A child prodigy gone bad

The Talk of the Town, by Ardal O'Hanlon, Sceptre, 244pp, £10 in UK

The Talk of the Town, by Ardal O'Hanlon, Sceptre, 244pp, £10 in UK

Just for the sheer spite and naked prejudice of it all: stand-up comedians shouldn't write books for the simple reason that they're never any good, vide David Baddiel, Hugh Laurie, Adrian Edmondson, Rob Newman and Ben Elton. Like a radio DJ releasing a novelty record, it's just some publishing company's inane idea of fitting an emperor out with a new set of clothes and a clear case of never mind the quality, just feel the width of the marketing and press campaign.

That understood, the 64,000-punt question here is: would this book have been published if its author was an unknown? The answer, which will probably disappoint, is a resounding "Yes" - The Talk of the Town is a robust and resonant read, even if it is as flawed as your average Shakespearian hero.

It's a wildly ambitious tome: Holden Caulfield meets Francie Brady for a lost weekend of drink, sex, casual violence and more drink. Basically, it is an old-fashioned rites of passage fable featuring an idiot who is none too savant; the text propels itself along courtesy of a series of dynamic contrasts: stupid male vs. sensible female, "muck savage" rural Ireland vs. "stupid trendy bastard" Dublin, maturity vs. arrested emotional development. Not so much "dark" as downright misanthropic, the narrative is as stony and grey as the author's native county. "My mother was a bit mad, my father died when I was at a vulnerable age, I drank too much, your honour, I had a bad temper, a brick landed on my head and I haven't been the same since I was scratched by a radioactive cat," is protagonist's Patrick Scully's apologia towards the end of the book for the havoc he has blithely wreaked on friends and family. Scully is a child prodigy gone bad, a disturbed and disturbing adolescent who degenerates into mild psychosis due to his inability to progress from childhood to adulthood. Taunted by his better siblings at home, failed by the educational system and barely tolerated by his friends, he naively weaves his way to a sorry end.

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The rather bare-boned plot doesn't and can't sustain the momentum, but instead there is a parallel text which works as a potted social history of the 1980s - all Smithwicks, Spandau Ballet and silly haircuts as Scully and his rogues' gallery of acquaintances leave school, lose their virginity, drink themselves comatose and end up doing "fuckin' pointless media studies courses". The action is split between Dublin and the country town of Castlecock, the former being a cold, anonymous place where all you can do is drink, the latter being a small, claustrophobic place where all you want to do is drink.

With a fairly scatological turn of phrase, Scully impresses with his blanket hatred of everybody and everything and his scabrous sense of humour. Working as a security guard, he falls for Francesca, who belongs to the studenty world of all-night parties, soft drugs and J-1 visas that Scully so desperately wants to belong to but instead professes to despise with a passion. The relationship is of the dangerously obsessive variety and can only have one end. On a crude level, it's bit of rough meets bit of posh but the paranoia and nascent insanity swill around to pleasing effect.

While it's always a shock to read what seems like yesterday's events as a piece of history (in this case the Eighties), O'Hanlon succeeds in evoking the era, due to a canny eye for detail and some seemingly flippant but telling observations. There is, though, an occasional clumsy phrase or cliche thrown wantonly into the mix which operates like a stutter in the story, and the lack of any real social dimension or desire to get away from endless "fifteen pints of beer and five whiskeys - I was totally locked" episodes lends an almost pantomime feel to an otherwise deliciously macabre story.

Flicking between present and past as if searching for stations on a television, O'Hanlon does far better when in reminiscing mode. The rich pageant of Scully's childhood is told with both poignancy and some all too rare laugh-out-loud humour. Although there are clues aplenty as to why he turned out as he did, it's Valley of Squinting Windows prose - complete with tales of IRA sympathisers, stone-mad neighbours and family idiosyncrasies that are mightily impressive.

The eloquent, even lyrical, pre-adolescent Patrick regresses to a repressed and reactionary young adult, but not before a vivid and Technicolor account of losing his virginity outside the local barn which doubles as a nightclub. Isolated and relinquishing his grip on reality in Dublin, Scully turns his relationship with Francesca into a game of Russian Roulette and if the ending isn't up to much, what precedes it certainly is.

Although prone to the odd longueur and with the plot not showing as much width as the richly developed characters demand, this is a skilful and thoughtful work that will shake, rattle and roll the reader into submission.

Brian Boyd is a freelance journalist