Words and images: the creative world of Neil Jordan

Neil Jordan: Works for the Page, by Val Nolan Jr. (Cork University Press, €39.00 / £35.00)

Neil Jordan’s career as an artist has been a curious one. He started, as so many writers do, by publishing a slim book with a short-lived and long vanished Irish publisher. But then a period of time working for the film director John Boorman, principally in shooting a documentary on the making of one of Boorman’s own films, transferred his vivid talents into a new medium, in which he has evolved as one of the most remarkable directors to come out of Ireland, and has achieved an international reputation.

However Val Nolan, an Irish academic currently based in Wales, who has several studies of Irish writing to his credit (and a foray into science fiction) thinks that the initial creations in prose by Neil Jordan should not be forgotten. Especially as he has returned to prose fiction in more recent days.

Irish culture

This book ought to be read by anyone interested in the evolution of modern Irish culture which has taken directions unimaginable back in the 1960s.  Val Nolan, so to speak, catches a literary imagination in full flight towards an unknown destination. But now that slim volume of his youth has been reissued in the new century, and will it seems survive, but now as a work of the imagination by the acclaimed director of that bravura film Michael Collins.