The city is Dublin, the year 2040. Out in the bay the USS John Barry is a permanent fixture. Sandymount Strand oozes toxins and is the ideal spot for self-immolation; town is largely the resort of junkies, whores and international flotsam and jetsam. Forces of the government of Taoiseach Domhnach Cascade shoot demonstrators on sight. And Richard Rutledge Barnes King, pill-popping, alcoholic American president, is killed at a Dublin Castle do. It is to be sure "a time when dysfunction . . . pervaded all". It's only 25 or so years away, and at times it feels closer.
But John Kelly has other fish to fry besides the “three-eyed mackerel” of dystopia. His arresting pictures of the urban scene are by no means to be dismissed. For one thing they’re sharply entertaining, and conveyed with a winning blend of verve and exasperation – verbal facility shadowed by a sense of cultural dismay.
But if all this novel had to offer was a series of set pieces depicting a polyglot crowd at Tara Street station, or the blocks at Grand Canal Docks where the second generation of "urban culchies" live, or the security rite of passage required to get beyond the gate at Trinity, shades of a Blade Runner remix would not be long in suggesting themselves. Especially as such scenarios – the black site at Shannon; the conversion of much of the park into Fort Phoenix – have the context of some fairly predictable takes on Ireland's soul-destroying client relationship with the US, the world bully. But sci-fi is a red herring; the presidential killing doesn't cue Tom Clancyoid kerfuffle.
Genre's shopworn contrivances and accommodations are not going to get the job done here, not even satire, which might seem to be the one From Out of the City comes closest to. Satire is certainly part of the fun. But there's always something else – some diversion, some optic, some dummy sale – and trying to say this is what it all amounts to is where the serious fun for the reader starts.
The source of this fun is the narrator, 80-year-old Monk (named for Thelonious), who claims right from the start – and maybe repeats once too often – that here is the truth, and nothing but. The main tipple of Monk and his protege Schroeder is Stolichnaya. It’s like a serum to them. Analogously, truth is quite possibly a distillate, but it’s the trippy ups and downs of delving into it that one experiences.
So Monk reminds us that the etymological origins of invention lie in discovery. And the novel is the manuscript he leaves as his testimonial to uncovering. Heady stuff. Monk’s surveillance of the surveillers is to upstage their aim to know everything – strictly in the interests of plausible deniability and to inhibit full disclosure, naturally.
So from his eyrie in Dún Laoghaire, Monk – a kind of Tiresias of the TV monitor – is plugged into every electronically available information source. Surfer, trawler, hacker and snooper, even to the extent of leasing “security feeds” from city-centre pubs, he would know the grass if it was grass still growing, his self-appointed task not merely to see into the dark tide of debased epiphenomena that constitute just the rancid state of the nation, as well as the “breakage and distress” of the historical moment generally, but to do so with sufficient penetration that he sees beyond it. He mentions gingerly the word “redemption”.
That is what Schroeder needs. Unsuccessful author of a novel called Lucky's Tirade (Beckett scholars please note), and a former Trinity lecturer (in fact, he once gave a tutorial to TCD student Princess King, the late president's daughter, which is not forgotten for him), Schroeder now spends a lot of time lurching around town in a fugue state fuelled by nonstop Stoli and pills ancient and modern.
Such behaviour does not make him stand out from his fellow citizens, particularly. But he does differ from the majority in his uncanny ability to hook up with femmes fatales, and an even more remarkable knack of coming to no harm in their hands, even when they are agents of the UIA (compared to which the now defanged CIA were only babes in the wood).
Two of his acquaintances, Roark the fink and ex-priest Claude Butler, are peremptorily disposed of, the latter for being President King’s DA (designated assassin: the security state has thought of everything; that’s why one must think beyond them).
But even when Schroeder is put in Fort Phoenix he lives to tell the tale, if that’s the phrase. His survival isn’t only physical, though. However far gone he is, he can make a decision, even one that means forgoing the pleasure of NB1 News’s Paula Viola, on whom Schroeder has been fixated for many a long day, and night.
Schroeder swims in a sea of mixed messages, and, as Monk is aware, the mix is always a little off-kilter – perhaps a tribute to his namesake’s piano playing. Take the names of Dart stations. They’re given in Irish and English, but what comes across is the silence between the two. Similarly, we’re told the derivation of such street names as Grafton and Westmoreland; again, the estrangement of sign from signified is what mainly comes across. As Monk and Schroeder between them remind us – the former in the form of knowledge and its incompleteness; the latter through experiences and its confusion – the world remains there to be discovered, to be revealed.
And, in the end, the weather changes. The future is not what it used to be. But maybe something can be done about even that. Lots of strange things are possible, not all of them bad. This ambitious and original piece of writing is smart, sophisticated and ingenious (though perhaps a bit too metafictional for some tastes). It’s the very rare reader who won’t relish it.
George O'Brien is the author of The Irish Novel 1960-2010
