FICTION: The Runners By Fiachra SheridanNew Island Books, 196pp. €9.99
BOBBY AND JAY are teenagers living in Dublin’s north inner city in the 1980s. Despite class differences – Jay is from the flats and Bobby’s parents own their home – they are the best of friends, with the area of Ballybough their concrete playground. Theirs is a world of soccer games and boxing, of climbing trees in Holy Cross College and running races round the perimeter of Croke Park. These are the places intimately known and possessed by Jay and Bobby and where they play and grow up.
Fiachra Sheridan, in his confidently fashioned first novel, creates a charmingly Edenic realm for his characters to roam around. Matching this untroubled world is his use of language, which from a child’s perspective is simple and direct, capturing well the guilelessness of wide-eyed youth. This is a story played out in public spaces, with Sheridan happily dodging the stereotypes of the Irish classroom and its various rites of passage.
No mention of school means that there’s a shift toward the physical in the novel, these boys energetically run and play amid the streets and shops and the canal. Reflection comes with Bobby’s observations, his eager innocence shining through.
The adult world is at a remove: Bobby’s parents are in the background, a somewhat benign presence. Even his father’s affair with alcohol is presented as just one more aspect of adult life that must be borne as a fact from the child’s point of view rather than worried about as a problem to be dealt with.
Sheridan’s technique, and it is utterly effective, is to offer a portrait of life that avoids exaggerated characterisation or overly melodramatic action. This restrained depiction serves to emphasise how Jay and Bobby’s essential being, like every child’s, is bound up in the unknown potential of whatever it is they will finally become.
As can be imagined, such a happy tale can never run its course. The shift from harmless play to something more troublingly dark is gradual. Anto, the boys’ boxing coach and in many ways a surrogate father figure to them both, betrays their simple trust. He is a respected figure in the community, his protection of the boys seemingly sincere, as is his desire for them to succeed in their sporting endeavours. From Bobby’s partial perspective, the reasons behind Anto’s position of authority slowly unfold as it transpires he is at the centre of a large drug-dealing enterprise. Unwittingly, the boys become caught up in his operation, running large amounts of heroin around the city concealed in videotapes.
The complexities of Anto as a character, the obvious contradictions of his position as both an authority figure who works for a better future for the children in the area and his supplying the heroin that literally destroys a whole generation of this community, are not explored.
The legacy of the wholesale annihilation of Dublin’s inner city can only be hinted at. It becomes clear that the novel is not especially concerned with teasing out such subtleties; to do so would perhaps break the quiet spell that Sheridan is working so hard to craft. His is a simple tale, simply told, a more personal story, but nonetheless powerful and compelling for all that. In a way The Runners is a fable, with the budding potential of Bobby and Jay, their childish naivety, representing that wider community: all their hopes, achievements and dreams will be shattered in the deathly, numbed embrace of heroin.
This is a self-assured debut. Fiachra Sheridan, son of writer and theatre director Peter, possesses instinctively the ability to present well-drawn characters and manage a well-paced plot. The result is that the intimacies of place and people emerge gradually so that the reader might care for both by the novel’s devastating end.
Derek Hand is a lecturer in English in St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra. He is currently writing A History of the Irish novel: 1650 to the Presentfor Cambridge University Press