Word: hanley
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...BEGINNING (315 pp.)-James Hanley-Horizon Press...
...James Hanley is the kind of Irishman who gives the impression that his life has been a knockdown, drag-out fight with reality. To enter his literary world is to enter a dark room in which at first the sparse furniture seems made of human bones. But as the slow light comes up through the long narrative, it is made clear that the ribs on the wall are a hatrack, that the upended coffin is a wardrobe and the skull under the bed is a more commonplace utensil...
Among novelists, James Hanley, 57, is a rare bird of dark plumage. A child of the Dublin slums, he educated himself between odd jobs (railway porter, cook, butcher, postman), went to sea and found no romance in it. His history and temperament have preserved him from the British novelist's preoccupation with class and the detail of social life. He writes with no special idiom or accent about the human condition. Hanley has been obsessed by his purblind Furys for a quarter of a century. (This volume is the fifth installment of their saga, the third to be published...
High point of the show is a forlorn ballad sung by Lanky Blonde Ellen Hanley about a wan, straight-haired maiden who attends a meeting of an antique music society and trustingly goes home with a base-hearted fellow enthusiast...
Like Graham Greene, Irish Novelist Hanley dotes on the guilt on the candelabra. He has given his protagonist the usual "failed-priest face," the customary taste for booze, and the symbolical death -Brennan falls from the height of Gaudi's grotesque unfinished Barcelona Church of the Holy Family. It is all pretty thick stuff, but an angry, eloquent passion against the paralyzing Red ticks in Europe's soft underbelly redeems it from mere melodrama...