Knowing Women  paperback

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A Conversation with James Lawless http://wp.me/p2Iv2B-3Z  via @wordpressdotcom

New Novel Knowing Women

Knowing Women Authored by James Lawless

Laurence J Benbo is a thirty seven year old graphic artist and Dublin bachelor, awkward with women and lonely after the breakup with his girlfriend Deborah. He meets Jadwiga, a lapdancer and, after winning a lottery, he bestows gifts on her. But his upwardly mobile brother Maoilíosa and his scheming wife Ena, on hearing of his win, try to blackmail the innocent Laurence into handing his money over to them by alleging that he interfered with their daughter Lydia. Laurence seeks out Jadwiga for advice in her lapdancing club. To his dismay, he sees her going into a room with Maoilíosa. He spends the night awake listening to the rain pattering at his window, thinking of Deborah and he imagines little Lydia coming to seek out her uncle Lar to finish the story he had started reading to her. As the rain gets heavier he knows there is going to be a storm.

Knowing Women  paperback

Knowing Women: James Lawless: Amazon.com: Kindle Store

“James Lawless has a mighty thoughtful and penetrating capacity to make you gasp and rage and then burst out laughing,”
Jennifer Johnston

Review by Anita Kearney in Goodreads.

James Lawless has created a character that could be any middle-aged lonely man or woman in any city in any country. The loneliness of Benbo is almost palatable. His voyeuristic view of life is both amusing and disturbing. This is the story of a man who is desperate for a connection with someone, anyone but also afraid to allow that connection to be made. The book is a testament to the idea of being alone even though you are surround by and are interacting with others.
The story is one that is old as time but with a new twist that keeps you turning the page to find out when it will all go wrong and when it does how will Benbo react. You are not disappointed as the story moves along at a good clip to reach a climax that is not quite what you would expect. All in all it is a fine read, I highly recommend it for a rainy day.

New review of The Avenue

“The Avenue” by James Lawless tell the story of Francis Copeland who is childless and in the middle of a stale marriage. Exploring life in the suburbs of Ireland, this story had me from the start. The writing style is colorful and descriptive and with striking details, the reader watches as Francis, (who works in the local library) with the help of the local children reveals the secrets of the avenue through books.

Bold voyage around the mind of the chick-lit consumer pays off

Finding Penelope

Indigo Dreams. €11.50

Penelope Eames, a curvaceous 33-year-old fluff novelist, relocates to a Spanish costa, partly to tinker away at another title and partly to escape the dysfunction of her father and brother in Dublin. In the fictional town of Felicidad, she is massaged by azure Iberian skies and the emergent affections of a local lifeguard.

The pleasure account is debited, however, by the seediness of the coke-snorting, pimping UK expat community, who range in shape and menace from needy but harmless neighbour Gwen to the repulsive porn-gangster Charlie Eliot. It is the latter whom Penelope must face to save her drug-addict brother Dermot after he turns up on her doorstep with shady intentions. Begging her to turn her back on hopeless Dermot and embrace stability and romance is dreamy lifeguard Ramon, whose mother died at the hands of a junkie. Gradually, the sheen of sunny escapism fades and Felicidad emerges as a stiflingly hot haven for unsavoury blow-ins.

On the face of it, James Lawless’s latest looks like an attempt to mine the lucrative chick-lit market while seasoning it with crime and spiritual redemption. But there’s more going on with Finding Penelope, a novel the Dublin author has called his ‘wry glance’ at the genre. Such moves are apparent when Lawless’s heady, hooky narration is in full flow and the thinness of the plot is less apparent. It is here, off-piste and burrowed into Penelope’s mind, that we observe him in his quest to understand the mindset of 70 per cent of the fiction-reading market.

To do this, Lawless consulted family and friends and revised the classic literary heroines. Toblerone-loving, self-doubting, spontaneously confident Penelope is the result. She swoons over the heavy, mother-obsessed anti-Lothario Ramon, where a younger woman might get bored.

Although taking umbrage, she is obedient when a pushy feature writer and sleazy photographer come to do a profile piece on her, and sees both faux-maternal comfort and unease in her agent. At her core, she finds ways to share the blame for Dermot’s demons and her mother’s suicide with her unpleasant philandering father. Penelope’s is an authentic voice, full of human contradiction and composed desperation.

It’s all very readable, cruising along in sprightly, buoyant chapters. Lawless (an award-winning short story writer and poet) has a classy turn of phrase and can whisk up ambience at will. But Penelope’s unrelenting internal monologue at times stifles the already scant crime rhythms of the plot; the result is a slightness in the male characters and a nullifying of any intrigue or tension.

Your gut reminds you, though, that the writer is not here for anything this ordinary. It’s no coincidence, for example, that Charlie resembles Penelope’s father, or that Ramon is both a ‘teacher’ and ‘lifeguard’. Witness Lawless’s elaborations on novel-writing, chick-lit and the publishing industry, all contemplated through Penelope’s brain channels. Neither the book-within-the-book or novel-as-soapbox architectures are especially original, but Lawless exploits both well.

A large part of this heroine’s self-worth rests on her new work, and her commercial side urges her to stick with happy endings (“that’s what they want her to produce … illusions; flavours of the month to provide comfort and solace for fire-side amusement … So make it all bland for word-glancing or page-flicking readers in ready supply of roses without the thorns.”). Something in the Spanish air, something perhaps wrestled into clarity over the years by Lawless, suggests to Penelope that the cool realities of life can be more redemptive.

Dublin Duchess on Rus in Urbe  (07-12-12)

James Lawless is the author of three novels and a study of modern poetry, as well as being the recipient of several awards. From Dublin and living in Co. Kildare and West Cork this is his first poetry collection.
The title Rus in Urbe is Latin and translates as ‘country in the city’ (rustic in urban) and is used to describe city parks such as New York’s Central Park. Lawless uses this phrase to divide his collection into two parts ‘Rus’ and ‘In Urbe’, and these forty plus poems maybe reflect his own life in Dublin/ the city and in the more rural West Cork and Co. Kildare.

In Part One: Rus, the country section, the poems are about nature and its surroundings; rocks, foliage, walking observations and weather signs. ‘Carrying Forward’ is a lovely poem, about recognition of our parents’ physical traits in ourselves. It opens in a visually quite beautiful way, “The hairs of my fingers/ are caught by the sun/ like some spidery creatures”. Observations in the garden are captured in ‘Changing Forms’, in particular a butterfly; “it pirouetted and tantalised,/ wings fluttering like eyelashes/ on a regal mistress”. The imagery is very attractive and almost seductive.

The great title of ‘The Bachelor Who Drank Poitín’ is a sad poem of a life in solitude and tells of a discovery after “they beat back the briars”, to find a corpse and the bottles, “They pushed in the door,/ inhaled the putrefied air;/ they called again”. A visual feast of memory is described in ‘Old Trains’, as the speaker hears the train and recalls, “my aunt, her bag laden with/ Crunchies, comics and stories/ to intoxicate myth-starved minds;”. But the modern train passing is a disappointment without the noise of the door banging or the steam, “just a flutter of breeze”.

Part Two: In Urbe opens with ‘Ascending a Liberties Staircase in 1952’. The scene is described in its sparseness; the black bannister, the bin chute and the concrete. A mother struggles up with a child and a baby in a pram, “I helped my mother tilt and lift;/ I could hear her heavy breathing,/ each slow tortuous step its own individual,”. Winner of a poetry competition, ‘The Miracle of the Rain’ is an emotive journey of two on the Santiago Pilgrim’s Route- one a bare-footed believer and her companion a booted sceptic; “It’s a matter of faith, she says,/ You must believe things to be true/ or the world is just a place of pain.” Her pain is a hidden one, only reveling itself on their arrival as she kneels in the Cathedral, “and copious tears flow out of her eyes”. The speaker realises, “I see the skeleton of her hand./ Pray to Santiago, she says,/ that he may cure me.” The poem is affecting and one I re-read in order to again experience its full power.

‘Parisien Vignettes’ is just that, short scenes or impressions of Paris. The liking of a fur-coated woman walking her poodle to a Degas painting is very effective and “in a distant café: a half heard love song”. But this is not a poem romanticising Paris. In Pigalle, the red-light district, “…a drugged girl,/ wavering in the middle of the street,/ remonstrates with captive motorists” and in the smart vestibule of a hotel in Porte D’Orleans a groomed dog waits, “the route on the pavement/ marked by his shit.”

James Lawless has put together a very good collection of poetry here, encompassing many emotions and environments. Some are short and snappy but still deserve as much consideration and contemplation for their message as the longer poems. The division of two parts puts the reader into a particular mindset to receive the rural poem or the more gritty urban poetry.

Rus in Urbe is published by Doghouse Books.
www.doghousebooks.ie

Glimpse of a mischievous and surprisingly saucy Austen

JAMES LAWLESS’ review in Irish Sunday Independent  – 17 February 2013

The Real Jane Austen Paula Byrne Harper Collins, €12.50

Is it possible to know the real Jane Austen? For the sake of family decorum, Jane’s sister Cassandra destroyed nearly 3,000 of the letters between them, keeping a mere 60 or so innocuous or censored ones to tell us little beyond their humdrum domestic lives.

Paula Byrne approaches the question in an original manner, differing from previous biographers in that she begins each chapter with an object connected to the life or work of the author: a silhouette, a barouche, a cocked hat, a velvet cushion, a Topaz cross, a vellum notebook, among others.

The effect is to give intimacy, to draw the reader into Jane Austen’s world, to mingle with the household, as it were. Byrne does all this in a readable and elegant style and, whatever about Jane Austen’s life being putatively boring, the ancillary lives lived by many of her relatives, recounted brilliantly by Byrne, are the stuff of high drama and make riveting reading: the cocked hat alerts us to her brother Henry’s career in the Oxfordshire Militia; lace prompts an insight into Austen’s kleptomaniac aunt Jane Leigh-Perrot, who was imprisoned for stealing a card of lace, and the account of her cousin Eliza’s husband, Jean Capote Feuillide, a captain in Marie-Antoinette’s regiment of dragoons, guillotined in the month of Ventose in Year 2 of the French Revolutionary calendar, makes one speculate if we are reading about the world of a different author.

Another object used, the Bathing Machine, illustrative of female demureness of the time, affords the writer an opportunity to adumbrate Austen’s love of the sea.

Byrne posits three major theses which she claims as new or fresh insights into the commonly viewed lifestyle of Jane Austen. Firstly, she refutes convincingly that Jane Austen was a mere retiring, religious spinster aunt. Byrne’s research shows that Austen had a saucy wit in, for example, her references to ‘rears’ and ‘vices’ in the admiralty and her humour comes through in spotting a friend Dr Hall from his carriage “in such very deep mourning that either his mother, his wife, or himself must be dead”. Austen was also a bit of a prankster when younger, and wrote the names of imaginary husbands for herself into her father’s parish register; and, far from being retiring, she was frequently a sought-after and fun-loving aunt who played shuttlecock with her nephews and nieces.

The second thesis that Byrne posits, however, is problematic – that Austen did not shy away from the great historical events of her time: the Napoleonic War, the British wars in India, the slave trade. That Austen was cognisant of such events Byrne proves persuasively, but to say she embraced them (think of Tolstoy and his embracing of history in War and Peace) constitutes revisionist hyperbole, as only trace elements of such happenings can be found in her novels. Austen may have been aware of these events but she chose in the main, apart from references in her Juvenilia writing, not to engage with them artistically.

Admittedly, she does question the provenance of Mansfield Park, which was built on the spoils of slavery, but she does not pursue the matter, no more than she pursues her father’s possible complicity, albeit indirect, in the opium trade.

The third thesis, that the writing of Jane Austen treats of ordinary life, is also open to question. What is ordinary? Are the lives of landed gentry ordinary, or of her wealthy brother Edward or of the Leigh family on her mother’s side with their 690 acres at Stoneleigh Abbey (confiscated from the Cistercians under Henry VIII) or of another brother James riding to the hounds with the Prince Regent? And the duchesses and ladies who saw their lives mirrored in her novels while bedecked in their Regency regalia at tea parties and balls are a far cry from, say, Dickens’ city urchins.

And Jane herself, although never possessing a lot of hard cash, did not have to worry about family or children or employment. She was time-rich with the privilege that endowed to dedicate herself wholly to her writing. She may not have had a room of her own, having to write in a busy sitting room; but in a way such an environment could have been a boon to a novelist with her ears pricked to the conversations and comings and goings of her family and friends, providing fecund material for her stories in what Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey called “a neighbourhood of voluntary spies”. And even if privacy was a rare luxury, she was able to survive contemporary conventions with solitary walks and sojourns by the sea.

Nevertheless, in the limited world Austen inhabited, holding, in the words of Virginia Woolf, “a candle to life on a country house stairway”, a life in miniature she portrayed with great accuracy.

A realist refusing, as Byrne points out, to be carried away by the romantic excesses characteristic of the time, she could describe a beautiful evening without deferral to the moon. And perhaps most importantly, her innovative device of using free indirect speech to convey the internal ‘disordered feelings’ of a character such as those of Anne Elliot in Persuasion, could be premised as a precursor of the stream of consciousness technique of the modernist movement as practised by Woolf and James Joyce.

Where Byrne succeeds in this book, published to coincide with the bicentenary of Pride and Prejudice, is she manages, in a scholarly yet reader-friendly way and with the restricted material allowed to her, to bring to life a dedicated artist of her time in her human attributes.

James Lawless’ latest novel is ‘Finding Penelope’ (Indigo Dreams)