Book review: Catherine Ryan Howard impresses again with latest novel

Catherine Ryan Howard’s latest novel is set locally, in west Cork. Picture: Bríd O’Donovan

• Run Time
• Catherine Ryan Howard
• Corvus, €13.99

The punning title of Run Time refers, of course, to the length of a film but also to an all-pervading atmosphere of adrenaline that tells the protagonist it is time to run.

Catherine Ryan Howard structures the novel like a Chinese box. Each story opens out to reveal a parallel one inside. Strung through the narratives is a lead character who is a clone of those in the other versions. For all these heroines, for they are all young women, it is definitely time to run.

Time is running out and death is near. It is similar to Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life in which Ursula dies over and over again. Does each death render the reader insensate to the following one? Or is it, like in a horror film, a way of building tension for the next shock? Or maybe like a bad dream in which you are ready to run, but you are, somehow, paralysed. It may, indeed, be Run Time, but how to run and where to?

The Chinese boxes contain a metafictional novel, First Draft, inside Run Time itself, as well as an accompanying film script, Final Draft. The plot is said to be based on true life. So that adds up to a very confusing three or four iterations of the tale.

Now, as Ryan Howard opens her pages, the film is also starting its production. Will events in front of camera match, in many particulars, the previously mentioned accounts? But, hold on, perhaps this is a chicken and egg fable? Which came first? Can any of the heroines realise that what she is reading, and/or living, and is her fate: Can she prevent it or is it predestined?

To add to our sense of unease the stories are set locally, in west Cork. The scene is close to Bantry, and the taxi driver hails from Sheep’s Head Peninsula.

Run Time by Catherine Ryan Howard

The star of the film is expecting to shoot in a west Cork of “rolling green fields and, at their edges, rocky outcrops slicing into a steel-blue sea. What she finds, on arrival, is a background of “claustrophobic forest”.

It’s more like The Shining, with dark forestry plantations surrounding the set, the trees so close together that they are like an impenetrable bottle green curtain.

There is a cottage in the middle of the woods. In Run Time it is a red brick bungalow with smoke twirling from a chimney, in the film script, Final Draft, based on the novel, First Draft, it is a quaint, stone holiday home, whilst on the shooting lot it is more of a log cabin.

These minor changes tend to hint at a separation of Ryan Howard’s yarns, but this would be deceptive: They are all headed in the same terrifying direction.

Ryan Howard has fun with the tropes of the psychological horror. The film production company is called Cross Cut, another pun, relating not only to the editing process, but to a means of slicing a throat open.

There is no mobile phone coverage for miles around. You can get lost and disorientated between the rows of thousands of identical trees. Everybody on set, other than the protagonist is male and one, at least, is really creepy. Things do not look good for the heroine, however feisty she might be.

The main conceit of Run Time, the thing that sets it apart from others of its kind, is the plurality of storylines, but that structural decision means that it is hard to get close to the central character or to care very much what happens to her. But Ryan Howard knows how to write a page-turner, and she has done it again.