Joseph O’Connor’s hugely enjoyable novel is a faux-memoir “written” by Robbie Goulding, the fictional guitarist of a fictional band called the Ships in the Night. It’s a testament to how convincing the novel is that, when I finished it, I automatically found myself wondering how Goulding’s bandmates would react to its publication. I had to remind myself a moment later that they didn’t actually exist.
The story begins in unglamorous Luton where Robbie, whose family moved from Dublin to England in the early 1970s when he was nine, is one of the first generation of his family to go to college. The local polytechnic is an unglamorous place, but it’s there that Robbie encounters the enigmatic and outrageous Fran Mulvey, born in Vietnam but raised largely in Yorkshire by Irish foster parents. Soon this unlikely pair are skipping lectures and writing songs instead, and their first attempts at live performing – busking to bemused shoppers on the streets of Luton – just fuel their desire to write and perform. Fran, whose family background is not a happy one, finds an unlikely refuge in the Goulding home, thanks to Robbie’s patient mother Alice and his zookeeper father Jimmy, behind whose constantly outraged blustering lies a kind heart.
Soon Fran and Robbie meet the final two members of what will become the Ships in the Night – a classically trained, academically-minded cellist from a London-Irish background called Sarah-Therese Sherlock, known as Trez, and her drumming Mod brother Sean. As O’Connortraces the band’s story, from shambolic first gigs to surprising international stardom to acrimonious law suits, Robbie’s narrative is interspersed with extracts from various interviews with Trez, Seán and Fran, creating a full picture of a group of people who became, in a strange way, a family. But families don’t always stay together, and we learn very early on that eventually Fran and Robbie would go their separate ways. The question of how they get there, and where they might go next, makes for a very funny, very sad and ultimately very moving book.
I first busked with my first band when I was 16; I was in bands, some serious, some not, for most of my twenties. I don’t know how much time Joseph O’Connor has ever spent in decrepit rehearsal spaces or playing to totally apathetic audiences in small towns, but I do know that he’s managed to capture exactly what it’s like to be in a band – the squabbles, the humour, the camaraderie, the bad gigs and the good ones, the hard work and, most of all, the sublime feeling when it all comes together and the chords you’ve been messing with turn into a song or the sound you make on a stage is the one you want to make.
As the Ships move from squalor in both London and New York to a world of stretch limos and celebrity lawyers, O’Connor’s prose bounces along with an unforced exuberance that ensures there’s never a dull sentence. He’s a master at capturing the complexity of interpersonal dynamics, particularly that very Irish and British way of hilariously insulting and tormenting the people you love the most; when Sean switches from being rude to Fran’s face and polite about him behind his back to the other way around, we know the relationship has deteriorated beyond repair. And I have never read a funnier, or more accurate, depiction of what it’s like to be lectured by an angry authority figure while trying, and failing, not to laugh than the glorious scene when Jimmy berates a drunken Robbie (“Oh, terrible smart, aren’t you, Prince Fucky the Ninth.”).
The Ships’ relationships with each other are deftly and tenderly drawn, especially Robbie’s relationships with Trez, after whom he yearns for years, and the troubled, mercurial Fran, who is that rarest of fictional characters, an utterly convincing enigma.
Ultimately, this is a book about love – love for friends and for family and, always and forever, for music. “To be young and in a band that is stumbling towards its own sound, messily, slowly, with all the infuriation of hope, is to realise what it feels like to be alive,” writes O’Connor, and that feeling has rarely been captured so thrillingly, and so vividly, as in The Thrill of It All.
The Thrill of it All is published by Virago, £8.99.
Anna Carey is the author of the Rebecca series of YA novels, including Rebecca Rocks.
Next Wednesday, we will release a podcast of the author in conversation with Anna and Martin Doyle, assistant literary editor of The Irish Times, recorded in front of a live audience in association with the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin.
Competition winners
The answers to our quiz questions were Roxy Music; Cowboys and Indians; and John Milington Synge.
The 12 winners of a copy of The Thrill of it All are: Fintan Garrigan, Artane, Dublin 5; Mark McAvoy. Douglas Road, Cork; Oonagh Casey, Blackrock, Co Dublin; Margaret Crowley, Kilmacow, Waterford; John Smith, Clonsilla, Dublin 15; Anne Davidson, Newbridge, Co Kildare; Sarah O'Dwyer; John Tobin, Abbeyfeale, Co Limerick; Simon O'Neill; Cian Fitzsimons; Maureen O'Rafferty; and Klaus Harvey.
