FICTION:The Eighty-Five Billion Euro Man By Donal Conaty Y Books, 239pp. €13.99
WHAT SITUATION COULD be readier-made for scathing satire than our breathlessly rapid fall from economic grace into IMF-monitored penury? What group more deserving of a good old-fashioned skewering than our own brand of Neros in Dáil Éireann? Enter, then, the online humorist Donal Conaty and his tale of one beleaguered IMF bureaucrat’s attempts to put manners on Ireland’s wayward caretakers before the country, under the behind-the-throne direction of the fictional Department of Finance chief Dermot Mulhearn, self-immolates.
Its billing as the first Irish-published book to be commissioned directly from Twitter – which, for good or ill, all but forces us to treat it as a novelty from the outset – perhaps helps to explain why The Eighty-Five Billion Euro Man, for all its hyperbolic charm and pantomime excess, doesn't really work.
A Twitter post can be self-righteous, it can be heavy-handed, its jokes and caricatures can be loud and uninspired. It can be all of these things and still be a sharp comedic tool because, as instant response, its humour rejects careful crafting. For the most part, the more quickly you can throw a workable non sequitur at a breaking news story, the more successful your Twitter feed becomes. But to sustain such an exaggerated comic narrative, especially one as brimming with soapbox hostility as this, requires a bit more finesse.
Instead what we get is a plethora of lame nods to The X Factor, Seán FitzPatrick and bunga-bunga parties, to name but a few, punctuated by overly long letter-to-the-editor-style diatribes about the corruption and ineptitude of Official Ireland. These bulky chunks of prose, shoehorned in at every possible opportunity, feel unnatural and draw greater attention to the fact that the jokes that bookend them aren't very polished. At its most frustrating moments the book reads more like a patronising lecture on the idiocy of the Irish people than as the disquieting farce it aspires to be.
Effective political satire is a balancing act, and a tricky one at that. Real-life characters already ripe for parody need to be pushed to the point of grotesque, cartoonish mutation, but they should never wholly cross that line, as to do so nullifies the impact of their lampooning beyond the instant gratification of seeing a man in a suit fall down. And we get an awful lot of this throughout Conaty’s novel.
One episode involving Brian Cowen and Mary Coughlan running around a field in Clara, taunting a drunken bull, will give a fair idea of just how tenuously connected these caricatures are to their nonfictional counterparts. Depicting Michael Noonan as a drooling infant or Enda Kenny as a buffoon with an imaginary friend, Paddy, could be amusing as a throwaway remark, but stretching these laboured portraits over 30-plus pages certainly is not.
All this is not to say that Conaty’s debut is entirely without merit. He has a flair for constructing ludicrously over-the-top set pieces that, when not marred by the aforementioned, can be wildly funny. A street brawl between two rival gangs of civil servants, a Michelin-starred chef roasting gulls and swans in the middle of Government Buildings, and a baby-kissing fiasco between election candidates are all par for the course in this bizarre political landscape.
Mulhearn, a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of the Celtic Tiger age, presides over much of this hilarity, and, despite not always being fed the sharpest lines, he is a fine creation. The author should also be commended for attempting to breathe new life into what has become a desensitising drone of recession-era rhetoric.
Unfortunately, much like the many, many targets of his ire, Conaty gets a bit too carried away. A little less ranting and a little more restraint would have done this story the power of good.
Dan Sheehan is a freelance journalist. He edited the 2010 collection Icarus: 60 Years of Creative Writingfrom Trinity College
