Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

Ronan Bennett was once a convicted IRA terrorist but in his current incarnation he turns out novels of lumpen prose. Bennett’s wife is the editor of Comment is Free, the Guardian’s Blog, and thus it is in the G2 section of the paper that we are treated to an article , ostensibly about Martin Amis’ wrangles with Islam, which crowbars in a quite remarkable number of allusions to the Irish Catholic (and I use Bennett’s own religious definition) as MOPE. What is it about the Irish Republican psyche that wants to project their own parochial concerns on every situation of conflict or discord which has ever manifested itself since the dawn of history? Why are they compelled to seek in misery, wherever it occurs, some echo of their own perceived suffering? Bennett does not make it past his almost unreadably clumsy opening paragraph, before directly conflating the entire religion of Islam with the Irish. Racist supremacism is charged against Amis and the Irish Catholic is of course a perpetu...

Having considered Martin Amis one of my favourite contemporary novelists, it was with a degree of surprise and alarm that I discovered I found Yellow Dog and House of Meetings jarringly over-written and tiresomely contrived, when I read these books more recently. I am currently reading Douglas Coupland’s J-Pod and it is with increasing dismay that I realise that whilst I loved Girlfriend in a Coma, for example, and found it profoundly heart-breaking, I’m finding J Pod just as profoundly irritating. Coupland’s irony drenched techno geeks no longer engage me at all. They are deeply annoying stock figures. The “Zeitgeisty” tics Coupland’s books employ, the stream of consciousness nonsense used to break up the prose and the computer / adspeak rubbish used for the same purpose are so self-conscious, so contrived, so exasperatingly IRRITATING, that I wonder will I be able to last through to whatever trademark heart-rending, life-changing, epiphany-heavy ending Coupland has in store for his m...