William Wall

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Commentary
Sue Leonard, reviewing Map of Tenderness in Books Ireland (Sept. 2002), writes: ‘The Map of Tenderness is, above all, a love story. The opening chapters featuring Joe and Suzie makes exquisite reading. But it is the lasting bo[n]ds of love that make Wall’s novel great. Scared of developing Huntingdon’s[,] Joe wants to “spare” Suzie, but she is made of sterner stuff, bringing an element of hope and strength to the novel. And over it all, there’s the enduring love of Joe’s parents [...]’.

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Sue Leonard, review of This is the Country, in Books Ireland (Dec. 2005), p.286: ‘[...] This is the Country is a novel covering the bleakness of the underbelly of Irish life. It could be an unbearably harsh read, but Wall has infused his tale with lyricism and true compassion. A bright teenager drops out to a world of drugs and violence, and hovers at the edges of gangland society in present-day Ireland. Then he makes his girlfriend pregnant. Embracing his role as lover and father, he manages to turn his life around. He becomes a marine engineer and lives a conventional life. He “even pays tax on non-cash transactions”. Then news of a murder brings back the old fears. Can he escape the violence of his past? It’s harder still, when the establishment seems set against you. / This is told in the first person by the unnamed hero. The language reflects his world, but it’s always fresh and vibrant. By the novel’s close, coherence has come in; and the words are touched with a sweet tenderness to sugar the sadness. / Wall’s novels have always had the capacity to move the reader. In this novel, the tenderness emerges more gradually; the reader will be taken by surprise when the build up of emotion becomes overwhelming. [... &c.].’

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John Kenny, ‘Craving the Normal’, review of This is the Country, in The Irish Times (14 May 2005), p.13: ‘Though he still sometimes works in poetry, Corkman William Wall now tends to refer to himself as a “lapsed poet”. Comparatively quietly, yet speedily, his new reputation has been established by the three novels he has published in the last five years. A crucial factor in the respect Wall has incrementally won for his prose over this short time is the identifiable uniformities of his subjects. Even though they vary somewhat in style, Alice Falling (2000), Minding Children (2001) and The Map of Tenderness (2002) have all focused to a significant degree on the domestic social unit, something Wall once underlined in an interview with this paper: “I’m fascinated by the way families disintegrate. It can happen so easily; the bonds that hold people together are so obscure. And the idea that blood is ticker than water is rubbish.” His baneful take on the Irish family, his fundamentally anti-idyllic mood, have not enirely endeared Wall to the more misty-eyed among his readers at home or abroad. / With an echo at its very end of the rejected blood-versus-water imperative, This is The Country sustains both the core mood and theme that Wall has established as his mètier. We are in perhaps even more comprehensively sinister country this time. [...; for full text, see infra.]

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Fiona Sampson, review of Water and Power, in The Irish Times (19 Feb. 2005), Weekend, p.10. ‘[...] In Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me, William Wall [...] gives us the poet struggling to read all that’s incomprehensible in the world today. And throughout this volume reading, or paying attention, stand-in for attempted engagement with that world: “Reading in poor light / errors accumulate / I see things that have / only a tenuous presence / and closer to home / I miss the numinous” (‘Postcards from the Inferno’). / However, Wall is a poet in love with both language and the world which generates it: “On sullen summer days / light comes out of another world” (‘The Coming of Fire to Ireland’); elsewhere, damselflies are “neon”. In the end sense-making, like poem-building, requires tenacity, “the tentative pilotage of living with ourselves” (‘The Old Venetian Lighthouse on Cephalonia’). If there’s occasionally a slight foreshortening in the line of its lyric and metaphysical thought, in this substantial volume Wall [...] is nevertheless conscious of his responsibilities as poet at a time when (as he says in ‘Trayer for Riding in Front’: “The omens are not good”.)’

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George O’Brien, ‘Getting to the point of surrender’, review of William Wall, No Paradiso, in The Irish Times (12 Aug. 2006), Weekend: ‘[...]It’s in the formal inventiveness with which this dynamic is handled that the reader will find No Paradiso most distinctive and most rewarding. In addition to the author’s alert, muscular style, his painlessly communicated appreciation of obscure learning, his vaguely didactic pleasure in accurately providing a sense of place, many of these stories are distinguished by a welcome engagement with form. The “strange geometry” of the final setting in “Surrender” is reproduced in the many variations of approach and perspective contained in No Paradiso. [... &c.].’ (see full text in RICORSO Library, “Criticism / Reviews”, infra.)

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Quotations

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