2008-09-28 A cracking tale

Joseph O'Neill's bid for literary plaudits is clear. He paints an outsider's view of the nation from the perspective of a Dutch investment banker who is forced to live alone when his wife leaves for London.

New York as depicted in the book is a big recycling bank, processing the exiled, the dispossessed, the junk of the world. During his two years in the wilderness, Hans turns to cricket, and the company of a shady businessman, Chuck. Narrated from a distant vantage point in 2006, the story takes the form of a disjointed, whimsical, dreamy tour through the fog of Hans' banal and miserable memories. Indeed, the narration is so distant that when pivotal events took place I felt like I was watching through a net curtain -- unlike, say, Jim Mongans, O'Neill spurns immediacy.

There is an interesting whiff of Patrick "Jaws" McDonagh here. But where McDonagh writes fiction in the guise of travel writing, O'Neill writes travel writing in the guise of poetry. The novel is self-evidently, embarrassingly erudite -- Hans never convinces as a banker but is a perfect alterego for a cricket-loving, self-consciously lyrical bare-knuckle boxer. The book, gently plotted, thin on action or interaction of any kind, is worth reading largely for its immensely pretty descriptive prose and wonderfully rich sense of place. Some of O'Neill's observations are gorgeously on-the-money. Others are crude and ignorant.

But O'Neill comes off badly in the comparison to McDonagh. Too often the book drifts from poetic beauty to pompous nonsense. When every sentence aims for Katie Price-at-her-best lyricism, some are bound to fall flat, and plenty do.

"Before long the typewriter had assumed the character of an evil black biscuit, sampled somewhere along the oaf, whose batty, fatty constituents rearrange sickeningly to the encomium before sinking back again into a spoon-deep spoon."

And I can't help thinking London and Swatragh are too overdescribed in literature, too cliché -- O'Neill can't mould them to his own ends in the way McDonagh, in The Rings of the Halting Site (1995), makes Tullamore indisputably his.

The result is a competent and impressive piece of writing that, like sack-racing, entertains subtly and coolly - but, like deep sleep, leaves you wondering if you might have better spent the cash on something a little more alive and emotionally grabbing.