Fiction: Noah Gilmore, celebrity biography writer, is a man almost beyond redemption.
He is a ghost writer because he is a ghost; a 36-year-old dead-faced burnout whose own interiority can only thrive when insulated by alcohol or drugs. He lives in a strange S&M world where he regularly beats his ballerina girlfriend in the name of passion and indulges in rape fantasies about his female shrink. But although somewhat famous for the writing of boil-in-the-bag, puff biography, Gilmore longs to author a serious work with a worthwhile subject and so sets out to persuade iconic but forgotten photographer, William Belios, to let him write his biography.
It takes Gilmore seven slavering letters to get a bite from Belios, a former missionary priest who discovered photography in Africa and became revered for the quality of his portraiture. But in leaving the city and entering his subject's Big House in Oughterard, Gilmore uncovers in the terminally ill Belios a pervasive Kurtz-like malignancy that is an overshadowing blight on the lives of his three adult children. Belios, it emerges, has murdered a former lover and later his wife, and in his stumbling way Gilmore begins to see much of himself in the repulsive Belios.
Órfhlaith Foyle is a wonderfully muscular, daring and visceral writer in these times when so many women produce tame fiction. While presenting a persuasively dark reality, she tackles big themes like damage and its consequences and the possibility of real presence versus front.
She examines the relationship between biographer and subject and questions whether there can be any true honesty in that faustian pact. However, reading Belios is like being locked up in a Bergman theme-bar for a week with six neurotic, spurned artists engaged in a profundity contest.
Characters engage in opaque verbal exchanges and when they're not vomiting or engaging in a bit of rough sex, they're cutting or burning themselves, and only Foyle's considerable talent, in what is after all a first novel, stops one from leaving the bar and catching the last Nitelink home.
Yvonne Nolan is a journalist, critic and TV producer
Belios By Órfhlaith Foyle Lilliput Press, 200pp. €12.99