John Fanning on some choice holiday reads
While I have a slew of new branding books for review in Marketing.ie, I’m going to leave them until the autumn, as this is the time of year many people choose to expand their minds and let a few new ideas in to stimulate the creative juices as you relax during the day on your summer holidays before you’re allowed a drink.
You may need at least one novel and you’re in luck because there’s never been a more outstanding crop of young Irish writers. The YIWs are making waves all over the world these days, picking up prizes, winning literary awards and featuring in writing festivals. You should read them all but if there is one novel which is a must read. It is Kevin Barry’s Beatlebone.
The book is both hilarious and profound. It is based on the true story of John Lennon’s purchase of Dorinish Island in Clew Bay in the 1970’s. The story begins with Lennon being driven around the West on his way to the island as he is pursued by Fleet Street nasties.
Hilariously inventive: Kevin Barry’s new novel, Beatlebone is based on the true story of John Lennon’s purchase of Dorinish Island in Clew Bay in 1978 for the knockdown price of £1,550. The story begins with Lennon being driven around the West by Irishman Cornelius O’Grady.
His Irish driver and guide, the onomatopoeic Cornelius O’Grady, seeks refuge in the run-down Amethyst hotel in Achill, presided over by a beast of a man memorably described as having “tiny, yellowish, pisshole-in-the-snow-type eyes”. Amid the drop-outs and hippies who flocked to the romantic West of Ireland in the 1970’s Lennon finds some kind of catharsis to soothe his tortured artistic soul.
Barry himself has no illusions about life in the West; “but it was not long one imagines before the idyll of a New West was smeared by the great dreariness that Ireland attempts to stay quiet about”. Beatlebone (Canongate, rrp £12.99) is a hugely enjoyable and rewarding novel by a writer at the height of his powers.
Digital detox holidays are all the rage, but even if you are leaving all your ‘devices’ behind, you might consider trying to understand some of the underlying currents of the digital revolution. A new book, The Four Dimensional Man by Irish writer Laurence Scott, who is making a name for himself in London’s intellectual circles, is a good start in going beyond some of the superficial criticisms of social media.
The fourth dimension was a popular notion a century ago. It was a place which could only be reached if the right conduit was found. Scott argues that the digital world now represents a new space and is characterised by what he terms; ‘everywhereness’: “we now have an everywhereness to us which alters our relationship to those stalwart human capacities of self-containment, remoteness and isolation” – he writes.
The author recommends mindfulness as a remedy to the enhanced intensity of digital life. The Four Dimensional Man (Heinemann, rrp £20) is a difficult but well-written book. It provides readers with a wider than usual perspective of the digital revolution.
If you have been following the branding and marketing communications publications of late you will have noticed the topic de jour for 2016 is ‘brand purpose’. A clue to the interest in this subject is to be found in Will Hutton’s new release How Good Can We Be which is one of a line of books putting capitalism under a critical microscope. Attendances at the altar of unfettered free markets have been slipping, what with the recession, rising inequality, tax evasion and stuttering growth. Hutton writes “we are living through an economic inflection point like no other – what lies ahead will be more transformational than anything humanity has lived through so far” – so there!
Hutton has interesting views on the digital revolution, where new jobs will come from and how companies must reorganise to provide more purpose.
Finally, Ireland’s greatest living poet, Derek Mahon, has a new Selected Poems by Gallery Press. From Mahon’s cool ironic stance in the first three lines of the first poem; “Wonders are many and none is more wonderful that man/who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge/and grasped the principle of the watering can” to the last poem which celebrates the blessed end of the Celtic Tiger; “Can we relax now and get on with life/Step out and take a deep breath of night air – Can we turn now to important things”, this book is a wonder.
It will delight, inform, educate and amuse readers.
Who knows, it may even make you a better person. Read it all through the summer and autumn, winter and spring and never ever leave home without it.
John Fanning lectures on branding and marketing communications at the UCD Smurfit Graduate Business School; john.fanning@gmail.com
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