Anyone picking up this book and expecting another of Eugene McEldowney's celebrated crime novels is in for a surprise although, I hope, not a disappointment. This is a dish to satisfy the current appetite for reminiscence about modest Irish beginnings - a vivid portrait of Belfast in the days just before the rest of the world discovered it. It may not be a whodunnit, but as autobiographical fiction it contains its own internal mystery as we try to figure out how much of the story is true.
The Faloorie Man is a character in a traditional song. Martin McBride, a young Catholic boy growing up in the Fifties and Sixties in working-class North Belfast, hears it sung by his father Isaac as he shaves each morning and the tune is the beginning of an eclectic soundtrack that accompanies Martin's life. There's Boolavogue and the songs of Glasgow Celtic, on through Elvis, Buddy Holly, the Chieftains, although, curiously, the Beatles era seems to pass our Martin by.
His journey to manhood takes him into the arms of a Christian Brothers education, where he is taught in some cases by people who live in an Ireland that exists only in their own heads, but it also takes him inevitably into the embrace of various young women, with whom he has a confused, furtive and occasionally embarrassing education of a different kind.
Martin thinks well of people and his world is populated by honest, diligent, god-fearing folk trying to get by. Sectarian division is by no means absent - there is an account of the Divis Street riots that prefaced the Troubles - but it is not what this book is about. Instead, sectarianism is a steady undercurrent, seen, for example, in how Martin's acquaintances view their employment prospects, in how he has to change his first name temporarily during one colourful episode working in a shop in East Belfast and, in a passage which will infuriate, when Isaac goes into the City Hall to pay his electricity bill and is humiliated.
Martin emerges from these pages with rather more than his share of normal youthful ingenuousness. He is like an uncertain visitor, appearing at times not to be a fully paid-up member of the world in which he lives. But a fragile sense of identity and truth is at the heart of this book and sends him, in the concluding sequences, on a voyage of discovery.
This is an affectionate chronicle, gently told. Throughout the narrative we see the streets and hillsides of a Belfast which seems like yesterday but is long gone. There is a bitter-sweet pleasure in re-discovering it and, for at least one reader, in meeting once more a character who was most certainly real: the late Fergus Pyle of this newspaper who gives Martin his first job and with it a sense of selfworth.
Keith Baker's new thriller, Engram, is published this week