Some Summer Reading... "Winterland"

I liked "Winterland" so well I bought a copy for a friend recently.

The sense of place, where you can feel that Dublin is a thriving city, is very impressively
described and the aesthetic link with Joyce's Sandymount Strand at the end is hard to miss.

Alan Glynn has captured the dislocations between private and public life in a brave new
Republic where citizens struggle to make lives and ends meet. Anybody who has ever been
hospitalised in Ireland will enjoy the sheer surrealism of the struggles between patient and
institution towards the end of the book. I have to admit I laughed out loud several times as
I was suddenly brought to a grisly realisation of how visceral Irish hospital life can be.


I have to admit to a bout of total cowardice when it came to the pages where thuggish gentlemen
meet in an isolated building on the edge of the city. Fast foward several pages and
it is unlikely that I will ever read them.

I watched "The General" on television again at the weekend and switched channel whenever
the action became too painful. This opens up the question about who mostly reads thrillers
and crime fiction, a question that is being discussed on many blogs at the moment. While reading groups,
mostly frequented by ladies of leisure, are quick to choose fashionable titles to analyse, many readers
admit to jumping pages when violence raises its many heads.

This has left me wondering if squeamishness is genetic or learned. If I ever come to a full explanation on this, I'll be certain to share it here...