Book Reviews
LEONARD COHEN: THE MYSTICAL ROOTS OF GENIUS BY HARRY FREEDMAN / BLOOMSBURY $29.99
In her book, ‘The Art Of Inheriting Secrets’, Barbara O’Neal says of Leonard Cohen, “I’ve studied his poetry, of course, but never heard him sing.” Maybe Cohen would have been pleased with this declaration since, according to book author, Harry Freedman, Cohen had no ambitions to be a singer, artist novelist, or musician; he merely wanted to be “recognized for his greatest love, his poetry.” In this analysis of Cohen’s songs (“what most people know him for”), Freedman sets out to examine how Cohen was influenced by Christian, Jewish and Buddhist traditions and how these helped shape his identity and the way he saw the world. Cohen’s knowledge of the Bible and religious folklore was profound, and nearly every song he wrote displays aspects of his religious ideologies. His most famous anthem, ‘Hallelujah’, recorded by over 300 other artists, is a case in point. It took Cohen five years to compose ‘Hallelujah’ and 20 years for it to eventually make the charts. Describing the biblical story of King David and drawing extensively on Talmudic tradition 78 | THE IRISH SCENE
and legend, Cohen retells how this complex and contradictory king was musician, adulterer, warrior and murderer. ‘Hallelujah’ is a tale about a conflicted world in which things cannot be reconciled. For Cohen, “regardless of what the impossibility of the situation is, there is a moment when you open your mouth and throw open your arms... and you just say ‘Hallelujah’.” In May 2016, Cohen and Irish playwright John MacKenna cooperated to create a requiem commemorating the deaths of three of MacKenna’s friends, the premier of which took place in Carlow on 15 June 2017. Departing from the traditional biographical approaches, Freeman examines Cohen’s works song by song, exploring how the lyricist reworked religious myths, prayers and legends thus providing a window in to the landscape of his soul, and an understanding of the Canadian poet who became a cultural giant. Cohen died on 7 November 2016, the day preceding the election of Donald Trump. “The broken world he sang about had fractured even further”. – Reviewed by John Hagan
THE DARK REMAINS BY WILLIAM MCILVANNEY & IAN RANKIN / CANNONGATE $29.99
When Scottish crime writer McIlvanney died in 2015, he left behind an unfinished manuscript featuring Glasgow’s original gritty, chain smoking, philosophical, hard-bitten policeman, DC Jack
