Book Reviews

Contemporary Irish writers have a knack of making their recent past feel very foreign. Clare Keegan’s Small Things Like These is set in 1985, but the horrors she reveals about one of Ireland’s Magdalene laundries seem more like ancient history. Alan Murrin pulls off something similar in The Coast Road, where in late 1994 divorce is still illegal in Ireland, unlike the rest of Europe. Izzy Keaveney, a housewife with two teenage children, ‘has the depression’ and has dragged herself to Sunday morning mass despite a hangover. She spent the previous evening at a dinner-dance, listening to her politician husband James give a talk about the importance of business in

‘If a horse is born in a stable, does it bark like a dog?’ By the time the Duke of Wellington’s famous question (‘If a man is born in a stable, does that make him a horse?’) made its way down to the young Michael Volpe, growing up in a fractured Italian family on the ‘streets and railway tracks… estates and football terraces’ of 1970s west London, it was mangled almost beyond recognition, bent and twisted into a surreal new shape. But the spirit of Wellington’s question remained, burrowing into a boy with one foot in the stable and one beyond, his very name a contradiction of identity: the blandly

‘Let me tell you about Jan Smuts,’ my grandfather, a doctor born not far from Johannesburg, would begin. And we, as children, would mutter and glance sideways and sink into our chairs. The story would go something like this: ‘Smuts was a Boer War leader, later feted by the English political establishment and central to international moves towards a liberal world order, a segregationist back home and reviled by the Afrikaner nationalists, who instituted formal apartheid from 1948. He was many things to many people, and his influence in South Africa and internationally was unparalleled in his time.’ My grandfather’s eyes would mist over and we would grunt responses about