As the last days of Summer draw to a close and thoughts turn towards Autumn and Winter, the Eason Book Club on the Pat Kenny Show looked towards and icy winter in Sweden, with a healthy dash of Nordic Noir. August’s book choice was In the Name of Love by Irish writer Patrick Smith, and the iciness of the prose would prove to divide the members’ opinions.
With Rory Cowen still touring, comedian and actress Katherine Lynch was called in to ably fill his shoes, joining regular members Brian Kennedy and Mary O’Rourke to weigh in on the book.
Mary wasted no time in describing how much she loved the bleakness of the novel, saying how impressed she had been by the spare and sparseness of the language used.
“Well you see, I’m just Miss Gullible, I loved it,” she said. “Others won’t have liked it, but I loved it. I loved the ‘spareness’ of the words, it’s very stark, it’s very sparse.
“Patrick Smith’s a translator, after all, and if you’re translating, you don’t use a lot of words. And I liked that,” Mary added, going on to compliment the tightness of the plot.
Katherine Lynch was equally impressed by the novel, Smith’s first, written when the Irishman had turned 70.
“And you can see all the fantastic languages used in the book, there’s about seven different languages used,” Katherine said. “For me, I love that Nordic Noir stuff, I love The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and all that stuff, and I thought, ‘Wow, I’m really going to be excited by all this stuff!’
“I love the scenery and the darkness that they create. I thought Dan was going to be like Nora Webster, be this fantastic man who was going to reshift his brain, and grief, and find some joy. But every single character in it is horrible! They’re horrible, but you cannot help but have empathy for them,” Katherine added.
But the tale of Dan Byrne, an Irishman living through the caustic cold of the Stockholm archipelago, was met with an icier reception by singer Brian Kennedy.
“Oh Pat, this is the first time that I’ve read a book that I really didn’t like in our book club. I felt like I was in bed with a cold and I couldn’t find the remote to turn off the TV because there was a crap auld movie on.
“I kept reading it, page by page, thinking ‘Something happen!’ I know that he was in grief,” Brian said, “I know that it was a very slow life that he was leading, that he was coming back into the world slowly again. But just... even the murder that happens later on was completely predictable!”
Celine Rossiter, this month's listener contributor, is a long-standing book club member, having been a member of one for more than four years in Kilmore, Co Wexford. Her club, made up of seven women, take on books of all sorts of genres every month, taking on the highbrow and the having a bit of fun with something trashy from time to time too.
On In the Name of Love, Celine said the club was, much like the Eason Club, split.
"It was an excellent book club, because there was loads of meat in it, loads of different aspects to talk about, aspects of the book that we enjoyed and didn’t enjoy," Celine said.
It's Brian Kennedy's choice of book for the next meeting, which will take place at the end of September. He'll announce his choice live on air with Pat early next week, and will be choosing from the following four books: Blindsided by Michael Lynah, Beneath the Earth by John Boyne, The Blue Guitar by John Banville, Purity by Jonathan Franzen.
You can listen back to this week's full podcast of the Eason Book club below:
