Translation/exposition: double jobbing taxi drivers are taking the bread out of the mouths of Dublin taxi drivers...and double jobbing writers are taking the bread out of the mouths of full time professional writers like myself. Taxi drivers and me are ad idem on this, as we are on many other important topics. Like where could it all end?
How and ever. Let's hope he wins. He'll earn big bucks. He'll jack in the day job. This will create a vacancy in the Civil Service. They won't fill it. The more unfilled vacancies in the Civil Service the better the running of the country. It's night follows day stuff. Simple economics. Taxi drivers and myself understand these things.
How and ever, again. I'd never really heard of Donal Ryan, not paying much attention to literary things or the Booker goings on. ( Like...they don't pay much attention to me...)
I first heard of him while reading the culture section of the Daily Telegraph. (I need that info for talking to Dublin taxi drivers.) More specifically, I was reading a review of his book by one Catherine Taylor. I know nothing about her. And she's probably not related to Ruth Taylor...
Ruth is a single Mum with a murky sexual past living in Bognor Regis. She's hardly related to Catherine Taylor, Daily Telegraph Book Reviewer. . But...there again...Taylor is not that common a name...
How and ever, for the third time. Catherine, whoever she is and whomsoever she is related to, does not strike me as being a native Irish woman. This, of course, in the Daily Telegraph's editorial eyes makes her the perfect person to discuss Ireland and review Irish novels. And she does it nicely. Fair and generous enough, she does mention however that there are some false notes in our double jobbing Civil Servant's opus. One of these is, she suggests, and I quote, "it seems unlikely that such a small locale can produce not one but three potential psychopaths."
WHAT ARE YOU ON WOMAN?
The book is set in LIMERICK !!!!
Limerick has whole areas almost entirely occupied by psychopaths. That's a big city...but...every small village in Ireland has at least one. A three psychopath village is nothing to us native Irish. We laugh at those places. Dismiss them as irrelevant and as somehow failing to live up to the Irish thing, all that.
Enough said.
FREE FREE FREE...
There's no such thing as a free lunch, all that. But there are some free books just a couple of clicks away. One is by myself and one is...not. Though I did edit it. Whether any of that is good or bad or indifferent is up to the reader.
Go to my website to get hold of A Walk on The Southside. That'll only be up there free for awhile, so act now, who hesitates is lost, etc.
The Mysterious Mary H is available from my Academia site, which for some reason always seems to need refreshing...but worth the wait.
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