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PRINT Luke Warde Tom Treacy Courtney Byrne Joe Jo
yce …a deft satire of Ireland’s rentier class and the pseudoreckoning of 2008. Midfield Dynamo Adrian Duncan [Lilliput Press] Midfield Dynamo’s contents page is laid out in the classic ‘starting eleven’ formation of a soccer team, plus one for the coach – call it a gaffer’s dozen. Far from a gesture of fancy-dan frivolity to impress the talent scouts, our author’s deeper purpose is ‘to visualize the book’s elements, structure and possible patterns’ in order to realize the collective’s most impactful thematic potential. This strategic approach is reinforced by implicit connections drawn between the pieces: Duncan, a trained engineer and visual artist, has included an accompanying sketch (reminiscent of a tactics playbook) that the stories’ field positions can be mapped onto. The title piece kicks off with memories of its narrator’s football-avid father, then of his grandfather’s hapless drifting from enterprise to disappointed enterprise in mid-century Midlands Ireland. (Caught midfield indeed.) The real creative pivot of the collection, though, is Prosine ki: a disillusioned footballer’s apology for the moral worth of selfless service to the collective over the individual’s quest for ‘aesthetic effect’ and personal glory. Duncan’s stories are as often about disenchanted engineers and struggling artists facing ruin as they are about devalued footballers facing the transfer market. The overarching connection between these austerely executed but richly imagined narratives has to do with the before and after of aspiration and disappointment, hope versus despair – not just across the arc of a career, but in the vexed history of family ties, estranged relationships, life’s other pursuits. For life (to steal the cliché) is a game of two halves. TT White City Kevin Power [Scribner] While spared his truly grim fate, Ben, Power’s anti-hero, is a kind of Patrick Melrose of bourgeois Ireland. Self-lacerating but ironic, eloquent but profane, myopic but insightful, Ben has MDMA where Patrick had heroin; a chancer for a father, not an abuser; clowns for friends, not monsters. The novel is narrated from St. Augustine’s rehab centre in Dublin, to which Ben has been committed, his life having gone – to borrow his own idiom – ‘tits up.’ Encouraged by Dr Felix, his psychotherapist, to put pen to paper and face his demons, White City is what results. The son of a hitherto successful property developer, Ben is the progeny of privilege. Privately educated in what seems a kind of surrogate Blackrock College, he is now pursuing a PhD – or trying to – on James Joyce. While a struggle, the stakes for Ben, like for others of his socioeconomic station, seem low: if the doctorate fails, there’s always a cushy number waiting on the back of his dad’s connections. Only now the latter has been outed as a crook, and this proves the catalyst for Ben’s precipitous descent into debauchery and ruin. Having abandoned a novel and now unable to fund his PhD – or anything else – Ben is offered a lifeline by the most unlikely of people: ‘the Lads.’ A recognizable bunch of posh blatherers, they lure him, their former school ‘friend’, into partaking in their shady property deal in Serbia, of all places. What could possibly go wrong? White City is more than Ben’s warts-and-all memoir; it’s also a deft satire of Ireland’s rentier class and the pseudo-reckoning of 2008. ‘The Lads’ embody the delusions of a boom-time generation who, to a large extent, got away with it. Gullible Ben, on this reading, serves as a stand-in for the ordinary Irish citizen who, when the party came to its inevitable end, was left to pick up the tab. Through Ben’s downfall, Power evokes a broader social malaise: what happens to people when the rug is pulled out from under them, when all that’s solid in their lives melts into air? Nothing good. ‘With zero money, zero prospects, and zero hopes,’ Ben tellingly deduces that his own deliverance from ‘hypercapitalism’ will be ‘through’ money, not ‘around’ it. Even as he scorns the crass materialism of his peers, he realizes that this contempt is itself dependent on his parents’ means. Perhaps there is no escape, no alternative, after all. White City’s tone is relentlessly misanthropic. This mightn’t sound like fun, but it nonetheless animates the novel’s riotous humour. In Ben’s diatribes flashes the kind of elusive comedy that literature’s great ranters – Dostoevsky, Céline, Bernhard – were expert at conjuring. Between Bad Day in Blackrock, Power’s debut, and White City are ten long years. The latter is a radically different novel: irreverent, distinctly not sober, and written with the kind of in-your-face panache you’d expect from a character like Ben. It was worth the wait. LW 44