December 07, 2003

Germany Calling

William Joyce was born in New York in 1906, raised in Mayo, educated in Galway, became a German citizen in 1939 and was hanged in London as a British traitor in 1946. Remembered for his wartime propaganda broadcasts, "Lord Haw-Haw" is the subject of a new biography. Alas, the author is Mary Kenny, and the prospect of wading through 320 pages of her turgid writing is a daunting prospect for Christmas. Eunan O'hAlpin obviously feels the same - reviewing the book in the Irish Times, he concludes that


Joyce was a very bad man but he deserves a better book than this.

Posted by Monasette at December 7, 2003 10:54 PM
Comments

Even if one doesn't find Mary Kenny's style totally congenial, I don't see how anyone could call it "turgid". I personally found her biography of William Joyce warm, informative and refreshingly free of prejudice. She used a wider range of sources than many previous biographers and writers have done, while retaining a personal touch that left the reader with a vivid picture of Lord Haw-Haw the man, something no other book on the subject that I have read has accomplished so completely.

If someone is looking for a source of intelligent comments on contemporary writing, I suggest a publication other than the Irish Times.

Posted by: Brian T. Hickey at December 30, 2003 12:39 AM

Well, it seems that botyh The Guardian, and acclaimed UK biographer A.N. Wilson, writing for the Evening Standard, both disagree. I would urge readers to make up their own mind, as the UK's two leading historians have praised GERMANY CALLING fulsomely.

“Mary Kenny has written an absorbingly elegant study,’ said Williams of Kenny’s biography Germany Calling: A Personal Biography of William Joyce, Lord Haw-Haw. ‘To all [Joyce’s] shabby dreams, loyalties and cruelties Kenny brings both compassion and a clear mind… a biography whose even-handed beauty of expression combines Irish gravity with Irish spark.”

This latest international praise comes some weeks after eminent UK biographer A.N. Wilson chose Germany Calling as his Book of the Year. ‘The biography which gripped me most will, I suspect, turn out to be a classic in the Quest for Corvo league. This is Germany Calling, by Mary Kenny, the life of the wartime broadcaster Lord Haw Haw, aka William Joyce. He was hanged for treason, even though he was not a British subject. Mary Kenny's book made me laugh aloud, and weep, and think. It is sympathetic, in all the right ways, to the monster it portrays."

Posted by: Joseph Hoban at January 19, 2004 11:03 AM