Going down in Derry

Further Adventures of James Joyce, Colm Herron. Dakota; €7.50

THE year is 1988; the scene Troubles-ravaged Derry. Conn Doherty and the James Joyce- obsessed Myles Corrigan, heroes of the extremely anti-type in Derry author Colm Herron’s latest offering, sit drinking away their nights in the Drunken Dog. A couple of never-were types, they have become mired in the rut of a life.

Conn teaches at All Saints, a secondary school run by a dictatorial Catholic hierarchy. As a teenager he had endured a stint in a psychiatric hospital following the kind of broken heart that never heals. Now he is middle-aged, single and, aside from the occasional fling, lonely. Myles has also been down the teaching road, though he was some years ago invalided into an alcohol-fuelled early retirement following a brutal beating at the hands of British soldiers. He too is single, and just as lonely. He too is haunted by a past that won’t let go.

Both men have elected to seek refuge in the Drunken Dog, an insane asylum of a bar littered with a colourful array of screwball characters.

Here they can shout down forgotten orders of Guinness and mourn the fact that all around them the world is coming apart at the seams.

Historically accurate background colour garlands these pages. In Gibraltar, three IRA members are executed by an SAS hit squad. Myles feels compelled to attend the resultant funeral which, held in Belfast’s Milltown cemetery, quickly descends into chaos when a loyalist paramilitary launches a gun and grenade attack on the mourners, killing three more people and injuring dozens.

Added to this mix, in quick and at times breathtaking one-twos, are a recounted kneecapping, some loveless under-the-covers debauchery and the sort of immense religious hypocrisy that sees the good and innocent made to suffer while the corrupt reap lavish rewards.

The novel’s flaws are inherent from the beginning, though for a while even they beguile. Much of the story is told in sharp, witty dialogue, but there are occasions when the exercise spills over to redundancy.

And while the main characters are quite finely wrought, some of the lesser lights fare less well.

Melanie is the most striking example of this; a young, sex-hungry woman whom Conn rescues from a burning flat, she falls quickly into a torrid affair with her knight in shoddy armour. Her character intrigues but, sacrificed in favour of gimmicky storytelling tricks, quickly turns paper-thin. Ultimately, great fiction is about making the right choices. Large parts of this novel are well written, carefully crafted, yet feel an edit or two shy of a diamond finish.

The author’s sense of ambition must be admired, yet too often he seems to dazzle himself, to the detriment of the story. The metafictional pyrotechnics initially amuse but all too quickly irritate. With his frequent interruptions of the narrative and his constant flitting between the realistic and the absurd, Colm Herron does not merely break the fourth wall, that necessary and often sacred boundary between audience and performer, he smashes it to dust.

In the final analysis, and for all this novel’s many positive elements, the finished product is hit and miss, serving to frustrate as much as it satisfies.