Best book I've read in years. An outstanding author, gone too soon. A master satirist, Molloy uses regional dialect, realism and laugh-out-loud humour to tell a story of sectarianism, racism, violence and discrimination rife against Catholics in 1960s Northern Ireland. She uses the faux-naif narrator, Ann Elizabeth McGlone, a magnetic, enterprising and spirited young catholic girl from the lower orders, to lambast the corrupt Northern Irish power structures: church and state, that preach love and practise intolerance. Deprivation is widespread and her life is in flux. In a few short years, she's worked as a machinist in a pyjama factory, as a bacon-slicer, a priest's housekeeper (hilarious episode), a maker of shrouds in a mortuary, in a delicatessen, she's become a political activist and has joined and been kicked out of the nuns - as the title suggests, she may have seen something shiny in all of these professions but ended up, as her father did, imprisoned for her troubles. Her casual portrayal makes all the more palpable, the hate-preaching politicians, corrupt priests, abusive nuns and horrific attacks by RUC officers, particularly the one against the People's Democracy march on Burntollet bridge in 1969, again the faux-naif device permits unmediated observation. Humour is a coping mechanism. She calls one of the housing estates they lived in 'Korea' because of all the fighting; she tries hard to live up to religious propriety but says: 'you couldn't ever imitate christ and manage to live in our house at the same time'; when her father will only allow her to leave home over his dead body, she talks about what a sorrow it is to her that he plans to die so young; and on her mother's anger, she calls it 'the menopause coming back to have another go at her'. It's just a fantastic novel. As I said it's written in Derry dialect, so a bit of getting used to but fascinating. Incidentally, Sarah O'Connor has an interesting chapter on Molloy and the use of dialect in 'Women, Social and Cultural Change in Twentieth-Century Ireland: Dissenting Voices'. She references O'Barr & Atkins thesis on how women's language is seen as a powerless language and talks about how, in turn, women tend to use more standard forms. Men, less bothered by stigma, use more localised forms. So, Molloy's use of Northern Hiberno-English was groundbreaking.
Highly recommended.