Reasons to be grumpy

FICTION: The Cold Eye of Heaven,By Christine Dwyer Hickey, Atlantic Books, 215pp. £12.99

IT IS SAID that your life flashes before your eyes in the moments before death, and Christine Dwyer Hickey takes this idea as the starting point for her rich new novel, The Cold Eye of Heaven. The book opens with a dramatic scene in which the novel's protagonist, Farley, finds himself prostrate and paralysed on his bathroom floor, his world reduced to the "rusty bolt that fixes the toilet to the floor . . . the white rise of the bowl's exterior . . . And the architecture of himself in the bottom of the full-length mirror". It takes Farley a moment to recognise his own reflection, but the self-recognition is not merely physical. It prompts an emotional journey back into the past.

Farley is an unremarkable type of character, a retired solicitor whose wife is long dead and who has settled into the numbing routines of old age: the solitary meals, the habituated social outings and the scant pleasures offered by remembering the past. He is a Dublin man, and his small world is evoked vividly through journeys from the sterile southside suburbs to the city centre. This is an intimate portrayal of a limited social arena. In many ways Farley feeds into the stereotype of irritable old crank: secretly lusting after the Polish neighbour he insults by refusing her hospitality; railing against the public use of mobile phones; despairing at the living corpses of drug addicts who line the quays.

Yet if Farley’s social observations seem trite, soap-box stuff, they also ring true to the portrayal of a man made intolerant by isolation, an old person rotting in a suburb that offers “nothing to inspire, nowhere to go”.

“At what point,” Farley wonders, does life “become about fear? Fear of being caught talking to yourself, of pissing your trousers, of pretending to remember a name, a place, a face you once knew well. Fear of getting done over by everyone out there: junkies, taximen, youngfellas, kids. Fear of your own face in the mirror.”

It is a moving portrayal of elderly loneliness and regret. However, as Dwyer Hickey reveals through a clever reverse chronology, Farley has not always been a curmudgeon. He once had dreams and passions of his own. An early memory highlights this poignantly. When Farley was a young man he fell into the River Shannon in the middle of winter on a company outing, and somehow survived. He was “unfuckingdrowned”, as the legend has it. “ ‘And from that moment on,’ his old boss, Slowey, used to say, ‘I knew our man Farley was a survivor. Not even the Shannon could keep the bastard down.’ ”

Through its slow backwards view The Cold Eye of Heavenreveals Farley's gradual transformation from survivor to victim of the natural debility of old age.

After the opening chapter Dwyer Hickey never returns us to the present moment. It is a typically brave choice by the writer: in Last Train from Liguria,Dwyer Hickey brings fascist Italy and Celtic Ireland together, and in Tattyshe expertly blends memoir and fiction. Her storytelling strategies, however, are never merely about style, and in The Cold Eye of Heaventhe reverse chronology ensures that we remain firmly rooted in Farley's consciousness as the novel spirals backwards through significant moments in his life: an old friend's funeral, the traumatic betrayal of his retirement, the fleeting abandon of a late love affair, the death of his wife, a childhood illness.

Although the determining incidents of Farley’s life are revealed to the reader in the opening chapter, our understanding of these events deepens significantly as Dwyer Hickey brings us farther into the past.

Dywer Hickey's skill is like that of a painter, slowly layering detail to provide a composite view. In The Cold Eye of Heaventhere are no clever tricks with hindsight or irony. There are no surprise revelations. There is just the measured pleasure of intimacy with Farley – "A man, a boy, a child, a baby, a man again, all at once" – who, for all the cantankerous prejudices of his old age, has lived a life worthy of celebration.

Sara Keating is a freelance journalist and lecturer specialising in 20th-century Irish culture