Month: January 2014

Reviews and articles

Germany calling

by Mary Morrissy1 Comment on Germany calling

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Audrey Magee is a name you might not have heard of,  but you will. Her debut novel, The Undertaking, is coming out with Atlantic Books early in February. It’s a novel set in Germany and Russia during the Second World War about an arranged marriage between a soldier on the front and a woman who wants to secure a financially independent future with a war widow’s pension. It features harrowing accounts of the Eastern Front, and Stalingrad in particular, as well as the dire privations on the home front in Berlin.

I had the treat of getting a sneak preview of this novel over a year ago in MS form and I was blown away. Watching the German TV series, Generation War, shown on RTE recently, set in the same locations and covering the same territory, I was reminded of how much more powerful Audrey’s book was in terms of concentrated emotional heft.  And while her focus is narrow – Peter Faber and his wife, Katherina – the philisophical scope of the novel is enormous, touching on themes of betrayal, patriotism, denial, survival guilt and retribution.

This is a fierce and fearsome novel and doesn’t read at all like historical fiction.  First of all, much of it is in dialogue. Audrey banishes the retrospective view, and makes the siege of Stalingrad sound like it’s happening right now and you’re in it. She takes her reader by the scruff of the neck and doesn’t let go. The writing is elegant, spare and lean and carries a powerful emotional clout you won’t forget.  I haven’t.

Audrey talks about the inspiration for the novel in this interview:  www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOJquB4TgCQ

News and Events, The World of Bella Casey

She Do the Police in Different Voices

by Mary Morrissy4 Comments on She Do the Police in Different Voices

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The Rising of Bella Casey is to be RTE Radio’s Book on One next week, January 20 – 24. The night-time slot consists of 15-minute excerpts broadcast, Monday to Friday.  One of the challenges of the programme is to edit down a 300-page novel to roughly 25 pages so that the listener gets a flavour of the book. That’s producer’s Aoife Nic Cormaic’s job.

Sometimes the books are read by actors; sometimes by the authors.  I chose to read mine.  It’s a strange experience.  On the one hand, who could be more familiar with the text than the writer? On the other, editing and reading for radio requires you to look at the book almost as if you’d never seen it before.Unlike a public reading,where you can make eye contact with your listeners and judge the reaction, the broadcast is a dramatised interpretation aimed at a faceless audience.

Having done the recordings, now the challenge is to listen back to them.  And to hear your voice as other people hear it!  RTE Book On One is on nightly, 11.10pm