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Exchange Place
'He took out his watch and looked at it. He rested for one minute as timed on his watch. He opened the briefcase and took out a passport and a pair of spectacles. He put the spectacles on and looked at the passport, and realised he was the man in the picture.A gunshot rang out: Part thriller, part spy novel, Exchange Place is set between Belfast and Paris and tracks the individual movements of two men, John Kilfeather and John Kilpatrick, who are trying to solve a mystery concerning a lost friend, a missing notebook and a gun. But this is no ordinary mystery and the usual rules don't apply. Appearances are deceptive; identities dissolve, become slippery; and it's easy to lose track of who you are in the winding streets and passageways of the city. As the paths of Kilpatrick and Kilfeather slowly and inexorably converge, it is only the subterranean Memory Palace that can open the way to the truth.
208 pages, Paperback
First published September 14, 2012
4 people are currently reading
55 people want to read
About the author
Ciaran Carson
65 books47 followersCiaran Gerard Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast and educated at The Queen’s University, Belfast. He knows intimately not only the urban Belfast in which he was raised as a native Irish speaker, but also the traditions of rural Ireland. A traditional musician and a scholar of the Irish oral traditional, Carson was long the Traditional Arts Officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and is a flutist, tinwhistler, and singer. He is Chair of Poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre for poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast. He is married to fiddle player Deirdre Shannon, and has three children.
He is author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as translations of the Táin and of Dante’s Inferno, and novels, non-fiction, and a guide to traditional Irish music. Carson won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.
He is author of over a dozen volumes of poetry, as well as translations of the Táin and of Dante’s Inferno, and novels, non-fiction, and a guide to traditional Irish music. Carson won an Eric Gregory Award in 1978.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 25, 2023
A dizzying, mysterious, and delightfully strange thriller by one of Ireland's greatest writers. Carson is best known as a multi-award winning poet who charted the psycho geography of his native Belfast and picked at the interstices of the English and Irish languages. However, he was also a noted writer of prose and wrote a number of books that fall between the cracks of fiction, memoir, and prose poetry. Exchange Place - the title refers to a real street in Belfast, one of the many cobbled alleyways that are called 'entries' - is, in a way, more conventional than most of his prose in that it is decidedly a novel in form. But then I say 'conventional' only by the standards of a brilliant writer who constantly pushed literature to the limits of its form.
The story is about two men - or is it really one man? - with a surprising number of similarities, one in Belfast and the other in Paris. They are both searching for a friend that has disappeared a long time ago. One man, John Kilfeather, is written in the first person; the other, John Kilpatrick, in the third person. There is a lot of intrigue and assignation, especially for Kilpatrick who is in the shadowy Paris of Modiano (a writer who almost attends a party that Kilpatrick is invited to). Kilfeather's adventures are more intellectual, concerning literature, fashion, and boutique drugs. The two come together in strange ways and we realise that the title of the novel is not simply referring to an address in Belfast (which it is), but also to the trope of characters being revealed as someone else, of changing character, in thrillers (Hitchcock's Vertigo, for example).
The story is very odd and a lot happens while also not very much happens. We are met with a lot of strange symbols and signifiers - we always are in Carson's prose. For example, the letter K appears a lot - as an initial or name, as part of the title of Kilfeather's unpublished novel - and as the weirdness of the novel increases one can't help but think of Franz Kafka's novels and the Ks in his novels. Indeed, in many ways this is a puzzle book rather than a mystery. There is more or less a kind of thriller plot going on, but he deliberately skips so many beats and allows his characters to wander off into unrelated thought that 'plot' would be too strong a term. It is more like the Japanese puzzle box that Kilfeather frustrates himself with trying to open.
This puzzle quality hits poetic heights too over the strange case of the numbers 1 and 4. Carson cycles around these obsessively: the character John Harland has a studio at the address 14 Exchange Place; Kilpatrick visits 41 Rue du Sentier; Kilfeather lives at 41 Elsinor Gardens; J.S. Bach's Contrapuntus XIV is heard many times on record players, a car stereo, a restaurant PA system, the radio; there are 41 chapters in the book. Furthermore, Kilfeather and Kilpatrick are in some way one and the same character, alter egos if you like. They are 'one for one': 1-4-1.
This obsessive invention takes precedence over story for much of the novel, which is precisely what makes this poetic novel sing. And speaking of singing, this is a tremendously musical book - and not alone among Carson's oeuvre in that regard. Exchange Place is more or less written in the form of a fugue - as much as is possible in words - a musical form most associated with Bach. Indeed, one of Bach's fugues is heard played many times in the novel. In music, a fugue consists of a single melodic line that introduces a theme that is then taken up and imitated by other melodic lines, with slight differences, while the original line continues. The result being a complex polyphonic texture of many voices and an obsessive exploration of the theme over time. This would be a fair description of the prose. In fact, this isn't the first time Carson has explored the fugue form, because he had previously experimented with it in his collection For All We Know - which, funnily enough, also plays with the spy thriller genre. Indeed, this novel really shines in the composery inventiveness that Carson finds in his words.
Exchange Place is a novel that only a great poet could write. It may make it less of a novel than some will like, but it makes it a much richer and rewarding read. Carson was never straightforward in his writing, but he engaged in much more than intellectualism. His work is often deeply moving, particularly the portrayal of parental relations (see The Star Factory in particular) and friendships (Exchange Place is a fine example of this). If one approaches this novel in the hope of a conventional thriller, they will likely be very frustrated. But approach it as a poetic and indeed musical novel, and they will be rewarded with a really rather affecting piece of art.
I've read almost all of Carson's published writing and Exchange Place is among his best works in my view. So many of his common themes are distilled in a way that initially seems less ambitious than the likes of Fishing for Amber or For all we Know, but which I actually think hits home emotionally more strongly. This is true literature by one of the greatest writers of the last generation. I will never be able to walk the streets of Belfast again without the disquieting feeling that my doppelganger is about appear before me, lift his fedora, and reveal to my horror my very own face.
The story is about two men - or is it really one man? - with a surprising number of similarities, one in Belfast and the other in Paris. They are both searching for a friend that has disappeared a long time ago. One man, John Kilfeather, is written in the first person; the other, John Kilpatrick, in the third person. There is a lot of intrigue and assignation, especially for Kilpatrick who is in the shadowy Paris of Modiano (a writer who almost attends a party that Kilpatrick is invited to). Kilfeather's adventures are more intellectual, concerning literature, fashion, and boutique drugs. The two come together in strange ways and we realise that the title of the novel is not simply referring to an address in Belfast (which it is), but also to the trope of characters being revealed as someone else, of changing character, in thrillers (Hitchcock's Vertigo, for example).
The story is very odd and a lot happens while also not very much happens. We are met with a lot of strange symbols and signifiers - we always are in Carson's prose. For example, the letter K appears a lot - as an initial or name, as part of the title of Kilfeather's unpublished novel - and as the weirdness of the novel increases one can't help but think of Franz Kafka's novels and the Ks in his novels. Indeed, in many ways this is a puzzle book rather than a mystery. There is more or less a kind of thriller plot going on, but he deliberately skips so many beats and allows his characters to wander off into unrelated thought that 'plot' would be too strong a term. It is more like the Japanese puzzle box that Kilfeather frustrates himself with trying to open.
This puzzle quality hits poetic heights too over the strange case of the numbers 1 and 4. Carson cycles around these obsessively: the character John Harland has a studio at the address 14 Exchange Place; Kilpatrick visits 41 Rue du Sentier; Kilfeather lives at 41 Elsinor Gardens; J.S. Bach's Contrapuntus XIV is heard many times on record players, a car stereo, a restaurant PA system, the radio; there are 41 chapters in the book. Furthermore, Kilfeather and Kilpatrick are in some way one and the same character, alter egos if you like. They are 'one for one': 1-4-1.
This obsessive invention takes precedence over story for much of the novel, which is precisely what makes this poetic novel sing. And speaking of singing, this is a tremendously musical book - and not alone among Carson's oeuvre in that regard. Exchange Place is more or less written in the form of a fugue - as much as is possible in words - a musical form most associated with Bach. Indeed, one of Bach's fugues is heard played many times in the novel. In music, a fugue consists of a single melodic line that introduces a theme that is then taken up and imitated by other melodic lines, with slight differences, while the original line continues. The result being a complex polyphonic texture of many voices and an obsessive exploration of the theme over time. This would be a fair description of the prose. In fact, this isn't the first time Carson has explored the fugue form, because he had previously experimented with it in his collection For All We Know - which, funnily enough, also plays with the spy thriller genre. Indeed, this novel really shines in the composery inventiveness that Carson finds in his words.
Exchange Place is a novel that only a great poet could write. It may make it less of a novel than some will like, but it makes it a much richer and rewarding read. Carson was never straightforward in his writing, but he engaged in much more than intellectualism. His work is often deeply moving, particularly the portrayal of parental relations (see The Star Factory in particular) and friendships (Exchange Place is a fine example of this). If one approaches this novel in the hope of a conventional thriller, they will likely be very frustrated. But approach it as a poetic and indeed musical novel, and they will be rewarded with a really rather affecting piece of art.
I've read almost all of Carson's published writing and Exchange Place is among his best works in my view. So many of his common themes are distilled in a way that initially seems less ambitious than the likes of Fishing for Amber or For all we Know, but which I actually think hits home emotionally more strongly. This is true literature by one of the greatest writers of the last generation. I will never be able to walk the streets of Belfast again without the disquieting feeling that my doppelganger is about appear before me, lift his fedora, and reveal to my horror my very own face.
October 20, 2012
Wow! This is by far my favorite novel by Ciaran Carson. It is simultaneously cohesive and non-cohesive, a dense puzzle of a book that wears its metaphors and parallels very much on its sleeve. As ever, Ciaran's prose is that of a poet, beautifully and uniquely crafted, endlessly fascinating and endlessly fascinated with itself. Ciaran's previous novels have tended to be less about plot and more about the unpacking of his character's psyche, relationships and internal monologue - and while there is plenty of that here, these developments are framed in a very intriguing narrative. A brilliant, delightful, thought-provoking book.
March 14, 2017
An eloquent book. This phrase embodies the theme "a fascination with memory, paranormal phenomena, surveillance, questions of identity and the bombing campaign conducted by the Provisional IRA in Belfast in the later decades of the twentieth century". Identities are constantly switching in this story which moves between Paris and Belfast.
December 19, 2018
Tangled, bewildering and bursting full of things to make you think. I loved getting taken along for the ride with this book, watching identities seep into each other and feeling the phenomenon of the uncanny every step of the way.
I lived in Belfast for 3 years and I'm grateful to this book for capturing a little of the city's feeling, and telling me some things I didn't know about it.
I lived in Belfast for 3 years and I'm grateful to this book for capturing a little of the city's feeling, and telling me some things I didn't know about it.
Read
June 22, 2014'A car-horn sounded ceremonially and my whole being shimmered with the knowledge that the atoms of my brain had been forged aeons ago in the stars, billions of atoms forming dense thickets of neurons and transmission cables endlessly communicating, more active often in sleep than in waking life.'
July 26, 2015
Noted Belfast poet Ciaran Carson writes about John Kildare, a character obsessed with his clothes, whose identity has been fractured by Belfast bombings and perhaps also by musing about Walter Benjamin and other literary theorists. The 60-ish KIldare keeps seeing himself in other people named John as he wanders through Parisian arcades and the mystery is why Exchange Place (where personalities are exchanged?) is considered a literary mystery. Its structure is like a fugue in which thematically related characters keep meeting up without developing. In music this works, but I find the technique tiresome in a book.
May 2, 2015
I only gave the book 3 stars as the author is very clever, scholarly and writes well. However this is such a hard read and refers too much to other works instead of focusing on this book. The author calls everyone John, which is a bit tedious. I guess ther@ e may be a point to this but still, its not obvious. And the blurb only really enters the story near the end. The rest of the book doesn't have a vast amount of storyline. Some good imagery though.
January 1, 2022
Difficile seguire il filo conduttore anche perché sembra non esserci, l'ho trovato complesso, sicuramente se l'avessi letto in un minor tempo avrei potuto collegare meglio il tutto. Ad ogni modo un libro "differente" che forse 😅 rispetto a molti altri ricorderò...speriamo 😂
May 21, 2014
Esiste anche una edizione italiana!
http://www.delvecchioeditore.com/libr...
http://www.delvecchioeditore.com/libr...
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews