The Detainees, by Sean Hughes, Simon & Schuster, 322pp, £12.99 in UK
Chapter nine of The Detainees is wonderful. It opens with a luxuriant soak in the frothy, jokey solipsism so beloved of Sean Hughes the stand-up comedian; it concludes with an account of an act of sexual violence so dexterously revealing in its lean, taut prose that it alone vindicates the existence of Sean Hughes the author. Unfortunately, Chapter Nine is barely twelve pages long, a mere sandbar in what is largely a sea of inconsequentiality. The Detainees is an airport novel in the strictest sense: it takes its central metaphor from inside the terminal building. In Hughespeak, detainees are people whose adulthood has been inhibited by unresolved childhood trauma. Passively awaiting that delayed resolution, and paralysed by their own fear of flying, they find themselves confined to the arrivals lounge of life, taunted by every word from the outside world that comes in on the Tannoy. The hero, John Palmer, is a grinning shambles of a man. Though not yet thirty, and the proprietor of a successful antiques business which provides more than enough income to finance his wine, coke and CD habits, his mental health is about as robust as a ball of wet Kleenex. For a decade, John has allowed his persecutor from school days, Alan "Red" Bulger, to rent a room in his head, and Red has been routinely trashing the gaff. Having emigrated to the US years earlier, Red unexpectedly returns to Dublin in jugular vein, determined to slash a dash through the staid suburbia where he grew up. John is horrified by the reappearance of his loud, flashy nemesis. And, true to form, from the moment their paths cross, Red starts hacking away at the slender thread by which John's sanity hangs. The final straw snaps when Red rekindles his teenage romance with John's wife Michelle, herself a woman of precarious psychiatric balance. Strangely becalmed and perversely inspired by the latest round of humiliations, John sets out to exact revenge with a campaign of psychological torture. The exorcising of his childhood becomes his mission, the very reason for his survival into adulthood. In capsule form, the novel reads like a bullet-proof plot for Sean Hughes, a writer/performer who has shone much comic light into the dark shadows cast by a fraught adolescence. However, The Detainees falls flat, primarily because the bulk of it appears to have been created as an exercise in join-the-dots narrative.
There is scant evidence of a genuine love for language anywhere between its covers. Even the most straightforward sentences and phrases often run into clumsy syntactical smashes and mixed-metaphor snarl-ups ("The priest, unduly doing his duty," "the limbering fiasco lit on a short fuse," "plying him with prosaical questions"). For every page that features an elegant, funny or insightful passage, a dozen more simply rustle past like dead leaves in a breeze, making no impact whatever. Some of the observations are laughably banal ("Was there a rule in broadcasting that daytime television had to be shit?"). The evocation of contemporary Dublin is replete with every regulation cliche up to and including a chatterbox taxi driver and a line about "the cosmopolitan air" of the "reinvigorated" city centre. The puny attempt at satirising Dublin's gangland is itself nothing short of criminal. Inside The Detainees, there lurk the bones of a very decent Sean Hughes novel. As it stands, this babbling book boasts all the depth, authenticity and style of a Formica countertop in an airport bar.
Liam Fay is a writer and critic; his book, Beyond Belief, was published earlier this year