BOOK OF THE DAY: CHRIS BINCHYreviews We Need to Talk about Ross: the Totally Official Biography of Ross O'Carroll-KellyBy Paul Howard Penguin Ireland 236pp, £12.99
ONE OF the upsides of the current economic slump, we are told, is that time formerly spent indulging ourselves with fripperies like working and eating can now be used to reflect on bigger issues: where have we come from, where are we going and what happened to all that money?
In the parallel universe of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, a similar and unprecedented period of contemplation has begun. His friends are anxious. Their employment prospects are in flames, and in Kiely’s the 6pm news has to be turned off because the general air of gloom is putting the girls off their bellinis.
Ross himself has spent the last two years doing "fock all". A hefty advance from Penguin has been spent and the commissioned book, 1,001 Birds You must Knob before You Die, is no closer to completion. In desperation, the publisher dispatches the ghost writer to see if Ross will agree to a biography. The project is given his blessing and the story begins.
This is the first book in the series not written in the voice of the eponymous and utterly unreliable hero. We are presented instead with a series of interviews with the characters that have featured in Ross’s work to this point. His parents, friends, teachers and various conquests, some still smitten, most embittered, give their versions of the myths and legends of Ross’s short, inglorious life.
As ever, the world that Paul Howard describes exists in an unsettling space between fiction and reality. Sociological documentary turns in a moment into pure parody. The obsessions, accents and vocabulary always ring true. Statements of fact end with question marks and more easily influenced readers may, unwittingly, find the same inflection intruding upon their real lives. The bars, restaurants and clubs, the endless inventory of brand names, the clothes and perfumes and cars and coffee-makers and bags, the schools and colleges, the rugby-club discos and 21sts and free gaffs – there is a seriousness of purpose, an attention to detail and accuracy that Howard brings to all of this. He nails the minutiae the various Dublin tribes use to distinguish themselves from each other.
By opening up the narrative to multiple perspectives he is able to take the personal mythologies of each of the key characters and slowly pick them apart. Ross’s father, Charles, remembers their early years in “one of the less affluent parts of Glenageary” as “an exciting episode in our lives. It was even an adventure to be living in amongst other people.” For Ross’s mother, the experience was very different: “Net curtains, coal fires, free newspapers . . . We were living like animals. Quite literally.”
After eight novels in the voice of the vapid, vain, “sexually incontinent” Ross, writing a book from the perspective of 20-odd characters is ambitious. For the most part, Howard pulls it off. Occasionally, the tone strays close to editorialising. A section in which two investigative journalists outline the origins of the O’Carroll-Kelly fortune, for example, reads like journalism – appropriate in a way, but one of the pleasures of the Ross books has been Howard’s ability to make his point and lacerate his targets without ever emerging from behind the curtain.
Fans will obviously get more out of this book than Ross virgins. Familiarity with the characters will add to the reader’s enjoyment when these are being forensically examined. But Howard has always been a sharp, funny and humane writer and this book again demonstrates the keenness of his vision and his ability to find humour in darkness as well as light.
Chris Binchy is a novelist. His latest book, Open-Handed, is out now in paperback