A new crop of 30-something Irish novelists seems to have taken to the crime and thriller genres with all the enthusiasm of a gangland lord for casual violence. At one end of the spectrum we've Hugo Hamilton's Headbanger (1996), with John Connolly's Every Dead Thing (1999) at the other - and plenty in between. Now well-known journalist Sean Moncrieff enters the bloody fray, with his dark and comic debut novel, Dublin.
Unlike Connolly, who avoids problematic representations of Ireland by opting for non-Irish settings, Moncrieff sets his bloodfest on a single Dublin Bloomsday. Where Connolly circumnavigates Ireland altogether, Moncrieff makes use of an alternative strategy, employing Joyce - but not Joyce's style - in an ironic echo of Ulysses; a strategy Martin McDonagh made use of in his post-modern blend of Synge in contemporary settings.
Like McDonagh's press pitch, the pre-publicity for Dublin draws a predictable analogy with the cinematic work of Quentin Tarantino. Dublin is representative of a recent batch of Irish literary efforts, in various media, where there is an anxiety about the literary. Here, as elsewhere, refuge is taken in a popular genre like the thriller, while aping the cinematic Dublin of films like The General.
The story itself details the wanderings of a latter day Stephen Dedalus, Simon Dillon: a coke-snorting, failed pop star and son of a famous High Court judge that, like Kafka's K, finds himself mixed up in events that he doesn't at first understand. Waking up in his friend Bongo Mannion's flat (a latter day Buck Mulligan - parallels with Ulysses continue throughout the novel, including an eye-patched "Citizen" character), Dillon quickly finds himself caught up in a gangland feud. As the novel unfolds, there are brutal murders all over Dublin, kidnappings, a bomb in O'Connell Street. There's a mysterious French woman, Odette, who acts as Dillon's lover/ bodyguard, and there is copious drug taking, as well as the liberal swilling of beer.
What Stephen Dedalus would make of all this, God only knows - let alone Joyce.
Action-packed and sometimes funny, the novel quickly careers off in a surreal spiral of events: a convoluted plot that is often as ridiculous as it is unbelievable. Who is that French woman? Why is the Russian Mafia attempting to take over the Dublin crime scene? Why was a certain woman murdered on a bus to Sligo, and what on Earth does Simon Dillon have to do with all of this?
While Moncrieff's novel is something of a roller-coaster ride, it does succeed, most of the time, in keeping the reader on board. While it is difficult not to get the impression that the author is sorting out the plot as he writes, he does, nevertheless, manage to make most things tie together at the end.
As an anti-literary debut, Dublin is engaging and deserves praise. It deserves to do well in the popular market at which it is pitched. However, it still leaves me craving a contemporary Irish fiction that is accurate in depicting current Irish life and that is sympathetic to its characters, without having to resort to overblown bloodbaths and Tarantino pastiche.
Ian Kilroy is a freelance journalist and playwright. His first play, The Carnival King, will be staged by Fishamble Theatre in this year's Galway Arts Festival.