of a footrace in vivid, 1080p detail, is actually really, really boring. Try it. You’ll have to get two friends, because being actively involved in the chase will provide too much excitement to get the feeling just right. With a pellet gun (or something, nothing that would cause fatal damage, mind), shoot one friend somewhere tender. Then quickly hand the gun to the other friend. Watch as the chase ensues (try not to shoot the first friend in somewhere that will prevent them from running quickly). It would be best, for you, if you had a golf cart, to follow along. So ride your golf cart alongside your friend and your friend in pursuit. Maybe have someone else drive you, so you can focus on the pursuer’s face the entire time. Otherwise you might crash into a bank of trash cans, totally invalidating the experiment, and the next time you get your two friends together you can bet it will be a lot harder to shoot one of them without the other one tattling on you and getting you beat up. So while you’re watching the chase, you’ll probably start thinking: “Man, could I not get Angelina Jolie to do the pursuer part? And I don’t even like her all that much.” Anyway, try doing that for five to seven minutes.

For purposes of the experiment, it would be most helpful if you could get Michael Douglas, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, and Hedy Lamarr all standing around. Maybe you could get hors d’oeuvres for them to munch on. Make sure you tell them that you would appreciate quiet, while you’re watching the chase, so they don’t disturb the environment you’re trying to set up. If you do get this setup, you’re pretty close to what this movie is like. Only less painful.

To really complete the simulation, have your friend, who’s driving the golf cart, every once in a while interrupt your observation of the chase to say something like: “Repeat that back to me.” “What did Michael just say?” “Why is Ewan eating the shrimp, he told me he was allergic to shellfish?” “Was Antonio just licking that tree frog? I TOLD him not to lick the tree frogs!” Make sure your friend says these things in clipped, military-like bursts. Also, if you do have a tree frog problem, the best way to deal with it is not to invite Antonio Banderas over to lick them all away, you should get proper pest control for that.

With all of these elements in place, you probably don’t need to watch this movie, or at least the first 30 or so minutes of it, which my wife and I suffered (well, if this is the extent of our “suffering” we’re kind of soft… but you see what I mean) through on Saturday night before finally ending our own suffering in an uncanny and, frankly, BRAVE move, and simply turned off the movie. We hugged each other and wept for a short period once the screen went black. And, after that moment, we emerged, stronger, more resilient, and I set off in search of a golf cart, pellet gun, and two friends.

This was an incredible book. Kevin Barry has a real lyrical tilt to his writing, he captures the raw, real feel of a the city of Bohane, a little outpost on the cold, murky Atlantic with such vivid strokes you believe, by the end, in this little city and all of its broken inhabitants. He’s done similar things, in the past, with his collection of short stories (There are Little Kingdoms), so I expected a good read, but have been let down by the high praise for other similar-ish works before, with similar blurbs: Joyceian, Flann O’Brian-esque… but, I have to say, Barry comes as close as you’re going to to living up to such high billing.

His recent New York Times Book Review cover was well deserved, and I feel he was shorted a bit, by having Pete Hamill write the review, because his review was something like his own writing (I’ve read his book Forever, which was a painful, stilted read), and didn’t quite do this book justice, with it’s bustling life to it.

So if you’re looking for a novel filled with sand pikeys, turf wars, Sweet Baba Jay appearing in the bogs, and the single greatest named character of all-time (F***er Burke), give this one a read.

The ending was quite good… brilliant, even, but I had to grit my teeth and listen through (audiobook) Bruen’s painfully too self-aware jack Taylor for the first four and a half hours (of a five hour reading).

I know that Bruen’s got a shining reputation as a master of Irish hard boiled crime fiction, but I find it too heavy handed, too obviously written, to be enjoyable as a story.

This was, I was hoping, my steal of the trip. We were heading home, lugging carry on and two small children through Shannon’s lovely concourse, and we stumbled upon Hughes & Hughes massive sale going on. When I say we stumbled upon it I mean that we’d gotten forewarning of it when my sister-in-law and family had reported the going out of business sale at the airport arm of the bookseller, so we didn’t quite stumble upon it so much as we targeted it like a book-seeking missile.
We loaded up a bag or two of books, and headed to security, happy with our haul. It was a mix of business books (not mine, quoth, err, me), kiddie books for the, umm, kids, a fiction of varying prospects. I like to go for local authors when we’re back, and David Rice was local by way of a trip or two round the world and into the priesthood, even. So he was my great hope. Even moreso than the insufferable John Banville writing as the (presumably) less sufferable Benjamin Black. I’ve bought two Benjamin Black novels by now, and I haven’t touched a one, for fear he turns out to be as painful to read as he was writing as himself.

So it was with great pleasure that I settled down with the Rice book once we were marginally adjusted to being back home in the States.
The story… well, here are the basics:
There is a massive nuclear reactor in England which has a dubious safety record, handles nuclear waste from all over the world, there is a woman journalist tasked with writing about it for her paper, there is a television priest doing a documentary on the last days of Pompeii and he has a feeling, a sneaking feeling that the manic behavior that gripped the people of Pompeii in their last days, which they refused to believe could be their last days (simply because it was inconceivable, which is, itself, the Pompeii Syndrome of the title), well, that manic behavior was exhibiting itself now, so what was the inconceivable disaster they could all face? There’s a Middle Eastern sheik with his castle, software plant, and theme park in Galway, staffed entirely by people from the Middle East and none at all from the west of Ireland. There’s also the country’s (Ireland) main anti-terrorist policeman, Black Jack, as he’s known, who is scared, during the course of the novel, by a woman out of her mind with Alzheimer’s disease who chases him with a frying pan.

It’s an… okay, I suppose, crack at a story. The idea was interesting-ish enough. Somewhere, though, David Rice read a book about writing in which the advice given went something like this:

“Show, don’t tell the dear Reader what is happening.”

Unfortunately, this advice was taken to mean that, so long as he doesn’t explicitly come out and write something like:

Jack is conflicted about his role as an anti-terror policeman, and is quite smart and open-minded, really, he just finds that people follow certain stereotypes sometimes, so he looks into it, without being racist, really.

Which is a good thing. Instead, however, he writes:

“Jack,” said his partner, “I know you’re conflicted about your role as an anti-terror policeman, and are quite smart and open-minded, really, and I know you just find people follow stereotypes sometimes, so you look into it, but you’re not racist, I know.”

Which is not great.
The whole thing gets unwieldy, fast. I quickly began to feel like I was being bludgeoned, which may have been a clever terrorist/torture ploy on Mr. Rice’s part. If so, good one.
By the last half of this book, unfortunately, I was reading just to get it over with. He had a few mildly entertaining twists, but I couldn’t get away from the dialogue telling me, rather than showing me anything. And the characters, whether it was the ham-handed descriptions/characterizations or something… else, just didn’t work, for me. The sheik was very one dimensional. The ranting racist West Ireland councilman was very one dimensional. The Black Jack character was… well, he was more than one dimensional, it’s just that none of the dimensions were contiguous. The reporter was… two dimensional, but again, the two dimensions were miles apart and at odds (hard to do, when you’re that far apart), and not in a good way.

At any rate, I finished the book off, and picked up another ‘find’ prospect Amazon dropped in my lap for less than a buck: Peter Spiegelman’s Black Maps, which has, so far, been a million times (roughly, and possibly adjusting for inflation) better, in terms of writing, a cohesive story, and well-paced action. Inconceivable that it could be as bad as The Pompeii Syndrome (which, again, I wouldn’t say was bad… just… difficult or tedious reading).