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So what does the Sunday Times think of Brian Keenan’s new book?

 

Maybe you are wondering if you should buy Brian Keenan’s new Belfast memoir, ‘I’ll tell me Ma’ , you could decide to turn to the newspapers to see how the reviews rate the book. You won’t be short changed if you pick up the Culture section of last week’s Sunday Times where there are two reviews for the price of one. On page 45 Newton Emmerson pans the memoir, concluding his review by stating unequivocally that it is ‘as flat’ as the cartoons which Keenan turned away from in childhood following cruel taunts about his prominent front teeth.

But hey! Brian shouldn’t be too disheartened by these harsh words because just two pages earlier, the same paper, in the same Books pages of the same Culture magazine, Nick Rennison describes ‘I’ll tell me Ma’ as a ‘remarkable act of literary exorcism.’ Where Newt sees cliché and a childhood described in a ‘detached and perfunctory’ manner, Rennison detects a ‘lively and unsentimental evocation of (Keenan’s) own past.’

Now I know there are as many points of view of a book as there are literary critics and each one is legitimate to a degree. But it does seem to me odd that the Sunday Times contradicts itself in its view of a book within two pages. Clearly the Emmerson review is designed for and published only in, the local edition of the paper, but the editor of the Culture section should then have removed the earlier, opposing review from the same pages. When Keenan’s memoir is published in paperback you can guess which Sunday Times quote the Jonathan Cape publishing will quote on the back cover.