To The Last Page

Neil Jordan's novels often (always?) feature figures dealing with trauma, loss, the past, each struggling with a disconnect in their lives. He has explored this through a number of variations including metaphorical or literal ghosts. In his latest novel, Jordan writing in the realm of futuristic science fiction for the first time, he deals with a speculative scientific approach where memories and trauma can be genetically altered, but the past and the future are linked in other ways that aren't so easily erased. Written in Jordan's familiar, evocative literary style, his latest novel is enriched by his extension into new realms. The novel is divided into two parts. In part one, the story takes in two timelines, one in the past in 1886, the other 200 years in the future in 2086, both periods lined by two figures from the Cartwright family. They are linked, Jordan style, by innumerable connections, by family evidently, but also by landscape, buildings and memory that is imbue...

Neil Jordan often writes with a supernatural element behind his stories, but there is usually another kind of intangible elusive mystery that pervades his writing; his characters trying to grasp with vagaries of memory, regret and loss, hoping for some kind of redemption. Like The Drowned Detective , music plays a part in The Well of Saint Nobody , something that remains elusive yet seductive and powerful, and it too can represent other desires or carry feelings of regret. William Burrows has a love/hate relationship with music. A once famous pianist who was celebrated in his day, William is now unable to play the piano, suffering from psoriatic arthritis, the skin peeling from his once nimble fingers. He comes to a small village in Cork, where he soon finds the need to engage a housekeeper for all the work that would find it difficult to do for himself in his current condition. Tara answers his ad in the local shop, Burrows not realising that the woman he has engaged knows him from se...