Like everyone else, I was charmed by Rónán Hession’s first novel which, despite being a book about kind and gentle people making their way through ordinary life events while trying not to hurt anyone, is oddly compelling.
Some of Hession’s authorial decisions are unfashionable: omniscient narrators, fiction built around low-stakes moral dilemmas, lack of physical description (I’m with him on that one: fiction is one of the few areas where it doesn’t have to matter what people look like). “I thought the show-don’t-tell police would have me put away,” he has said. I’m probably a member of that force but these things are fashions, not laws. George Eliot does plenty of telling.
Panenka is a natural successor to Leonard and Hungry Paul. Panenka is a “penalty technique” in football, and also the nickname of Joseph, who lives with his daughter Marie-Thérèse and his seven-year-old grandson Arthur. Panenka and Marie-Thérèse are both in the aftermath of failed relationships and working together to raise Arthur and trying to find their own sources of happiness.
Personal questions
Marie-Thérèse is newly promoted to retail management, which means her former colleagues on the shop floor resent her, and we find out Panenka’s pleasing and unusual job only at the end. Panenka has recently begun to suffer appalling headaches which he tries to keep secret, disliking being the object of attention, and he spends spare evenings in a run-down bar with men who can be relied upon not to ask personal questions.
Marie-Thérèse has one friend, Carla, who can be relied upon to ask the questions Marie-Thérèse would rather avoid. Arthur has friends, likes sweets and football, is an ordinarily lovable and wholly convincing child of the sort rarely encountered in literary fiction. They all live in a run-down but friendly part of Dublin, where things are grubby but you can go safely about your business.
The narrative tension, which is not the point of this book, comes from Panenka’s diagnosis and prognosis, from the gradual disclosure of his back story and from the reader’s hope that Marie-Thérèse will resolve her difficulties with work and relationships in a sustainable way, professional triumphs and romantic happily-ever-afters not being on the table.
If you object to books in which not much happens, this is not for you (though if you want happening, read the news). Nice people try hard and things get a bit better. Hession’s project, across both books, is admirable and interesting: are goodness and kindness in ordinary life enough to sustain a novel? It’s obvious that the answer should be yes, and in Leonard and Hungry Paul it was.
I found Panenka harder going; a lot depends on the reader’s understanding of and sympathy for a man permanently affected by failure on the football pitch. Hession has done his work so that you don’t have to like or understand football to follow the story, but if you’re immune to the appeal of team sports, a lot of imaginative work is required.
As a young man, Panenka played for the team loved and supported by everyone in his area but failed to score a crucial goal in a crucial match described in detail over four pages: “Seneca were relegated and spent the next 25 years outside the top division.” Everyone hates him. He becomes too depressed to leave town or start again and eventually his marriage falls apart: “Panenka had already internalised the profound blame being attached to him. He deserved it and the name that had already become branded on him.”
The problem here is only partly the telling-not-showing; if your literary tastes tend to the modern and you lack sympathy for footballers and their fans, appreciating this book will be hard work in a way that appreciating the social and romantic concerns of Leonard and Hungry Paul was not.
The dialogue is often more like soliloquy, especially towards the end (“Chapter 28: Proverbs”), as the characters begin to break the fourth wall. “When you’re consumed with the effort of processing internal pain… It’s like holding your breath under water: you realise that you need to breathe but if you breathe at the wrong time, you drown,” Panenka tells his new friend Esther. Her reply includes this announcement: “The future turns out to be a kite crashed in the sand.”
These moments seem to come from a medieval morality play more than a modern novel. If that’s the point, then the books are interesting and important for the same reasons that make them slow going.
