Some thoughtful and interrogative reviews\/ blogs have been posted about Malarky.<\/p>\n
Marcus Pactor wrote a mid-book review, which is a curious concept that I might join him in writing sometime. I like the continuum that a mid-book review gives to the act of reading. It establishes that it’s ongoing.<\/p>\n
Some extracts from Pactor’s blog<\/p>\n
\u201cThe personal becomes political\u201d is\u00a0 worn, too.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Schofield turns it around so\u00a0that the political becomes personal.\u00a0\u00a0 We\u2019re very much in the post-9\/11 world, but Our Woman\u2019s mostly absorbed by her own life.\u00a0 She\u2019s interested in Afghanistan mostly because that\u2019s where her homosexual son Jimmy took off to.\u00a0 She\u2019s interested in Syria because that\u2019s where her latest lover\u2019s from.\u00a0 When she and her husband watch the news and see riots on the West Bank, she comments: \u201c\u2019Well whether they\u2019re nutters or not,\u2019 I said, \u2018they\u2019re lovely looking people.\u00a0 Look at the great faces on those young men, see the elasticity in their skin and the beards make them look wise when they\u2019re all but twenty.\u2019\u201d\u00a0 This personalization is not a reduction.\u00a0 New meanings and understandings of human value are assigned.\u00a0 They have little to do with neocons and their useless counterparts.<\/p>\n
Sentence-wise, she\u2019s also\u00a0 excellent.\u00a0 You can hear the Irish voice articulating lovely, inventive metaphors. \u201cOne of her fleeting Ballyhaunis Bacon moments has just scraped by her, when the pork of her husband\u2019s action clouts her forcefully out of nowhere and she finds brief comfort in the thought of him, entering the factory to have his flesh separated from his bones for betraying her the way he has.\u201d<\/p>\n