Jack Droney wants the world to sing, so much so that he has written the word upside down on his bare backside in order to read it in the mirror when his head is between his legs. Armed with this information the reader might expect a fantastic romp through a weird small town in Ireland, peopled by grotesques enacting even stranger events. This is what the reader might expect but, happily, this is not what the reader gets.
What Michael Curtin achieves in his new novel is a wonderfully delicate balance between the absurdly surreal and the achingly real. Comedy and tragedy combine to produce a tale that holds the reader's attention from beginning to end.
Toots Books, the alias of James Imbusch, has lost his way in life. His son Jimmy has drowned and his wife, Nellie, has retreated into a convent, unable to cope with the loss. Droney, a friend from his youth, believes that Toots needs to sing. For him singing can take many forms but the end result must be the same: a kind of freedom for the singer, as well as brightening the day of whatever audience is at hand. It is a simple idea but in the world of Curtin's novel it takes on the air of profound wisdom.
An unlikely set of characters assembles round Droney and Toots, coming together for a concert that will allow them all, in their own way, to sing. There is Walter Nix, a retired taxi driver who imagines himself as something of a detective. There is, too, Ignatius Valelly, also retired, but with boundless energy for organisation as he puts together a very traditional programme - complete with Irish dancing - for their evening's entertainment.
There is much to laugh at in the novel: the singular eccentricities of all the characters, the comic disaster that is the concert. However, in a carefully controlled and crafted narrative that shifts easily from the past to the present, Curtin manages to present these characters and their adventures as wholly rounded and believable. There is a nostalgia for a time when every town and village in Ireland had its "characters" who transcended the conventions of so-called decent society to live the life they wanted. Certainly Curtin evokes the sense of community that permitted, indeed enjoyed, people who acted as a constant reminder that there are ways to exist beyond the accepted norm.
This is a book to simply enjoy, not least because Michael Curtin achieves that rare thing in fiction - a genuinely unexpected twist in the tale that, for this reader, underscored the main theme of the book: that people are fundamentally good and can do good for others.
Derek Hand is lecturer in the Department of Humanities at D·n Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology