Author interview: Paul Johnston

I met crime writer Paul Johnstone a few weeks ago for a very pleasent few hours in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin to shoot the breeze over his new book. The resulting interview was published in The Sunday Business Post.

Enjoy.

First Person: Johnston bounces back
Sunday, July 08, 2007 - By Alex Meehan

Crime writer Paul Johnston could have been forgiven for giving up his writing career and trying his hand at something else. After all, not everyone could work through writer’s block, being dumped by their publisher, losing their agent, having their marriage fail and, to top it all off, contracting a virulent form of cancer.

Yet this is exactly what the Scottish writer did. He battled all these setbacks to regain his health, find love again and have his ninth novel, The Death List, published. Johnston is back and this time he’s armed with a sense of conviction and a willingness to go places other authors shy away from.

The Death List is a page turner and, with the right push, it could be the novel to take Johnston’s career to new heights. It’s a gritty and violent thriller, set in London, pitting a crime novelist against a psychotic serial killer named the White Devil.

There’s an uncanny resemblance between Johnston and his latest protagonist, Matt Wells - he too is recently divorced, has writer’s block and has been dropped by his publisher. Surprisingly, he claims the resemblance is mostly coincidental.

‘‘Is Matt based on me? No, not really,’’ Johnston says.

‘‘At least I didn’t plan it that way and anyway, there’s nothing much in that for a writer unless you mess your characters around to have fun. Really, this is a book about the nature of revenge.”

In the story, Matt is depicted as a writer best known for his short-lived series of detective novels set in Albania - a dig at Johnston’s own Alex Mavros series of Greek detective stories.

‘‘If anyone thinks they’re featured in the book and that I’ve treated them badly, then at least I’ve also made fun of myself. Satire doesn’t take any prisoners - it goes for you as the writer as well.”

Johnston was also inspired by his interest in Jacobean literature - his bad guy is named after John Webster’s tragedy The White Devil - and by the visceral nature of the urge to seek revenge experienced by people who perceive themselves wronged.

‘‘Everyone feels like knifing their boss or strangling their wife at some point, and urban myths abound featuring angry wives exacting revenge on their adulterous husbands by pouring honey in their petrol tanks or spurned au pairs phoning the speaking clock in Australia and leaving the phone off the hook,” says Johnston.

‘‘In many ways, revenge like this is quite childish, but the urge fulfils a basic human need.

‘‘The problems start when people seek to do serious harm, like the White Devil in the book. That was the premise on which I based this story - I wanted to investigate that.”

While Johnston’s books have never been lacking in violent content, The Death List is notably darker in this regard.

The author underwent serious surgery to battle the cancer he was diagnosed with in 2003. The resulting operation to remove a kidney and surrounding tissue left him scarred and thoughtful.

‘‘Without trying to get too precious about it, I think the violence in this book is a reflection of the real world.

‘‘We do live in a violent world and I was shocked when I came out of hospital and saw what had been done to me on the operating table.

‘‘My books have never been for shrinking violets in terms of violence, but this personal experience made me more concerned to be very open about it, perhaps in a slightly disturbing way. I think this is the real world.

‘‘It’s the same here. I read an Irish paper this morning at breakfast and there was a story about how some kid had been stabbed, and someone else had been shot, and a house was blown up,” says Johnston.

‘‘At home, I have a one-and-a-half-year-old child and I spend a lot of time changing the TV channels because at any minute incredible violence from the streets of Baghdad or Gaza can appear on the screen, complete with bodies and severed limbs,” he says.

‘‘It’s up to each individual how much they want to take on. Some people will watch a movie like Seven and think it’s disgusting, and others won’t be bothered at all.

‘‘Hopefully, reading books like mine is a reasonably cathartic experience, because there’s certainly an element of writing these books that’s cathartic.

‘‘Confronting your fears robs them of power and we all go through unpleasant experiences, but that’s all part of the experience of life.

‘‘If you consciously try to stay away from horror movies, crime novels or violence on the news, you are cutting yourself off from a large part of real life. The role of death in life.”

Johnston argues that there’s nothing unhealthy about reading about the darker aspects of the human condition, as it can act as a release.

‘‘I do think crime writers have some responsibility in what they write, but when people read novels, they are capable of accepting that, while it may be a reflection of society, it’s not the real world,” he says.

‘‘Violence can also be entertaining in a dark way. I’m sure many people will remember seeing the movie Pulp Fiction in the cinema - the part where they accidentally shoot the guy in the car - everybody laughs. I’ve seen it since and I still laughed.

‘‘Sure it’s violent and revolting, but it’s also funny.”

Johnston has setout to deliberately write a commercial novel in The Death List and is unapologetic about the appeal of his books and their place in the publishing world.

‘‘I certainly don’t have a problem with the idea of commercial writing, but many people do, particularly in the world of literature.

‘‘Crime writers tend to be fairly down to earth types, because at the end of the day you’re trying to sell books and I’ve never understood why anyone would write a book if they didn’t want it to be popular and sell.

‘‘This was a deliberate attempt to write a page turner - I like reading page turners - but it’s not the easiest thing to do.

‘‘People tend to be dismissive of popular authors like James Patterson as if their commercial appeal makes them lesser writers, but in fact writing this kind of fast-paced book is difficult.”

The publishing world has been both cruel and kind to Johnston.

On one hand, he’s had eight other books published, has won awards for his writing and was able to turn professional after just his second novel.

On the other hand, he wrote three full books before being published for the first time in 1997 and, before The Death List, he was dropped by his publisher.

‘‘In my case, the reason was that my editor left the publishing house I was signed to and suddenly there was nobody in-house to champion my work. Understandably, everyone else just looks at the bottom line.”

Having worked in business in the past, the author says he can see why publishers would question the wisdom of keeping him on board, but believes there are other ways to deal with the issue rather than just dumping the author.

Johnston feels it would be better for the industry if publishers put more time into fostering talent and advising writers who aren’t hitting the mark on how to tweak their work.

‘‘I think this is a journey that all writers have to undertake at some stage,” he says.

‘‘Ian Rankin is a case in point - he’s a successful writer, but was close to being dropped in 1997; about a week later he won the Golden Dagger and since then his career has been in permanent lift-off.”

According to Johnston, publishing companies have decided not to build authors in the way they did in the past.

‘‘In literary fiction it’s not so bad - if they see someone at the age of 25 who they think may win the Booker Prize in 15 years’ time, then they probably will support them, but they certainly won’t pay them much, unless it’s obvious Zadie Smith-style material.

‘‘With genre fiction that definitely doesn’t happen. They do the sums on every book.

‘‘From an author or an agent’s perspective, this is simple - potentially any book that’s published can make money.

‘‘Perhaps not much, but people will always sell 3,000 or 5,000 copies.

‘‘Also, generally speaking, most publishing companies write off advances anyway,” says Johnston.

In order to stay published, Johnston says most authors now have to write certain kinds of books.

‘‘That’s where things get sticky, because no genre fiction writer is comfortable with the idea of being told what to write. It might not be an explicit order, but heavy hints are dropped and it’s generally made known to the author that certain types of books will be more welcome than others.

‘‘This doesn’t bother me, because I’ve never understood why an author would want to write books that wouldn’t sell anyway. That’s bonkers.

‘‘I’ve always wanted my books to be as widely read as possible, even if I haven’t always been my own best ally in that.”

Taken from The Sunday Business Post

Review: Blaze, by Richard Bachman

King by another name – and it’s scary too
Blaze. By Richard Bachman, Hodder and Staughton, €17.60.

Review published in The Sunday Business Post, Sunday, June 10, 2007 - Reviewed By Alex Meehan

Love him or hate him, there’s no doubt that Stephen King is among the most important writers to emerge in the last 50 years. His books include some of the best loved stories of modern times such as Carrie, The Shawshank Redemption, Misery, Stand by Me and The Dark Half.

The latest book to come from his word processor is not his most recently written. Blaze is the last of the novels King wrote between 1966 and 1973 under the pseudonym Richard Bachman.

At the time, it was widely believed that an author could only expect to sell one book a year, so King came up with an alter-ego to get around the restriction and Bachman was the result.

Written in 1973, Blaze was completed just before his smash hit Carrie, and then binned without being shown to publishers. Thirty-four years later, it has been pulled from the back of a filing cabinet, lightly rewritten and dusted off for a 2007 release.

King writes about the darker underbelly of life, about fractured and broken characters living seedy lives in stark contrast to ordinary decent folks. He is best known as a horror writer, but really he’s a character writer beyond compare. He can use a single sentence to suggest a fully formed character in a way that lesser thriller writers can only aspire to.

Blaze is one such book with one such character. Clayton Blaisdell Junior is the criminal antihero, a mentally handicapped giant of a man who struggles to make sense of the world.

The story jumps between two distinct narratives. In the backstory, the young Blaze is beaten by his violent alcoholic father and thrown repeatedly down the stairs, resulting in brain damage and a fist-sized dent in his forehead.

He is taken into care and struggles to find his way in the world until a chance encounter introduces him to George, a small-time hustler who becomes Blaze’s best friend and the brains behind a prolific partnership in short cons and petty crime.

Blaze depends heavily on George to keep the capers coming and the law at bay. George is tiring of his hand-to-mouth existence, though, and wants the pair to move from short cons - confidence tricks and department store scams - to a long con - a big league crime that will pay big bucks.

In the main narrative though, we discover that George is dead, following a knife fight, yet confusingly, he continues to play a role in Blaze’s life - he talks to him, goads him and encourages him to follow through their one last caper. This time, Blaze is to kidnap the infant son of a wealthy local businessman and demand a US$1 million ransom.

Is George really dead? Is he a ghost haunting Blaze from beyond the grave? Is Blaze imagining his voice? It is a Stephen King novel, so it’s hard to say and that’s half the fun. Blaze is classic King - a gripping story well told. In most crime novels, the tension is created as a clever criminal eludes capture and a clever detective pursues him.

Here though, the tension is built not from wondering how Blaze will be caught, but wondering how much longer somebody this stupid can evade capture?

Blaze is a sad case - his is truly a hard luck story, but it is very hard to feel sympathy for him. His humanity shines through when he starts to fall for the kidnapped baby Joe, but not for long and it’s not hard to predict where this car crash of a story is going to end up.

King killed off Richard Bachman in 1985,when too many people knew his real identity. He put out a press release announcing the death of the author from ‘‘cancer of the pseudonym’’, but when you’re a writer as prolific and successful as this one, then even 30-year-old literary cast-offs beat the pants off other writers’ best work.

(Taken from http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2007/06/10/story24157.asp)

Review: An Iron Rose, by Peter Temple

Hard-boiled thriller with an Australian accent
An Iron Rose, by Peter Temple
Review published in the Sunday Business Post, May 27, 2007 - Reviewed by Alex Meehan

It’s not often you come across a detective novel set in Melbourne, and rarer still that it’s quite so good as Peter Temple’s An Iron Rose. When MacArthur John Faraday’s best friend Ned is found hanged, the police and surrounding community make the reasonable assumption he committed suicide. But ex-cop turned blacksmith Faraday is far from convinced, and nagging doubts make him think all is not as it seems, and if it wasn’t suicide, then it must have been murder.

Faraday has thrown in his big city ways, moved to the country and opened a forge. He sinks pints in the local pub, chats to the locals and even togs out for the local footie team, but leaving behind his dark and violent past as a detective senior sergeant in the Australian Federal Police is not as easy as all that.

Clearing out Ned’s house after the funeral, Faraday discovers press clippings from the 1980s about the skeleton of a girl found down an abandoned mine shaft. Why is Ned concerned and what drew him to repeatedly visit the Kinross Hall detention centre for juvenile girls?

Is it possible that Ned himself may have been responsible for string of killings of teenage girls? As Faraday progresses through his investigation, more murders occur, this time to people he’s interviewed. The story heats up as Faraday sets out to find the truth and draws sinister forces down on himself in the process.

An Iron Rose is a stylish thriller written in the first person and chock full of local Australian colour. The characters speak in gruff, truncated sentences and are fond of black humour - they play out their roles in a harsh environment with a worldly sense of irreverence. This is an accomplished novel from a writer who is a name to be reckoned with in his home country.

A heavyweight crime writer, Peter Temple is an ex-journalist who occupies an Ian Rankinesque position in the Australian fiction charts. He is best known for his series of detective novels featuring disgraced lawyer and gambling addict Jack Irish and has won a record five Ned Kelly awards for excellence in Australian crime writing.

An Iron Rose is a time-out for him, a standalone crime thriller separate from the franchise that has made him a household name down under. Temple’s success is based on the simple premise that Australia has its own people, vernacular language, culture and personality, so why shouldn’t that be reflected in its fiction? Iron Rose features well drawn characters in atypical settings that challenge the genre well.

Interestingly, this book was first published in 1998, but is only now available in this part of the world. Despite the size of the Australian market, it has been historically difficult for successful authors to break out and find audiences in Europe and the US.

Publishers have apparently felt that Australian slang and culture would be too difficult for audiences used to US and British-based detectives to take to heart. Based on An Iron Rose, that may soon be a myth exploded. Just in time for the summer season, this is an ideal beach or poolside read - it’s engaging, entertaining and interesting without requiring too much from the reader.

Review: Hellfire by Mia Gallagher

Powerful story of hope and heroin
Published Sunday, September 10, 2006 - Reviewed by Alex Meehan
Hellfire, by Mia Gallagher, Penguin Ireland, €19.10.

As any writer knows, the problem with writing about inner city heroin addicts is that it’s hard to make a lying, thieving, violent scumbag your main character and still ask your reader to like them and care what happens to them.

The thing is though, smack addicts are real people with hopes and dreams and aspirations, and in Mia Gallagher’s Hellfire, the lead character shows how good people can come to do bad things.

Much of Hellfire is concerned with how an innocent 15-year-old girl messes her life up with drugs, how she is influenced by those around her and how she sets out to take revenge on those who led her down the path she is now on.

The book takes its name from the infamous Hellfire Club, the hunting lodge in the Dublin Mountains behind Rathfarnham which was reputedly the site of satanic rituals and 17th-century debauchery presided over by the infamous Buck Whaley.

In Gallagher’s debut novel, the Hellfire Club is also the name of a teenage gang, a group of kids from Dublin’s north inner city obsessed with drugs and the occult in late 1980s Ireland.

At the centre of the group is Lucy Dolan, a streetwise teenager with a talent for reading tarot cards. For most of the book, Lucy is 15 years old and living with her dysfunctional family, which has been shattered by drugs, poverty and marital break-up.

She lives with her aging fortune teller granny and her street trader Mam, but the Dolan house is not a happy home - Lucy’s brother Micko is a heroin addict while her dad, the once dapper mod, Jimmy Marconi, is no longer on the scene.

The story starts in 2003. The adult Lucy has just been released from jail and is trying to make sense of her troubled life and the need she feels to confront her nemesis, Naylor, the two-bit gangster who introduced her to heroin.

Over the course of the story we see her degenerate into drug-fuelled desperation and insanity, before she comes out the other side, haunted by her memories of a night spent at the Hellfire Club.

A first person narrative delivered by Lucy to Naylor, Hellfire is written entirely in a Dublin dialect that takes some getting used to. Few books are written in this manner and with good reason: first person narratives restrict the writer enormously in that they can describe only what their lead character experiences or remembers.

This makes it hard to describe the world the story is taking place in and, as a result, first person novels can feel shallow and unfulfilling.

However, Hellfire is the exception that proves the rule and the first person narrative works well. It emphasises the restricted viewpoint of a character that lives in a small world, that of Dublin’s north inner city. Lucy has trouble relating to the potential for normality that exists beyond it.

Overall, this is a remarkable debut novel. The writing is lively and lyrical, the story exciting and startlingly original and the characters well drawn and engaging.

Hellfire is a dark book, but reading it is not a dark experience. The main character is a teenager with all the optimism that goes with early adulthood. Lucy is streetwise but naive, brave but afraid, all at the same time.

Her world is an invigorating place in which to spend time, but her descent into heroin addiction and psychosis is all the more upsetting because, by that stage of the book, we know Lucy well and believe bad things shouldn’t happen to girls like this.

The hell of the addict’s existence is rendered normal through Lucy’s eyes and it is horrible to witness. That we care so much speaks highly of a character drawn well with a believable narrative. This book could have been about the ugliness of heroin but instead it’s about the beauty of hope.

The only minor criticism that needs to be levelled at Hellfire regards its pacing: this is a whopper of a book, even more so when you consider it is a first effort. It clocks in at 660 pages but the first 150 could easily have been cut to make for a more energetic read.

This first section of the book deals with Lucy’s early childhood, her family and her relationship with her influential grandmother and absent father. It is beautifully written and a great introduction to the world in which the novel takes place but not a huge amount happens that is relevant to the story itself. However, when the story really gets going, it’s a page-turner.

Review: Innocent when you dream

Innocent When You Dream: Tom Waits: The Collected Interviews, edited by Mac Montandon, Orion Books, €21.90.
(By Alex Meehan, Published Sunday, February 26, 2006 in The Sunday Business Post)

Listening to Tom Waits’ music has the ability to make you feel cooler than you actually are. Innocent When You Dream, a selection of the many interviews that Waits has given over the years, sees Mac Montandon take us inside the world of one of America’s most enigmatic songwriters.

Waits’ music is keenly observed and often bizarre, but never boring. He is best known for his distinctive baritone foghorn voice and for his penchant for utilising debris he’s found in junkyards as percussive instruments on his records. He’s a rarity in the modern musical mix: a clever man who plays interesting music, isn’t afraid to use his intellect and is genuinely amusing.

This is the same guy who, when questioned about his on-air drinking, retorted to a disapproving TV interviewer: ‘‘I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.” In 1977, he remarked: ‘‘I’ve never met anyone who made it with a chick because they own a Tom Waits album. I’ve got all three, and it’s never helped me.”

His eventful career has spanned three decades, and Innocent When You Dream is a record of that time, albeit through the filtered pages of his collected interviews. With a foreword from Pixies frontman Frank Black and contributions culled from the pages of Newsweek, Zig Zag, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and the NME, this is what life looks like from the other side of the interviewer’s notebook.

The book is split into three parts with interviews covering different sections of his career, interspersed with the odd poetic contribution from Charles Bukowski and contributions from famous fans like Elvis Costello.

Part One covers the 1970s and the first stage of Waits’ career. This Waits is heavily influenced by the Beat movement and Jack Kerouac and his music shares the limelight with his swaggering, hard-drinkin’, hard-smokin’ crooner persona.

In Part Two, Waits’ marriage to songwriting partner Kathleen Brennan - a script editor he met while working on his acting career - takes centre stage, along with three of his most significant albums: Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Frank’s Wild Years. Waits has now calmed down somewhat, to the extent that he has even given up the booze.

By Part Three, the interviews become increasingly entertaining, if less revealing, as Waits has adopted the media management technique of answering interviewers’ questions with interesting facts he has amassed in his notebook about the natural world.

A book like Innocent When You Dream is aimed at the fanatical Waits fan, but arguably there isn’t any other kind. You either love the guy, haven’t heard of him or just don’t get it. Waits is an enigmatic figure, the Hunter S Thompson of music, and he’s purposefully constructed an impenetrable persona about himself.

While we don’t get to find out too much about him in the book - Brennan, his songwriting partner and muse, remains hidden throughout - we do get to trace the development of Tom Waits’ thought processes as he grows older.

In the first interview, he’s a 24-year-old wild man, a barely housetrained musical hobo sitting nervously in the corner, but by the end of the book, he’s a settled fifty-something with a wife and kids.

Intriguingly, he has retained his dangerous edge for all this time. As a book, Innocent When You Dream is a middling effort, but that largely couldn’t be helped. Waits is an entertaining subject, with a well known penchant for lying through his teeth in interviews.

He is incredibly witty, but has a tendency to repeat his bons mots to sequential interviewers. So, combine the entertaining falsehoods with witty comebacks and the ubiquitous background material, and soon you start feeling like you might have read this bit before.

That said, in some ways, this is the book’s strongest point. No official autobiography of Waits exists, so this is as close as you’ll get to one. The interviews collected in Innocent When You Dream form a record of his career, music and personal life from 1974 through to 2004.

If nothing else, it’s an illuminating record of what it must be like to have to deal with the media from Waits’ perspective, or, as he puts it: ‘‘I deal with the media exactly the same way I deal with the cops - nervously.”

Review: Samurai William by Giles Milton

Review: Samurai William by Giles Milton
(Review published Sunday, June 09, 2002, reviewed by Alex Meehan)

In 1598, an English man named William Adams set sail for Japan as pilot of a Dutch expedition with five ships and 100 men. Lured by the thought of lucrative silk and spice trades, the Europeans hoped to make their fortune and return with enough cash to secure their futures.

However the journey proved extremely difficult, and when Adams eventually landed in Japan in 1600 after 20 months at sea, four ships had been lost and just 24 crew had survived. Those that did make it were suffering from scurvy and dysentery — only six could stand and several died the week after they arrived.

Giles Milton’s Samurai William is the story of this epic voyage to Japan and the subsequent events that took place during Adams’s 20-year stay in the country, with a special focus on his spectacular rise in stature in the court of the feudal Shogun, or ruler of Japan, Lord Tokugawa Ieyasu.

Milton’s account of the trip makes for unsettling reading. Sailors of this period did not yet know that fresh fruit prevented scurvy, and so many died painfully on long sea journeys.

Standard rations consisted of salted meat and biscuits which were frequently infested with weevils. This was bulked up with whatever fresh food could be gathered en route, although boiled rats and mice also featured when stores ran low.

In 1600, there were no reliable maps of the Pacific and the Far East, and navigational techniques were still extremely rudimentary. As a result, the route taken by Adams’s expedition involved sailing down the coast of Africa, across the Atlantic, through the Magellan Straits and across the Pacific to Hawaii before finally reaching Japan.

Europeans had arrived in Japan some time previously — most notably Jesuit missionaries intent on converting the natives to Catholicism. The Jesuits had told the ruling Shogun that all of Europe was united in Roman Catholicism under the authority of the Pope, and that all rulers in Europe deferred to him.

Needless to say, the priests weren’t too impressed when the Dutch and English Protestants aboard Adams’s boat arrived, and tried to have them crucified. But Shogun Ieyasu was intrigued by the tales of political division which Adams told, and invited him to court to educate him in European politics as well as shipbuilding and navigational techniques.

Much to the displeasure of the religious orders in Japan, Adams rose in stature to become a trusted confidant of Ieyesu and he was eventually honoured with the title of Samurai and Hatamoto, or Lord, complete with country estate and retainers.

After 13 years as the only Englishman in Japan, Adams was longing for the company of his countrymen. But he was horrified when the next batch of English seamen eventually arrived — he thought them smelly, bad mannered and uncouth; they in turn thought Adams had gone native.

He had adopted the local customs of bathing daily, as well as washing and oiling his hair. He dressed in silk kimonos, had a large retinue of servants and carried the signature daisho, or twin swords, of the Japanese ruling samurai class. Most shockingly, he had married and had children by a local Lord’s daughter, despite having a wife and daughter back home in London.

By contrast the newcomers had been on a ship for two years without a wash, had lived on rats, were suffering from scurvy and were intent on boozing and whoring once they hit dry land.

While Milton’s book purports to be about William Adams, it would probably be more accurate to describe it as an intensely readable account of the first trading missions to Japan.

Much space is given to documenting other voyages to the region at the time, key among them the Dutch East India Company’s efforts to establish trading bases around the Far East.

Much of the book is constructed from the records and logs left by the sea captains and pilots of the day, and so also provides an intriguing insight into the workings of feudal Japan and the attitudes of European travellers to this unique island nation.

Adams’s story was the inspiration for James Clavell’s epic novel Shogun, and the subsequent 1970s TV series of the same name starring Richard Chamberlain. It’s easy to see why, as it is a fascinating tale.

Giles Milton has managed to provide a complex history lesson in the form of an engaging narrative. Anyone interested in the mysteries of the East or in the cultural make-up of the inscrutable Japanese will find this an engaging read.

Review: Prey by Michael Crichton

Prey by Michael Crichton, Harper Collins, €17.35
(Review published Sunday, January 12, 2003, The Sunday Business Post, review by Alex Meehan.)

When Jurassic Park became one of the biggest hits of the 1990s, scientists bemoaned the fact that the story’s nightmare scenario of the return of the dinosaurs set back the image of genetic engineering by ten years.

With Michael Crichton’s latest techno-thriller, Prey, those in the know are already levelling the same accusations. The plot follows a tried and trusted Crichton formula — meddling scientists have opened a technological can of worms in the misguided pursuit of profit.

This time however, instead of giant dinosaurs running amok, microscopic nanotechnology robots have escaped from a secure research laboratory in the Nevada desert and are threatening to engulf the world.

The story centres on an out-of-work Silicon Valley programmer, Jack Forman, and begins by detailing his marital difficulties with wife Julia. She works for the mysterious Xymos Corporation, and has started putting in odd hours.

Jack suspects she is having an affair and so jumps at the chance to work for Xymos himself, troubleshooting a state of the art computer system using software he originally helped design.

The meat of the story takes place at the Xymos facility in the remote desert, where it emerges that ground-breaking research into the use of nanotechnology to create remote controlled spy technology has gone horribly wrong.

Millions of microscopic nanobots have escaped the facility and are lying in wait for their creators outside the safety of the lab. Jack, along with the usual mix of scientist types, is trapped inside and is faced with the problem of killing off the nanobots before it’s too late.

Nanotechnology is still in its infancy as a technology, but the premise is that machines can be made so small that they could, for example, be used inside the human body for medical purposes.

Prey explores the idea that such atom-sized machines could be controlled using computer software, replicating the characteristics of animals, most notably predators and prey.

But the nanobots in Prey start to reproduce like bacteria and create man-sized swarms, and also develop the ability to evolve. The swarms appear and disappear at will and can float through keyholes and under doors, but most worrying of all is that they start to eat living things in order to reproduce.

For Jack Forman, a potential solution comes in the form of interpreting the programming behind the techno-bugs. They act like animals, so if you know how animals act you can fool the swarm. At least for a while.

Prey isn’t an awful read, it’s just not as good as you expect from someone like Crichton. It has its high points — his descriptions of characters working against the clock help to build tension, while the plot development at the beginning is well handled.

But the characters are mostly one-dimensional stereotypes with little engaging depth. Lengthy sections recall phone conversations and most of the time the plot is as transparent as a mediocre airport novel.

In addition, large tracts of text are given over to lengthy explanations of the technology involved in this type of research, as well as the philosophical implications of its use. While this is a clunky technique that interrupts the flow of the book, it has also left Crichton open to criticism for other reasons.

The specialist website Nanotechnology Now said in its review of Prey that the science was “not just wrong, it’s stupid”.

This would be forgivable in the name of a good plot, but sadly Prey does not read like the latest offering of an experienced and extremely successful author. It would make a fine lightweight holiday read, but don’t expect to be blown away.

Interestingly, the movie version of this book is already in pre-production and should be in cinemas by 2004. Unlike Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs though, swarms of semi-invisible nanobots don’t immediately spring to mind as ideal silver screen baddies.

Dalkey fears goats starved to death

While researching a story today, I fell victim to the narcissistic temptation to search for myself on the net (my name that is, not a sense of spiritual purpose) and one of the responses was this story - this is the first piece I had published in 1996 as paid journalism.

Ahh, the good old days, when the Irish Times would let me past the front desk!

 

Dalkey fears goats starved to death
By ALEX MEEHAN

EFFORTS are under way to determine the cause of the death of 20 goats on Dalkey Island, Co Dublin, amid suspicions that they have starved.

Only a male and a female remain of the historic herd that first started grazing on the island more than 200 years ago.

A vet attached to Dun Laoghaire/Rathdown council believes the animals were probably killed by an infection, according to Mr Donal O’Neill, senior administrative officer with Dun Laoghaire parks department.

But there is local speculation that the goat herd may have starved to death. “It was a very dry summer last year, and there isn’t much vegetation on the island,” one local man said. “There are also a lot of rabbits and birds. A herd of 22 goats is quite a strain on an island that small. I think they starved to death.”

According to local people, the goats were being kept alive by sympathisers sailing out and leaving hay on the island.

The council says that, because the goats are wild, they were left to themselves more or less. “Some of them have died, yes. We have a vet that goes over every fortnight and he was there last week and they were fine. Some had died of natural causes, like old age, but that’s normal,” said Mr O’Neill.

A diver swimming in the area earlier this week reported seeing the bodies of several dead goats floating in the water.

“When this was reported, we sent the vet over again to check and most of the goats were dead. There are two left, a male and a female,” said Mr O’Neill.

A council vet has taken samples from the dead animals for analysis. It has no plans to introduce more goats to the island.

Ms Therese Cunningham, of the Dublin Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, said she was distressed and concerned about the deaths.

“The goats have been a feature of Dalkey’s heritage for many years.

The goats have been on the island since the Martello tower was built in Napoleonic times. They were originally put there to provide milk for soldiers garrisoned at the tower.

Taken from http://www.ireland.com . . .

Cars and money

I’m researching a story and just came across this factoid:

In 2006 in Ireland, 736 Jaguars, 344 Porsches, 140 Lamborghinis, 52 Bentleys and 30 Ferraris were registered.

Isn’t that bizarre in a country with a population of less than four and a half million people. What a waste of cash. (Not that I wouldn’t say no to the right Ferrari, but I certainly wouldn’t pay for a new one, even if hypothetically I somehow managed to lay my hands on that much cash.)

Book review: The Pilo Family Circus

Laughs mixed with terror

The Pilo Family Circus, by Will Elliott, Quercus, €16.15.
Published Sunday, February 25, 2007 - The Sunday Business Post

Reviewed by Alex Meehan

For most people, a trip to the circus is fun, a chance to escape to a shiny, happy place full of smiles and laughter. Not for Jamie though - for him the circus will never be the same again.

At the start of The Pilo Family Circus, Jamie is a twenty-something Aussie living in a shared house with not much to show for his life - no girlfriend, no job, and not much in the way of a backbone. All that changes when he accidentally stumbles across a trio of clowns up to no good late one night in a Brisbane suburb.

Stalked, harassed and finally auditioned against his will, Jamie is carried off by psycho clown Gonko and his sidekicks Goshy and Doopy of the Pilo Family Circus. It turns out that the Pilos are recruiting and whether he likes it or not, Jamie has been chosen as their newest clown.

But Pilo’s is no ordinary circus and these are no ordinary clowns. Presided over by the demonic Kurt and George, the circus functions as staging point between hell and the real world, existing in a netherworld into which unsuspecting members of the public are lured to be harvested. The clowns play a lead role, with their ultra-violent performances and viciously dark and twisted humour. Elsewhere in the circus, dwarves, acrobats, fortune tellers and magicians lie in wait for the nightly ‘tricks’ to wander in from the outside world.

Initially, Jamie is shocked and stunned by the hellish nature of the circus, and he scrapes by on terror and adrenaline as he learns his new role and how to avoid the monstrous and grotesque freaks that populate the fairground.

The story takes a twist when Jamie gets made up with magic face paint that turns him into his alter-ego - JJ the Clown.

JJ takes to his new role with gusto, becoming the most enthusiastically psychotic clown of all, and the stage is set for an epic battle as Jamie and JJ’s split personalities struggle for supremacy. The plot takes side diversions into inter-circus rivalries, as the clowns attempt to take out the acrobats and finally shut a meddling fortune teller down, but essentially Jamie’s story is of his struggle to come to terms with JJ’s actions and his attempt to escape the circus.

Meanwhile, we get to explore just exactly what makes up a clown. In the real world, clowns are the children’s favourite - most people see them as delightful, whimsical entertainers, but there’s a shadowy side, and many others see them as deeply sinister perversions, with their grotesque painted faces and comedy footwear.

Needless to say JJ the clown, along with head clown Gonzo and the others at the Pilo Family Circus owe a lot more to Pennywise the Clown from Stephen King’s IT than they do to the children’s favourite Bobo or even the Simpson’s Krusty.

There is a spark of originality here and the story drives itself along well, while also heavily referencing the kinds of worlds loved by Terry Pratchett and Stephen King.

There is also a healthy dose of The League of Gentlemen - take the wrong path at The Pilo Family Circus and you could easily bump into Papa Lazarou lurking down a dark alley. However, this is essentially a light-hearted book. There is an anarchic joy to be taken in the twisted humour and The Pilo Family Circus is escapist in the literal meaning of the word.

It manages to be edgy while also being genuinely funny and scary without descending into the cliches of the horror genre.

As a debut, this is outstanding: well conceived and well written. The Pilo Family Circus is certainly worth a visit, but hang on to your candy floss - the ride can get bumpy.

Taken from The Sunday Business Post