Andersonstown News - Saturday, 6 February 2000 Tue, 8 Feb 2000 02:46:00 -0500 Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - Beananti@aol.com -- Eoghan Corry's Bookshelf -- INCREASE THE PEACE -- Editorial ********************************************************** Andersonstown News - Saturday, 6 February 2000 ********************************************************** Eoghan Corry's Bookshelf Meeting is such sweet sorrow All That Really Matters by Campbell Armstrong (Little Brown £15hb) Glasgow-born thriller writer Armstrong, now living in Offaly, turns his skills to a poignant true story of how his ex-wife was reunited with her daughter, only to discover that both were suffering from cancer. In 1954 she had become pregnant by her boyfriend, a shadowy figure who quickly faded out of the drama. With Armstrong, she had three children before they split up. The divorce was not particularly bitter and they remained friends. Thus, when Armstrong learned in the summer of 1997 that Eileen had cancer, he was deeply shocked. Three months later, she was contacted, from Yorkshire, by her long-lost daughter, by then aged 40. Like many adopted children, she had spent years trying to track down her real mother despite getting little help from official sources. When she succeeded, their reunion could hardly have been more poignant. Armstrong's passionate memoir of love retrieved records the next few harrowing months as mother and daughter pack everything they can into their short time together. It became a focal point for the extended family and offered enormous comfort not only to Eileen, who eventually succumbed to her illness, but to Armstrong and his children. Is blood thicker than water? The conclusion, like all good thrillers, is not all it seems. Westsiders by William Shaw (Bloomsbury £12hb) William Shaw introduces us to several players in the surreal games of the Los Angeles suburbs. Districts such as South Central and Compton are dominated by violent crime emanating from vicious internecine rivalry as some 300 gangs wage pointless battles over territory. With a murder rate that peaked at 803 deaths in 1992, the area bears some resemblance to a war. Check out the rap charts for details. A thriving local music scene means that everyone seems to be looking to rap, produce or set up a label. Their personal stories, often depressing, sometimes desperate but never melodramatic, throw light and shade on to a group whose music often represents them as two-dimensional. Some belong firmly in Los Angeles: the guy builds up a thriving promotional business posting flyers around town, only to have his partner murdered in a motiveless shooting; or the rapper who spends all his time locked inside his bedroom because he has to live on another gang's territory. Some translate easily into other urban cultures, like the guy who turns up at every talent show going and always wins second place. And there are some who float on another planet entirely, such as the drug dealer who pours whatever profits he makes into cutting tracks. Sweet Dreams are Made of This by Margaret Burt (Sceptre £10hb) A beautiful teenage girl living with her uncle in the Scottish borders after the death of her father has an intense affair with a law student. Then a psycho becomes obsessed with her, follows her, and embarks on a seven-part programme of hate to break the couple apart so he can claim her for himself. The theme of obsessive love has never recovered from Glenn Close, this is a crude caricature of the genre. The Bombmaker by Stephen Leather (Hodder £4pb) With a name like that, the author should be writing about S&M (a big theme in the fiction lists this autumn) and staying well clear of the totally out-of-date genre: bad novels about reformed Northern Ireland paramilitaries who are forced to return to their old jobs by the FBI/CIA/evil masterminds (the third in this case). To feed English publishers fascination with female IRA members this bomb-maker is a woman who has settled down to suburban anonymity until blackmailed into making a bomb for a big Triad scam. But Leather does his best to rescue his novel from such dubious territory, and provides a wonderful last-line climax, one of the best in this year's crop of thrillers, which justified turning the previous 374 pages. Some of the book is set in Dublin and Belfast, but the author avoids local references beyond the Irish Times crossword. Long John Silver by Björn Larsson (Harvill £7pb) Fictional characters are prey to a new type of plagiarism, the continuation of real or classic story-lines beyond their conclusion. Seldom does the work go anywhere near the original (Captain Bligh's Portable Nightmare last year was a rare exception). This bowdlerises the Treasure Island character, last seen as he jumped ship in the West Indies, and turns him into cliché. The story is picked up in Madagascar with Silver living out his old age in luxury. We learn how Silver lost his leg, and how a good man turned murderous. From hints in Stevenson's original, Larsson draws out a salty yarn that's a worthy companion to the original, rather than a piratical plundering. Stevenson should have written the sequel. ******************************************************* INCREASE THE PEACE Political leaders in London, Dublin and Belfast are locked in frantic discussion this morning in a desperate, last- ditch bid to save the Good Friday Agreement. But as unionists step up their demands for the destruction of the political institutions set up under the Belfast deal, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams is urging the British and Irish governments not to give up on the peace process. "It is my certain view that the process can still be saved" the West Belfast MP told the Andersonstown News last night. "The issue of decommissioning can be resolved to everyone's satisfaction including the unionists. Some time today Peter Mandelson is going to give his judgment on the de Chastelain report... there is no reason why it cannot be positive and why the British Government and the Ulster Unionist Party cannot take it as a positive report. Meanwhile, the SDLP is appealing for Sinn Fein and the UUP to "step back from the brink". "I think that the process is greater than all the forces that threaten it," said West Belfast Assembly member Alex Attwood. ******************************************************** We say . . . Setting a new course There is a certain weary inevitably in the air this morning as we find ourselves caught in the kind of seemingly intractable political dilemma that this newspaper said was inevitable if the unionists kept on their long march into the cul-de-sac of decommissioning. We can argue long and hard about why it was that decommissioning became such an obstacle in the path to peace and why it was only mooted after the IRA called its ceasefire. But the facts of the matter are that all the nationalist parties have accepted--in many cases despite their better judgement--that decommissioning is now an integral part of the Belfast Agreement. That has been a bitter pill for many republicans to have to swallow, but if that was hard to get down, the imposition of arbitrary deadlines by a splintering Ulster Unionist Party is absolutely indigestible. Let's take a step back from all the sound and fury generated by No camp unionists and the media over the fate of the Assembly and Executive and remind ourselves that we weren't that keen to pass under the statue of Carson into Stormont in the first place. Events since have conspired to persuade us that we are a very long way from anything approaching democracy in the Assembly chamber, with unionists of all hues finding irresistible the urge to pretend that they're back in the old Stormont redoubt they occupied for so many years. And to heap insult on injury, they now seem determined to force this community back into the abandoned bunkers of yesteryear. George Mitchell's famed dogs on the streets could have told the unionists that the IRA would not move on decommissioning before the 31 January. Indeed, the very suggestion that such a situation would occur only came within hours of the de Chastelain report. The mechanics of an IRA move on decommissioning have been rehearsed often enough in the press for even the most minor UUP apparatchik to be well aware of the fact that the IRA can only agree to spike their own guns after a meeting of their rank and file. Having crossed the Rubicon of decommissioning by even agreeing to talk to the International Body, there was no prospect that they would take a second leap of faith within weeks. That's the reality, the unfortunate reality most would agree, of how this war, war is replaced by jaw, jaw. But Ulster Unionists, who are keen to lecture the rest of us on how David Trimble must act pragmatically if he is to keep the support of his party, expect the IRA to abandon their own pragmatic considerations when addressing decommissioning. Could it be that the real reason for the UUP grandstanding and the subsequent descent towards disaster of the peace process is more to do with their own realisation that the game is up than with the desire to see IRA guns being handed over? Cynics might suggest that the unionists are really using the guns' issue to renege on an agreement which they now realise threatens their privileged position in our society. If that is the case, then the Good Friday Agreement cannot be saved. Because if unionists don't scuttle the peace process ship on the rock of decommissioning this time round, they will simply set course for another hazard. Monthly threats of pull-outs and walk-outs by unionists will be the backcloth of political life here forever if they are allowed to have their way ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytire-02.08.00-02:46:02-7044