FictionIt's the 1970s and we're in the Limerick last heard of in the rain-sodden Angela's Ashes. Except now it's the start of a scalding summer in a suburban housing estate and while TB and empty bellies are long in the past, daddies are still martyrs to the dhrink and mammies are still battling in the kitchen.
The narrator, 13-year-old Sean "Nod" Hickey, is a member of a gang called Rocket Gang P, led by the worldly Pinhead Duffy, an enigmatic character who, at the age of only 14, understands all the nuances, eyebrow lifts, stares and subtle smiles of the jostling world of young male hierarchies.
Worryingly at first, with its narrator's artless prose, Pinhead Duffy feels like it's going to be one of those annoying crossover books marketed at a teen and adult readership which often leave the adult reader longing for more depth.
Although Close lovingly recreates those simple-seeming 1970s summers, with plenty of salad cream and sliced ham, Curly Wurlys and Patsi Pops, she also manages a coming-of-age story that's truly affecting, bitter-sweet and acutely observant of the pain that accompanies a child's transition away from simple truths and into the bewilderingly complex world of adults.
It takes some time and many chapters for Close to settle to her task. We follow Sean, Pinhead and the gang through madcap escapades and adventures, hurling matches, carnivals, mystery tours, shoplifting and fishing expeditions, but Close leavens her gift for comic situation with Sean's sensitive witnessing.
For although Sean hero-worships Pinhead, in the course of the novel he begins to perceive more critically Pinhead's cruelty and amorality and to understand its causes: an alcoholic father and the hinted-at abuse by a neighbour.
In that long summer Sean inexorably grows into his own skin and becomes more assured of who he is, and this, alongside a tragic death which affects the whole community, inevitably sparks a growing away from Pinhead.
In what is essentially a first novel (she has co-authored two other novels under the name Sarah O'Brien), Helena Close has written an account of a Limerick boyhood which, despite its episodic nature and a weakness in its overall guiding narrative, is a delicately wrought and assured debut from a born storyteller.
Yvonne Nolan is a freelance TV producer, journalist and critic
Pinhead Duffy By Helena Close The Blackstaff Press, 250pp. £6.99