Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye over the latest crop of paperbacks.
Dirty War, Clean Hands: ETA, the GAL and Spanish Democracy
Paddy Woodworth, Yale University Press, £10.99
Paddy Woodworth's extraordinary tour de force of investigative journalism probes the involvement of the Spanish state and Socialist Party leadership of the mid-1980s in a murderous campaign against Basque activists in France. Woodworth, until recently an Irish Times journalist, crafts his tale brilliantly on a range of levels: as a cautionary, moral tale about the corruption of power, almost a classic Greek drama; as a taut, complex thriller; as an essential introduction to the emerging Spanish democracy, and as a textbook treatment of both the uneasy relationship between socialism and nationalism, and of the contradictions inherent in terrorism, in this case of ETA and of its right-wing, state-backed counterpart, GAL. And then there is the series of finely crafted, enduring human portraits of, among others, the Clouseau-esque José Almedo, Bilbao policeman and GAL organiser; murdered children's doctor and Basque activist Sebastian Brouard, and the mysterious Julian Sancristobal, at one stage one of Woodworth's own flatmates, who becomes director of state security and is jailed for kidnap. - Patrick Smyth
Off the Wall, Edited by Niall MacMonagle Marino, €12.95
What a pleasure this book is! Even if you're not normally a slavish fan of poetry, you'll get great fun out of this compilation of "anarchic, irreverent, outrageous and unsettling" poems, ranging from quirky to bloody to perspective-opening. The anthology includes work by William Carlos Williams, Brendan Kennelly, Paul Durcan, Aidan Mathews, Margaret Atwood, Seamus Heaney, Pat Boran and Carol Ann Duffy - you can sense from the diversity what an eclectic collection this is. There are some delightful moments in it, such as: "Saint Laurence O'Toole meant business/ with his high cheekbones and stiff mitre./ Mary wore lipstick and no shoes/ so I sat on her side of the altar" (Caitriona O'Reilly, 'Nineteen Eighty-Four'). Fleur Adcock, describing Emily Brontë cleaning her car, writes: "Water sloshes over her old trainers/ as she scrubs frail blood-shapes from the windscreen." In a visually rich poem, Rosita Boland, chopping red peppers for dinner, must desist as she hears how Revolutionary Guards in Teheran remove lipstick from women's mouths with a razor blade, "replacing one red gash with another". You'll never see the world in the old way again after reading this collection. - Christine Madden
Morvern Callar, Alan Warner, Vintage, £6.99
Reissued in paperback to tie in with Lynne Ramsay's film, Alan Warner's first novel is as strange as its heroine's name and as volatile as the cocktails (pint of cider, lager, Pernod and blackcurrant, anyone?) and chemicals she consumes. From the opening scene, when Morvern finds the body of her suicidal boyfriend under the Christmas tree lights, the contradictory moods are as stark and heightened as dreams. By keeping his death quiet and claiming his unpublished novel as her own, Morvern finds herself an alternative life away from the supermarket job, bleakness and betrayal of her coastal Scottish home town. But wherever her story leads, her mixture of fearlessness and vulnerability, "rampantness" and loneliness remains constant, from the clubs of Spain to the haunted hills of Argyll to the trendy nightspots of London. The Scottish idiom made familiar in recent years by James Kelman and Irvine Welsh is here infused with a seductive lyricism all its own, and Morvern herself is a magical creation. - Giles Newington
The Homeric Hymns, New translation by Michael Crudden, Oxford World's Classics, £7.99
In purely poetic terms, these 33 hymns are uneven in quality, to say the least. Some are downright bad. But, in context, they - at times - make a fascinating read, illustrating how the Greek gods were once celebrated in prayer, quite merrily, as a type of boorish royal family whose foibles reaped havoc among their subjects, the humans. Best is 'Hymn to Hermes', addressing the "glorious" thief who seldom helps "but unceasingly cheats throughout the gloomy night the tribes of moral men". Literally born yesterday, our hero lures Apollo into trading his cattle for a lyre knocked together out of a tortoise shell and sheep-gut strings, and, better still, manages to leave his half-brother happy with the deal. For all his associations with communications and trade, Hermes emerges here rather as the god of ambush marketing. Michael Crudden, classics teacher at Alexandra College, Dublin, provides translation, succinct notes, and a useful glossary of names. Valiantly as he tries to enliven these hymns, however, the poetry itself goes to show what a much better novelist Homer was. - Joe Humphreys
Standard Time, Keith Ridgway, Faber & Faber, £6.99
The short story form fits Keith Ridgway like a glove, though the gloves are definitely off in this dazzling, eccentric and occasionally violent collection. It is almost impossible to convey the range of style and subject matter encompassed by the dozen stories of Standard Time: Catholic mysticism in 'The Dreams of Mary Cleary', urban deprivation in 'Never Love a Gambler', obsessive compulsions in 'The Ravages'. Then there's the sinister, the historical and, as in 'The Problem with German', the awkward tenderness of a gay relationship. The final - and by far the longest - story, 'Angelo', is both page-turning mystery and elegiac exploration of love and loss; a tasty appetiser for Ridgway's forthcoming novel, The Parts. - Arminta Wallace