Keeping his mirror uncracked

FICTION:Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra's Box By Ross O'Carroll-Kelly (as told to Paul Howard) Penguin Ireland, 340pp. £12.99 - STEPHEN DEDALUS, a century ago, described Irish art as "the cracked looking-glass of an old servant". Well, the Irish are servants no longer, but the looking-glass is still broken, and in a most peculiar way.

Irish fiction hasn't kept up with Irish reality. So we get "literary" novels about paedophile priests, novels about the Famine, novels in which farmers walk the fields - but who pops into Starbucks and orders a grande chai latte with soy?

During the last decade few novelists have bothered to notice what modern Ireland is actually like. This is terrain that Paul Howard, whose mirror remains uncracked, has made his own, seeing - or, more accurately, hearing - what the Irish really are, in south Dublin anyway.

Howard has a flawless ear for the verbal self-betrayals of our prosperous middle class. He skewers their susceptibility to jargon ("It's a really good opportunity for him to skill up in the areas of engagement management expertise and client relationship"), their readiness to embrace cliche ("I mean, you stop at a petrol station now, ask for directions - the chances are no one will have a clue where to direct you. They're all Chinese. Yeah, yeah"), the way in which their kneejerk liberalism reflects nothing more than a fear of censure ("I know this is going to sound bad, but he was, like, black?"), and the way in which, in the suburbs of south county Dublin, a surfeit of material possessions seems to spill over into a rapt self-love ("Look around you. We have everything. I couldn't think of a single thing to pray for").

You will search the pages of our more distinguished literary novelists in vain for this kind of thing. When was the last time you read a novelist whose ear for the way some Irish people speak was so acute that he was capable of writing a sentence like "Just going back to what you were saying there about the whole non-national thing"?

Reading a line like that, you hear a whole culture speaking. And Howard's virtuouso ear for Hiberno-English records just as readily the accents of "de Nort Soyde": in the dialogue of Ross's skobie sprog, Ronan, the Herald becomes the Heddild, and the afternoon becomes the Arthur Noon.

This is more than an extraordinary comic gift; it is a way of talking seriously about character and social standing. In the Ross books, character is voice: how you speak is who you are. The twin engines of the books are language and class, and the way in which one expresses or betrays the other. This used to be the sort of thing Irish writers did all the time. Now, to find it, you have to go to Paul Howard, who isn't supposed to be a "literary" novelist at all.

Mr S is the ninth instalment in the Ross series, and it's a joy to read: funny, pacy, lighthearted, smooth. There's nothing here as dark as Ross's negative epiphany in the Ice Bar towards the end of This Champagne Mojito is the Last Thing I Own, and in a way that's a pity; but Mr S nonetheless offers all the satisfactions of a fine comic novel: a certain cosiness, some great gags, and the sense of an accurate moral compass steadily at work behind the scenes.

The very early Ross books were cruder, but more identifiably satirical: the Castlerock boys used to sing a southside version of Deutschland Über Alles before a game, and there was in those early novels a kind of anger that surfaces only faintly in the new one. It may be that Ross is running out of steam, that Howard has squeezed all he can out of this particular conceit, and that he requires some new pretext for displaying the fruits of his auditory imagination.

I hope he finds it; but Ross will certainly do for now.

Kevin Power's first novel, Bad Day in Blackrock, has just been published by The Lilliput Press