Review: A searing story from an increasingly impressive Irish writer
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 02 2, 2014
Irish author and poet James Lawless was born in Dublin, read Irish and Spanish at the University College Dublin, followed by honors studies in Communications and Cultural Studies at Dublin City University. He has been both a secondary schools teacher and a guest lecturer as well as volunteering for social concerns organizations. His highly successful career has been molded by not only his gifts as a poet, a writer of short stories, and a novelist (he is widely published) but also by his concerns with humanitarian issues and political histories. He currently has homes in both County Kildare and West Cork.FOR LOVE OF ANNA, Lawless' second novel is a story of love, ideology and corruption. The author wisely introduces his own summary of the novel, guiding the reader to the important themes: "There are three main strands running through this novel. Firstly, it may be read as a poignant love story - Anna is a ballerina with whom the main protagonist, the university student, Guido van Thool, falls in love. But Anna is also an acronym for Anarchists of the New Age, which brings us to the second dimension of the novel as an ideological story positing ideas in the mind of the philosophy student Guido, in the wake of the collapse of Russian communism and the dilution of oppositional politics, on what alternatives there are to the all-devouring monolith of corporate capitalism. Anna wants to steer him away from this sort of 'dangerous' thinking, but his friend, the anarchist Philippe, keeps goading him. Paralleling the lives of the lovers is that of a corrupt judge, Jeremiah Delahyde (the third strand) who literally crashes into the world of Guido and Anna on a fatal New Years night." Anna's death at the hands of the drunken Delahyde in an auto `accident' sets into action a line of revenge by Guido - a move that ties the three threads of the novel together tightly. Love, passion, philosophy, the arts, devotion, anti-globalization marches all play major roles here. It is an engrossing novel that marries a passionate love against examples of what power does to people, how a single turn of events can create a chain reaction of incredible proportions and leads even the most nave of people to act in unimaginable ways.Lawless writing is mesmerizing. Once he establishes each of his characters he has seared them on our minds, and all the complexities of the interaction of human love, the exigencies that corruption consumes power, and the even greater issues of morality become increasingly focused until the novel's brilliant end. Highly recommended. Grady Harp, February 14