Tom Williams
Build It Up, Tear It Down
Kevin Power’s outstanding second novel, White City, opens with the narrator, Ben, in a drug rehabilitation facility, reliving the experiences that have brought him there. At the start of these reminiscences, Ben is living with his parents, drifting through a PhD on Joyce and toying with writing a novel, when his father – a successful and respected Dublin financier – is arrested, accused of stealing €600 million from his own bank. Cut off from his supply of money, Ben spirals into drug addiction, all the while maintaining a hectic relationship with Clio, an unsuccessful actress who is fond of self-dramatisation. Ditching academia, he ends up in a horrific job at a call centre, ‘a twilit world of radically lowered expectations’, before a chance encounter with an old school contemporary, James Mullens.
Mullens is making big, if mysterious moves in the financial world. His life is a ‘standing reproach’ to Ben’s: he actually makes money, rather than simply dreaming of becoming an artist; he announces that his girlfriend is a radiologist ‘in the same offhand way that he might tell you he
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‘Even setting to one side the historically neuralgic relationship with ... Ireland, Britain’s insular periphery has from at least the time of the Romans presented difficulties for authorities wishing to centralise.’
Peter Marshall on Britain's islands.
Peter Marshall - Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago
Peter Marshall: Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago - The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia
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