Crime ain’t funny, but...
DAVID “Worm” Healy is a 19 year-old with no qualifications and a reading obsession. Unfortunately for him, his father Decky is a crook “with a capital C”, the head of a bustling criminal enterprise in the rebel city.
Worm — short for bookworm — finds himself handling the “bottom of the ladder stuff” like selling hash; his older brother “Spanner” handles the thievery, while his younger twin siblings “The Pits” and “Spider” run “the drugs in the nightclubs where they have a lot of people working for them”.
Displaying a firm handle on cringe-worthy humour, O’Leary’s prose bounces along in a sing-song of slang and casual profanity. Arguably there are places where closer editorial intervention could have sharpened the book as a whole, however the narrative’s early lurches and freewheeling digressions more than capture the manner in which the Healy family conduct themselves.
Indeed, this is a novel built around the deliberate cartoonishness of its characters. “Just about everyone gets a nickname in Cork,” Worm explains, though people receive such sobriquets “whether they want one or not”. Thus the real tension fuelling The Healys is not that between drug-dealers and the law but instead that generated by a collision of the characters’ public faces with their own vision of themselves. Within such a framework, it is no surprise that the intellectual Worm struggle with his family’s reputation, especially when called upon to partake in his father’s “Costa del Sol job”, the retirement heist around which the novel pivots.
“If I tell a girl what me and the family do, they run a mile,” he says. “If I say nuthin’ and they find out later on, then I’m a scumbag liar and they run a mile anyway”. The point is largely theoretical until Worm meets a beautiful Spaniard and seriously begins to consider fleeing his family’s chaotic influence.
Peppered with text messages and tweets, as well as vivid descriptions of Cork City, The Healys is very much a story of the now. Celtic-Tiger Ireland is dead and gone here, with the upside-down nature of crime and punishment in the recessionary nation not escaping the eyes of Worm’s unsavoury contemporaries. After all, “if ya steal a bike you’ll be prosecuted, but not if ya bankrupt the country”.
The result is more of a comedy than a crime novel per se, though O’Leary adds depth by offering the reader a frustrated protagonist with a strong voice and a breath of pop-cultural reference to underscore the absurdity of shows like The Wire appearing as influences in an Irish context. As debuts go, The Healys is a largely entertaining, idiosyncratic effort which speaks to the enterprise and imagination of its author.
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