The Blog

What I don’t get about Sally Rooney’s Normal People

By Bernard O'Keeffe

On the second page of Sally Rooney’s universally acclaimed, Booker- longlisted novel is the following paragraph: ‘He puts his hands in his pockets and suppresses an irritable sigh, but suppresses it with an audible intake of breath, so that it still sounds like a sigh.’ What? I get the hand in the pockets bit, but … Read more

Review of Roddy Doyle’s Smile

By Bernard O'Keeffe

WARNING: contains spoilers As soon as you reach the end of Roddy Doyle’s extraordinary novel, ‘Smile’, you’re tempted to go back and read it straight through again to work out whether you should have anticipated the narrative trick  Doyle has just pulled and whether or not the whole thing actually works. I have done just … Read more

Frank’s Last Invigilation – a short story

By Bernard O'Keeffe

  Frank’s Last Invigilation    When anyone asked Frank whether he was counting the days to retirement he would answer not with a smile or a yes but with a number. No countdown had ever excited him more and each morning he gleefully crossed another day off the list he kept in his diary. It … Read more

Teaching ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’

By Bernard O'Keeffe

Given the revived interest in Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ (sales of the novel have increased dramatically since Trump’s election and a USA TV adaptation is to be screened by Channel 4 in the UK),  I found it interesting to look back at something I wrote in 1993 about  teaching it. An Approach To The … Read more

What I don’t get about Sex Education

By Bernard O'Keeffe

    The Netflix comedy-drama Sex Education is look-away explicit in its treatment of sex. In fact, before I acclimatised to its no-holds barred, let-it-all-hang-out approach  I spent many of the early episodes watching the screen through eye-shielding hands, tempted on occasions to hide behind the sofa as if I was a kid again hearing … Read more

Now I get it, Elena Ferrante

By Bernard O'Keeffe

Elena Ferrante, I apologise. Last summer I read the first of your Neapolitan Novels, ‘My Brilliant Friend’ and I was underwhelmed. I wrote about it in a round-up of my summer reading. I am not usually worried by being out of sync with majority opinion but In your case something was nagging at me, so … Read more

Leonard Cohen. You Want It Darker.

By Bernard O'Keeffe

It is easy, and tempting, to see the eighty-two-year-old Leonard Cohen’s magnificent fourteenth album as a farewell. As is often the case with Cohen, though, it is not quite that simple. ‘You Want It Darker’ may seem to be the singer’s farewell to his life, his work, to us, but throughout the album the nature … Read more

‘A’ for Ian McEwan’s ‘Nutshell

By Bernard O'Keeffe

  Well, Ian, what can I say? You’ve done it again – out smarted your clever class-mates and dazzled your teacher with a real tour-de-force. Your classmates chose a more predictable approach. Many wrote as Gertrude (the closet scene being a particular favourite). Some opted for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, despite my warning that this had … Read more

1971 — The Greatest Year in Rock — Never A Dull Moment

By Bernard O'Keeffe

Whoever said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture (and I still can’t work out who it actually was) clearly hadn’t read ‘1971’, a brilliant book which shows that when David Hepworth writes about music it’s like losing yourself on the dance floor to your favourite song or admiring a particularly beautiful building. Hepworth’s thesis … Read more

Je Suis un Rock Star. The Stones at The Saatchi Gallery

By Bernard O'Keeffe

  Exhibitionism, the Rolling Stones exhibition at The Saatchi Gallery, is all show and no tell. Fair enough for an exhibition, you might say, and especially for an exhibition which  draws attention to its own showiness by giving itself that title. That’s not to say that it’s unenjoyable. In many respects it’s great. There’s a … Read more

What’s So Funny ’bout Love, Peace and Understanding? The end of Mad Men

By Bernard O'Keeffe

(SPOILER ALERT) The ending of ‘Mad Men’ is deliberately ambiguous. It’s not frustratingly ambiguous in the way that the ending to ‘The Sopranos’ is – this finale’s ambiguity is far more satisfying, and its satisfaction lies in the way that, whichever way you choose to read our last sight of Don Draper (and they are … Read more

Paul Weller — Sheerwater’s more famous son

By Bernard O'Keeffe

As I watched Paul Weller perform at Glastonbury last night my wife said that he ‘was looking good’. Being a secure kind of guy I had no problems with this undoubtedly true observation, but when she followed it with the question ‘how old is he now?’ I felt a little more uneasy, as contemplation of … Read more