There’s a lot going on in the term “prestige drama”: a coy acknowledgement that most regular television drama lacks credibility; an earnest aspiration to moral and artistic seriousness; and a hint of inadvertent, oxymoronic irony deriving from the futility of that ambition.
Diarmuid, the protagonist of Séamas O’Reilly’s slim debut novel, is a Derry screenwriter engaged on one such project: a high-production TV series about a teenager murdered during the Troubles, crassly titled Dead City. A famous American actor flown in to star in the show has mysteriously vanished. Amid swirling speculation about her fate, Diarmuid and 13 other narrators unpack their ambivalent feelings about the production.
Their musings, briskly rendered in short chapters, form an extended meditation on the ethics of storytelling. Ann Marie, the mother of the murdered boy, is uneasy about having her ordeal turned into Sunday evening entertainment (“using it to sell dish soap and car insurance”). Finbar, a visual artist hired to recreate a mural for the show, laments the tired symbolism of doves – “a metaphor that became doggerel shorthand seconds after it was invented”.
O’Reilly’s characters reveal a weary disdain for the buzz-phrases of historical reckoning: the hackneyed language of dark chapters, raising awareness, vital and necessary work. But the filming is a boon to the local economy, so a phlegmatic self-interest prevails: “People ... wanted to imagine their city would be the cultural centre of the world when a show about its worst days was aired.”
READ MORE
There is a case to be made that the therapeutic cuddliness of American-influenced TV programming has been a culturally liberating force, helping to batter down the walls of secrecy and shame.
But not everyone’s buying it. One of the novel’s most compelling voices is Bogle, a hardy old-timer who thinks trauma and anxiety are concepts “invented by weak men who want trophies for their whinging” and waxes nostalgic about the camaraderie that sustained him during the Troubles. He reminisces fondly about a fellow inmate in Long Kesh, the internment camp turned into a high-security prison, who escaped the facility and then immediately re-entered it, “wearing new clothes, carrying a hundred fags and a telly”, just for a bet.
O’Reilly channels a conversational vox-pop realism that oscillates between stolid resignation (an “at the end of the day” here, a “but what can you do” there) and flashes of stridency. There are some gratifying digs at Irish-Americans and the selective historical amnesia of the British. (“They treat their own violence like the hiccups, something terrible that was happening for some mysterious reason and just as mysteriously stopped.”)
Though thinly drawn, the characters are good company on the page and endearingly unworldly. One woman, eager to express her admiration for a disabled employee of a teashop, calls him “a credit to his disability”. Elsewhere, a young actor recalls messing up an audition after a miscommunication over a dodgy phone line: the part was a sommelier, but he misheard Somalian, with amusing consequences.
The various threads are smartly interwoven. One chapter features a couple who earn a windfall by renting out their home to the filmmakers. (They like it because it looks “old-timey”; the couple would like to spend the money on a renovation, but will hold off in case there’s a second series.) One of their family photos goes missing; we later learn that it was pinched by another narrator, Lucie, who works for the production company. She has severe childhood trauma because her father had lived a secret double life; kleptomania is her petty revenge against the cosmos.
It’s a poignant revelation, if a little on-the-nose; the symbolism of that stolen family portrait isn’t a million miles from the corniness of doves. And therein lies the quandary: we’re all susceptible to a spot of melodrama, and the difference between pathos and mawkishness is a question of palate.
Prestige Drama embraces the very cliches it laments, as if to underline their ubiquity. The AWOL actor – the novel’s central plot line – is a case in point. As one character sardonically remarks, “There’s something inescapably moreish about a missing woman, much as any good writer hates a trope.” That trope is deployed here in a spirt of knowing satire, providing a springboard for an eloquent critique of pop culture’s obscene fixation with murdered girls.
If the “prestige” in prestige drama is essentially a shorthand for integrity, then the enemy is surely commerce: the formulaic stuff – the potboiling, button-pushing, heartstring-tugging – is what sells.
And that cynicism feels particularly crass when applied to personal histories and collective experiences that are still within living memory. There is a discomforting sense that something valuable has been bought on the cheap and debased. This is sombre, emotionally complex terrain, but O’Reilly navigates it with an impressively light touch – and plenty of wit and warmth.
