The Talk of the Town
Ardal O'Hanlon
Sceptre pbk, 244 pgs, £10
Review by Gerald Houghton (1998)
Beware comics bearing, if not gifts exactly, then at least novels. They're all at it these days, and almost to a one (well, Ben Elton, certainly) are rubbish. Only Stephen Fry has mastered his game, managing to be a comedian and an actor and a damn good novelist at one and the same time. And he went a little mad, don't forget.
Which, sort of, brings us to Ardal O'Hanlon, stand-up and famed star of Channel 4's finest sit-com in 15 years, Father Ted. Well, now is the time for this thirtysomething to fancy a slice of that writing cake, serving up Talk Of The Town - quite possibly not the novel everyone expected. It has jokes, certainly, but not a lot, favouring heavy pessimism by the spade-load. This is not a jolly book. O'Hanlon apparently wanted to publish under a pseudonym.
Our narrator is one Patrick Scully, a young man about Dublin in the early 80s. Always up for the crack, he has a job, a flat and a girlfriend. Things would seem to be going right for the 19-year-old. Except that his job is security man in a jewellery shop where the only fringe benefit guarding for Mr Dunn is that you can make off with his merchandise yourself. And the flat is shared with the combustible Xavier 'Balls' O'Reilly. And of his girlfriend Francesca?
O'Hanlon's novel is split between Patrick's bitter, laddish telling, and diary entries from Uni-student Francesca, those latter realised with a fine eye for nervous adolescent pedantry. "I was scared of intimacy," she writes, "interaction, being physically there at any event involving me." Patrick's nights are a whirlwind of crap discos and heavy drinking and the occasional fight. And its one of those bouts, boasting the bravado of the pissed, that puts him in hospital, where convalescence gives him the chance to review events.
What emerges is a portrait in frustration. O'Hanlon is especially good at suffocating small town life (much of it unfolds in Castlecock), with its petty rivalries and gossip. Patrick knows his chance passed him by when he broke an ankle just before an important football game, and looks to the idealised Francesca for his future. Unfortunately, as her diary reveals, she spends as much time trying to avoid him and his quick, infantile temper as she does trying to get into Balls' pants: "Maintaining a grip on things generally was like keeping mice at a crossroads." It can only end in tears.
And it does, but in ways you might not expect from its initially flip tone. "Happy memories you see," Patrick says at one point, "are not relevant to my story." For a first-time novelist O'Hanlon handles his local dialects deftly, and manages those shifts between light and dark well, tempering our sympathy for Patrick with his racism and queer bashing. This novel really is considerably better than it ever needed to be.