Some of our regular reviewers select the book or books they most enjoyed or were impressed by over the course of the last year…
TJ Morrissey SJ
The most interesting book of the year for me was Paul: A Biography, by Tom Wright (SPCK Publishing, £19.99). The author is recognised as one of St Paul’s greatest living interpreters.
He brings Paul to life, clarifies his letters, and sets him in the complex array of Jewish and non-Jewish communities within the Roman Empire from Tarsus to Jerusalem, Damascus, Tarsus again, and countless journeys to numerous places before coming to Rome and still hoping to go on to Spain, the limit of the known world.
The author explores the ten years Paul spent in his home town of Tarsus, following his vision of Jesus on the road to Damascus, and explores the significance of those years for his future teaching. The highs and lows in Paul’s life are explored, especially his time of doubt while in prison in Ephesus when many of his Corinthian Christians as well as those in Ephesus turned against him and made him question if all his teaching had been mistaken and vain. He eventually found peace when he came to realise after much prayer and pain that just as Jesus’ testimony came with suffering, so, too, his message to the world comes with suffering.
Paul’s Christian message spread with remarkable rapidity, attracting people by its assurance that the death and resurrection of Christ brings forgiveness for all peoples, Gentiles as well as Jews. One could go on… This is a rich and well-written book, a book for reflection as well as for reading.
Frank Litton
Francoi Manni’s excellent study of the writings of Herbert McCabe, Herbert McCabe: Recollecting a fragmented legacy (Cascade Books, £30.00), which I read with growing admiration this year, makes it clear that he belongs to the top rank of Twentieth Century English-speaking philosophers and theologians.
Fr McCabe did not win his reputation with learned monographs accessible only to academics. He gave talks and preached sermons. Dr Manni prompted me to return to an earlier collection of these, God Matters (published in 1987 and still in print). What an inspiring read – his sharp intellect and wide learning elucidate complex theological truths and related philosophical issues.
J. Anthony Gaughan
There is nothing more ridiculous than to judge the past by the social standards of the present. Hence it is regrettable that Flannery O’Connor, the renowned American Catholic writer, has become a victim of the latter-day culture neo-Puritans in the US.
Her crime was that she resided at a time in a place where, notwithstanding her objections to it, discrimination against black people was socially acceptable and practised.
The dishonour which has been done to the memory of Ms O’Connor is unjust. It is also misplaced for another reason. At the heart of much of her writing there is ever a redemptive theme. No matter how racist and devoid of moral compass her characters are, there is always a hint that human decency will ultimately prevail.
This is portrayed skilfully by Lorraine V. Murray in her splendid biography: The Abbess of Andalusia: Flannery O’Connor’s Spiritual Journey (St Benedict Press, 2009)
John F. Deane
Of the books I most appreciated this year, I must mention, firstly, the new and wonderfully lyrical poems by Padraig J. Daly, A Small Psalter. But the book that stirred my own imagination this year is the biography of an exciting, challenging and Catholic composer, The Life of Messiaen, by Christopher Dingle (Cambridge University Press, £59.00)
Olivier Messiaen died in 1992, having survived part of World War II in a Nazi camp, where he composed and performed some of his music. The book is lucid, precise and eminently readable, outlining the life and giving clues to what is a body of music unique and precious, music that focuses on Christian beliefs such as the Eucharist and the Christ-Child, and presenting the most unusual, uplifting homage to bird-song in much of the work.
❛❛He brings Paul to life, clarifies his letters, and sets him in the complex array of Jewish and non-Jewish communities within the Roman Empire”
Gabriel Fitzmaurice
The book I enjoyed most this year was A Ghost in the Throat by the poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa (Tramp Press, €16.00), it is a loving account of her personal and poetic engagement with the experiences and imagination of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, whose lament for her murdered husband, composed after 1773, Ms Ní Ghríofa here brilliantly translates into English.
Washing Up, Derek Mahon’s final collection published posthumously by Gallery Press is a thing of beauty, a joy forever. Technically and formally flawless, his poems range from the celebratory, to the contemporary, to the radically political and conclude with a memorable tribute to our poet-president Michael D. Higgins.
And finally, The Catholic Writer Today (Wiseblood Books) by American poet Dana Gioia is an invaluable collection of profound and lucid meditations on Catholicism in contemporary culture and the Catholic literary tradition.
Desmond Egan
Early in the year, coming to know of my interest in Gabriel Marcel (1883-1973), whom I once had the privilege of hearing lecture, the distinguished Marcel scholar and editor of the Gabriel Marcel Journal, Prof. Brendan Sweetman prompted me to write about that experience.
His A Gabriel Marcel Reader (St Augustine Press, £18.27) is a valuable compendium of Marcel’s thinking, with its central emphasis on the uniqueness of individual experience without abandoning (as Sartre and others did) the need for core value.
This approach made Marcel reject the description of himself as an ‘existentialist’ even as he addressed basic human problems in the context of modern post-war questioning of the existence of an objective moral code. Importantly for me, Marcel does so as a committed Catholic.
Presence is mystery in the exact measure in which it is presence, he insists. It leads him to the insight that “Artistic creation…excludes the act of self-centring and self-hypnosis which is, ontologically speaking, pure negation”. How much contemporary ‘poetry’ falls under such examination.
His writings are filled with such relevant insights. Marcel also points out that atheism has been progressively replaced by an anti-theism, whose mainspring is the will that God should not be. Always, he emphasises the concreteness of living and mistrusts any philosophising which is not grounded in experience. This seems to me fundamentally important.
Ian d’Alton
One never wholly understands John Banville. Is he laughing with us, or at us? I really don’t know. But what I do know is that this whodunnit-cum-police-procedural, Snow (Faber &Faber, £14.99), works on all sorts of levels.
It’s 1957 Ireland, in Mr Banville’s formative decade. A priest is brutally murdered. The police must get involved. The twist is to have the murder take place in a Wexford country mansion cut off by a snowfall, a Protestant house full of the eccentric relics of ‘ouldacency’.
‘The body is in the library’ indeed! So far, so Agatha Christie. But Mr Banville injects a shot of dissonance: the investigating Garda inspector is also of horse-Protestant stock.
This is not just a classic detective novel but, through its characterisation and sense of place, a commentary on the Ireland of its time. The Catholic Church is at the apogee of its power. Archbishop John Charles McQuaid glides through Mr Banville’s pages, manipulating and managing the scandal, with the Protestant policeman tip-toeing through the minefield.
This wonderfully written novel is ultimately about the quirks of the human condition. And in that, it resonates with all of us.
Teresa Whitington
I most enjoyed Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence (Fitzcarraldo Editions, £10.99)
Each of the essays in this collection is inspired by a single sentence, and explores that sentence as an exemplar of its original author’s literary sensibility and vocation.
Brian Dillon, already an accomplished essayist, classifies this latest project as an exercise in ‘slow reading’. In each of the 27 essays, Mr Dillon both enacts a moment of reading and slows that moment down by attentive description – of the language used and the lived experience it represents.
Mr Dillon made his selection of sentences from notebooks he has compiled over years of dedicated, reflective reading. The 27 authors chosen range from the canonical to the contemporary. We get fresh perspectives on all.
Joe Carroll
Minor Monuments: Essays, by Ian Maleney (Tramp Press, €15.00)
Ian Maleney grew up beside the great Bog of Allen, not far from the Shannon and Clonmacnoise. He escaped to become a sound engineer in Dublin. But to his surprise he found he was increasingly drawn back to the bog at Boora and began recording its noises and silences. Part of his book is a meditation on the mysteries of silence.
While he was doing this, his grandfather, John Joe, who with his wife had helped rear him was entering deeper into dementia. As the old man lost his memory, the sound engineer found he was recalling how John Joe had been more important in his younger life than he had realised.
He calls the 12 chapters of his book ‘essays’: not classroom essays, but strivings after what this experience means. Can it be universalised? Can what seems like an empty, endless bog hold the secret to what life is really about?
As he commutes between bog and city, doing his turns at minding the increasingly frail John Joe, the writer also finds a link with Seamus Heaney whose poetry sometimes explored life and death in bogs.
For a first book, the writing seems effortlessly simple. You feel you want to follow this young explorer of life as far as he will let you.
Charles Lysaght
Both my favourite books relate to Fine Gael, a party I could never quite bring myself to join. One is iconoclast Shane Ross’s irreverent, refreshingly self-mocking, highly entertaining memoir In Bed with the Blueshirts (Atlantic Books, £14.99) which gives a unique insight into the process of government, while also laying bare the obstacles he encountered trying to put an end to cronyism and what he believed to be a low standards of conduct when he was an independent minister in a Fine Gael led government between 2016-20.
The other, a scholarly well-written history of Fine Gael by Stephen Collins and Ciara Meehan entitled Saving the State (Gill Books, €25.00), is more positive about the party, stressing its honourable role when the State has been most under threat; to its credit it does not conceal the self-seeking, the intriguing and lack of loyalty that has afflicted the party in the last half-century.
Anthony Redmond
Peadar King is the presenter/producer of RTÉ’s What in the World? In his new book War, Suffering and the Struggle for Human Rights (Liffey Press, €19.95) he relates heart-breaking stories of about 13 different countries affected by war, racism and human misery.
He writes about Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, the Palestinian Territories and Yemen among others. He talks about the sheer cruelty, grief and propaganda involved. He brings home to us the human stories and the unspeakable sadness and sorrow behind these stories.
This is a book that gave me sleepless nights. Peadar King covers so much ground in this utterly riveting, heartrending book.
Mary Kenny
Strange Flowers (Penguin, £12.99) by Donal Ryan begins with a young girl’s disappearance from Tipperary in 1973, and her parents’ bewildered search for her: and what happens five years later, when it becomes something more complex. Mr Ryan has a compellingly lyrical style, and the novel is submerged in spiritual references.
The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity (Bloomsbury Continuum, £9.99) by Douglas Murray brilliantly explains how the destabilisation of our institutions has been brought about by rapid, even instant, social change.
Achill Painters: An Island History (Knockma Publishing, €20), by Mary J. Murphy is a delight. Achill has always attracted painters and writers and exquisite reproductions of art works by such as Mainie Jellett, Marie Howet and Alexandra Van Tuyll, interwoven with narrative text, make this book a treasured gift. (Obtainable from info@charliebyrne.ie)
Christopher Moriarty
A remarkable book by a very remarkable person, Here’s the Story: A Memoir by Mary McAleese provides her own view of a plethora of public events of which she was the centre.
If that were all, it would be valuable work. What makes it so special is her intimate account of growing up in Ardoyne, among other aspects of her life, family and faith.
The revelation that she is an accomplished and compelling writer, with entertaining, and mostly benign, views on a number of very well-known people, would be quite enough to constitute a ‘book of the year’. But there is so much more to it than that.
Rev. Robert Marshall
Anthony Trollope one of the giants of Victorian literature, found himself as a writer during his years in Ireland. His most important work, his series of novels about Barsetshire, was begun while he lived in Donnybrook, then outside Dublin, in the 1850s.
The six Barsetshire novels ought to be read chronologically in order to fully understand the personalities and intricacies involved. The Last Chronicle of Barset (1867) concludes Mr Trollope’s series narrating life in the Victorian cathedral city of Barchester and its shire in the west country of England.
Two chapters, ‘Requiescat in pace’ and ‘In Memoriam’ record the death of Mrs Proudie, the evangelical and managerial spouse behind the public face of her weak Episcopal husband. These chapters are amongst his finest as the bishop and others react to her passing. The book is a wonderful example of a great novelist addressing timeless issues in human life.
Felix M. Larkin
When Joe Biden is sworn in as president of the United States on January 20, he faces the task of restoring the prestige of the presidency. On three previous occasions incoming presidents faced a similar task: Ford after Nixon in 1974; Franklin Roosevelt after Hoover in 1933; and Lincoln after Buchanan in 1861.
The transition from Buchanan to Lincoln is the subject of my favourite book this year: Lincoln on the Verge: Thirteen Days to Washington by Ted Widmer (Simon & Schuster, $35).
For his inauguration, Lincoln had to make his way by train to Washington DC from his home town of Springfield, Illinois. That journey is traced in meticulous detail in Mr Widmer’s book. Given the tensions over slavery that would shortly erupt in civil war, Lincoln’s safety was always in doubt. His route was circuitous, passing through no Southern state.
The journey of 1,900 miles took 13 days. On the way he was hailed by enthusiastic crowds. This short, but vital time, is richly recreated. At Philadelphia, Lincoln exhorted his fellow countrymen to live up to their founding ideals: a call that needs to be heard again.