WATCHING THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN

We’re back in Ryan’s Daughter territory, fifty two years on from the release of that film romance, set in a coastal village in the aftermath of the Irish Revolution of 1916. This time we’re on an island, off the mainland, from where the battle sounds of a Civil War can vaguely and occasionally (only early in the film?) be heard as ‘noises off”.

The Hollywood Bog Standard Irish Approach is applied once more. Build beautiful sets, in stunning locations, then blow them up or burn them down. All in an area of great natural beauty, which like the “noises off”, serves merely as backdrop, not to a romance in the case of The Banshees of Inisherin, but to a glum and meagre tale of depression and madness. 

The Banshees of Inisherin is a stage-play with island characters and glorious scenery as a moving backdrop. Lest any one be in any doubt that we’re in Ireland, the name Inisherin is an Anglicisation of words in Irish for Island Ireland.

Colin Farrell, splendid as the sorrowful and immature Pádraic Súilleabháin, should get an Oscar nomination. Brendan Gleeson, as the depressed and mad Colm Doherty, may also be Oscar-nominated. With all-embracing post-modern disregard, Súilleabháin’s name would place him on an island off the south coast, say Cape Clear, while Doherty’s name would place him off the north coast, say in Lough Foyle in Inishowen.

The film is enjoying wide-spread critical and commercial acclaim. It is billed as a noir/dark comedy. There’s likely a Phd to be had by a student of dramatic arts to unearth the embedded racism in the use of those terms for comedies (alleged) of violence, gore and bleakness.

The Banshees of Inisherin is as Oirish as a frothy pint of stout stuffed with colcannon, black pudding, bacon and cabbage and topped off with a sprig of shamrock. Begorrah. 

The plot is lame and the story as thin as last year’s nettle soup and just as bitter. Two men, one entering, the other leaving, middle age, bond by the daily ritual of sharing two o’clock pints in the island pub, staffed winningly by D’Unbelievables, Pat Shortt and John Kenny, who enhance the pub scenes with the best of Paddywhackery.

Súilleabháin (Colin Farrell), leading the bromance, invariably calls for Doherty (Brendan Gleeson), only to find himself suddenly re-buffed by his glum friend, for no other reason than that Doherty is bored. This very much contemporary “first world problem” is set against an old-timey backdrop of a peasant existence, straight out of Lorca crossed with John Millington Synge. It edges the film forward. Just about.

The island is peopled with locals who mill about from farm to pub, to church to graveyard to quayside, women in shawls and men in caubeens to bate the band. A clutch of student musicians, led by the excellent Aaron Monaghan, drives a fine trad session in the pub, spell-bound by Doherty’s indigenous fiddle-playing style. He struggles to write one last tune. He’s an artist aching to create a work that will validate his gift; that will be his tipping point and send-off as he dementias his way to senility. So transfixed is he by this desire and his need to clear his life of his boring and persistent friend to make time for his real work – he is the frustrated artist, with time running out – that he chops off not one finger but a whole fist of them in a bile of spite. 

Why didn’t he save his hand for fiddle-playing and cut off his toes instead? No matter. No one seems to care one bit anyway. Island life, with all its bucolic coming-and-going, carries on. Certainly, Doherty is mad, but so, it seems, are his neighbours, blithely ignoring Doherty’s self-harm.

Madness and self-hate fill the core of the film. No one laughed in the cinema where I saw it. Whatever about glowing critical reviews, the best that can be said, perhaps, is that audience views are mixed.

“Ironic” is invoked as the style of the film. Irony implies something to be in opposition to, something to send up. Can madness, violence and paedophilia be sent up? The film has as much irony as a Pontifical High Mass held over the graves of victims of clerical sex abuse.

Writer and director Martin McDonagh has great success with stage plays and films, including notable West End hits and box office triumphs. He previously worked with Farrell and Gleeson as wise-cracking top-of-the-morning boyos on a killing spree in the Belgian tourist city of Bruges. The film also included the terrific English actor Ralph Fiennes, whose most regarded work was his use of the c-word in order to raise a puerile laugh. 

The same pairs’ antics in The Banshees of Inisherin receive a 97% positive critics’ review on the amalgamation website Rotten Tomatoes, where it is described as a “feel bad treat”. Many writers have poured praise on the film. The Guardian (London) calls it “a flawless tragicomedy”. The New York Times suggests that “you are apt to be tickled, sometimes to gales of laughter, by the spray of verbal wit that characterises the McDonagh dialect.” 

Ne’er a tickle did I experience and I’m fond of getting and giving ‘em. Begorrah.

Súilleabháin (Farrell) leads a “pigs-in-the-parlour” existence, without the pig. He shares the house with his sister, a dog, a pony and a wee donkey, who dies when he ingests Doherty’s severed fingers. Poisoned? Choked? This triggers the violent ending that long foretold itself, as did the suicide of the young man, preyed upon by his abusive father, the island’s Guard. Where’s it to happen then? Sea cliff? Lake?

McDonagh is hailed as a genius. There is no doubting his ability for story-telling on stage and screen, though, by any measure, this is a weak outing. He has talent, imagination and a powerful position in the international film industry. Searchlight Pictures don’t throw their considerable financial power behind any old notion.

I wonder at McDonagh’s use of his gifts, then reflect that how the gifts of an artist are used is, in large part, determined by the zeitgeist and the market that conjures it. In McDonagh, this leads to the grimmest portrayals and caricatures of lives in Ireland. 

His work is compared positively with the work of John Millington Synge, an early 20th century Irish dramatist, who also used hyperbole, the gothic and violence, particularly in his most famous drama The Playboy of the Western World. In Synge’s case the audience of his time was national. In McDonagh’s it’s global, in the western-world use of that term. Considerations of scale (film is bigger) and range (film travels further) apply. The same tropes of hyperbole, madness, violence, sexual repression and isolation are brought before us without Synge’s charmed Hiberno-English.

Isn't there the light of seven heavens in your heart alone, the way you'll be an angel's lamp to me from this out, and I abroad in the darkness, spearing salmons in the Owen, or the Carrowmore?

A nagging concern about representations of people in Ireland, past and present, rose up as I watched the film’s opening. Hollywood’s interests have not moved on much from Ryan’s Daughter. Ireland is a place to set up a transient carnival, apply the brilliance of writers, directors, actors and film-technicians to tales of desperation, then decamp, leaving detritus behind. 

The film was shot on location on the island of Achill, off the western seaboard. Did it leave an economic legacy to the people of Achill? Will tourists flock, even temporarily, to stand where Súilleabáin and Doherty stood on the glorious beach at Keem? Will they visit Súilleabháin’s house, the boringly quiet man of the piece, pony-in-the-parlour and all?

A resident of Achill, Dea Birkett, writes in The Spectator, not noted as a contrary platform.

The island is no more than a beautiful backdrop for these thwarted lives. It’s a familiar fictional tale of rural Irish misery, shared by generations of Hollywood script-writers.

I only saw one Banshee. Did I miss the others? However Sheila Fitton as the death-foretelling crone, Mrs. McCormick, makes a mark, as does Bríd Ní Neachtain, as the nosey grocer/post-mistress, Mrs. O Riordan. Like the island itself, these characters are “colour” and background. The strongest female character is Pádraic’s sister, Siobhán Súileabháin, played terrifically by Kerry Condon. Even this role is straight out of central casting for the Hollywood Bog Standard Irish Approach. Siobhán is bookish and frustrated. She can’t wait to get off the island. There is nothing for her in her home place. It is no surprise that she leaves for a mainland job as a librarian just as the violent conclusion unfolds.

There is large measure of self-hate in McDonagh’s work. How much of that comes from McDonagh himself is material for psychologists to delve into. I reflect that his most successful film (?), Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, took him to the USA, where he told a sturdy story, based on a solid comedy-drama plot, which offered a degree of triumph for his broken and oddball characters. The step away from Ireland allowed McDonagh to breathe and, as you might say in Ireland, get out of his own way.

This film arrives in a period of successful indigenous film-making, including fine work in Irish such as Foscadh, Arracht, Róise agus Frank, Black 47 and, in particular, An Cailín Ciúin, presenting a range of stories and forms, including comedy.

Island Ireland is a place you leave, like a cinema you’d have been better off not entering at all. I should have gone to see Wakanda, where the black/noir makes some sense. 

Great cast. Terrific performances. Shame about the film.

The Banshees of Inisherin. Not recommended.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-the-banshees-of-inisherin-gets-wrong-about-ireland-2

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/23/the-banshees-of-inisherin-review-martin-mcdonagh-colin-farrell-brendan-gleeson

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/20/movies/the-banshees-of-inisherin-review.html

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READING HAMNET

That’s an ‘n’, not an ‘l’. And it’s a novel, not a play. It’s Hamnet, not Hamlet, names which were common and interchangeable among the rural and small town people of late 16^th century Warwickshire, in central England. The novel could have been called Agnes, because it is her story, though she is better known as Anne, the country-woman who marries the glove-maker’s son from the nearby town, when she becomes pregnant with their first child, Susanna.

Names, written down and omitted, are essential throughout the book. The glove-maker’s son is never named. Early on he is called a ‘wastrel’ and ‘a gangly youth’, said not to be of age for marriage. He is the Latin tutor, spending his days as a messenger and runner for his violent father, the glove-maker, or giving Latin and English lessons to the children of wealthy farmers and aspiring townspeople. Later he is known as ‘husband’ and ‘father’.

Bartholomew, Agnes’ brother, warns the glove-maker’s son, at the time of Agnes’ betrothal.

Take good care of her, Latin boy, very good care, and no harm will come to you.

Later when Agnes, feral as a farm cat, goes to the forest to bear her child, and a great search rises up to find her, Bartholomew tells the Latin boy that he once asked his sister why she married him. Bartholomew tells the Latin boy that Agnes replied:

That you had more hidden away inside you than anyone else she’d ever met.

What is he scribbling on the curls of paper that litter the newlyweds’ bedroom floor?

Written by Coleraine-born Maggie O’Farrell, Hamnet is a stirring domestic epic of home, yard, garden, village, farm and forest. Agnes is the central and driving figure, though the short life of Hamnet, twin brother to Judith, is the pulse of the story. 

The language is earthy, precise and beautiful. I was reminded of Harvest by Jim Crace. Matters, places, objects and human interactions are vividly gifted to the reader. The story is charmed. It is redolent with the world – fields, flowers, trees, herbs, plants, animal skins, bread and babies – that infuse Agnes’ sensibilities, wisdom, power and generosity. She is savant and shaman in a thrillingly ordinary world that is set on an elevated plane by Ó’Farrell’s gifts for scene-setting, description and wonder. 

Agnes bears a mantle of openness and wildness, inhabiting earth and air. Though never presented as a witch, she does have a familiar. Not a cat, but a kestrel she got from a priest, a part-religious, part-druidic figure. 

Readers have differing views on the novel. Some readers find it overwritten and the prose ‘purple’. Though it is a heightened fiction, with otherworldliness enlivening the day-to-day, I liked the truth of it. I liked the drama of it, even though it may disappoint readers looking for a driven plot. 

Loud stage aside: Can a thin plot make a good story? What exactly is the relationship between plot and story?

Part 1 ends on Hamnet’s death, with a line of iambic pentameter. A conscious choice by O’Farrell? 

Then there is silence, stillness. Nothing more.

Part 2 launches into the grieving, where O’Farrell sometimes uses staccato paragraphs to leap between the emotions of her characters, setting each of them in their attempts to recover from the loss of the child. 

Soon after the funeral, the Latin Boy returns to London, using the chillingly contemporary line voiced by many men (and women) 

my company needs me.

He is now the playwright history knows as Shakespeare, though never named as such. His company is in the playhouse, where his work enjoys great commercial success. He realises that Agnes will not join him in London. He buys land and property nearer home, including the finest house in the town. His is celebrity money remitted to keep his family at a distance and in conditions that make them the envy of their neighbours and confuse Agnes. She takes refuge in the garden. Susanna, her eldest child, handles home affairs. Judith, the remaining twin, wanders the streets at night searching for her dead brother, but he is not there.

When Agnes is given a playbill for her husband’s latest play, a tragedy based on a medieval Danish legend involving a young man called Amleth, she sees that he has called it Hamlet, a close allusion to their dead son’s name. 

The novel returns to flowing prose when Agnes travels to London with her brother Bartholomew, a beacon of (male) constancy and power who always stands by her. There is an early scene where Agnes asks him about the Latin Boy. Bartholomew is driving fence posts into the ground as O’Farrell shows his physical power and his brotherly love in deft actions and dialogue. 

Agnes plans to castigate her husband for daring to write about their son without talking to her. Their marriage is under severe pressure due to the loss of the boy, the distance between them and Agnes’ intuition of infidelities by her husband.

The scenes in the city searching for the husband, then finding him on the stage at the playhouse, are exhilarating. Through a ghostly doubling, O’Farrell achieves a splendid reading experience of a theatre experience. Agnes sees that her husband, in writing this play and in playing the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son, thus resurrecting him. 

Written in the present tense, the novel inhabits the ‘here and now’, which adds to its strangeness by making historical time current. The opening sentence reads:

A boy is coming down a flight of stairs.

This is Hamnet.

The sexual consummation scene in the apple store begins with

The lines and lines of apples are moving, jolting, rocking on their shelves.

This is Agnes and the Latin boy.

The book is strange, like Agnes herself. And wonderful for it.

Recommended.

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THE LOUT’S LEAVINGS

 

Crossing the threshold into the street, The Lout casts his leavings about him, notably a potent, toxic package set to blight the future: a pledge of £700 million to the French nationalised energy company EDF. The post-Brexit irony of this pledge is completely lost on The Lout. Nothing trips him up, as he bowls along the street to the benches at the back of The Big House. 

In the face of the current greed crisis, which precipitated an energy crisis, The Lout kicks the can down the road for the overwhelming of future generations. The can, one of very many, contains the leavings of a nuclear facility which are so toxic as to be the stuff of horror stories. 

The names terrify: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, Zaporizhzhia.

The Lout revels in squeezing people. He promises to stop squeezing if they’ll swallow this rancid pill. All the hard work by people to turn away from burning black rocks and piping gas from underground is now tossed onto the nuclear midden named Sizewell. 

Size matters to The Lout. He says “go nuclear, go large”, on the south-east coast of England, in the county of Suffolk. Underground facilities, located in rock layers 500 metres below the bottom of the sea, will contain the leavings forever (sic!). The Lout will not be taking to a coastal retreat in the area between Ipswich and Norwich. Residents of the region around The Hague and Rotterdam, across a narrow sea, fit domestic geiger counters to their windows and hope for the best.

The Lout’s honey is unlikely to be enough to attract private investor bees to add to the midden and secure the full budget cost. The Lout cares nothing about that. He has a loose working definition of ‘getting things done’. 

If the great Indian writer Arundhati Roy had been born in England her prescient remarks about dams would transfer to nuclear power stations.

Dams (nuclear power stations) are the temples of secular India (England) and almost worshipped. They are huge, wet cement flags that wave in our minds.

The Lout leaves. The Louse arrives. The Lout lock-fastens The Louse into the pledge. She has made a career of sucking capital into herself from across the spectrum of ideologies in The Big House. She will not back down. She, too, is committed to

Big. Great. Done.

The Lout turns the corner of the street, a radioactive glow emanating from his back, the leavings of a toxic time and a poisoned future.

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THE AGE OF THE LOUT

The Age of the Lout began with the modern-era Hooray Henry, in the 1990s, a garish, over-dressed, be-suited financial gambler, who frequented wine bars and who was lampooned by tv comedians with the catchphrase “loadsamoney”.

The lampooning was a form of homage.

Hooray Henry thrashed clubs, garden parties, fashion shops, race meetings, wine bars and restaurants. He normalised money-making as a throwaway gambling frenzy. So what if the wine bar and the streets were littered with glasses, many of them shattered, half-eaten plates of food, paper napkins and the detritus of a debauch recently tossed off? 

That was Staff’s concern. There was always Staff. They did little hooraying, while working long and underpaid hours in bars, clubs, hotels, taxis, shops, delivery and transport companies.

Hooray Henry went to an exclusive school and university, where he glossed his habits and his entitlement with a smattering of the European classics – Greek and Roman – in environments where only those classics were valued, while the classics of Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australia were demeaned as exotic, serving merely as plunder for acquisitive and decorative uses by Hooray Henry. 

Hooray Henry migrated out of the financial world. He appeared in legal realms, quietly amassing assets and further privilege, including honours from the Kingdom, while tempering the flash, under the steely uniform of pin-stripes, gown and wig.

Another natural migration for Hooray Henry was to journalism, where certain media moguls valued his “excess of snobbish self-esteem” (Cassell Dictionary of Slang) and his “loud voice and ineffectual manner” (Chambers Dictionary).

Hooray Henry realised he could trash the whole country, while running it. Hooray Henry took the short step to Power and burrowed his way up through the mound of lies and invective, by which he plied his trade in words, emerging unscathed from sackings and scandals to mount the highest podium of all, from which he condemned Staff to crawl to food banks, to queue on trolleys in hospitals, to stand on railway platforms where no trains run, ever cleaning up after him, as Staff have always done, at home, at school, at university and at work.

Described, in a kindly manner, as a clown, an oaf, even a buffoon and an eccentric, Hooray Henry is The Lout, “an ill-mannered and aggressive man or youth” (Chambers Dictionary). He is the contemporary manifestation of the fabled Roman Hooray Henry, Loutus Maximus, infamous for his peregrinations between The Senate, The Bacchanalia and the bedroom.

This is the new age of Loutus Maximus.

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READING HARLEM SHUFFLE BY COLSON WHITEHEAD

I’m in a hospital waiting room, jotting down notes. Two men and a woman also wait. We’re seated in well-spaced chairs and wearing masks. A doctor in blue clinic-scrubs and a caramel hijab comes to the water-fountain, fills a plastic cup and, looking out of the window at the building work below, pauses for a moment.

A nurse calls out “Roy Carney”. A thin man gets up and, supported by a woman, gingerly steps forward. They follow the nurse to a consultation room. The doctor turns from the window and returns to the clinic.

Roy Carney? Close enough for me to consider it a synchronicity, even an affirming omen. The notes I write are on Colson Whitehead’s current novel, Harlem Shuffle. The protagonist in Whitehead’s story is Ray Carney, furniture dealer and crook.

After a soft opening of backstory and scene setting, the book plunges Ray Carney and the reader into The Harlem Riot of 1964, which sizzled in a heatwave between July 16 and 22. James Powell, a 15-year-old African American, was shot and killed by police Lieutenant Thomas Gilligan in front of Powell's friends and about a dozen other witnesses. The riot followed. 

Igniting the story in this time and place makes it a forcibly contemporary historical American novel. Police officers continue to kill African American children. 

At the end of the riots, reports counted one dead rioter, 118 injured, and 465 arrested.

But not Ray Carney, who continues to develop his furniture sales’ business and gear up his criminal activities by getting involved with a jewellery heist at a famous Harlem landmark, Hotel Theresa. The step for Carney from low-level fence of stolen goods to an active participant in a sophisticated criminal venture is instigated by his cousin Freddie.

Family is important to Carney. His father’s legacy, a villainous one, set him up in business. His mother and his aunt, Freddie’s mother, are hard-working matriarchs who hold Carney’s esteem. His wife Elizabeth and their children, May and John, hold Carney’s loyalty and love. His attachment to his cousin Freddie underscores the novel, right to the very end. Family sticks.

The American Dream of material betterment drives the story. Carney aspires to and achieves a home for his family on Riverside Drive. Driving and striving later secure him the greatest prize, when Carney supplants his patronising in-laws, by achieving the much sought-after historic Harlem address of Strivers’ Row. Carney’s part in his in-laws comeuppance is a side-benefit of his revenge play against a banker who stifled his striving by barring his admission to Harlem’s African American elite. 

Carney as a character and the actions of the book place Harlem Shuffle in an American crime novel tradition exemplified by the works of Elmore Leonard and Sara Paretsky. It is perhaps closest to the Los Angeles late 1940s crime novel Devil in a Blue Dress and other work by Walter Mosley. Might there be a film version with younger versions of Denzil Washington as Carney and Don Cheadle as Freddie? 

Moral behaviour is complex, venal actions underpin material progress, cops are self-serving and Carney admits to himself that he may not be able to sustain his double life as a furniture retailer and a crook for very much longer. The 1960s move the African American experience into a form of modernity wherein social and class divisions intensify, while race divisions deepen.

Women characters are present but marginal. They are waitresses and hookers, one of whom plays a crucial role in Carney’s revenge caper. Elizabeth’s job in the Black Star Travel Agency improves, as African Americans’ ability to vacation at home and abroad increases, but she does not participate in either of her husband’s commercial ventures.

The history of Manhattan is present throughout the novel. The early Dutch colonisers survive in the Van Wyck family, the real estate magnates who animate the book’s final third through a relationship with Freddie. The Dutch colony of the late 1650s led by Peter Stuyvesant created the settlement of Nieuw Haarlem in the northern part of the island of Manhattan as an outpost of Nieuw Amsterdam at the southern tip of the island. When English colonisers over-ran the Dutch, the name was Anglicised to Harlem. Scant mention is made of the Lenape people who inhabited the island before the colonisers arrived. 

The reader is left to wonder at the end of this fine book how the drive and legacy of Carney and his community will play into the future where the killing of African American children by police officers remains.

Like all great crime fiction, this is a morality tale, set pert as a diamond on a stolen ring in a particular time and place. The detailed descriptions of home furnishing of the period are lovingly presented, vivid in themselves and redolent with the desire for material acquisition. Carney gets caught up in a crush downtown, when a nuclear attack drill is called, while he is on his way to transact a deal with stolen goods. He never otherwise stands so close to white people. 

The words “crook” and “crooked” echo throughout the book and resonate down the centuries.

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead is highly recommended.

Strivers’ Row, Manhattan, New York

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/Strivers'+Row,+New+York,+NY+10030,+USA/@40.8181081,-73.9512673,15z/data=!4m5!3m4!1s0x89c2f67099017971:0xbd386814b9d388d!8m2!3d40.8183185!4d-73.9436973

Devil in a Blue Dress, film

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112857/?ref_=vp_close

See also Reading the Nickel Boys by Dave Duggan

https://headstuff.org/culture/literature/reading-the-nickel-boys/

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