The Talk Of The Town

When I was young and aspirational, one of the things I always dreamed of was having a bookshelf in my lav. Partly because it seemed like the ultimate in decadent luxury, partly because I'd built up a collection of the sort of volumes that a bog bookshelf is based on - those spinoff books that TV comedy shows come out with every Christmas. The bookshelf never really materialised - not enough room in there at the moment, to be honest - but the collection of bog books has been multiplying at a rate of knots. Without moving too far from this computer, I could get you The Goodies Book Of Criminal Records, Mr Bean's Diary, Batchelor Boys: The Young Ones Book, The Mary Whitehouse Experience Encyclopaedia, and the omnibus edition of the books that probably started it all - The Complete Works Of Shakespeare & Monty Python, Volume One: Monty Python. All were generally only capable of being read once, usually thrashed together by the people who actually did the show, but assisted by an editor who did all the real work and ended up with a tiny acknowledgement on the copyright page.

And then a few years ago, comedy writers and performers started wondering what it would be like to write non-bog books. It just might go back to Ben Elton's Stark: an ecothriller that was so determined to be a Serious Novel that it more or less completely ignored jokes, and concentrated on cramming far too much plot and Author's Message speeches in instead. (It's a failing he never really sorted out till Popcorn, to be honest.) Since then, most comedy stars have decided they've got at least one novel in them: Stephen Fry, Hugh Laurie, David Baddiel, Rob Newman, Sean Hughes and Adrian Edmondson have all had a go, with varying degrees of success. Generally, these books have been accompanied by grumblings in the heavyweight books pages on how these upstarts are dabbling in things they just don't understand, and how Proper Serious Novels are being passed over in favour of these tatty imitations which only really sell because of the name on the cover.

And now Ardal O'Hanlon, best known for playing the eejit Father Dougal Maguire in Father Ted, has written a novel too. However, this time the review pages have been curiously silent. No condemnation, not even a review (nothing I've seen so far, anyway). Which is surprising, because it's very, very, very good.

The Talk Of The Town is set in Ireland in the early eighties: yes, it's a typical coming-of-age first novel, and the dates probably match up with O'Hanlon's adolescence. The narrator - well, the main one - is nineteen-year-old Patrick Scully, growing up in the small town of Castlecock. When we first meet him, he's coming home for the weekend from his dead-end job in a Dublin jeweller's. Over the first couple of chapters, we start to find out some of the problems on his mind. From a promising start at school, he's got steadily worse and worse, to the extent that he's forged his Leaving exam results to reassure his mother that he's doing well. He's sent the same forged results to the Garda, trying for a job as a policeman like his late father, although he's sure he doesn't have a hope in hell of getting it. And he's having trouble with his girlfriend Francesca, who's gone off to her mum's in Wicklow after they had a big row a few days earlier.

For the most part these worries are internalised, as Patrick refuses to let the outside world know what's going on. But the alarm bells start ringing for us in a creepy little scene as he prepares for his night out. Checking in the toilet after he's been, to make sure he hasn't got worms, he finds a gold ring sitting in the middle of the turd he's just laid. He fishes the ring out, washes it under the tap, swallows it, and then carries on with his ablutions - and all of this is narrated as if it's the most natural thing in the world. Clearly, something's going on that he's not admitting to anyone: including the reader, or himself.

The night out in Castlecock is, to say the least, eventful. On the town with his mates Xavier "Balls" O'Reilly and Shovels Malone, he gets laid for the first time up against the back wall of the Mirage nightclub with a local girl, and gets involved in several fights, the last of which leaves him hospitalised with concussion and several bruised ribs. And it's while he's laid up in bed that he starts tracing back through the events that have led him to this point.

Interspersed with Patrick's recollections of his childhood, and the year he's spent in Dublin so far with his girlfriend Francesca, are pages from Francesca's own diary. She writes about how they first met, at a Fresher's Ball in Dublin twelve months earlier: Balls O'Reilly had also just started as a student, and brought his pal Patrick along. They slowly develop some sort of relationship, but it's really all going one way, and Francesca admits in her diary that the main reason she's stringing Patrick along is that it keeps her close to Xavier, who she finds much more interesting.

In a fairly intricate flashback structure, we hop from Patrick's reminisces of his childhood with his father, to his teenage disappointments, to his perspective of his time with Francesca, all the time undercut by her own diary entries that tell a very different story. Eventually the whole thing comes to a head when Francesca goes away to America for the summer and leaves Patrick to stew in his own juices. When she comes back, Patrick has some tough choices to make.

The Talk Of The Town is a very dark, very complex book: the next time I watched Ardal O'Hanlon in Father Ted after reading it, I couldn't believe this was the same person. (He seems as surprised as the rest of us at just how dark it is: note the dedication to his daughter, "who arrived too late to offset the cynicism so rampant in this story.") Like Patrick McCabe's acclaimed The Butcher Boy (coincidentally, O'Hanlon has a small role in the film), the novel's best trick is to put you inside the head of an increasingly disturbed narrator without your ever losing sympathy for him.

The fact that O'Hanlon still allows humour to come through despite Patrick's pain helps tremendously. As he watches another squabbling couple coming home from a fancy dress party - he's dressed as Dracula, she's Cleopatra - and the male half of the couple yells "I never want to see you again as long as I live", Patrick reflects "That's good coming from Dracula." The whole sequence this comes from (the night out in Castlecock) is pretty much a comic tour de force, with Patrick losing his virginity up against a wall while simultaneously trying to carry on a conversation with a mate who's peeing against it, and a splendid evocation of what his "normal" nights out are like (not getting a slow dance when Wonderful Tonight comes on, nearly being killed by drunk ex-soldiers, walking all the way home, falling asleep at the kitchen table face down in your curry, the usual sort of thing).

The book seems to be selling all right, if you believe the charts, but I can't believe that reviewers haven't been leaping up and down raving about how good it is. So I'll do it. The Talk Of The Town is published by Sceptre Books and costs ten quid in paperback. It's a terrific debut for Ardal O'Hanlon, and bodes well for his future as a novelist. This book is far too good to go on a bog bookshelf: I certainly wouldn't have it in my bog. Being a monkey, and all.

Links

Channel 4's official Father Ted site doesn't have much on it now the show's over, but once you've worked out how the navigation works it's good silly fun.

The Craggy Island Examiner is the best unofficial Father Ted page, with pictures, sounds, news, and a Father Jack screensaver that just shouts "Drink! Feck! Girls! Arse! Gobshite!" at you all day.

The Comedy Cellar is Ireland's premier stand-up comedy club, founded ten years ago by a group of comics which included Ardal O'Hanlon. Their site has listings and comedy news, and currently includes an interview with Ardal in RealAudio.

The Edinburgh Book Festival has an appearance by Ardal on Friday August 21st, if you're in the area around then. He'll be talking about The Talk Of The Town and reading extracts.

July 18th 1998