An ordinary, almost staid, couple are overwhelmed by crisis when their third child is born. The book starts off fairly ordinary and staid too, but this makes the crisis all the more realistic when it hits and easier to sympathize with. Once the new baby is born, the writing becomes sensitive and involving, the characterization [...]
A New Start in Finsbury JOHN TAGUE TLS Philip Casey THE WATER STAR 434pp. Picador. £14.99 0 330 37190 8 Philip Casey’s second novel, The Water Star, confronts the central Irish experience of the twentieth century: exile. It is distinguished by the finely wrought lyricism that has characterized much of his poetry. His first novel, [...]
The scarring runs deeper than the flattened landscape in Philip Casey’s novel, set in postwar London Washed ashore in a bomb-damaged land THE WATER STAR By Philip Casey Picador, £14.99 ISBN 0 330 371 908 The water star is a reflection: imperfect, but beautiful in itself. Its darklit image shivers in a breath of wind, [...]
Casey is a poet and a playwright; he has a poet’s delicate ear and a playwright’s eye for direction . The tale that unfolds in this thick, satisfying volume is not particularly complex – any more than the circumstances of any of our lives are complex, which is to say, infinitely and infinitesimally so. Through [...]