Θάνατος

Yesterday's post about noir fiction reminded me of why I chose to be a gardener.

The literature of our trade is rich and rooted in the daily existence of every person who breathes and lives on our jolly little blue-green Planet.

It all started in a garden, if the sages of old are to be believed, and while death is acknowledged as inevitable by those who tend the soil, it is part of the order of things and life always returns.

If you ever go to Angers, do not miss a visit to the Tapestries by Jean Lurçat. In one, a single plant struggles to survive in a vastness of post-nuclear fallout... or so it seemed to me.

The joyful colours of life reborn are everywhere in the series.

In this context, I re-opened "Bloodland" by Alan Glynn this morning and tried, yet again, to engage with narrative voice and a very new vocabulary. What is "thanaxite"? Why are the drugs that the characters swallow in seeming handfuls in all the Glynn novels not listed in the Internet's pharmacopoeia?

And the insistence that characters have on getting one another to talk...

Umberto Eco once mentioned in a somewhat lack-lustre talk he gave in UCD, that the search for "Truth" was a particularly Western pre-occupation.

This impulse seems to be in full bloom in the current spate of noir novels that are causing readers to gather in conventions in New York and to compile reading lists for the return to the Reading Groups' coalface as I write.

And "Bloodland", as is beginning to dawn on me, is truly within the canon of Irish literature. Why did Susie die? Jimmy wants to know...

And the talking, the eternal flow of words designed to hide secrets and silence.

In the finest noir style, the book deals many deathly blows along the way. Large Corporations are evicerated, symbolically at least. People are frightened.

"This is how it goes. You get talking to someone, you interact, and it all starts to fall apart."

And it seems, from the vantage point of my little apple orchard, that Mr Glynn does have ways of making his characters talk than are not dreamt of in my philosophy...