Irish Times reviewers cast a critical eye over the latest batch of paperbacks.
The Dreamers Gilbert Adair Faber, £6.99
Poor Matthew, young, repressed, American and in Paris, teams up with Theo and his vicious twin, Isabelle. The siblings are very French and very involved with each other. Night after night, the trio meet at the movies. Then the politics of 1968 close the cinema and the twins need alternative entertainment. Matthew, sexually drawn to the pair, accepts an invitation to the family apartment and immediately moves in. Slick, sophisticated, exact and nasty, this is a reworking of Francophile English writer Adair's début, The Holy Innocents (1988). Think Cocteau, Les Enfants Terribles (1929, translated 1955). Now Adair has written the screenplay for Bertolucci's film version. If you've read Cocteau's dark, superior novel, you may wonder why Adair wrote such a blatant pastiche. If you've not, you may ask why Adair penned such an arch, sickly romp.
- Eileen Battersby
The Very Man Chris Binchy Pan, £6.99
It's a bit of a worry when you see the words "Irish" and "Nick Hornby" in close proximity on the cover of a paperback. On the other hand, young Irish men are still something of a mystery - often, as in the spiralling suicide statistics, a mystery with a tragic dimension - so any attempt to get inside their heads must be welcome. The head in question belongs to Rory, a fast-track young advertising executive who, after a couple of years in New York, has returned to Celtic Tiger Dublin. Within months he has a designer flat in Temple Bar and an intelligent live-in girlfriend - but then the rot sets in. Binchy's take on our economic miracle is marvellously dark, his portrait of the cappuccino-and-cocktails generation acutely observed. In its quest to avoid soppiness the ending achieves only indecision: that apart, it's a very good read indeed.
- Arminta Wallace
We Did Nothing : Why the Truth Doesn't Always Come Out When the UN Goes In Linda Polman (translated by Rob Bland) Penguin, £7.99
Detailing events that occurred in the 1990s, Linda Polman offers a travelogue with a difference: a harrowing insight into the myopia of United Nations peacekeeping missions to Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda and Sierra Leone, where powerless, ill-equipped, blue-
helmeted troops watch those they had been sent to protect eyeball death and die, while extras from Graham Greene novels go about the commerce of war. It's a disturbing recollection that underlines UN impotence in genuinely responding to the ravages and mayhem of civil war. Describing a Groundhog Day-style ongoing nightmare, Polman points an accusatory finger at the permanent members of the UN's Security Council who, Lear-like, stumble blindly, ignorant of the mindless suffering and madness, from one political resolution to the next.
- Paul O'Doherty
April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici Lauro Martines Pimlico, £8.99
In April 1478, at High Mass in the cathedral in Florence, the Pazzi clan of that city, with the backing of the then Pope, attempted to murder the de facto rulers of the city, Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici. A 10-year-old Machiavelli watched from the aisles as Giuliano perished and Lorenzo the Magnificent escaped; Leonardo da Vinci sketched the conspirators' bodies hanging from the city's buildings, and Botticelli did a scandalous mural to commemorate the occasion. Martines's book lifts the lid on the political apparatus at work in Renaissance Italy. While the scholar in him paints an exhaustive and intriguing picture of Florentine life, the imaginative author revels in the gruesome details, particularly of the fall of the Medici after the death of Lorenzo, in this tale of conspiracy, murder and revenge.
- Laurence Mackin
Persia In The Great Game: Sir Percy Sykes - Explorer, Consul Soldier, Spy Antony Wynn John Murray, £9.99
A respectable background, typical for an imperialist of the day, brought Sykes to recruitment into army intelligence. Sent to Persia in the 1890s, his instructions were to thwart Russian expansion into India through Persia. He joined the "great game" of espionage and geopolitics and plunged into the world, familiar today, of chaotic manoeuvring of reformers, mullahs, bandits and Great Powers. He foiled Russian attempts to annex north-eastern Persia and, in the first World War, recruited a local force to safeguard Persian oil for the British navy. This sympathetic and rich biography shows that a big element in the success of Sykes - an indefatigable mountain-climber, shot, and polo player - was his establishment of friendships with Persians, and his deep appreciation of their language, folklore, culture and religious practices.
- Olivia Hamilton
The Dedalus Book of the Occult: A Dark Muse Gary Lachman Dedalus, £9.99
Gary Lachman weaves his way deftly down the dark centuries of occult literature and philosophy in this fascinating, scholarly work. In the process he digs up a wonderful cast of strangelings, such as Gérard de Nerval, who paraded Paris streets with a lobster on a blue ribbon leash while explaining: "It doesn't bark and knows the secrets of the deep." Lachman reveals that at the heart of all occult sensibilities is a belief not in simple Satanism but in some vast existential secret which is then wrapped in rites and rituals. While he inserts the most delightfully dry and knowing asides here and there, his is a serious study of occult influences on writers, philosophers and poets such as Nietzsche, Goethe, Shaw, and Yeats, who came under the spell of one Madame Blavatsky. Highly recommended.
- John Moran