Above all else, The Wire is a study of governance, and of how the collective institutions of a city are interlinked, and threaded together: from the dogged ‘pawn’ drug-dealers of season one to the impoverished middle-school students of Edward J. Tilghman of season four; from the dwindling powers of the Baltimore Stevedores union of season two... Continue Reading →
'This will tell the tale’The Coen brothers’ eighteenth feature film, and their first to be released through Netflix, is comprised of six separate vignettes, each documenting an individual story from the American frontier. It is a Western-anthology film set within a Western-anthology book. Of the six stories, there is a single overarching constant: life within... Continue Reading →
When I began this collection on the Coen brothers’ work, there was one character who is the anomaly. Inside Llewyn Davis, the Coens’ sixteenth film has always been something of an enigma: the film itself, for instance, often ranks within the pantheon of the brother’s filmography and has yet drawn the ire of some critics... Continue Reading →
“Lucky” Ned Pepper’s name is uttered with trepidation throughout Joel and Ethan Coen’s faithful adaption (2010) of Charles Portis’s formative Western-bildungsroman True Grit (1968) as if it were a means by which to summon the ruthless brigand to the speaker’s door. However, it is not until an hour into the film that “Lucky” Ned (played... Continue Reading →
No Country for Old Men [2005], Cormac McCarthy’s ninth novel, follows the concluding volume of The Border Trilogy, Cities of the Plain, with a break from the ‘cowboys and horsemen’[1] of the American West and into a post-Vietnam Texas altered by war. Along with the relocation of the narrative’s period, McCarthy drastically revises the functions... Continue Reading →
Of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre, their work characteristically contains an eclectic diversity of raconteurs, wastrels, itinerants, killers, pragmatists and nincompoops, to name just a few typical attributes. Indeed, with the agendas and objectives of these protagonists varying dramatically, to succinctly summarise a single defining attribute of a Coen brothers’ character is to negate the complexity... Continue Reading →
Days Without End is an odyssey: our Odysseus is the Sligo-born Thomas McNulty, a survivor of the Irish famine, whose valiant attempts to endure the formation of America’s western frontier grips and then drags us along his harrowing road towards peace. The novel, published in 2016, charts the recollections of McNulty as he documents his... Continue Reading →
Soldiering: The Subject of War within Sebastian Barry’s A Long Long Way Sebastian Barry’s fifth novel, A Long Long Way, centres upon the brief life of Private William ‘Willie’ Dunne, an apprentice builder from County Wicklow whose experiences as a recruit in the Royal Dublin Fusiliers portrays the abject horror of trench-warfare during World War... Continue Reading →
A Legacy of Spies Towards the conclusion of John Le Carré’s summative novel, A Legacy of Spies, his twenty-fourth work of fiction, the author’s protagonist, the retired MI6 operative Peter Guillam, the spymaster George Smiley’s most entrusted acolyte, observes a relic of World War Two as he, in his age, laboriously strolls across the cove... Continue Reading →
True History of the Kelly Gang From the title alone, Victoria-born writer Peter Carey’s seminal novel is casting a false trail; the act of documenting the ‘truth’, the fact, of the Kelly Gang’s origins and then the clan’s eventual downfall is left to the titular outlaw as he delineates his life to his then unborn... Continue Reading →
Words on Pages 