Enniscorthy Co Kerry

I'm quite the fanboi for Colm Tóibín. I thought The Heather Blazing was the best history of this our Republic despite being fiction from beginning to end. I can't swear that I read his Brooklyn, but I saw the Saoirse Ronan vehicle of a film. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself to earbook the sequel Long Island (2024) on Borrowbox. Maybe I'm lucky to have found a copy of last year's best seller available for download. Maybe Tóibín is now a drug on the market and nobody wants to read such stuff.

In Long Island, Eilis Lacey has married into a Brooklyn Italian clan which made good and made it ut to the 'burbs in Lindenhurst, Suffolk County, NY. For reasons, she leaves New York and returns home to Enniscorthy [R 1970] for the first time in 20 years. Her two teenage children have never been to visit that side of their family. Tóibín grew up in Enniscorthy and his presentation of small-town busybody snob and gossip is unsettling. As for the story, the unfolding tragedy hinges on a series of coincidences worthy of Dickens and deductive powers worth of Sherlock Holmes - so I guess it will take its place in The Canon. I reserve judgment on the moral and social failings of the cast of characters, but don't let that hold you back.

The audiobook is read by Jessie Buckley, award-winning actor from Kerry via Thurles. Buckley has a) unnecessarily, decided to render direct speech in different accents b) unaccountably, given up on the nuance of regional Irish accents to voice everyone from Enniscorthy as if they're from deepest Munster. A disconcerting cross between Martin's Life and Healy-Rae. And a lot of the proper names [Buncloddy, Curraghcloo, Clonrosh] are mangled because . . . who cares? 

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For the record, I've also knocked of a history of the British communications intelligence CommInt service GCHQ (2019) by Richard Aldrich. It runs to 19 hours of political and historical detail of phone-taps and radio-traffic capture. The stuff from the 1970s tinkled a distant bell because I lived in England then and read newspapers. But the more recent material was revelatory. Every email I've ever sent has been processed by GCHQ software, for example. That's the same GCHQ that put out a puzzle book for Christmas 2016