“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Sunday, September 28, 2008

“In The Desiccated Murk Of A John Banville Novel …”

Declan Hughes reviewed Benny Blanco’s THE LEMUR for the Irish Times yesterday, and I choked so hard on my cornflakes I needed a good Heimliching from a 300-pound gorilla. To wit:
“This is not Banville writing as Black, this is Black writing as Banville, and John Glass is that familiar figure: Banville Man. Banville Man, furrowed brow wreathed in smoke, forever caught between a swoon and a sneer; Banville Man, the rumpled aesthete whose exquisite nerves are ever besieged by the crass and the vulgar (“For God’s sake, Louise. The ‘chopper’!”); Banville Man, whose loathing of the hell that is other people is surpassed only by his loathing of himself.
  “And in the desiccated murk of a John Banville novel, where no one expects much by way of character or action, where a bogus back-story is the least you might imagine a man to have, that’s all par for the course.”
  I actually liked THE LEMUR, on the basis that I thought it was good fun to read Banville playing around with the genre conventions. But this is much more fun – we haven’t had a good old-fashioned writers’ spat in, oooh, never. And what gives this one a frisson is that Banville used to be the literary editor-type with the Irish Times.
  Ding-ding, gentlemen, seconds out …

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