Before the cynicism sets in, there is a phase of early adulthood in which friends and lovers regard their relationships with an earnest solicitude that belies their years, and even the cad in the gang inflicts his heartbreaking with a certain apologetic tenderness.
Rockadoon Shore, the debut novel by Rory Gleeson, is a wistful homage to that fleeting formative stage. Its starting premise is simple: six undergraduates – three male, three female – ensconce themselves in a rural lodge on a boozy weekend retreat.
There are gnawing interpersonal tensions, will-they-won't-they flirtations, and a whole heap of emotional baggage to sift through: one of the girls is a virgin and determined to pop her cherry on the sojourn; another is in love with one of the boys but the boy she's in love with is himself grieving over an ex; one of the girls worries that people find her cold; one of the boys slowly arrives at the realisation that he has done nothing but get get high for the past year, and fears that he might, as a consequence, have become boring. Think early Big Brother meets Friends, with a sprinkling of fish-out-of-water countryside farce à la Withnail & I.
In case this all sounds a little too jovial, the group is being clandestinely watched by a lonely and depressed old farmer named Malachy, for whom the lodge holds various grim memories of lost love and the sad detritus of a wasted life. When Malachy decides to pay the youngsters a neighbourly visit to introduce himself, he gives them a fright by doing so shotgun-in-hand. To everyone’s surprise the self-styled alpha male in the group duly bolts out of the lodge, and is later found hiding up a tree.
Mistrust
This episode is strongly reminiscent of Ruben Östlund's 2015 film, Force Majeure, in which a man who mistakenly believes he and his family are about to be buried in an avalanche instinctively looks to save himself rather than protect his brood, and in so doing contrives to ruin a family skiing holiday. Here, as in that movie, the flight response precipitates a welter of doubts, suspicions and mistrust. The event is the trigger for a litany of recriminations as the friends begin, through the haze of drink and drugs, to work towards a better understanding of each other and themselves.
Rockadoon Shore is divided into numerous relatively short chapters which hop across the perspectives of all seven characters – the six holidaymakers and the old voyeur – in a manner that recalls William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. Gleeson's prose, though, is far from Faulknerian: the register is anecdotal if not outright conversational, the narration briskly paced and every bit as cheerily expletive-ridden as the dialogue.
Gleeson can certainly spin a yarn, although perhaps not everyone will be enthused. The concerns that animate the young co-protagonists are little more than mild, common-or-garden social anxiety, or late-stage teenage angst, never more so than when one of them, Lucy, ruminates on whether the best-looking member is necessarily always ‘the centre of the group’, or whether other factors come into it.
Pathos
If the central plot of Rockadoon Shore falls fairly blandly within the coming-of-age genre – one character in particular, the wise and headstrong Catherine, emerges as the story's true heroine – certain motifs at the periphery of the action threaten to elevate the story above a mere gap-year frolic. Malachy's pathos-ridden inner monologue, in which he bemoans his own failure to take the plunge and move to the city when he was younger, accounts for the bitterness that engulfs him as he watches the youngsters having fun: life having passed him by, their exuberance is painful to him.
Malachy’s plight is a cipher for the vicissitudes of rural-urban migration, a concern that occupies Gleeson at several points in this book, most notably during a segment in which Malachy ventures out for a drink.
The town is dead, and the local pubs are struggling for business: “The young had moved away to Sligo, or Galway, many to Dublin, for work or adventure. The old farmers didn’t make the effort. The drink-driving ban forced them to choose between a five-mile walk or a night alone.” The houses in this locale “were empty now, abandoned, or owned by Germans or Americans or people in Dublin who used them as holiday homes for two weeks of the year”.
The decimation of communities, the hollowing out of a whole way of life: this melancholic backdrop is only lightly adumbrated, but it hints at a keen and socially attentive writerly sensibility, which will hopefully be more expansively showcased in due course.
