It’s June 2019 and a whale gets stuck in the Thames. As attempts are made to repatriate it to the North Atlantic, Londoners come to observe this extraordinary sight. Across a long, sweltering weekend, a group of lovers, friends and acquaintances meet, drink, uncover long-hidden secrets about each other, have sex and plan uncertain futures. It’s not entirely clear which has more chance of survival: the humans or the whale.
Choosing to set a novel over such a short timeline presents a number of challenges to a novelist so it’s to Oisín McKenna’s credit that, in his debut, he manages to deliver such a compelling narrative.
The beating heart of the story is Phil, a twenty-something gay man involved in a complicated relationship with one of his housemates, Keith. His best friend, the newly pregnant Maggie, is oblivious to the fact that her boyfriend Ed secretly sits on the other side of the bus and that his earliest sexual experience was with Phil. Almost everyone is lying about something and it feels like the heat, along with the promise of a climactic party at the end, will sweat the truth out of them all.
McKenna avoids stereotype in his presentation of the gay characters. Phil is not some desperately promiscuous homosexual, sleeping with everyone in trousers, but nor is he terrified of intimacy. He’s just a regular guy, on the lookout for the perfect man, but happy to have a little fun until Ryan Gosling shows up at his door.
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Maggie and Ed are more complicated and perhaps betray the novelist’s rawness in that they’re less well drawn. They love each other but their relationship suffers from a lack of intimacy, not least because Ed has retreated so far into the closet that one more step will land him in the snowy wastelands of Narnia. It’s never fully explained why Ed is so dishonest. It’s 2019, after all. For the most part, no one cares about other people’s sexuality and coming out traumas are a thing of the past. When the truth is finally revealed, Maggie’s reaction feels more idealistic than credible, and is probably the only flaw in an otherwise convincing tale.
McKenna, whose background is in spoken word poetry, offers some brilliant lines. A strong candidate for sentence of the year comes when he describes Maggie as someone who “doesn’t make art any more. She just socialises in proximity to it”. In an earlier scene: “there are men with ties loosened, tongues loosened, men loose and loosening. Tops off, tops lost, tattoos in cursive fonts. Silver chains, gold chains, topless in the station.” One can imagine the author reading these sentences aloud, driven by their rhythm and repetition. They’re hypnotic and beautifully cadenced. Rap as a novel.
Alongside the more youthful characters sits Rosaleen, Phil’s mother, hoping to reveal something personal to her son but never quite finding the right moment. She too has regrets despite being married to a kind man. Kindness is underwritten in fiction, but compassion abounds here.
Structurally, it is clever to let the novel build towards a party, particularly when it takes place in an abandoned warehouse that has become home to a group of young people due to be evicted soon. It offers the opportunity for one last bacchanal, a moment where they’re forced to recognise that the carefree days of their twenties are coming to an end and a more serious life lies on the horizon. For Ed and Maggie that new life – a literal one – suggests a return to their old one in Basildon. Youthful blitheness has given way to financial reality and, although they’re reluctant to give voice to it, they both feel an undercurrent of despair.
That balance of sadness and joy in the novel is well executed. The straight couple are loving but unhappy. The gay men are enjoying life but conscious that, in their culture, a clock is always ticking and if they haven’t found someone by the time the music comes to an end, they’ll be banished from the game forever.
Evenings and Weekends is an impressive debut, pulsating with energy, humour and an agreeable amount of erotic charge. It put me in mind of early works by Rob Doyle and Keith Ridgway, two Irish novelists whose work is notable for its uncompromising prose and vivid characterisation. On the basis of this book, McKenna seems destined to join their august company.
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