S.T. Coleridge said that 'a great mind is androgynous' - Claire Kilroy has a great mind. She writes without bias. Her characters boil your blood and drain it at the same time - Larney the riddler; rapacious Ray; the overlooked women who are themselves the puppet masters; the landowners and property developers; the lawyers; the 'bills' and 'mills' - Kilroy's prose sings with the absurdity of them all. This is a novel about reckless, megalomaniacal men and the property 'doom' that crippled Ireland; that excavated every square inch of our hapless country forcing us to live within its ruins. It's compulsive reading; smart, savage and witty. But what struck me most was Kilroy's ability to inhabit the mind of an alcoholic and capture, so truthfully, so vividly, the reality of addiction, the shakiness of recovery and the unpredictability of relapse. When Tristram comes face to face with a pint, he says: 'This was what I was. A cubic pint of deepest black. I was holding my soul, distilled into liquid and aching to be reunited with my body, howling to be poured back in.' This is insightful writing at its best. I love everything about it.
It's interesting reading this novel now in 2017. Notwithstanding our volatile recovery, the wolves are quietly combing their pelts and the jade-green-glass-eyed players are blowing on their dice, readying themselves for the soul-trading game that most of us will only get the hang of when it's over. This novel reminds me what I love most about Irish fiction: the women who populate it. Kilroy, Enright, Binchy, Boyce, Keegan, Gaughan, O'Donoghue et al. The women who put flesh on the bones of Shakespeare's sister and give the rest of us a literary tradition to be proud of, one we can relate to. Recommended.