Irish Fiction: Big Fat Love opens with Philo, the heroine of the novel, looking for shelter with the Nuns in Dublin's North Wall. Philo is massively, almost cartoonishly, overweight and she has left her husband, Tommo, because of his constant verbal abuse.
Her kids have been taken into care and she wants to start again and the convent seems to be the most positive place to begin.
Philo's largeness is not just physical; her personality is also super-sized, and like an unstoppable force of nature she barrels through these pages affecting all those she comes into contact with. Certainly, as a character, it is she who keeps this narrative rolling along at great speed. There is hardly time to catch breath as Philo does a Sister Act-like stint in the convent, visits her kids, schemes to get them out of care and back home living with her.
The backdrop for this ultimately feel-good story is North Wall. It is a place and a neighbourhood that Peter Sheridan celebrated in his family history, 44: A Dublin Memoir. The overwhelming sense of a tight-knit, village-like community that held that earlier work together, is all but shattered here. Despite Sheridan's best efforts to depict the North Wall's vibrancy and its health through, especially, the characters of Cap and Dina, who become lovers at 70 years of age after a lifetime of waiting, it is, ultimately, a lament for a world and a time of decency that has all but passed away.
Like recent English movies that present once busy and thriving industrial towns coming to terms with their post- industrial torpor, Big Fat Love merges the real and the surreal, the ordinary and the everyday with the thoroughly fantastic. It is at its best when offering these wonderfully unexpected images and moments, like Dina - after an operation on her toes - being pushed around the streets on a set of roller skates.
If it is the case that within every fat person, there is a thin person trying to get out, then with this novel, it is the case that there is a playful surrealistic story waiting to escape from the confines of conventionality.
This is a comic novel, mostly. Philo's world is a violent one, but there is no sense of real horror or outrage at her predicament. A world of male cruelty, it seems, must be put up with to a certain extent and, in the end, made the best of. There are momentary lapses in terms of voice and technique. But these seem to matter little in a novel that is determined to tell its story and determined to be uplifting in the face of despair. At times nostalgic, at times brutally direct, this is a novel meant to be fun. And it is.
Derek Hand
Derek Hand is a lecturer in English in St Patrick's College, Drumcondra. His book, John Banville: Exploring Fictions, was published by the Liffey Press last year
Big Fat Love By Peter Sheridan Tivoli, 309pp, €12.99