“Declan Burke is his own genre. The Lammisters dazzles, beguiles and transcends. Virtuoso from start to finish.” – Eoin McNamee “This bourbon-smooth riot of jazz-age excess, high satire and Wodehouse flamboyance is a pitch-perfect bullseye of comic brilliance.” – Irish Independent Books of the Year 2019 “This rapid-fire novel deserves a place on any bookshelf that grants asylum to PG Wodehouse, Flann O’Brien or Kyril Bonfiglioli.” – Eoin Colfer, Guardian Best Books of the Year 2019 “The funniest book of the year.” – Sunday Independent “Declan Burke is one funny bastard. The Lammisters ... conducts a forensic analysis on the anatomy of a story.” – Liz Nugent “Burke’s exuberant prose takes centre stage … He plays with language like a jazz soloist stretching the boundaries of musical theory.” – Totally Dublin “A mega-meta smorgasbord of inventive language ... linguistic verve not just on every page but every line.Irish Times “Above all, The Lammisters gives the impression of a writer enjoying himself. And so, dear reader, should you.” – Sunday Times “A triumph of absurdity, which burlesques the literary canon from Shakespeare, Pope and Austen to Flann O’Brien … The Lammisters is very clever indeed.” – The Guardian

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: HELLFIRE by Mia Gallagher

Mia Gallagher’s debut novel utilises two risky devices to embellish its narrative, but boy, do they work. Firstly, the protagonist, Lucy Dolan, is trying to make sense of a horrific, life-changing event of 13 years earlier and narrates the story partly from the first person, but mostly from the second; she’s addressing her childhood friend, Nayler, who is the missing piece of the puzzle that is her life. This switching between pronouns works beautifully and imbues an epic story, which spans four generations, with a life-force from the beginning – who is this Nayler and why is he so central to the plot? It doesn’t become fully apparent to the end, but that device drives the narrative in its jumping from the present, which is 2003, back to the ’30s,’40s and ’50s of inner city Dublin and from there to the ’60s, right up to the heroin epidemic that infected the city in the ’80s. Secondly, the entire story is relayed in vernacular Dublinese, which can be tricky to pull off; Roddy Doyle is one the only writers to have successfully done it thus far. But Gallagher’s faithful rendering of Dublin’s wackers, ganglords, messenger boys, tinkers, dealers, fortune tellers, pimps, junkies and brassers is more comparable in flavour to Irvine Welsh (which is intended as a high compliment). My only criticism is that the novel is perhaps overly long – somewhere three-quarters of the way through it seemed as though its cohesiveness had slipped a little; the time that Lucy spends in prison feels like it could be shortened and is slightly at odds with the rest of the novel. But, that small quibble aside, it redeems itself by the end and HELLFIRE is, overall, as addictive as Lucy’s beloved ‘gear.’- Claire Coughlan

1 comment:

Colm Keegan said...

I met Mia last Saturday - she read from her book and i was astounded. She performed rather than read, and it was as if she was possesed by the books narrator. Can't wait to pick up a copy.