Darling Sweetheart by Stephen Price

Darling Sweetheart By Stephen Price, New Island, €11, 389pps


PRICE seems to have a thing about self-regarding egoists, a subject he covered in his first novel, Monkey Man, which dealt with the media. In the book to hand, he deals with much the same subject; the exaltation of mediocrity or egotism and the cult of celebrity in the movie business, shallow people of little talent who will do literally anything for fame and money. In other words, there are very few decent men in showbiz and quite a few flaky females. One of these is Annalise Palatine, who is about to make her big-time debut in a Hollywood blockbuster. She is the daughter of a famous movie actor, David Palatine, now dead but who had a ropey temperament himself – so it's a case of black cat, black kitten. Playing opposite Annalise is a real movie beaut, a monster of conceit, Harry Emerson, a big Hollywood celebrity who wants a lot from Annalise and not just on the film set. The director is a Scandinavian who believes it's every woman for himself. Of course, everything begins to fray at the edges, not least these very edgy people. Ostensibly a thriller, the book is more an excellent satire on the current cult of celebrity.


Quotes of the Year 2009 Collected by Bernard Share, Gill & Macmillan, €10, 204pps


DIFFICULT to know who this compilation is aimed at. Even more difficult to see who it will satisfy. Divided into monthly chapters spanning from September 2008 to August 2009, this who-said-what begins somewhat undramatically with Peter Robinson: "I see no reason, politically, legally, morally, why the Executive should not be sitting." Other reminders of who-said-what includes the predictable: "I never in public life took a bribe, backhander or anything else..." (Bertie at the Mahon tribunal), the mildly funny: "I'm a year younger than Mickey Mouse" (octogenarian poet John Montague), and the credulous: "It's bringing people together... what's wrong with that?" (Seamus Hogan, Rathkeale shopkeeper, on the thousands who travelled to see the outline of Our Lady in a tree stump).


China: A History By John Keay, Harper, £11, 570pps


CHINA, as an increasingly popular subject, may be well-trodden territory, but seldom as concisely and elegantly as in Keay's capacious account. It's a very necessary book of a complex country which will lead to greater understanding of a huge landmass that my grandfather unpolitically called "the yellow peril", and that was over 100 years ago. Even then it was drawing the attention of the outside world. Keay takes his readers from fractious third-century Chinese politics to Marco Polo's travels from Venice circa 1290 AD – was he the first quasi ambassador before the age of diplomacy? – to the Manchu dynasty that ruled for 300 years, on to the more recent 1911 revolution of Dr Sun Yat-sen, and winding down with present-day China. Important and impressive.


Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels from Los Angeles to Beijing By Ian Buruma, Atlanta Books, £10, 400pps


FROM a different angle, in this more concentrated report on the country, professor Buruma examines the economic growth and wobbly 'social order' of the world's most secretive superpower – it has a lot to be secretive about – by calling in on some of the state's opponents, now scattered right across the world. In Beijing he is told by a taxi driver that the Chinese people cannot criticise the government, so the government makes big mistakes. "We live in a prison here, make no mistake. Everything you hear is lies." Elsewhere, he listens to dissidents now living in the US Singapore and Taiwan, all of whom are willing to tell him of their brutal past in China, though he never translates what he is told into sentimental terms. Things will have to change, they all agree, and hopefully it will be peacefully.


Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life By Gerald Martin, Bloomsbury, £15, 660pps


BY SHEER force of will, Marquez seems to have made a success of his life. Raised in the barrios of Aracataca, Colombia, he wins a scholarship, goes into journalism, and tries to write short stories. His earliest influence is Juan Rulfo whose novel Pedro Paramo he pores over to see how it works. He learns it by heart. He falls in love with a girl named Mercedes when they are children. He vows he will marry her. He does, two decades later. He vows to his friends that one day he will be South America's Cervantes. He is. Central to his success as a writer of magic realism is his grandmother, Tranquilina, who saw ghosts, believed in omens, imagined fantastical settings and filled Gabriel's head with them. Out of such omens and settings came One Hundred Years of Solitude and Autumn of the Patriarch and universal respect and recognition.