Neil Jordan

In an unspecified post-Communist Eastern European city, an English private detective named Jonathan makes a living by taking on assignments from ordinary citizens desperate to find lost loved ones. He lives in the city’s suburbs with his wife Sarah, an archaeologist working at a dig in the city, and their young daughter Jenny. Jonathan and Sarah’s marriage is going badly: the couple is seeing a therapist. In the course of previous investigations, Jonathan has (in unorthodox and highly show more questionable fashion) consulted an elderly psychic named Gertrude, whose advice has proved helpful. Early in the novel Jonathan and his associates Istvan and Frank are approached by a couple from the countryside who, 12 years after she went missing, are still looking for their daughter Petra. They are convinced she disappeared somewhere in the city. But before Jonathan can get the search for Petra underway, as he’s walking near the river one evening, he sees a young woman on the bridge who seems about to jump. He goes to her and tries to talk her down, but she jumps anyway, and he jumps in after her and pulls her to safety. She leads him along the twisting twilit city streets to an apartment, where they dry off, and soon he hears her playing one of Bach’s Suites for Cello. He leaves, and when he arrives home Sarah has the Casals recording of Bach’s Cello Suites on the CD player. From here, the story of Jonathan’s search for Petra and for some measure of peace of mind grows complex and layers mystery upon mystery: the city descends into a state of unrest, he discovers things about Sarah he would rather not know, the conundrums and inexplicable events pile up. Neil Jordan’s writing is brilliantly atmospheric. The unnamed Slavic city where the action takes place remains enticingly out of focus, and one can almost smell the steam rising from the cobblestones as the sun emerges after a sudden rain shower. The Drowned Detective is billed as a crime novel, but Jordan incorporates elements of other genres into an occasionally awkward mix that makes it difficult to place the book in any single category without caveats. The purist reader of detective thrillers will probably be disappointed, perhaps even frustrated. But for anyone who doesn’t mind spending a few hours with a novel that doesn’t necessarily answer all of the questions it poses, The Drowned Detective is not the worst choice you can make. show less

“I know exactly when I died,â€? says Nina Hardy, and she is not speaking metaphorically. Decapitated by her gardener, and shoved into a septic tank, she is emphatically deceased.

Luckily for her, she has had a rich life. And fortunately for the reader, Neil Jordan has decided to tell her haunting tale.

Jordan, the acclaimed film director, is no slouch as a writer, having won Ireland’s Guardian Fiction Prize for his story collection Night in Tunisia in 1979. After a ten-year show more break from publication, concentrating on a film career highlighted by his Oscar-winning movie The Crying Game, among others, he has returned to the page with Shade, an altogether exceptional novel swollen with dreamlike mystery and dread.

Nina is the shade of the title, “a shade of what I was . . . A rumour, a shade within a shadow, a remembrance of a memory, my own.â€? A ghost without purpose other than observation, she traipses back and forth through time, watching her life unfold from childhood, filtering even the most minor of occurrences through the spectre of tragedy.

Rural turn-of-the-century Ireland sets the stage, as Nina and her friends Janie and the hapless George pass the time, playing themselves as characters from Great Expectations, and later, from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. Nina’s ghost plays a part, a mournful presence seen only by Nina’s younger self but adopted by them all as “the symbol, the embodiment of their uniqueness, their fraternity and sorority, their secret language.â€?

Life intrudes, as it must, as George and Nina’s half-brother Gregory find relentless terror on the battlefields of WWI, and Nina begins her adulthood through the sorts of horrors only women can ever experience.

As Shade progresses, travelling from the bloody trenches at Dardanelles to the theatrical stages of England and back again, there are echoes of Canadian author Robert Hilles’ wonderful recent novel A Gradual Ruin. But where Hilles finds a prospect of redemption after senseless brutality, Jordan finds only sadness that infects the soul and alters the consciousness in irreversible ways.

Unlike Alice Sebold’s best-selling, thematically similar novel The Lovely Bones, Jordan has little time for the considerations of an afterlife from the deceased’s point of view. Instead, like his most personal films, Jordan uses the awareness of Nina’s imminent death to examine the undercurrent of conflict that permeates his characters’ lives, the constant possibility of violence that accompanies every gesture.

Justly praised for his sterling cinematic dialogue, it is a joy to discover Jordan wields a poet’s ear for literary description and atmosphere as well. Shade’s lyrical storytelling, with its references to “endless mackerel skyâ€? and rivers of “alluvial flow,â€? is suffused in brooding melancholy; the pages themselves seem submerged in deep shadow.

When the shadow is finally lifted, Jordan’s tale reveals itself to be an exquisitely crafted drama, a flowing Irish ode to impossible loves and the destructive conditions of adulthood. Tragic, moving, surprising, and unforgettable, Shade is a masterful lament to the fragility, and strength, of the self. show less

Aesthetics like you wouldn't believe. Angela Lansbury!!! The opening scene with the sister in the woods is truly creepy with oversized dolls and red-eyed wolves in a classic dark wood - running in the white dress super gothic touch. In the story of the woman who marries the traveling man, it's the wild folk wedding that kicks it off. It's so lush!

It takes us on a toxic masculinity journey. It fails to offer a way out of the "nature" of these wolf/men in the grandmother's tales. Women are show more victim of the men in the stories, even if the men are given some sympathetic "excuses"

I also wondered, is this horror? Then a guy rips his face off at one point, so... yes. show less

2.5 stars

Carnivalesque by Neil Jordan is a story about a boy named Andy who finds himself sucked through a mirror in a carnival’s house of mirrors. His reflection enters the real world and goes home with his parents, leaving Andy stuck and alone on the other side of the glass. He is not alone here, for this is the world of the Carnies, the carnival people, a place where magic is real. Meanwhile Andy’s mother watches the Not-Andy living with her family, wondering if this is merely Andy show more growing up or if this is something else, something more sinister.

The prose had me captivated and wanting to read more from the first page. The language used is beautiful and enchanting, perfect for depicting a world that overlaps our own, a place filled with magic and people who aren’t quite normal. I was also quickly invested in Andy’s family, namely in Andy and his mother, two characters that are both interesting in their own right.

Andy is not quite a child but not exactly a teenager, either. He knows something has changed within his family, but doesn’t know what. The air of sadness is palpable, but something he can’t quite get to the bottom of and doesn’t seem to wholly understand. The house of mirrors is a surprisingly frightening place. After being sucked into the mirror, he finds himself in a place very similar to our own world, yet quite different. When he speaks words seem to come out backwards, forcing him to be more careful with his words. In this place he has a new name, Dany, partially due to the difficulty of speaking and hearing the words correctly.

This metaphor is a bit heavy handed, I have to admit. The entire scene went from quite atmospheric and spooky to a bit drawn out and heavy handed. However, I do like that the mirror world is different from our own. The place itself was frightening. The new characters introduced were quirky, odd, and had more going on with them than perhaps met the eye.

It was Eleanor I found most interesting, however. We see a perspective not often seen in portal fantasies here – that of the parents left behind. What do the parents think? Do they notice that the boy who looks like Andy isn’t really him? What happens in the world left behind? These are all questions that are answered here. Eleanor’s struggle is real. There is an air of mystery here, Eleanor having the nagging feeling that something isn’t right with her son, but not knowing what.

As a whole, the first third or so of the novel stands tall and proud. It was intriguing. It flowed from place to place and character to character with easy. The second third doesn’t follow this same pattern. The majority of the second third is dedicated to world building and the backstories of characters not heavily involved in the plot. Reading had the tendency to grow tedious. We learn about the carnies, this new family of carnival workers that has taken Andy in. I never found myself very invested in any of the carnies, despite each of them having objectively interesting pasts. They were secondary characters at best, in no way the main characters of the novel. All forward momentum of the story was stopped in exchange for what is, essentially, an info-dump. Yes, very pertinent information was conveyed, but the manner was drawn out and dull.

Much reference is made to a former boy who fell through a mirror and the books and notes he kept on the carnies and their history. It seems a bit obvious to say that if all of this were related in more direct manner it may have been more interesting and felt less like a deviation from the plot. Passages from this book could have been used. At the very least past events could have been relayed through Andy instead of nearly writing him out for a chapter on end.

These chapters wind their way in so circular a manner that they finally manage to stumble upon the plot once more. The mystical yet spooky air of the novel changes. Real world events take a clear turn towards the horror genre, which may surprise some readers. Not-Andy proves just as strange, terrible, and frightening, as Eleanor supposed. A slow, meandering plot suddenly has a single focus. While a fun, edge of your battle concludes the novel, it proved to be ultimately unmemorable. I was not necessarily invested in the reasoning behind this attack on the carnies and ensuing fight, largely because I never felt very connected or invested in the carnies and their past.

What I was invested in was Eleanor. The ending of her plot was something I was both invested in and enjoyed. I found myself sympathizing with her more so than many of the other characters, and it was this ending that I enjoyed the most.

While hitting on some very deep topics and touching on things other, similar books don’t often both including, Carnivalesque just didn’t hold my attention the way it should have. The plot was meandering, there was too much backstory and info dumping, and side characters were thrust into a spotlight they were never really intended for. Regardless, I quite enjoyed the author’s prose, and do want to read more of his work.

This review and more can be found on my blog Looking Glass Reads. show less