Reading Paul Howard (Routledge Studies in Irish Literature) [1 ed.] 0367645351, 9780367645359

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Reading Paul Howard

Reading Paul Howard: The Art of Ross O’Carroll Kelly offers a thorough examination of narrative devices, satirical modes, cultural context and humour in Howard’s texts. The volume argues that his academic critical neglect is due to a classic bifurcation in Irish Studies between high and popular culture, and it will use the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Sigmund Freud, Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida to critique this division, building a theoretical platform from which to examine the significance of Howard’s work as an Irish comic and satirical writer. Addressing both the style and the substance of his work, this text locates him in a tradition of Irish satirical writing that dates back to the Gaelic bards, and it includes writers like Swift, Wilde, Flann O’Brien and Joyce. Through textual and contextual analysis, this book makes the case for Howard as a significant and original voice in Irish writing, whose fusion of the three traditional types of satire (Horatian, Juvenalian and Menippean) has created a parallel Ireland that shines a satirical light on its real counterpart. As Freud suggests, humour is a way of accessing aspects of the psyche that normative discourses cannot enunciate, and Howard, through the confessional voice of Ross, offers a fictive truth on 20 years of Irish society, a truth that is not accessed by discourse in the public sphere or by what could be termed literary or high cultural fiction. Eugene O’Brien is Professor of English Literature and Theory, and Head of the Department of English Language and Literature in Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. He is the editor for the Oxford University Press Online Bibliography project in literary theory and of the Routledge Studies in Irish Literature series.

Routledge Studies in Irish Literature Editor: Eugene O’Brien Mary Immaculate College University of Limerick Ireland

Feminist Discourse in Irish Literature Gender and Power in Louise O’Neill’s Young Adult Fiction Jennifer Mooney James Joyce’s Mandala Colm O’Shea The Irish Short Story at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century Tradition, Society and Modernity Madalina Armie Seamus Heaney’s American Odyssey Edward J. O’Shea Seamus Heaney’s Mythmaking Edited by Ian Hickey and Ellen Howley Irish Theatre Interrogating Intersecting Inequalities Eamonn Jordan Reading Paul Howard The Art of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly Eugene O’Brien

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www​.routledge​.com​/Routledge​ -Studies​-in​-Irish​-Literature​/book​-series​/RSIL

Reading Paul Howard The Art of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly Eugene O’Brien

First published 2024 by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 and by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Eugene O’Brien The right of Eugene O’Brien to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. ISBN: 978-0-367-64535-9 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-64539-7 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-12499-3 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003124993 Typeset in Sabon by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction: Towards an Evaluation of Paul Howard

1

1 Seeing Ireland Differently – The Theoretical Lens

15

2 Ireland’s Satirical Tradition and Howard’s Place in It

29

3 The Best Years of Our Lives – School and College

46

4 Married in the Celtic Tiger

71

5 States of Denial

93

6 From Prosperity to Austerity

110

7 Bouncing Back

136

8 Ross Grows Up (?)

167

9 A Family Man

188

Works Cited 217 Index 224



Acknowledgements

This book has been the fruit of a long number of years reading, enjoying and teaching the books of Paul Howard, featuring Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, to undergraduate and postgraduate students in Mary Immaculate College’s Department of English Language and Literature. The responses from students, both orally and in writing, have all helped to shape my thinking, and made me look all the harder at the cultural value of these books. I have written about Howard in some books in the Reimagining Ireland series, edited by my great friend Eamon Maher, and I thank him for the opportunities, and for the chance to air some ideas at various conferences of the Association for Franco-Irish Studies, of which he was founding president. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Mary Immaculate College for their support and collegiality. As Head of Department, there is a lot to do, and the ability of my colleagues to do their jobs so well gave me the time and, more importantly, the mental space to complete this book. My family has been listening to me talk about Ross for years, and I would like to thank Eoin, Dara and Sinéad for their opinions, comments and laughter as we spoke about the books and the newspaper columns – these conversations shaped my thinking in more ways than they know. My wife, Áine, is always supportive of everything I do, and, at a time when people were querulous about whether the study of Howard was sufficiently ‘literary’, her support, and her advice to follow my own opinions, were crucial to the development of this book, and for that, and for so much else, I thank her. I also appreciate her forbearance in putting up with a large computer on the kitchen table. As ever in my work, Paul and Katie have been sustaining presences throughout this book, and I would also like to thank Jay for his company on many mornings and evenings as I wrote this book. Finally, I would like to thank Paul Howard for his generosity in providing me with texts; for his alacrity in responding to stupid questions from me; for his support of the project in general; and mostly for creating a parallel Ireland which acts as a mirror and teaches us so much about the Ireland in which we live, in a funny and mordant way. I think his books make us laugh, but 

Acknowledgements  vii they also make us think. He is saying important things about the Ireland in which we live, and he is doing it in a very entertaining way. His work can be traced in a direct line from the ancient bards and filí of the Irish language through the satirical strain that is so important in Irish writing, and it is my hope that this book will encourage people to read his work in that tradition, as it very much enhances it and brings it up to date.

Introduction Towards an Evaluation of Paul Howard

People often ask me if there was one particular individual who inspired the character of Ross and I’m reminded of a schools’ match that I attended in the mid- to late-1990s while I was writing the early stories that make up the main body of this book. It was at the very start of the Celtic Tiger and a young buck with the confident bearing of a five-star general strutted off the field and said to his father, ‘I don’t give a fock how you think I played – just crack open the wallet’. And, at least in my mind, that was the moment when Ross O’CarrollKelly was born. (Howard 2000, 8)

Writing in The Irish Times, reviewing Paul Howard’s eleventh book The Shelbourne Ultimatum, Patrick Freyne saw Howard as ‘one of a pantheon of anthropomorphic Irelands (others include Cuchulain, Kathleen Ní Houlihan, Dev and Marty Whelan)’: I believe that, in years to come, heavily footnoted editions of Paul Howard’s long-running series will be the textbooks on early 21st century Ireland. In fact, I assume it will be annotated sooner rather than later …. It won’t be long before readers will be wondering who Katie Holmes and Suri Cruise were, so I suspect the books will soon come with more footnotes than TS Eliot’s The Waste Land. (Freyne 2012) The paralleling of Howard’s work with that of Eliot is interesting for a number of reasons. Eliot can be seen as a synecdoche for high modernist culture. The intellectualisation of poetic theme, subject and form that highlights so much of Modernist art can be seen in its purest form in his work, with The Waste Land (Eliot and Rainey 2006) being a poem that needed endnotes to guide the reader through the intersubjective weave of references to myth, legend, literature and other languages and cultures. It was a poem specifically written in a high cultural frame of reference. To equate Eliot and Howard, a writer who would seem to be firmly placed in the DOI: 10.4324/9781003124993-1

2 Introduction paradigm of popular culture is quite a knowing gesture on Freyne’s part, as the Irish literary establishment has largely ignored Howard’s work, as will be further discussed in Chapter 1. To see Howard as a necessary voice in understanding contemporary Ireland, just as Eliot’s voice is essential in understanding the Modernist period, therefore, is a serious claim, and one that the present book will both endorse and amplify. Annotating a book is one of the performative gestures that enfold that book into a high cultural frame of reference; to annotate is to suggest, first, that this book is worthy of study and, second, that the context within which this book is written needs to be explained in order to fully understand the particular vision of the book. Similarly, Howard, in Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s Guide to South Dublin: How to Get By On, Like, €10,000 a Day (Howard 2007a) went so far as to include a glossary of terms, a ‘ThesauRoss’, a dictionary of words and terms commonly used in South Dublin: ‘It will give you a better understanding of what the fock everyone is banging on about’ (Howard 2007a, 9). It is typical of Howard that he will affect the academic convention of explanatory notes, and then undercut them with the following profanity, and the slang term ‘banging on about’. To see Howard as embodying a very particular vision of Ireland is at the core of the present study: in my view, Freyne is correct in pointing to the cultural significance of Howard’s work, as it captures a very specific place and time in Ireland, as well as a very particular attitude to class and privilege, terms that are becoming increasingly important in Irish Studies, despite having been long repressed in academic critique. This book will assess the writings of Paul Howard as being of cultural and stylistic significance. It will argue that his critical neglect is due to a bifurcation in Irish Studies between high and popular culture, and it will use the thought of Pierre Bourdieu, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Mikhail Bakhtin and Jacques Derrida to critique this division and to build a theoretical platform from which to examine the significance of Howard’s work as an Irish writer from an academic perspective. It will address both the style and the substance of his work by placing him in a tradition of Irish satirical writing that dates back to the Gaelic bards and includes writers like Jonathan Swift, Oscar Wilde, Flann O’Brien, Austin Clarke and James Joyce. Through textual and contextual analysis, this book will make the case for Howard as a substantial and original voice in Irish writing, whose fusion of the three traditional types of satire (Horatian, Juvenalian and Menippean) has created a parallel Ireland that shines a satirical light on its real counterpart. As Freud suggests, humour is a way of accessing aspects of the psyche that normative discourses cannot enunciate. This book will contend that Howard, through the confessional voice of Ross, offers a fictive truth about 20 years of Irish society, a truth that is not accessed by

Introduction  3 discourse in the public sphere or by what could be termed literary or high cultural fiction. Satire as an agent of change has long been a potent force in culture, and this book will place Howard centrally in this tradition. Paul Howard has written across a range of genres. In the series there are 21 novels; four plays; two musicals; a mock travel guide of South Dublin; a book of mock interviews with all of the characters in the series, as well as the ongoing newspaper columns, a selection of which form the core of a book published in 2021 RO’CK of Ages (Howard 2021b). Ross first appeared in The Sunday Tribune newspaper from 1998 to 2007, and then migrated to The Irish Times, or, as the character himself would put it, in the upper-class accent that permeates the books, The Oirish Toimes from 2007 to the present, and it is from the latter columns that this book derives. Spelling deviations like this, a stylistic feature called eye-dialect, force the reader to say the words aloud, and, by reading phonetically, the reader mimics the accent of the haute bourgeoisie, who are the main target of Howard’s satire. It is clever in that even as we laugh at them, we mimic their own way of speaking and, by analogy, their way of seeing Ireland, so that, performatively, we inhabit their accent and, by extension, aspects of their worldview. These comic novels are powered by the twin engines of language and class ‘and the way in which one expresses or betrays the other’ (Power 2008b, 11). As already noted, Ross has remained the topic of a newspaper column. Our analysis will begin with RO’CK of Ages: From Boom Days to Zoom Days (Howard 2021b), as it demonstrates, in parvo, the satirical and epistemological thrust of Howard’s writing. This book is divided into chronological sections, from 2007 to 2020, with each series of yearly columns prefaced by a brief chronology of serious issues that occurred in the particular year, followed by a segue into the alternative world of Ross with a page containing the word: ‘Meanwhile …’ (Howard 2021b, 1). The ellipses lead the reader into the alternative satirical version of that year, and it is in the liminal space, shuttling between real and parallel Irelands, that Ross lives and breathes, and the force of that duality of perspective shines through in a later column not included in the collection. Meaning resides in the oscillation, the negotiation between these two discourses, inter-dit. The French psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan speaks of how the truth, or full speech, is very hard to access and that sometimes it can be found only ‘inter-dit’; it is ‘said between the words, between the lines. We have to expose the kind of real to which it grants us access’ (Lacan 1998b, 119). In the column of 20 March 2021, Ross’s daughter, Honor, asks why their family has not already got the COVID-19 vaccine. In Ireland, the vaccine was distributed on a need-first basis, with those who were elderly or immunocompromised getting the initial doses and then the general population, who were vaccinated in descending order of age. In this context,

4 Introduction Honor’s question seems odd ‘As in, why can’t we just, like, pay to get it before everyone else?’, and Sorcha explains that the vaccine is being administered on the basis of greatest need: ‘What, even though we’re rich?’ Honor goes, and when she puts it like that – yeah, no – it does seem unfair. Sorcha’s there, ‘Honor, I hope we didn’t raise you to believe that just because we live in a big house in Killiney, we should be allowed to use our money to skip the queue’. Honor goes, ‘We use our money to skip every other queue. Why should this one be any different?’ (Howard 2021d) And, of course, we smile, until we look back across the imaginary ellipsis to the following week’s ‘real’ headlines in Ireland and discover that 20 teachers and staff in St Gerard’s, a fee-paying school just outside Bray, County Wicklow, received ‘leftover’ vaccines in the Beacon private hospital, and that ‘the children of Beacon chief executive Michael Cullen attend the school’. The hospital maintained that they had permission from the HSE (Health Service Executive), but the HSE did not agree: ‘these vaccines were administered contrary to our very clear guidelines and we certainly did not approve them’ (Arthur Beesley 2021). This has been followed by a number of occasions where ‘the great and the good’ (read the wealthy and the entitled) have been seen to get vaccines ahead of their allotted place. It is Howard’s awareness of how the Irish haute bourgeoisie never sees itself as being unfair, but rather as entitled, a position voiced enthusiastically and unironically by Ross and his father Charles, that is so accurate in his books. Ross is the classic limited narrator, who sees nothing wrong with his inherited privilege. However, Howard does see through this placenta of self-entitlement, and he consistently punctures it with sharp, Juvenalian satirical incisions. The stylistic trope that makes the series work is the intellectual gap between the very fallible first-person narrator and the very sharp and aware intelligence of the author, which means that irony is pervasive across the series. This allows for some really sharp satirical readings of the ‘real’ Ireland by Howard, at Ross’s expense. The fact that Howard is able to inject such irony while never taking on an omniscient narrative perspective is quite sophisticated in terms of writing technique; as Ross’s father Charles (‘Chorles’) might put it, citing Ovid: of ars est celere artem (‘the true art is to conceal art’). Ross’s perceptions of his parallel world mirror those of the real world, and the ironic counterpoint is an ongoing leitmotif in the series. So on looking around at Leinster fans at a rugby match, he notes that:

Introduction  5 See, we get a bad rap – and by we I mean, like, Leinster fans? But, despite what people say, we really do come in all shapes and sizes. There’s goys here with Aviator shades on their heads, goys with Oakleys on their heads, goys with Ray-Bans on their heads. I think Oisinn sums it up best when he describes it as a real cultural melting pot. (Howard 2021b, 41) Oisinn may be speaking ironically, but Ross is not. While authorial irony is pervasive, the narrator himself is an irony-free zone, as he seems to genuinely feel that his own particular social-class grouping is a diverse one; in other words, he does not really see outside the defines of the affluent South Dublin suburbs. This is also true of his obsession with rugby, and his ongoing delusions that he should have a place in the Irish rugby structures. Ross again seems to be the embodiment of the Brandoesque ‘I could have been a contender’ mentality, as he approvingly notes the comments of the New Zealand player Tana Umaga, who said that ‘I could have played at number 10 for Ireland had I not pissed my talent up against the wall – which was an amazing thing for me to hear, because I don’t always get the recognition?’ (Howard 2021b, 60). We smile at the lack of awareness, but as this is satire in the Horatian mode, it is never completely cruel, and Ross’s moments of self-knowledge (all too brief but real nonetheless) do serve to broaden him as a character. For example, he notes, watching Ronan O’Gara in action: See, there are those who say it could and should have been me down there today, but those people are wrong. I could never do what he does and that’s a hard thing to admit when you’re pushing thirty and someone else is living your dream. (Howard 2021b, 42) And it is the skill of Howard’s writing in making us feel a sense of connection with, and sympathy for, this character that may lessen the sharper Juvenalian element of the satire, but which leaves us with a character who is lovable and coherent for all his fault, in the mode of Horatian and, to an extent, Menippean satires. Ross can be seen as an aspect of the Irish cultural unconscious, living with fantasy and articulating some opinions that readers may share but are unwilling to acknowledge verbally. Some of his opinions could be seen as a form of return of the cultural repressed, which may be another factor in his enduring popularity. The same is true of his parents, who might be termed unrepentant Dublin 4 dwellers, who have very little time for any other part of the city, let alone the country, and have no issues in voicing this. Ross’s mother,

6 Introduction Fionnuala, is the author of a ‘recession-era misery lit novel, Mom, They Said They’d Never Heard of Sundried Tomatoes’ (Howard 2021b, 76). As she tells Ross ‘there are People Like Us and there are People Like Them. As your father says, this city has been planned in such a way as to ensure that we lead parallel and mutually exclusive lives’ (Howard 2021b, 256). She has formed a group called ‘Luas Women’, which is protesting against linking the red and green lines of the Luas (an Irish tram system), and campaigns against any extension of the postcode ‘Dublin 4’ to people in Terenure, again quoting her husband: ‘if the people of Terenure want to live in Dublin 4, why don’t they simply buy houses in Dublin 4? A damn liberty expecting Dublin 4 to come to them’ (Howard 2021b, 114). We see the privilege, the classism, the smug self-regard, but Fionnuala does not, and again, it is in that gap between characters mired in their own ideology, and an author who allows them to express this until it becomes a reductio ad absurdum, that the humour lies. Howard points to the ‘chip on my shoulder about class, which was a very big issue in the Ireland in which I grew up’, and admits that he began his satirical project with ‘certain axes to grind when I set out to satirise the world of schools rugby’ (Howard 2000, 8), and that he gradually moved away from the players on the field to their parents, friends and family groups. Fionnuala’s husband, Charles, referred to as a disgraced property developer, local politician and founder of the political party, New Republic, is a right-wing crony capitalist. Famous for wanting to be ‘tough on soccer, tough on the causes of soccer’ (Howard 2021b, 18), he responds to the recession by forming a document-disposal firm called ‘Shred Focking Everything’, destroying documents that could be evidence of wrongdoing. ‘People aren’t ready to hear what it was that made this country great for eleven-and-a-little-bit years. All we’re doing is making sure that no one finds out’ (Howard 2021b, 63). He teaches Ross’s daughter to play an Irish property version of Monopoly, ‘capitalism in all its wonderful glory’, as he calls it, and, as when Honor wants to buy a house on Capel Street ‘she takes a hundred from her little pile of money and she puts it into – hilariously – a little brown envelope’, and Charles then ‘slips it into his pocket – or “off shore”, as he calls it’ (Howard 2021b, 324–325). He is unrepentant about his role in the Celtic Tiger, and the €48 million that he hid in Andorra. He and his solicitor-friend, Hennessy Coughlin-O’Hara, ‘are tendering to build a portion of this famous wall that Donald Trump wants to build’ (Howard 2021b, 244), and he says that the boom was created by people like him bending laws and bribing people: It was us, Ross. We’re the economic boom. We’re the Celtic Tiger. You think it got here by accident? Without us, the bloody Irish would still be cleaning their teeth with their own shite. (Howard 2021b, 19)

Introduction  7 Here, the cultural unconscious of Golden-Circle Ireland speaks directly in a way that it can never do in the ‘real’ Ireland; here it can eschew notions of wokeness and political correctness. That shuttling back and forth across the ellipses does amuse and instruct: in the COVID lockdown, for example, class and social prejudices, while largely unspoken, were rife, as travellers and students are often blamed for COVID spikes, whereas often people like ‘us’, who are ‘careful’ but felt free to travel to a holiday home or to friends or to have dinner parties, were absolved from blame. This mentality is captured beautifully in a mother and son conversation about COVID-19: ‘Oh, we’re all fine up here, Ross. As I said to Delma on the phone, I just can’t imagine this thing [COVID-19] coming to Foxrock’ (Howard 2021b, 327). There is a truth in fiction, and, in Howard’s work, satire provides the mode for the telling of this truth. His parallel Ireland is a mirror through which we can smile at the ‘real’ Ireland but also learn more about it than more normative discourses are often willing, or able, to disclose. In these columns, Howard’s ironic eye is turned on attitudes of the Dublin 4 elite, and the columns work because the reader is already very familiar with all of the characters involved in the series: Ross himself, his wife Sorcha, their daughter Honor and their triplets: Brian, Leo and Johnny (all called after Rugby players, as befits Ross’s fetishisation of the game); his son from a previous relationship, Ronan Masters; his half-sister, Erika Joseph; his father Charles, his wife Fionnuala, and his long-time friend Hennessy Coughlin-O’Hara. Ross’s own friends, Christian Ford, JP Conroy, Fionn de Barra and Oisinn Wallace, add to the group. Regular readers of either the columns or the books all know the particular foibles of each character, so we read the pieces in terms of familiar faces, voices and attitudes. Given that the columns feature commentary on contemporary social affairs, readers will also be aware of these as well, so it is in the oscillations and negotiations between the real Ireland and the imagined Ireland of the Ross universe, the inter-dit, that the humour is to be found, with a smaller dialectic involved in the interaction between the columns and the series. The series started in 2000, two years after the first newspaper column in The Sunday Tribune, with The Mis-Education Years (Howard 2000) (the title gesturing towards the R&B album entitled The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill), which describes Ross’s last two years at Castlerock College and his Leinster Senior Cup victory, albeit a steroid-fueled one. The Teenage Dirtbag Years (Howard 2001), referring to the title song of the debut album of the band Wheatus, which was featured in the film Loser, sees Ross in his first year in a sports management course in UCD. During this year, he also goes to the USA on a J1 visa. The Orange MochaChip Frappuccino Years (Howard 2003) shows us Ross leaving home and

8 Introduction working for his friend JP’s father, Barry Conroy, as an estate agent, in the aptly named firm of ‘Hook, Lyon and Sinker’, a job at which he is surprisingly good. The title of this book channels Sue Townsend’s novel Adrian Mole: The Cappuccino Years, as well as the orange mocha frappuccino ordered by three male models in the film Zoolander. As is clear, the novels are always acutely plugged into the cultural Zeitgeist of the time in which they are written. These allusive and intersubjective titles also serve to situate the Ireland about which Howard is writing in very much a global and contemporary context: he is not remotely interested in the old Anglo-Irish conflict, as his focus is on synchronic as opposed to diachronic views of identity; he sees Ireland as part of a globalised consumer culture, and this is quite a shift in gear for Irish writing, which has remained obdurately focused on the Anglo-Irish historical context and on issues of religious and historically driven identity. PS, I Scored the Bridesmaids (Howard 2004), whose title refers overtly to the novel PS, I Love You, by Cecelia Ahern, deals with his marriage to his long-term ‘portner’ Sorcha, and his discovery, on the wedding day, of a son (Ronan Masters) about whom he knew nothing. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress (Howard 2005) tells of Ross’s interactions with Ronan, who lives with his mother and grandfather in the north side of Dublin in a very working-class area. The title invokes Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and the book is a strategic one in the series as there is now a social-class counterpoint set up between middle-class and working-class Dublin across the range of language, attitudes and outlooks. Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade (Howard 2006) (the title refers to coitus interruptus, used as a form of contraception, as this is the penultimate station on the DART electrified commuter rail network in Dublin) deals with Sorcha’s pregnancy; Ross’s sympathetic pregnancy; the birth of their daughter Honor; Fionnuala’s burgeoning career as a writer of chick-lit; and Ross’s participation in his new nightclub, Lillie’s Bordello. In these three books, we see Ross gradually assuming the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood, though he takes quite an idiosyncratic view of how to fulfil these roles. He also offers a little more in the way of selfknowledge, and we get some insights into aspects of his character that are not completely shallow and narcissistic. It is in these books that his growth from caricature to character can be seen to begin. Howard shrewdly realises that one-dimensional rugby jock who is constantly womanising is not something that can be developed, and, from this point, the series will grow in breadth and in depth. This Champagne Mojito Is the Last Thing I Own (Howard 2007b) covers Ross’s fall from grace as his father goes to prison and he is forced to take up paid work while Sorcha finally leaves him after yet another

Introduction  9 infidelity. The title refers to Jonathan Rendall’s tragi-comic novel about boxing, This Bloody Mary (Is the Last Thing I Own). The title of the next novel, Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box (Howard 2008), blending Frank Sinatra (the eponymous ‘Mr S’ with whom Charles drank years ago in Dublin) and the myth of Pandora’s box, suggesting troubling revelations, deals with his new job as the rugby coach of the Andorran national team, and also with his attempts to cope with his separation from Sorcha and Honor. He also discovers that Erika, a long-time crush of his, is his half-sister. Rhino What You Did Last Summer (Howard 2009a) sees Ross in Los Angeles, attempting to win Sorcha back. He has a bromance with a gay American, Harvey, and his family become reality TV stars. Ross gets plastic surgery (his rhinoplasty is referenced in the title, as is the film I Know What You Did Last Summer). Fionnuala’s novels begin to earn popularity in America, and she has an intense relationship with her agent, Trevion. In these three books, we see Howard beginning to write about the Celtic Tiger crash, and he gradually builds up to this by having Ross out of Ireland for two of the books, in Andorra and in the United States, and by having Sorcha’s current partner, Cillian, acting as a type of Cassandra figure, who sees the world financial crash coming but is not believed by anyone. In The Oh My God Delusion (Howard 2010), we see the economic crisis deepen, and Ross and his family continue to struggle financially, with Ross moving to a ghost estate. Additionally, he and his friends face being stripped of their Leinster Schools Senior Cup medals due to their having taken drugs to enhance their performance. The title conflates Sorcha’s signature expression ‘Oh My God’ with Richard Dawkins’s book The God Delusion. NAMA Mia! (Howard 2011), whose title conflates the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), the Irish organisation set up to manage bad loans and property, with the ABBA-inspired stage musical Mamma Mia!, gives us an Ireland in recession, but Charles’s shredding company ‘Shred Focking Everything’ is successful. Ross becomes a ‘toy boy’ for Regina Rathfriland, a wealthy older woman, and he tracks down his friend Oisinn, who, having gone bankrupt, has fled the country, and brings him back to Ireland. Fionnuala has switched to writing ‘misery lit’ memoirs: Criminal Assets; Legal Affairs, Fifty Greys in Shades; Mom, They Said They Never Heard of Sundried Tomatoes; Karma Suits Ya and States of Ecstasy. The next book, The Shelbourne Ultimatum (Howard 2012b), whose title conflates The Bourne Ultimatum and Dublin’s iconic Shelbourne hotel, sees Ross surviving the shooting depicted at the end of NAMA Mia!, but having to deal with Gardaí, who do not believe his story. He aims to sabotage Fionn and Erika’s upcoming marriage; Sorcha gets a job in a pound shop; Honor becomes a child star; while Fionnuala continues to

10 Introduction seek fame with her misery memoir. The series now begins to feature an ensemble cast, as Howard gradually takes characters from their purely secondary roles as, what E. M. Forster called ‘flat characters’, and, instead, makes them more fully developed. Forster saw flat characters as ‘types, and sometimes caricatures’, adding that ‘in their purest form, they are constructed round a single idea or quality’ (Forster 1956, 48), and he contrasted these with ‘round characters’, who are ‘capable of surprising in a convincing way’ (Forster 1956, 55). There is a gradual rotundity of characterisation to be seen as the series develops, with Charles, Fionnuala, Sorcha and especially Honor and Ronan developing quite independently of Ross. Referring to the television series Downton Abbey, and the economic downturn in Ireland, Downturn Abbey (Howard 2013) sees Ross become a grandfather as Ronan becomes a father. Honor is dropped from one of Fionnuala’s Hallmark Channel films, and she is expelled from school due to bad behaviour. Charles and Fionnuala’s divorce comes through. Sorcha throws a Downton Abbey–themed party, and Ronan falls in with a local gangster. Fionnuala moves into ‘mommy porn’ with Fifty Greys in Shades and begins a relationship with Oisinn. Keeping Up with the Kalashnikovs (Howard 2014) refers to Keeping Up with the Kardashians and the Kalashnikov rifle, so often used in guerrilla wars and campaigns. Fionn is taken captive while teaching at a school in Uganda, and Ross and his friends go out to rescue him. Meanwhile, Sorcha has given birth to triplets, and Honor is more difficult than ever, acting as pied piper to a troupe of rats (originally this book was to be called Raiders of the Lost Dork) (O’Carroll-Kelly 2014). Seedless in Seattle (Howard 2015), connecting the film Sleepless in Seattle with Ross’s impending vasectomy, finds Charles going to Argentina to find his missing daughter Erika. Ross is dealing with Fionn’s new personality, making an enemy of his daughter, and when he gets caught writing ‘The Fock-it List’, Sorcha insists that Ross should get a vasectomy. He is now the father of triplets, who are called Johnny, Brian and Leo, after Leinster and Ireland rugby players Johnny Sexton, Brian O’Driscoll and Leo Cullen. These books add the triplets, expand Ross’s family, and again we see the characters moving out of Ireland, which is undergoing an economic upturn. There is a new optimism reflected in the books, with the character of Fionn seeing major development, while Ross himself is now a family man with a very rebellious teenage daughter and all that this involves. The generational repetition, wherein Honor treats Ross and Sorcha as dismissively as Ross treats his own parents, is another interesting layer in this section of the series, as Ross becomes a father and grandfather while still retaining aspects of his man-child incarnation. In Game of Throw-ins (Howard 2016), Ross joins a struggling Seapoint rugby team, where he plays as hooker, as opposed to his youthful preferred

Introduction  11 position of out-half. Ronan is in a turf war with a rival Love/Hate tour operator, while Honor is in love with a Justin Bieber lookalike; Fionnuala is marrying a 92-year-old billionaire; and Charles founds a new political party ‘New Republic’. The title combines the popular J. R. R. Martin books and television series Game of Thrones with the ‘throw-in’ move in rugby. Again, the series is very on point culturally, as the RTE gangster drama Love/Hate was very popular at this time and Game of Thrones was also becoming a cultural phenomenon. In Operation Trumpsformation (Howard 2017), gay marriage is legalised in Ireland. Fionnuala is imprisoned, accused of the murder of her second husband, while Ross’s triplets develop an interest in soccer. Charles aims to emulate Donald Trump and build a wall around Cork. Honor adopts a transgender identity, becoming ‘Eddie’, and goes on a gender-fluid toilet crusade in her school. The title connects ‘Operation Transformation’, a television series about weight loss and lifestyle change, with American President Donald Trump. The next book, Dancing with the Tsars (Howard 2018), finds Sorcha pregnant with a baby that is possibly not Ross’s. Meanwhile, Charles is at war with feminists; Sorcha is a senator; Fionnuala is making trips to Russia; Ronan is dealing with sex addiction; while Ross and Honor aim to win the Mount Anville glitter ball. Separated (again) from Sorcha, Ross finds himself as a stay-at-home dad, attempting to dissuade his son from getting married and helping his daughter in her quest to win the most coveted prize in South Dublin, namely the Strictly Mount Anville glitter ball. The title conflates the TV series Dancing with the Stars with the Russian tsars. Here Ross becomes as close as he can be to a grown up, with family ties. He finally faces his ‘I could have been a contender’ rugby fantasies, and he becomes a forward, doing the dirty work as opposed to one of the glory players in the backline. There is a real sense of working through his fantasies into some form of reality here, and his bonding with his daughter further deepens his character and that of Honor, in both her female and transgender personae. The fact that he now has to deal with a relationship of Sorcha’s is a karmic situation that many of the readers of the books will have been delighted to see. Schmidt Happens (Howard 2019) sees Sorcha giving birth to Fionn’s child, and Fionn coming to live with Ross and his family. The triplets become notorious as troublemakers around Dublin. Fionnuala seeks revenge after Ross nearly lets her choke to death in the previous book, as Charles works with shadowy Russian interests in order to become Taoiseach. Meanwhile, Ross gets an unexpected call from Irish rugby manager Joe Schmidt, who has been sent his Rugby Tactics Book by Honor. The title refers to Schmidt and the colloquial expression ‘shit happens’. In Braywatch (Howard 2020), Ross has become the rugby coach at Presentation College, Bray. His daughter Honor has become a Greta

12 Introduction Thunberg–style environmentalist; Fionnuala is about to become a mother of sextuplets with six Eastern European surrogate mothers, while Charles has been caught attempting to fix the election. Ross attempts to negotiate all of these hurdles while guiding a team of underachieving players to the final of the Leinster Schools Senior Cup. Normal Sheeple (Howard 2021a) sees a parallel Ireland where the housing crisis is solved by Homedrobes (living units the size of a hot press), and Vampire Beds (people sleeping upright). Ross is now a grandfather and ends up in Kerry playing Gaelic football and meeting a Sally Rooneyesque Irish teacher called Marianne, with the awkward dialogue between the two being an excellent pastiche of Normal People (the book, but especially the television series) (Rooney 2018). Charles has become Taoiseach and has moved to Áras an Uachtaráin, with Michael D. Higgins and Sabina relegated to living in the attic and surviving on baked beans and toast. Charles is pressing ahead with Irexit and is busily selling off afforestation and Ireland’s riches (Newgrange has moved to Gorky Park in Moscow) as well as cosying up to Vladimir Putin. In Once Upon a Time in … Donnybrook (Howard 2022), we see Ross living in the aftermath of the burning down of Leinster House (Ireland’s own Reichstag fire), with Charles blaming the EU and becoming ever more closely connected to the Russian-funded mafia, but Ross and Erika find out that it was he who did it. Sorcha and Ross are in conflict again, due to his having had sex with Honor’s Irish teacher, and Ross becomes the coach of the Irish women’s rugby team. In these latest books, Ross faces up to his age-old loathing of Bray to become a school coach as well as playing Gaelic football, something else he would have always despised, and generally he is starting to live in his real world as opposed to his fantasy one. The relationships between different characters develop beyond him, and Charles’s political ambitions become more concrete and more nefarious. Indeed, Charles is one of the most interesting characters in the series in terms of growth, as he moves from immoral to amoral to downright illegal, and yet we retain some sense of fondness for him. Ross is almost acting his age here, and there is a thoughtfulness about him at times that makes him a far rounder character than before (though Howard will still pull him back to his roots at times). The overall plot of the series develops in these books, and, as ever, Howard keeps the reader off-balance by developing seemingly flat characters into whole new levels of complexity. Ross and his mother bond in Normal Sheeple – a real character development – and their connection is real and seems lasting. There is a poignancy to the Ross-Fionnuala connection here, especially as she seems to be developing some form of dementia, as there is to his relationship with his daughter, Honor. In a way, these books form something of a protracted Bildungsroman, the story of the moral and psychological growth of a character from youth

Introduction  13 to maturity. Franco Moretti calls it ‘the symbolic form of modernity’ (Moretti 1987, 5). For Moretti, one of the most telling points of this genre is the fetishisation of youth, and, indeed, he sees that, for our modern culture, youth becomes the age ‘which holds the “meaning of life”: it is the first gift Mephisto offers Faust’ (Moretti 1987, 4), and Ross embodies this as, even though he is a grandfather, he still sees himself as young. So, in this sense, he is very much the embodiment of a culture where being young, looking young or acting young is at the core of so much of our social practice. This is another reason why so clearly an obnoxious character can appear to be so relatable to readers of all ages, genders and classes in Ireland. Indeed, Moretti could have been speaking about Ross when he speaks of the novelistic youth of the Bildungsroman as ultimately betraying itself ‘in its narcissistic desire to last forever’ (Moretti 1987, 228). Howard has also written four plays about Ross, as well as two musicals, but for reasons of space, these fall outside the purview of this study. The structure of this book will involve an opening chapter that sets out the theoretical framework, looking at the ideas of different thinkers on narrative and humour, through which the series will be read. The theorists involved will be Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, Mikhail Bakhtin, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan. Chapter 2 will trace the Irish satirical tradition, which I argue is the context of Howard’s writing, and will also look at his work as a blend of the three major classical traditions of satire: the Horatian, the Menippean and the Juvenalian modes. The remaining chapters will trace the development of various themes through the books, and will do so in chronological order, dividing the books into groups. I appreciate that these groups are somewhat arbitrary, but all are guided by looking at the development of the characters through different phases, as well as watching that dialectical negotiation and oscillation across the ellipses from Howard’s fictive Ireland to the events of the real Ireland. Hence, Chapter 3 will look at his school and college years and his first trip to America, taking the early books: The Miseducation of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, Roysh Here, Roysh Now … The Teenage Dirtbag Years and The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years. Chapter 4 will look at his early married life in the books: PS, I Scored The Bridesmaids, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress and Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade. Chapter 5 looks at the denial that preceded the post–Celtic Tiger recession in This Champagne Mojito Is the Last Thing I Own, Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box and Rhino What You Did Last Summer. Chapter 6 looks at the austerity that reigned in Ireland after the ‘troika’ of technical experts from the IMF, the European Central Bank and the European Commission imposed stringent austerity, and at how this was represented in The Oh My God Delusion; NAMA Mia! And The Shelbourne Ultimatum. Chapter 7 looks at how the Celtic Phoenix, as

14 Introduction Charles calls it, is part of the following books: Downturn Abbey; Keeping Up with the Kalashnikovs and Seedless in Seattle. Chapter 8 looks at three books that explore the more mature Ross: Game of Throw-ins, Operation Trumpsformation and Dancing with the Tsars. The final chapter looks at four books that show Ross finally living in the present and acting more or less age appropriately: Schmidt Happens, Braywatch, Normal Sheeple and Once Upon a Time in … Donnybrook. One of the most important tropes that unite the series is that of negotiation: negotiation between the knowing author and fallible narrator; negotiation between fictive and real Irelands; negotiation between narrative and ironic narrative; negotiation between different forms of satire wherein we both laugh with, and at times laugh at, different characters; and, most importantly, the negotiation back and forth across those ellipses that Howard so presciently used in RO’CK of Ages. These are not one-way passages; rather, they involve a series of oscillations. Here I am using the term ‘negotiation’ in quite a specific sense. The French literary theorist and philosopher Jacques Derrida traces the etymology of ‘negotiation’ to the Latin negotium: ‘not-ease, not-quiet … no leisure’ (Derrida and Rottenberg 2002, 11). He sees this ‘[no]-leisure’ as the ‘impossibility of stopping or settling in a position … of establishing oneself anywhere’. This process is typified by the image of a shuttle, what he terms ‘la navette, and what the word conveys of to-and-fro between two positions, two places, two choices’ in a process of ‘going back and forth between different positions’ (Derrida and Rottenberg 2002, 12). This is how Howard’s writing works, and how his satire is so effective. There is a constant negotiation between the creation of his fictive Ireland as a mirror image of the real thing and the satirical undercutting of aspects of that real Ireland in his fictional one. There is a shuttling between the real truth and the fictive truth of the novels, which, in turn, has a lot to say about the real Ireland. The opening chapter will offer a justification for an academic critical analysis of Howard’s work, and it will address the absence of such analysis in the academic sphere as well as suggest why this is the case. It will look at the distinctions between popular and high culture in the Irish public sphere, and will it suggest, using some of the ideas of Jacques Derrida on context and framing; Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan on psychoanalysis and the unconscious; Mikhail Bakhtin on satire; and Pierre Bourdieu on the nature of symbolic power and popular culture, that imaginative writing has the ability to unveil aspects of a society that had previously remained hidden. It will also suggest that popular culture has been a hitherto undervalued resource as a means of telling different truths about Irish society.

1

Seeing Ireland Differently – The Theoretical Lens

That Howard’s works are popular is not an issue; what perhaps is an issue is that they are not academically popular. There is no discussion of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly in such collections as Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture, edited by Anne Mulhall, Wanda Balzano and Moynagh Sullivan (Wanda Balzano 2007); or Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tiger’s Tales, edited by Conn Holohan and Tony Tracy (Holohan and Tracy 2014); or Ireland and Popular Culture, edited by Sylvie Mikowski (Mikowski 2014); not to mention accounts focused on more ‘literary’ culture, such as Susan Cahill’s Irish Literature in the Celtic Tiger Years, 1990–2008: Gender, Bodies, Memory (Cahill 2012); Derek Hand’s A History of the Irish Novel (Hand 2011); or Liam Harte’s Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel, 1987–2007 (Harte 2014). Currently, the only texts on Ross O’Carroll-Kelly that could be classified as academic scholarship are a book by Clare Gorman, The Undecidable: Jacques Derrida and Paul Howard (Gorman 2015); Mike Cronin’s ‘Sport, Masculinity and Self-Centredness in the Writings of Ross O’CarrollKelly’ (Cronin 2009); Adam Kelly’s ‘The Re-education of Ross O’CarrollKelly’ (Kelly 2017); and three linguistic analyses of the Ross novels by Carolina Amador-Moreno: ‘A Corpus-Based Approach to Contemporary Irish Writing: Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s Use of Like as a Discourse Marker’ (Amador-Moreno 2012); ‘“There’s, Like, Total Silence Again, Roysh, and No One Says Anything”: Fictional Representations of “New” Pragmatic Markers and Quotatives in Irish English’ (Amador-Moreno 2015); and ‘Encapsulating Irish English in Literature’, by Carolina Amador-Moreno and Ana María Terrazas-Calero (Terrazas-Calero 2017). I have written two previous pieces on him myself: ‘A ‘Third’ Reading: James Joyce and Paul Howard and the Monstrous Aporia’ (O’Brien 2009), and ‘“TendencyWit”: The Cultural Unconscious of the Celtic Tiger in the Writings of Paul Howard’ (O’Brien 2014). His work is mentioned in passing in five other academic articles but that is all. It is surprising, given both his popularity in

DOI: 10.4324/9781003124993-2

16  Seeing Ireland Differently terms of sales as well as the topicality of the issues about which he writes, that he has received so little academic interest. Interestingly, Howard is mentioned in Austerity and Recovery in Ireland, where his musical on the recession, entitled Anglo: The Musical (Howard 2012a), was mired in legal challenges just before it began, as lawyers for the ‘DPP were sending us letters saying they were concerned about it and Sean Fitzpatrick’s lawyers were sending us letters saying they wanted to see the script…. On opening night, there were all these people taking notes in yellow legal pads’ (Roche, O’Connell and Prothero 2016, 316). Hence, Howard is very much at the centre of current sociocultural issues, and he is one of the very few writers to confront all aspects of the Celtic Tiger, so the question has to be posed as to why there is so little critical or academic attention given to his work. My own view is that Howard’s work is seen as being popular as opposed to literary, in the old culture war binary of ‘high culture’ versus ‘low culture’ (or ‘popular culture’ to use the more politically correct and less pejorative euphemism). To write about Howard is not to engage with a fictional work that is deemed to be ‘literary’, and, for this reason, he is not discussed in the same breath as Anne Enright, John Banville, Roddy Doyle, John Boyne, Donal Ryan, Claire Kilroy, Cathal Barrett – the list goes on. The Digital Platform for Contemporary Irish Writing, which sets out a stage for contemporary Irish writing, is chaired by Margaret Kelleher. It is an excellent resource for contemporary writing in Ireland, and it spans poetry and fiction and Irish language books as well as those in English. It features 50 prominent Irish writers and provides access to reviews and resources about their work, but Howard is not listed therein (Kelleher 2015). Possibly, the development of the character from a sports column in a newspaper does not tally with the usual progress of serious writers, who normally write for literary magazines or appear in short-story competitions in newspapers. Hence, there is a sense that if his work is not voiced through traditional literary pathways, then it is not ‘literary’ in that sense. Second, the books are very definitely located in the realm of popular culture. The parodic pseudo-confessions of a sex-obsessed sports player are not really the stuff of high literature, and, as such, the works are not given academic attention by literary and critical writers. Third, after modernism, notions of high seriousness became hegemonic in terms of defining great writers. From the New Critics to F. R. Leavis and beyond, there are not a lot of laughs to be found, and Howard is located in that realm of comedic entertainer as opposed to a writer who has some profound things to say about the human condition, and especially that of contemporary Ireland. In terms of attention to language, Howard is especially inventive, creating a number of neologisms: ‘shmugly’, meaning ugly; ‘shoecotic’ implying

Seeing Ireland Differently  17 ‘as severe mental state in which women lose contact with external reality while thinking about shoes’ (Howard 2007a, 364); ‘“Ran-a-lites” noun, pl. Dublin 6 rich-kid boy-racers especially from Ranelagh’ (Howard 2007a, 359); and a ‘“Mall Teaser”: noun a girl who spends time hanging out in shopping centres, flirting with boys’ (Howard 2007a, 350). Aware that this is almost like another language for some readers, Howard, as already noted, has published a ‘ThesauRoss’ to explain these rhymes to his audience (Howard 2007a, 319–377). Here, a version of Cockney rhyming slang is set out, in the format of a dictionary, complete with parts of speech markers, with a serious number of racist, sexist, misogynist and many other non-politically correct terms that form the argot of this very privileged group of people. Indeed, ‘the division between local and newer pronunciation has been the object of parody’ (O’Sullivan 2019, 361) by Howard. Carolina Amador-Moreno sees some of his linguistic usage as a way of making connections with the reader, by using terms like ‘like’ and ‘roysh’, which help to ‘build some sort of rapport with the reader’, who ‘thus, sees in Ross’s stories the voice of a potential “buddy” (for whom one might even feel sorry)’ (Amador-Moreno 2012, 34). In terms of language, he is very much up with current trends, as evidenced in his rendering of ‘yeah in collocation with no [which] is a clear attempt on Howard’s part to satirise this new linguistic habit that seems to have become more or less lexicalised as a discourse marker in other varieties of English’ (TerrazasCalero 2017, 260), and his acute ear for the contemporary is quantitatively signified by the fact that in The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, there are 41 new words and terms attributed to Paul Howard (Dalzell and Victor 2013), which speaks to both his popularity and his verbal acuity. The codification of the idiolect speaks to the snobbery of the class involved, as well as to their sense of self-importance and separateness from other groups and classes in Dublin especially as well as the rest of the country. The notion of accent as a social stratifying device is something with which we are all familiar, but it has seldom been used in fiction to such telling and highly humorous effect. There is a very real intricacy of style, expression and playfulness with generic conventions at work in the series, and the comedic value of the books is enhanced by these stylistic additions. In an interview with John Meagher in The Irish Independent, Howard speaks of the genesis of the character, noting that several publishers rejected the idea of Ross, and Howard was forced to self-publish. Howard explains: ‘I’d no idea what 5,000 books looked like until a lorry pulled up in the laneway outside the Sunday Tribune [off Baggot Street] and they started unloading pallets’, he says. Fortunately for him, the

18  Seeing Ireland Differently photographic department had just gone digital and the former dark room was turned into a makeshift store for the novels. (Meagher 2015) While working as a sports reporter, Howard’s first loves were football (he is a fanatical Liverpool supporter) and boxing; his first book, Celtic Warrior, was on the Irish boxer Steve Collins) (Howard 1995), and his second, The Joy, was on the experiences of a drug addict in Mountjoy, a large prison in Dublin (Howard 1996), but on being sent to cover some schools’ rugby matches, he immediately became attuned to the very particular South Dublin social class. There are also issues of popular and high culture at stake here, but we will look at these in more depth in Chapter 2. Suffice it to say at this juncture that Howard’s work has not really been the subject of a sustained and academic and theoretical analysis – something this study will rectify. I use the term ‘theoretical’ advisedly, tracing its etymology from the Greek theoria, meaning ‘to look at’, but in quite a specific way. In her book Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy, Andrea Wilson Nightingale cogently argues that, for the Greeks, the supreme form of wisdom was ‘theoria, the rational “vision” of metaphysical truths’ (Nightingale 2004, 3). There was a very specific nature to ‘theoria’, as it seemed to presuppose that knowledge came from without and involved a journey and a return with a new perspective. For the early Greeks, a theoretical knowledge involves a sifting of different perspectives, a series of comparative and contrastive judgements or adjudications, and then a telling of this knowledge and a response to that telling. Theory here is as much a process as a product, and it is as much perspectival as foundational, both points that will inform this discussion of Howard’s work. According to Plato, the philosopher is ‘altered and transformed by the journey of theoria and the activity of contemplation. He thus “returns” as a sort of stranger to his own kind, bringing a radical alterity into the city’ (Nightingale 2004, 5). The notion of a journey, of a return and of a reporting is significant in the creation of theoretically driven knowledge, and we have seen that the journey across those ellipses is at the centre of Howard’s satirical mode. Aristotle would go on to internalise this notion of a new perspective by doing away with the physical journey and the public reporting of this new knowledge, and instead, he made theory a matter of internal contemplation: Aristotelian theorising is ‘simply a matter of intellectual “vision” and is not nested in or connected to practical projects. This kind of theoria, then, is private rather than civic’ (Nightingale 2004, 188). Here the ‘journey’ is an internal one, a new vision of some idea or text or event that, through contemplation, can offer a different perspective which may change perception and thought.

Seeing Ireland Differently  19 Again, there is a process at work here, and this is what connects the Greek progenitors of theoretical knowledge with thinkers like Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, who will also be part of the analytical framework of this study. The idea of truth being both available and yet not available is significant, and it will be seen as being at the core of Howard’s writing about Ireland. The fact that theory is a little more concrete than philosophy in terms of how its knowledge is applied can be traced back to the original notion of public reporting, but it can also be seen in the language used by Aristotle, the thinker who moved away from praxis to contemplation. In Metaphysics, when writing about theory, Aristotle used the term ‘theoretical grasp’ 118 times (Aristotle 2016), and the use of the physical term ‘grasp’ is indicative of the unconscious and somatic aspects that apply in theoretical thinking. It suggests that there is something there, and yet not obviously there, something slippery that needs to be found and ‘grasped’, held onto in order to be examined; it suggests that there is a need to hold onto these glimpses of knowledge as they are not permanent and can be elided and disappear quickly. There is something of an intuitive imperative at work here that speaks to the core of this kind of thinking. Truth is complex, plural, often contradictory, at times aporetic and needs to be actively sought. If, for Aristotle, the ‘object of contemplation is truth’ (Aristotle 2009, 103), then the axioms, the givens, the doxa upon which that truth is built are hugely significant, and they must be understood before the truth of an issue can be ‘grasped’: for ‘it is the axioms that are most universal and the starling-points of all things, and if not to the philosopher, then to whom does it belong to get a theoretical grasp on what is true and what is false about them?’ (Aristotle 2016, 34). There is a movement between the axioms and the new text, the new truth, that is being grasped, and this movement, echoing the inaugural image of the physical journey and reporting of the theoros with which this discussion began, is one that will be further internalised in the thinking of Martin Heidegger. In his writing, Heidegger, drawing on the thinking of Fredrich Nietzsche, uses the term Augenblick, which has been variously translated as ‘moment’, ‘moment of vision’, ‘in the twinkling of an eye’ or the French ‘coup d’oeil’ (Heidegger 1996, xvi). It has a storied and studied history in Heideggerian criticism, and it is a word that has become heavily freighted with philosophical weight. A number of books have been written about the term, the most useful to my mind being William McNeill’s The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory (McNeill 1999) and Koral Ward’s Augenblick: The Concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ in 19th- and 20th-Century Western Philosophy (Ward 2008). It is not my purpose here to delve into the term or its wide range of meanings; instead, I hope to use it as a portmanteau term that can explain how Howard’s

20  Seeing Ireland Differently writing constantly shifts perspective, and, in moments of vision, we see how the comic parallel Ireland of his writing casts a very long and revelatory shadow across the face of the real Ireland: we are shuttling, like the navette, back and forth across those ellipses all the time as we read. I think theoretically, these ellipses from RO’CK of Ages should be seen as hauntologically present across all of Howard’s work, as it is only in that comprehensive glance of an eye, that Augenblick, that ‘fulfilled moment’ (Heidegger 1949, 95), that moment of vision, that we can see the full and complete interpenetration of both the satirical writing and the object of that satirical writing. It may seem digressive at best to engage in a discussion of the etymology of the word ‘theory’ via Plato, Aristotle and Heidegger in a discussion of Howard’s work, but, before we discuss his work, it is crucial to understand the modality of that work: Howard is both funny and relevant and we need to see exactly why this is so. The Augenblick, the glance of an eye, is as good a metaphor for understanding what he is doing as I can find. To read satire is to be constantly, and unconsciously, glancing from the satirised entity to the real entity, and for satire to work at its best, both text and context need to be shuttling back and forth in the mind of the reader so that the full meaning of the satirical portrait is clear. Of course, this may be happening unconsciously, and one will read the satirical text as itself for a lot of the time; but there are these moments of anagnorisis, of recognition, where text and context are brought together in a revelatory glimpse of the truth that only the literary and aesthetic world can bring. One could see similarities with Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of metanoia here, which he sees as crucial to reflexive thinking about culture. It signifies ‘a change of social space which supposes a change of mental space’ (Bourdieu 1991b, 36). He sees this as a way of thinking through the doxic givens of our culture and habitus and, instead, of seeing things in a new and different way. Satire embodies this metanoetic moment. That something in the text is funny is the initial reaction, but a deeper meaning accrues when that is counterpointed with a similar event in the real Ireland, and it is when the two are juxtaposed, in the Augenblick, that the humour and the satire actually achieves its aim. For example, in The Oh My God Delusion, the mobile shredding business ‘Shred Focking Everything’ will go around Dublin, capable ‘of shredding three sacks of documents per minute!’ (Howard 2010, 264), and it turns out that ‘the old man was right about a lot of people having a lot of shit to suddenly hide’ (Howard 2010, 348). As is normal for the series, Ross is only partially aware of what is going on, and part of the humour is watching him slowly piece together what is happening: ‘you’d be surprised at the number of people availing of a confidential document-shredding service who insist on paying in cash. Or maybe you wouldn’t. Maybe that’s the point’

Seeing Ireland Differently  21 (Howard 2011, 1). Ruth Barton has made the point that South County Dublin has been ‘distinguished’ in real life, ‘by the measures certain of its inhabitants were prepared to take to increase their wealth and, when the economic crash came in 2008, to conceal assets owed to the banks, or more accurately, the public purse’ (Barton 2018, 196), so Howard’s satire has purchase in reality. Indeed, seeing himself and Charles, businessman, politician and fully paid-up member of the haute bourgeoisie, sitting in in a ‘yellow Transit van with Shred Focking Everything painted in blood-red letters on the side’ (Howard 2011, 282) is certainly funny – but it is not really satire until that Augenblick takes place that reads this fictional notion of destroying incriminating documents in the light of perhaps the most significant meeting of powerful people in Ireland since the foundation of the state, and the journey back and forth, the shuttling, is revelatory in the extreme. In the real Ireland, on the night of 29 September 2008, the chief executives of Allied Irish Bank and Bank of Ireland looked for a bank guarantee from the Taoiseach Brian Cowen, the Finance Minister, Brian Lenihan, and a small group of advisers and higher civil servants. This guarantee was based on the idea that the banks had a liquidity issue; hence, it was granted. All deposits were guaranteed unconditionally, and this was sanctioned by an incorporeal cabinet meeting in the small hours of that morning, when the remainder of the cabinet was contacted by phone and confronted with a fait accompli. What this meant, in actuality, was that the taxpayers, the private citizens, the ordinary people of Ireland, under the guise of their own relatively small savings accounts of up to €100,000 being protected, were now burdened with the debts of the banks, debts that, it would soon become clear, were cataclysmic. It was not an issue of liquidity (that the funds were there to meet the obligations but could not be accessed short term) but rather one of solvency (that the funds were not actually there) with which the meeting was dealing that night, but this did not become clear until after the fact, something that is stridently addressed later in the series by Charles in Operation Trumpsformation. The issue of whether senior bankers present at best did not know the true state of the liquidity of their institutions on the night of 29 September or, at worst, blatantly lied about the state of their banks’ finances has never really been clarified. The culpability at worst, or chronic inefficiency at best, has been addressed in a number of inquiries. Regulation was non-existent, a point made in a report by Klaus Regling and Max Watson: ‘it appears clear, however, that bank governance and risk management were weak – in some cases disastrously so’ (Regling 2010, 6). Given the genre involved here, that of a government report, and the generally nuanced and carefully chosen linguistic tenor of such discourse, this is a damning indictment of the structures of management in private

22  Seeing Ireland Differently banks, specifically Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland and Anglo-Irish Bank. This final bank was the cause of much of the problem, owing to its reckless lending, which resulted in a €1.5 billion bailout for it, and full guarantees for all bondholders, secured and unsecured, in all banks. ‘The result was national bankruptcy, the need for a financial bailout from Europe, and a rise in unemployment to some 400,000 people’ (Maher and O’Brien 2015, 62–63). That meeting decided the fate of the nation and yet, bizarrely, no official minutes were taken at that meeting; no official documents have been made available to the Joint Committee investigation. A small number of personal unofficial contemporaneous notes were made available to the Joint Committee, but these were personal and unofficial. This lack of an official record of possibly the most important gathering since the foundation of the state was commented on by the Taoiseach of the time: ‘I have to take responsibility, I am sorry that there isn’t an accurate, full note of that meeting. It would be the protection of all of us, if there were’ [italics original] (Joint Committee Banking Crisis Inquiry 2016, 244). This meeting cost the Irish taxpayer some 65 billion euros (Joint Committee Banking Crisis Inquiry 2016, 173), and yet there were no minutes kept. There were a number of official inquiries, reports and investigations: The Irish Banking Crisis Regulatory and Financial Stability Policy 2003– 2008: A Report to the Minister for Finance by the Governor of the Central Bank (Honohan 2010); A Preliminary Report on The Sources of Ireland’s Banking Crisis (Regling 2010); Misjudging Risk: Causes of the Systemic Banking Crisis in Ireland: Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Banking Sector in Ireland (Nyberg 2011); and the Report of the Joint Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis Houses of the Oireachtas (Inquiries, Privileges and Procedures) Act, 2013 (Joint Committee Banking Crisis Inquiry 2016). And at the end of this, the real truth of what happened, how it happened, why it happened and why there seems to have been no major consequences to those in charge of the system after it happened remain unanswered. In other words, if there are no records taken in the first place, there is no need to shred everything – and all of a sudden, the yellow boiler suits and the van and the mobile shredder become a symbol for all of those people who have something to hide, who have some form of control over information and who feel sufficiently free from legal sanction to destroy those records. Here is the Augenblick of which we have been speaking. Charles in a boiler suit shredding records is funny, a case in point of how the mighty have fallen, but when looked at in the light of the information deficit around that fateful meeting, when that theoretical journey is made, and the shuttling process undertaken, then all of a sudden, he becomes a satirical synecdoche of an attitude to accountability by members of an Irish elite. There is a moment of metanoia here as we think

Seeing Ireland Differently  23 about how one sector of society copes with events that they caused and which will be catastrophic for other sectors. This is where fiction and satire can be of help. In normative discourse, there are many things that one cannot say due to the laws of slander, defamation and libel. People are also now highly attuned to avoid making statements that can be incriminating, and large companies and institutions often offer courses and seminars to employees on what they can say and what they cannot or, to be more correct, should not say. Freedom of information means that a lot of meetings and statements can make their way into the public realm, so that while de jure, we seem to be in a more open society, de facto, all that really happens is that a lot of the more sensitive material does not find its way into records of meetings or actions or processes. Perhaps this is the weakness – the structural weakness – of the books and reports that have attempted to find answers to these questions: they are structurally unable to provide the answer because things that we intuitively know, or that are said informally, which give the full picture of the event in question, never make their way into normative discourse. The only way they can be accessed is inter-dit, through the gap between words or reading between the lines or shuttling between the factual and the fictional. So perhaps asking why there are no consequences for the people involved in this financial disaster needs to be done through a fictional, as opposed to a factual, discourse; there is a need for an Augenblick caused by the shuttling across into the parallel Ireland created by Howard if there is ever to be a metanoia that can change the way that things are done. To seek the truth-content of the mind-set behind this state of affairs, we need the negotiation between the real and the fictive, and we need only listen once more to the voice of Charles O’Carroll-Kelly: ‘Do you think there’d be a Celtic Tiger today without all those material contraventions of the County Development Plan?’; he points out that there was no money in green fields so people like him bribed county councillors to turn them into ‘shopping centres, factories, private housing estates’ : See, the media don’t get it, Ross. Charlie Haughey got it. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael get it, but of course they can’t just come out and say, ‘Look, this is how economic booms happen. Now enjoy your lobster bisque and stop worrying your little heads about it. (Howard 2007b, 170) The sense of entitlement that one sees here is never going to be replicated in the dry discourse of reports or even in the angry discourse of the books written on the topic. No captain of industry or senior politician is ever going to voice sentiments like this as to do so would be to

24  Seeing Ireland Differently court disaster. However, that such attitudes exist is evidenced almost every day as white-collar crime seldom gets punished, and inefficiency or incompetence in terms of managing public money never seems to draw down sanctions. In Keeping Up with the Kalashnikovs, Oisinn has made up a song about how NAMA is actually a way of paying builders to manage the assets that they no longer own. Oisinn is explaining to Ugandan kidnappers, who have taken Fionn hostage, about how NAMA works, explaining that when a lot of developers in Ireland lost billions when the economy collapsed, ‘NAMA pays them six or seven thousand euros a week’ (Howard 2014, 340), and when asked if this is a charity, Oisinn says no, and when asked where the money for this came from, he says ‘Well, I suppose, from the people’. When he is finished explaining Julius, Benjamin and Rolly all laugh and as Ross points out: ‘When a bunch of gun-toting African gangsters admire the way your country does business, you’ve got to seriously wonder about the place’ (Howard 2014, 341). In the carnival of laughter, meaning is found between the lines, inter-dit. In terms of the real of this situation, Oisinn again has responded to it with a fictional text, with his idea for an adult cartoon called Rob the Builder, based on the popular children’s cartoon Bob the Builder, except that ‘Rob is never busy’, as ‘his business is in the hands of NAMA, who pay him €250,000 a year to manage his own portfolio – in other words, to sort out the mess that he made?’ (Howard 2014, 317). The song is as follows: Rob the Builder! Does he build things? Rob the Builder! Does he fock! Sluggish and Slothful, Shiftless and Slack, The taxpayer pays them For having the craic Rob and the gang have so much fun, They’re meant to be broke, But they’ve plenty of mun! (Howard 2014, 318) In terms of the Lacanian real of the situation, this grasps what people actually felt about the whole thing, as those who caused the crash are then carefully insulated from the consequences of that crash, while younger and poorer people saw their lives ruined, and the country is still in the throes of a housing crisis. The pun in the title Rob’ suggesting ‘robbery’ is very close to the real of the situation, a real that has led to the rise of left-wing parties, independents and Sinn Féin in contemporary Irish politics.

Seeing Ireland Differently  25 This culture of cosseting a particular group of wealthy insiders proceeds apace. One only has to look at the ever-escalating price of the National Children’s Hospital, where no one seems to have thought of penalties for contractors who go over budget, a practice common in every local building project. In this case, the cost ballooned and no one takes responsibility or suffers any consequences. Charles is from a class of people who see nothing wrong in what he has done. When he is sentenced to two and a half years in jail for accepting bribes, evading tax and breaching planning laws, his speech from the dock is revealing: With respect, Your Honour, it would be wrong to interpret my, inverted commas, co-operation with the Criminal Assets Bureau and the Revenue Commissioners as an indicator of remorse on my part. I feel none. Thank you. (Howard 2007b, 335) He feels no remorse because he feels he has done nothing wrong. In his own eyes, he has brought Ireland from being like the ‘Albania of western Europe’ (Howard 2007b, 168) to being a modern, industrial western European country and has little sense of shame or guilt about how he did it: ‘In the early nineties, when the economy was at its lowest ebb, I employed 2,478 people. I should be in the Seanad today, on the board of half-a-dozen semi-states – not in jail’ (Howard 2007b, 169). This is the attitude that speaks to what Jacques Lacan calls ‘the real’. For Lacan, humans conduct communication through the symbolic order – language, signs, codes that we all understand – but there lie areas (the unconscious, the repressed, the materiality of the world) that resist such signification. It hints at what lies beneath the symbolic order, things that have an effect but that cannot be said: ‘when discourse runs up against something, falters, and can go no further … that’s the real’ (Lacan 1990, xxiii). The real is the areas of experience that we know but cannot fully put into words; it describes at times the elephant in the room that is not amenable to discourse or explanation. It is Lacan’s term for that which is beyond expression, but behind experience, it ‘is always and in every case in its place; it carries its place stuck to the sole of its shoe, there being nothing that can exile it from it’ (Lacan 2006, 17). Some types of writing, notably poetry with its blend of rational and associative writing, and humour, which can shed light on that which has been repressed, can provide some sporadic access to the real and can cause ‘a glimmer of signification [to] spring forth at the surface of the real, and then causes the real to become illuminated with a flash projected from below’ (Lacan 2006, 468). What Charles is saying is a comic voicing of the real, in Lacan’s terms (that which is there but which cannot be voiced), of those in power, the crony capitalists who are the object of Howard’s satire. By putting words

26  Seeing Ireland Differently in Charles’s mouth, he gives us a fictional image of the true perspectives of people who feel that their actions are for the public good, and if they have to break some rules, well so be it. This is the attitude of people who can attend a meeting and make decisions that will bankrupt a country, and not take minutes of the meeting. And perhaps more importantly, this is the attitude of those who are supposed to hold feet to a metaphorical fire in enquiries or investigations. There is a shared sense of community at work here which stresses that no matter what happens, they will not suffer. Ironically, Cowan’s notion that minutes would have been a protection is false; the fact that there are no minutes is a protection because it allows each person and group in that meeting to offer their own limited version of the truth, and to avoid saying what they have done. Consequences do not really accrue for ‘people like us’, and this very phrase is used by Ross in this context: ‘Come on, Regina, people like us are never really skint. Not the way ordinary people are’ (Howard 2012b, 87). Of course, this is true in the book, as Charles, we discover, is not quite as ‘skint’ as he makes himself out to be. In Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box, he explains to Ross that he has a nest egg stashed in Andorra of some 40 million euros, ‘trying to say it like it’s fock-all – and failing miserably’ (Howard 2008, 286). It was the reason that he went to jail without too much of a fight, and also why Ross had to take up paid work (for the first time in his life), as Hennessy explains ‘we didn’t want CAB or the Revenue knowing’ (Howard 2008, 286). We also discover that a number of Charles’s business ventures were specifically set up to ‘repatriate the €48 million that I hid in Andorra during the boom years … including my cheesemongers in the Merrion Shopping Centre’ (Howard 2021b, 46). We smile on reading this as Charles, despite his many faults, his snobbery, his blindness to any form of social justice and his greed, is, at bottom, a comic character. However, his opinions are very much to the right, as the following will verify: ‘On teenage mothers – they should be forcibly sterilised to ensure they don’t produce any further burdens on the State ….’ ‘On the National Lottery – an ingenious way of giving poor people dole money and then taking it back from them again. On heroin – God’s way of culling the package holiday classes…’ ‘On the hospital crisis – if these so-called patients can afford cigarettes, scratch-cards and Sky Television, they can afford private health insurance. What’s wrong with sleeping on a hospital trolley anyway? Think of it as a bed with wheels…’ (Howard 2007b, 15) These opinions are very much not what people at the top of the social pyramid say out loud; however, there are strong suspicions that what Charles

Seeing Ireland Differently  27 is saying fictionally chimes with some deeply held, but unvoiced (in the public sphere at least), opinions of the great and the good. At least those opinions are mostly unvoiced. Seán Fitzpatrick, synonymous with AngloIrish Bank, widely seen as one of the architects of the financial meltdown, when asked about how Ireland could cope better with recession, ‘called on the Government to reduce corporation tax and tackle the “sacred cow” of universal child benefit, State pensions and medical cards for the over-70s’ (O’Brien 2008). One can hear echoes here of Charles’s views on unmarried mothers from the man who, on 4 October 2008, was still maintaining that ‘Anglo-Irish Bank is a very well-capitalised bank’ (www​.youtube​.com​ /watch​?v​=kD6jobUqyjg). It is interesting to say the least that the people that he felt should bear the brunt of the recession should be unmarried mothers, pensioners and those on medical cards – the poor. Now, in the light of this Augenblick, Charles’s remarks are less over the top, and perhaps they reveal a form of truth that only rarely appears in the discourse of the powerful. It is through the theoretical journey and reporting, the shuttling from satirical Ireland to real Ireland, that the potency of Howard’s work is to be seen at its best. The hiding of information that might call a financial and political élite into question has become something of an industry in Ireland. Seán Fitzpatrick was put on trial for financial irregularities, but, interestingly, after 126 days (the longest trial in the history of the state), on 27 May 2017, The Irish Times reported on the outcome of ‘the longest-running criminal trial in the history of the State’: At the heart of the issue was the failure of the ODCE to carry out its investigation in a fair and impartial manner. Kevin O’Connell, a legal adviser with the office, shredded documents during a ‘panic attack’ in his office in May 2015. (Gleeson 2017) The Irish Times looked askance at the details of what happened, as the Office of Corporate Enforcement seemed to both attempt to create a biased case against Fitzpatrick while at the same time underfunding and underresourcing the investigation team: ‘the appointment of an inexperienced investigator, the failures in taking witness statements – notably from two EY partners – and the shredding of documents relevant to the trial’ (Taylor 2017). It seems hardly necessary to trace the connection, through the Augenblick, between the fictive shredding business and the fact that whitecollar crimes, misdemeanours or, as they are increasingly termed, irregularities or system failures never really seem to be prosecuted successfully in the real Ireland. Probably this is because there is a sense of a common

28  Seeing Ireland Differently community who are all ‘our kind of people’, and, formally or informally, there is a coded sense of looking out for each other. This non-asking of questions, this avoidance of responsibility is what Howard satirises, and he does so on an ongoing basis and with some aplomb. And the best response to it comes, again, from Charles: ‘But look how many others have moved into our line of work since we set up Shred Focking Everything. There’s Get Rid Quick, Slash & Byrne ...’ (Howard 2021b, 63). His humour is there to make us laugh and then to make us think; he is one of the very few writers to directly address the Celtic Tiger phenomenon, but, oddly, while he has written some 26 books and has sold over two million copies of his books, his work has received very little academic attention. Part of that is because his books are seen as sui generis in contemporary Irish writing – and therefore not fitting into any categories. However, this is not the case. In fact, looked at theoretically, Howard’s work is actually the latest iteration of an ancient genre of writing that has been popular in both the Irish and English languages, and the next chapter will explore this genre in terms of its Irish incarnations as well as its classical antecedents – Horatian, Menippean and Juvenalian satire.

2

Ireland’s Satirical Tradition and Howard’s Place in It

Satire as a genre is as old as literature itself, and it is ‘broadly defined as the literary art of discrediting a subject by making it appear ridiculous’ (Lanters 2000, 2). In the Irish-language tradition, it dates back to Gaelic Ireland, where it was said that someone could survive a defeat but not a satire: ‘Is beo duine tar éis a bhuailte ach ní beo é tar éis a cháinte’ (‘A person is alive after being beaten but not after his good name is taken’), and, until the Norman invasion, satire was central to the discourse of the Gaelic Irish public sphere. In Irish writing in English, there is also a rich satirical tradition through the writings of Swift, Wilde, Shaw, Kavanagh, Clarke and Flann O’Brien. Satire has long been the subject of academic study. In this chapter, the general features of satire will be examined, as will the specific Irish satirical tradition in both the Irish and the English languages, as a way of contextualising what Howard is doing and locating him within the Irish literary tradition. Satire, despite its mockery, can be seen as the most humane of literary genres in that it ‘requires the inclusion, not the exclusion, of human failing’ (Quintero 2011, 2), and, therefore, while offering these weaknesses to critique, by their inclusion, it nevertheless suggests that they are a core part of the human being. Archilochus, a Greek poet of the seventh century BCE, is generally seen as the earliest known satirical writer (Elliott 1960, 7). His ‘satire took the form of invective, and was renowned for its particularly bitter and venomous nature’. He wrote in the iambic meter, which ‘derived from the Greek word iambos “to assail”, and therefore satire was associated with it’ (Elliott 1960, 7). It is generally accepted that there are three types of satire: Horatian satire (playful and clever); Juvenalian satire (more aggressive and acerbic); and Menippean satire (generally attacking attitudes rather than people). In terms of satirical modes, Horace (65–68 BCE) is generally seen as milder, as he is laughing with the victims of his writing; Juvenal (55–127 BCE), is much more cutting and derisive, laughing at them, while Menippus (third century BCE) treads a middle ground through the use of dialogue. Gilbert Highet points DOI: 10.4324/9781003124993-3

30  Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition out that the early satires by Menippus and Varro were ‘so rich in vulgarisms, archaisms, neologisms, and bold imagery … that they even make the straight verse satires of Horace and Juvenal look rather tame and monotonous’ (Highet 1972, 37). It will be my contention that Howard’s writing offers a blend of the three modes of satire, and we will briefly look at all three before delving further into the specifically Irish satirical tradition. Horace’s satirical odes will look quite familiar to a contemporary reader, comprising what have now become stock tropes in terms of satire and parody: ‘the ambiguous mediating speaker, the Saturnalian reversal, the shifting satiric scene, the mock-heroic parody, and the shifting satiric voice’ (Knight 2004, 158). In Howard’s books, the fiction is that Howard, the author, is being told the events of each book by Ross the eponymous character, and he then repeats them in the voice of Ross. Each book has the title printed and, then, in parenthesis (‘As told to Paul Howard’). He is set up like some sort of ghost-writer with a photographic memory, or a Dictaphone, who faithfully writes out all that Ross narrates to him. In effect, he is a cross between a mediating speaker and a first-person narrator, as while Howard is not directly present in any of the books except one, he is a silent speaker who nevertheless mediates what the other characters are saying. His mediation is very subtle, as there is no omniscient narrative perspective. No one tells us what characters are thinking, and Ross himself acts as a second layer of mediation, as we can know only what Ross tells us, and Ross is well aware of his limitations: ‘I’m so slow sometimes, they could put deckchairs on me and call me a focking cruise ship’ (Howard 2010, 150). Hence, Howard has to write in such a way that we not only hear what Ross tells us but also see and hear more than he tells us. Mediating speakers may be figures of some confusion or doubt, but primarily they reproduce the uncertainties of their subject, embodying the problems and confusions explored in the poem rather than merely commenting on them (Knight 2004, 159), and, for Horace, the role itself is shifting. In his first book of Satires, he narrates in a first-person voice, and the details seem to be those of his own career. However, in the second book, there are a number of different narrating figures, each representing different aspects of Horace. It is as if we can learn about him from his own voice, and also from the voices of others. The shifting satiric speaker is used metatextually in Howard’s work, as characters speak in their own voices, and we soon forget that we are listening to, what is, in effect, reported speech, as we become immersed in a polyphonic dialogue between the characters. Indeed there is a very high proportion of dialogue in Howard’s texts, given that there is no real overall narrative perspective, so we hear what characters say themselves, and we make our judgements on this, as the form of the novel allows for such direct access (even though

Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition  31 it is, in effect, doubly mediated by both Howard and Ross): ‘satire and the novel are massively overlapping genres’ (Knight 2004, 204). While Howard is primarily a Menippean satirist, there are large traces of Horace at work in the way that he treats his characters. Horace, as a satirist, ‘did not like to give pain’, and even though he is laughing at ‘various forms of nonsense’, he is not really ‘motivated by a dark and cutting malice’ (Elliott 1960, 112). There is a fine example of this in RO’CK of Ages, when Charles has been discovered having sex with Sorcha’s separated mother, Ross is horrified and calls it a ‘sordid little tryst in the back of a camper van’, and, in the dialogue that follows, Ross’s lack of vocabulary becomes clear: ‘There was nothing sordid about it’. ‘Er, it’s incense, Dad’. ‘Yes, you’ve reached for a word there, Ross, and taken the wrong one down from the shelf. For the record, there was nothing incestuous about it either. Sorcha’s mother and I are not related except through the marriage of our children’. (Howard 2021b, 342) Charles’s gentle admonishment of his son is part of his character, as he is very reluctant to criticise Ross for anything, and while this South Dublin parenting trait is being mocked, nevertheless the essential kindness and unconditional love that Charles has for Ross is a redeeming feature for each of them, and this Horatian trait allows us to remain fond of both characters, even when they commit acts that are horrible. We will see this Horatian strain in Howard’s writing as we move through the series, but we will also see it mixed with the other, sharper strains of satire. When looking at the destruction of information in the Irish bailout crisis, there is a combination of the ‘two classical strains of satire, Juvenalian outrage and Horatian urbanity’ (Greenberg 2011, 123). Juvenalian satire is a sharper mode of writing, and it carries a sharp sting of moral outrage. This type of satire operates ‘effectively when legal institutions themselves are corrupt’ (Knight 2004, 30). It is motivated by anger, and by a desire to punish those who are seen to transgress; in this type of writing, we are very much laughing at people as opposed to laughing with them. Swift’s sæva indignatio, would be one of the most popular examples of this type of writing. A comedy driven by indignation is necessarily sharp, and we see traces of this in Howard’s work, though he generally allows the characters to have a saving grace, which makes us feel better about them. In the earlier books, when dealing with teenage characters, Howard points up the mostly female obsession with remaining slim: ‘and Emer’s there, “Oh my God, that reminds me, how many points is a muffin?’ and

32  Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition Sophie’s like, “five-and-a-half”’ (Howard 2001, 80). One of the characters, Sophie, is seen to have serious issues with her body ‘the girl is, like, TOTALLY obsessed’, and has spoken of getting ‘rhytidectomies and laser skin-resurfacing’ (Howard 2003, 178). Her friends think she is getting some form of cosmetic surgery, and they are jealous ‘she’s going to think she’s SO beautiful’ (Howard 2003, 178). Just out of curiosity, and without any real desire to comfort her, Ross and his friend Oisinn decide to see what she had done in the hospital. She is post-operative and has her face bandaged, and Oisinn bursts out laughing, ‘and I go, “Focking hell, Sophie. You look like the Elephant Man”’ (Howard 2003, 180), and her response to this cruelty is to drop the bunch of grapes in her hand, and then the two boys hear the ‘sound of, like, water splashing onto the floor. And we look down, and Sophie’s, like, pissed herself’ (Howard 2003, 181). Here we see a touch of the Juvenalian mode, as this spoiled and privileged boy has absolutely no empathy at all for Sophie, and he seems to be immune to the damage he is doing to an obviously frail and fragile young woman. Howard has said that the Ross series began in anger, but that, as time went on, he came to actually like the character, and this developing fondness is clear in how the Juvenalian satire is mitigated through a kindlier Horatian mode. The episode ends with the following admission from Ross: ‘and on the way home not a single word passes between us, between Oisinn and his asshole friend’ (Howard 2003, 181). There is a dawning of self-knowledge here, just a hint, that stops the reader from completely hating him. The same is true later in the book, when Sophie, deep in counselling, writes him a letter, making it very clear how deeply he has hurt her. She explains that she has ‘Distorted Body Image Syndrome’, which basically means that she hates the way she looks all the time: ‘I thought my chin was too fat and my eyes as well’, and she looked for the surgery as a birthday present. Her comments on Ross’s visit are telling and unsparing: ‘Imagine it, Ross. All your deepest little secrets and insecurities are laid out in the open for people to laugh at and then gossip about with their friends. I had to be sedated that night, you know’ (Howard 2003, 199). This is heartbreaking, and the writing is crystal clear; the confessional tone and the obvious signs of someone at the end of their tether should make us despise Ross for what he has done, and Sophie spells out her feelings towards him later in the letter: ‘I’m incapable of feeling anything but hate for you’, and she goes on to note that she thinks he is a ‘very unhappy person’ (Howard 2003, 200). She goes on to say that she has learned not to worry about other people but ‘to be happy with who I am’ (Howard 2003, 200). Ross’s reaction to this letter is not to share it or to laugh but to fold it up and put it back in his pocket. The effect of the letter, and of his dawning realisation of how awfully he has behaved, is what spurs him to offer a house (he is working as an estate agent) to a more deserving couple later in

Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition  33 the book and to use some bribe money to tide them over Christmas. Barry Conroy, his employer at Hook, Lyon and Sinker, lets him go with regret, noting that he has now developed a conscience, which he sees as ‘a bad, bad thing to have. In this game anyway’ (Howard 2003, 204). There is a notion of ‘satire as a form of redemption’ (Knight 2004, 31) to be found here, when, at the end of the book, on Christmas Eve, Ross, the prodigal, returns home to his mother and father with a plea for forgiveness: And I just, like, burst out crying. I’m like, ‘I’ve focked things up, Dad. Focked things up big-style’. He hugs me and goes, ‘But we can put them right, son. We’ll put them right’. (Howard 2003, 20) That there is some good in Ross is clear from these early stages, and Howard’s satire, while it can be sharp, is moving towards a more redemptive arc, using humour as ‘a road to redemption’ (Bevis 2012, 85), and, for this reason, the Menippean strain of satire is possibly the strongest one to be found in the series. The term derives from the Cynic Menippus, a Syrian slave who won his freedom and eventually became a citizen of the Greek city of Thebes. He was apparently the first non-dramatic writer of satire to make his work continuously funny: ‘he is called the σπουδογέλοιος, “the joker about serious things” par excellence; and he surely modelled much of his work on Aristophanes’ (Highet 1972, 36). Generally, it is a mixed genre, having some Horatian and some Juvenalian characteristics, and it is quite verbally creative, using prose and poetry as well as a mix of register, tone, format, different versions of information, and an undeniable ‘impulse towards diversity’ (Friedman 2019, 6). Eugene P. Kirk’s description of later Menippean-influenced satire goes on to list ‘unconventional diction, Neologisms, portmanteau words, macaronics, precocity, coarse vulgarity, catalogues, bombast, mixed languages, and protracted sentence’ as sometimes ‘appearing all together in the same work’ (Kirk 1980, xi), while Theodore D. Kharpertian has summarised the effect of Menippean satire in its breaches of categories and its being an ‘open and flexible’ genre (Kharpertian 1990, 21). Kharpertian also draws attention to what he terms ‘the reformative impulse of Menippean satire’, as it attempts to create a ‘better world than it found’ (Kharpertian 1990, 41), and the conclusion of The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years demonstrates aspects of this, as we see a micro-redemption take place in Ross. The genre is one of fluidity as it allows for ‘movement up and down the literary scale (high and low, oral and literary, verse and prose) and between genres and forms

34  Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition of speech’, and has space for ‘intertextual play or subversive, boundarydestroying attacks’ (Friedman 2019, 14). I think it is clear that Howard’s work can, predominantly, be seen as Menippean, given the mixture of languages, styles, registers and dialects that arise in the series. It specialises in ‘undermining assumptions and norms, its tendency to question and unbalance, and its celebration of oppositionalities’ (Friedman 2019, 16), although it has strong Horatian connotations in that, by and large, the characters remain likeable. It is interesting that Howard’s work has not really been academically analysed in the context of satire to date and, even more so, given that Irish writing has a long and storied tradition of satirical work. As already noted, in Gaelic culture satire was one of the central modes of writing. Roisin McLoughlin, in her encyclopaedic book, Early Irish Satire, details just how complex the literary context was in the area of satire. The ‘aér’ is the Irish-language word for satire, defined as ‘(a) cutting, incising; (b) act of satirising, lampooning, defaming’ (Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh 2007, 4), and there was a whole class of poets, the fili, whose social role was to write poems of praise or blame for their noble family. An important function of the fili was ‘to satirise and to praise and he was thus largely responsible for the decrease or increase of early Irish society’s most coveted attribute, honour’ (Kelly 1988, 43). This poetic class was highly professionalised and stratified, and there were grades and various levels of promotion to be found therein: there were ‘seven grades of poet: ollam, ánruth, clí, cano, dos, macfhuirmid and fochloc, with three subgrades, i.e. taman, drisiuc, oblaire’ (Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh 2007, 12), and the status of poetry is made clear when one looks at the retinue that an ollam would be expected to have: ‘twenty four people for an ollam when engaged on public business, twelve when pursuing a claim, ten at feasts of hospitality, eight on a circuit with a king’ (Breatnach 1987, 104). Clearly, this was a high-status profession, and satire was central to its power. There were also poets called bards, and the essential difference between the fili and the bard was ‘the latter’s lack of professional training’ (Kelly 1988, 47). Poetry, and especially satire, was very much an established aesthetic form, which had a strong influence in the political and sociocultural world of the time. Satirical writing was part of the training of the fili, and a manuscript from the fourteenth century, written on vellum, ‘is the earliest extant Irish manuscript containing didactic material relating to the training of poets’ (Mclaughlin 2008, 107). Their power was not only cultural, but also societal, as there was a reciprocal relationship ‘between the poet and his patron in Early Irish society, whereby the poet received a reward (duas) in exchange for his praise poem (duan)’ (Mclaughlin 2008, 3). The poet could confer praise, honour and reputation on his patron, and this was

Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition  35 clearly highly valued in old Irish society, and it explains why poets were so highly regarded. However, the obverse was also true, as the poet could ruin someone with a satire. Because of this, there were a series of rules, regulations and stratifications around the use of satire, with distinctions being made between ‘the formal, legal satire of the fili “poet” and that of the cainte “satirist”, who was reviled by both secular and ecclesiastical authorities’ (Mclaughlin 2008, 4). Such an important cultural and social role had many rules and sub-divisions and, overall, McLaughlin lists 28 specific named types of satire (Mclaughlin 2008, 287), which again demonstrates the complexity and sophistication of this genre of writing in old and medieval Irish society. Vivian Mercier, in his important study of Irish literary humour, The Irish Comic Tradition, stresses that one of the most striking facts ‘about Irish literature in either Gaelic or English is the high proportion of satire which it contains’ (Mercier 1962, 105). Burlesque, parody and irony were the three main types of humour used in Gaelic satire, with irony as the ‘fundamental satiric device’ (Mercier 1962, 2), something with which Kernan agrees: ‘nearly all satire makes use of irony’ (Kernan 1965, 81), and something that resonates with any reader of Howard’s work. Irony basically says one thing while meaning the exact opposite. In being ironic, ‘the satirist praises what he loathes, speaks with enthusiasm of utopias which he proves to be wastelands … and confidently puts Achilles’ spear in hands which cannot hold it’ (Kernan 1965, 82). Irony and parody are quite sophisticated, as they assume knowledge of a norm or context, which is then alluded to in a parodic or ironic manner: without knowledge of this context, the satire just does not work. ‘Irony depends on an established or understood standard on the part of the author and the reader, so that when we are confronted with its opposite we recognise it as ironic’ (Kernan 1965, 84), and, as such, it indicates a high level of sophistication on the part of the satirical text and a high level of understanding of the differences between how things are supposed to be, as opposed to how they actually are, on the part of the reader. So clearly, Gaelic Irish society was quite sophisticated, and notions of reputation were hugely important, given that there were such professionalised structures in situ for the development, training and reward of poets who could enhance and diminish them. As writing in Irish was gradually replaced by writing in English, through the processes of colonisation, satire remained a strong genre, with perhaps its most famous proponent being Jonathan Swift. A man enmired centrally in the politics of his time, Swift wrote in Juvenalian style about his life and times, and he took up cudgels to defend both friends and ideals. A Modest Proposal, written in 1729, is a response, in part, to famine in Ireland, as:

36  Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition Reversing the age-old stereotype of the Irish as cannibals fostered in English writings, Swift depicts a situation in which the Irish are the devoured rather than the devourers, though not entirely blameless for their plight. (Swift, Fabricant, and Mahony 2010, 123) This conspectus, coming as an introduction to the piece in Swift’s Irish Writings: Selected Prose and Poetry, does not oversell the piece, and it locates it correctly at the centre of issues of the time, dealing with poverty, famine, the poor and the role of science in the betterment of society. The text focuses on a scientific methodology of the time, embodied by Sir William Petty. An anatomist, founder fellow of the Royal Society, and president of the Dublin Philosophical Society, Petty argued that all affairs could be expressed in ‘Terms of Number, Weight, or Measure’ (Lynall 2012, 107). It is this sense of valuing humans in a purely financial or commodificatory sense that is parodied in A Modest Proposal. There is a gap between the author and speaking persona in the text, similar to what we see in Howard’s writing, as the ‘person’ who proposes eating young children in order to ease the economic plight of so many in Ireland ‘is a totally fictional character created for the occasion’ (Atkins 2013, 61). Swift cites an American authority, looking towards a more enlightened form of government, which would be normal enough in such discourse, and, without a change of tone, he moves from the rationale to the bizarre, or one might even use the term, the burlesque: I HAVE been assured by a very knowing American of my Acquaintance in London; that a young healthy Child, well nursed, is, at a Year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome Food; whether Stewed, Roasted, Baked, or Boiled; and, I make no doubt, that it will equally serve in a Fricasie, or Ragoust. [italics original] (Swift, Fabricant and Mahony 2010, 125) He can think of no rational objection to the scheme, other than that the population ‘will be thereby much lessened in the Kingdom’ (Swift, Fabricant, and Mahony 2010, 129) I GRANT this Food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for Landlords; who, as they have already devoured most of the Parents, seem to have the best Title to the Children. [italics original] (Swift, Fabricant and Mahony 2010, 126) The mention of the landlords metaphorically eating their tenant through wrack-renting brings the Juvenalian satire to its rather sharp point, as he

Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition  37 calls into question the ethics of those who see his scheme as wrong and immoral, but who are happy enough to see people’s dignity, wealth and health metaphorically eaten by unjust rents and conditions over a period of time. While Swift is a pivotal figure in the Irish satirical tradition, he is by no means the final one. José Lanters has produced a significant analysis of later Irish writers who use Menippean satire, looking at the work of Darrell Figgis, Eimar O’Duffy, Austin Clarke, Flann O’Brien and Mervyn Wall. Her argument is that their writing provided a strong critique of a post-rising and post-independence Ireland, and that all of the writers under discussion were ‘affected by the period of change and upheaval in Ireland in the decades after the declaration of the Free State’ (Lanters 2000, 45). The use of humour to provoke ridicule is central to satirical writing, and irony and parody are central to satire as a generic form. Mercier states that he knows of ‘no comparable example of parody in Western European vernacular literature which antedates Aislinge Meic Conglinne … written not later than 1200’. As the Irish had been writing scholarly works in the vernacular since the eighth century, he points out that ‘vernacular parody might conceivably have appeared much sooner than it did in Ireland’ (Mercier 1962, 8). Another significant study of comedy in the Irish tradition is David Krause’s The Profane Book of Irish Comedy. Krause looks at the dialogues between Oisín and Saint Patrick from the perspective of the subversive humour that informs the Ossianic dialogues, with ‘Oisín as the first subversive against the strictures of Holy Ireland’ (Mackillop 1986, 126). This book discusses Samuel Beckett, Brendan Behan, Dion Boucicault, William Boyle, Paul Vincent Carrol, George Fitzmaurice, Lady Gregory, Denis Johnston, Sean O’Casey, Lennox Robinson, Bernard Shaw, George Shields, J. M. Synge and W. B. Yeats in the context of their connections with the old Gaelic tradition. He does not really dwell on satire, with the term being mentioned 26 times in over three hundred pages (Krause 1982), but the study does examine dialogue in some detail, and Howard’s novels, as well as his dramas, are suffused with dialogue, and so much of the humour and satire stem from dialogic interaction across his work. So, that there is a strong satirical tradition in an Irish context is demonstrably clear, and that the work of Howard is a part of this tradition; is a continuation of this tradition; and is a development of this tradition is, I would contend, also demonstrably clear. Howard’s work is satirically syncretic in that it fuses Horatian and Menippean, and occasionally Juvenalian, modes of satire across the range of the series. Stylistically, he tends to give each character a leitmotif, whether it is a linguistic tic as in Charles’s ongoing self-punctuation ‘Quote-unquote!’ (Howard 2009b, 9); “Exclamation mork!” (Howard 2005, 183) (which changes to a repeated ‘Exclamation mork! Exclamation

38  Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition mork! Exclamation mork!’ later in the series) (Howard 2021a, 123); and Latin tags: ‘macte virtute sic itur ad astra! Excellence is the way to the stors’ (Howard 2020, 1) or ‘id est, if you’ll pardon the Latin’ (Howard 2008, 253). Then there are Sorcha’s countless ‘Oh my God’ exclamations; as well as her habit of fixing her hair in a certain way (which she repeats exactly across the first four books), as she takes off her scrunchy and ‘slips it onto her wrist, shakes her head, smooths her hair back into a low ponytail, puts it back in the scrunchy and then pulls five or six strands of hair loose; as Ross notes: ‘it looks exactly the same as it did before she did it’ (Howard 2000, 25). Also, there are Ross’s own difficulties with language and vocabulary: ‘He just shook his head – I think it’s a word – ruefully?’ (Howard 2017, 46). Howard also satirises institutions and the engines that drove Ireland through the cycles of Celtic Tiger, the crash and the Celtic Phoenix, notably estate agents: ‘an honest estate agent. I mean, isn’t that what they call an oxymoron?’ (Howard 2021b, 229) and bankers through the voice of Charles: Most of our senior bank management, they’re great guys, really terrific – I should know, I played rugby with enough of them – but you wouldn’t trust them to hold your ice-cream cone while you tied your shoelace. (Howard 2021b, 43) The (fictitious) estate agency of Hook, Lyon and Sinker, the CEO Barry Conroy tells his workers, ‘has been a byword for unscrupulous practices in the areas of selling and letting’. As Ross notes ‘we’re all just, like, nodding. We worked hord to build up that reputation’ (Howard 2021b, 210). Writing in The Irish Times about what he learned from the columns and the books, Howard speaks to the value and role of satire: Satire doesn’t bring down governments. It’s hard to say that it changes anything at all. The best you can hope for, I’ve discovered, is Molière’s aspiration ‘to amuse men while gently correcting them’. I never expected the targets of the Ross books to become my audience. I reflect on this every time I’m invited to a yacht club, or a golf club or a south Dublin rugby school to read. I wanted to infuriate these people – but now I am their courtroom jester. (Howard 2021c) As Howard notes, his satire critiques the absurdities of boom-time South Dublin life; yet, the ‘targets of the satire greatly enjoy the work’ (Boland 2012, 448), possibly because they are so insulated by privilege that they can see no danger in laughing at themselves. I also think that Howard

Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition  39 sells his own writing short here; his ‘problem’ is that his caricatures have become characters, fully rounded and developed, with whom his readers bond. As readers, we, like Ross, are willing to make excuses for him when he falls into error because, basically, we are fond of him. He is arrogant, privileged and not the sharpest tool in the box, but he is aware of this. He is the loveable fool, the idiot savant, a latter-day, though sharper and crueller, Bertie Wooster. His moments of self-knowledge and self-awareness raise him above caricature and into literature, and this is quite an achievement, especially when the vignettes of Ireland and the Irish are so incisive and funny. Laughter is also part of the reason why Howard is not taken seriously in academic studies. I contend that the issues involved in this can be traced back to the aesthetic and cultural frameworks within which Howard’s texts are located, created and received. Primarily, his books are not seen as literature or as high culture but as popular culture and as humorous. Often humorous writers find it hard to be taken seriously, even though they often show great stylistic and linguistic facility. P. G. Wodehouse, E. F. Benson and Terry Pratchett, for example, write beautiful sentences, but their works are seen to lack the high seriousness that, since Modernism, has been primarily associated with the aesthetic: Bakhtin’s carnival is not generally seen as sufficiently thought-provoking. In Howard’s case, the materiality of the books is relevant. The art on the covers is not academic or high culture; instead, it is cartoonish, usually highlighting Ross’s large nose and some idiosyncratic events in the book. They are reviewed in newspapers and online but not in academic journals. In other words, even as these books are placed in the ‘fiction’ section of bookshops, as opposed to the ‘literary fiction’ section, their academic fate, so to speak, is sealed. I think it is important to interrogate the assumptions that cause these books to be so placed literally in the shop and metaphorically, in terms of academic attention. Notions of the cultural and aesthetic context in which the books are seen, then, are central to their epistemological status, and, to critique this, the work of Jacques Derrida and Pierre Bourdieu needs to be adduced. Writing about Kant in The Truth in Painting, Jacques Derrida made some telling points about the relationship between the frame (parergon) and the work itself (ergon). Derrida notes that: The parergon stands out both from the ergon (the work) and from the milieu; it stands out first of all like a figure on a ground. But it does not stand out in the same way as the work. With respect to the work which can serve as a ground for it, it merges into the wall and then, gradually, into the general text. (Derrida 1987, 61)

40  Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition Derrida’s point is that the structuration of a work of art is predicated on a framing device, which is both part of the work of art and, at the same time, part of the ground from which that work originates. In this context, he is examining the interrelation of the frame, which gives structure and specificity to a work of art, and the work itself. To extrapolate a little, the frame of any work of literary art involves the philosophical, cultural and epistemological context out of which that work emerges and towards which that work is addressed. In other words, seeing a chair in a waiting room means that the chair is furniture and meant to be sat on; however, seeing a chair framed off in an art gallery means that the chair (possibly the exact same material chair) now has a different context. This means that the parergon, far from just being outside the ergon, actually has a defining function in terms of how the ergon is perceived. The term ‘parergonal’, as Marion Hobson notes, does not point ‘to an outside transcending the picture, but to a push and pull relation between the interior and the exterior’ (Hobson 2001, 147). Indeed, Derrida’s broader work has made this very point in the seemingly contradictory declarations ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (there is nothing outside the text’) (Derrida 1997, 158), and ‘Il n’y a pas de hors contexte’ (there is nothing outside of context) (Derrida 1988, 136). For Derrida, the work of art cannot be what it is without the supplement of the frame, and, therefore, the frame (parergon) is paradoxically situated both inside and outside the work (ergon): the ergon must be set off against a background, and this is what the frame works to achieve. In Howard’s case, the parergonal structure of his work would seem to be that of popular culture, specifically the comic novel. The cover art has already been mentioned, but a further parergonal factor in the reception of Howard’s work is to be found in the art that is in each book. In six to eight places in each book, cartoon images of scenes from the narrative appear, drawn by Alan Clarke. These images are caricaturish and cartoonish, exaggerating features of characters and playing with perspective. They are black-and-white line drawings, with different characters enacting aspects of the narrative teeming in the background. These immediately establish a parergon that these books are for entertainment and comedic value as opposed to being ‘serious’ literature; they are ‘books with pictures’, and, therefore, semiotically they are not seen as part of the high seriousness that has been an essential aspect of modernist and postmodernist literature. Postmodernism has espoused a ludic epistemology at times, but it is a ludic sense of play that is within very specific parameters, and cartoon drawings are not part of this paradigm, though the graphic novel as genre is deconstructing some of these perceptions. Hence, the parergon is definitely influencing the reception and the placement and value of the ergon. And yet, in the world of serious literature, illustrated volumes, usually in the mode of high art, or realistic art, can enhance the value of books in limited editions. Sometimes, books of poetry with illustrations are seen as very high culture: one thinks of illustrated copies of Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray (Heaney and Cooke

Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition  41 1984), with drawings by Barrie Cooke, or of Thomas Kinsella’s The Táin (Kinsella and Le Brocquy 1969), with illustrations by Louis le Brocquy, which are highly valued. I make the point to stress that the parergons are far from fixed. Clarke himself, the illustrator of the books, is a very accomplished artist and sculptor, whose work has been exhibited extensively in Ireland as well as in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Italy and Japan, and it is held in numerous galleries and private collections. He is currently an artist in residence in the former Victorian Factory, La Cathedral Studios, in Dublin. Located just off Thomas Street, he offers exhibitions and shows, and his work is highly respected and valued: in this sense, he is part of the discourse of high art. Therefore, the quality of the art and illustrations cannot be a factor in this, so there are other factors at work in the ascription of value and of keeping Howard at the margins of academic critique, and these can be better understood in the light of Pierre Bourdieu’s discussions of the notion of symbolic and cultural capital. According to Bourdieu, texts are prescribed by their contexts, but they are also capable of altering those same contexts. In this case, offering an academic critique of Howard’s work will allow for the fictive truths they offer about Irish society to be unpacked. Many high-culture texts focus on interiority, and, in addition, they are seen to embody forms of cultural capital, something that is referred to as a ‘form of value associated with culturally authorised tastes, consumption patterns, attributes, skills and awards’ (Webb, Schirato, and Danaher 2002, x). It covers a wide range of resources, such as ‘verbal facility, general cultural awareness, aesthetic preferences, scientific knowledge, and educational credentials’ (Swartz 1997, 41). Symbolic capital is ‘any property (any form of capital whether physical, economic, cultural or social) when it is perceived by social agents endowed with categories of perception which cause them to know it and to recognise it, to give it value’ (Bourdieu 1984, 47). It is a type of ‘denied capital’, as it is a form of power that is not perceived as power but as ‘legitimate demands for recognition’ (Swartz 1997, 43). In other words, to say one is reading Joyce or Proust is to claim, and be awarded, symbolic capital; to claim that one is reading Paul Howard is not to be seen to access the same cultural or symbolic value and, hence, not to accrue any symbolic or cultural capital. A good summary of the relationship, and difference, between capital, cultural capital and symbolic capital has been set out as follows: Economic capital, say one hundred dollars, can be exchanged for a night at an expensive hotel. Cultural capital, such as a university degree, can be exchanged for a desired job. And if you have symbolic capital as an expert on Bourdieu, you may be able to cash in on this by agreeing to help your fellow students with an essay using his ideas only if they grant you certain favours in return. (Webb, Schirato and Danaher 2002, 110)

42  Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition Both of these function by what Bourdieu terms ‘the club effect’, a sense of shared interests and tastes among a group of people ‘which are different from the vast majority and have in common the fact that they are not common, that is, the fact that they exclude everyone who does not present all the desired attributes’ (Bourdieu and Accardo 1999, 129); in Howard’s case, caricaturish illustrations on the cover of one’s books do not allow one into that club. Reading Howard will not allow for the acquisition of the symbolic capital of a university degree, although, interestingly, there is a metalepsis already at work here, as Howard’s work is now part of the BA programme in Mary Immaculate College, and some undergraduate, masters and doctoral dissertations have been done on his work, so that as this process develops, his work will gradually accrue cultural capital: as Bourdieu has noted: ‘taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ (Bourdieu 1984, 6). For Bourdieu, acts of reflective thinking, or metanoia, are crucial if a cultural field is to be understood and critiqued. A cultural field is defined as a ‘series of institutions, rules, rituals, conventions, categories, designations, appointments and titles which constitute an objective hierarchy, and which produce and authorise certain discourses and activities’ (Webb, Schirato and Danaher 2002, 21). Thus, Howard’s work is located in this cultural field and is continuously engaged in critiquing it satirically. Within the books, notions of bourgeois symbolic capital are offered to satire all the time. A good example, from one of the later books, is the middle-class habit of using the Irish language to name one’s children. In this scene, from Downturn Abbey, Sorcha is describing mutual friends and the list of names is completely over the top: ‘Ciadhla Nic Airt; Muirgheal Ní Muireadhaigh; Rionach Nic Giolla Mhaoil; Aodamar Nic an Tuile; Eabha Ní Shé; Siofra Ní Uirthile; Tiarna Nic Uilgeagoid; Treasa de Poire; Clar Ní Riada; Sile Ní Mhurchu; Naoise Blennerhasset and Miryam Nic Mhathuna’. As Ross puts it ‘I swear to fock, it’s like listening to Chewbacca trying to argue his way into a pub pissed’ (Howard 2013, 286). Here the choice of names is very much an issue of cultural and symbolic capital, as such names demarcate from a semiotic perspective that one is middle class, educated and interested in a specific sense of Irishness and the Irish language. Cultural capital is derived from such choices, as the very moment one hears a name in Irish from a non-Gaeltacht area, the associated cultural and symbolic capital is clear for all to see. Without even knowing these girls, their social class, addresses and general outlook can be imagined. In other words, the choices that we make in terms of our cultural artefacts are both reflective of, and reflexive of, the social class and societal and cultural power of ourselves as classifiers. Thus, when I say that I am currently reading Ulysses, this statement reflects a certain sense of social

Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition  43 class, and of what Bourdieu would term ‘cultural capital’. The selection of cultural objects is a series of negotiations in terms of high and popular culture, but it is also a series of negotiations in terms of one’s own sense of identity: to say I value Joyce is to locate myself in a position of intellectual centrality; to say that I value Howard is to locate myself at the intellectual margins. I will find it far easier to place a paper, article or chapter on the work of Seamus Heaney than I will on the work of Paul Howard, as high culture is hegemonic in academic circles, as third-level academic research and knowledge is, by its ontological and epistemological nature, high cultural in mode. I would contend that the whole idea of high culture itself is in need of interrogation. In the first place, any system or structure is not monadic in that it exists and operates differentially – for there to be a system of high culture there must be one of low culture (and the adjective ‘low’ is the technically correct term in this context as it is the binary opposite of ‘high’, but it has been attenuated for the purposes of political correctness into the euphemism ‘popular’). As Bourdieu has noted, each position in the field of high culture, or in a particular canonical system, ‘receives its distinctive value from its negative relationship with the co-existent position-takings to which it is objectively related and which determine it by delimiting it’ [italics original] (Bourdieu 1993, 30). This would seem to contradict the notion of aesthetic disinterest, which suggests that great art or high culture comes into existence beyond the criteria of economics. Here the parergon is very definitely defining the shape and reception of the ergon, as we will see in the context of Howard’s writings on the Celtic Tiger. Interestingly, Bourdieu notes that the Kantian idea of aesthetic disinterest is, in fact, a marker of social class in itself: ‘the pure gaze implies a break with the ordinary attitude towards the world which, as such, is a social break’ (Bourdieu 1984, 31). For Bourdieu, utterances or texts are not just signs to be deciphered; they are also ‘signs of wealth, intended to be evaluated and appreciated, and signs of authority, intended to be believed and obeyed’ (Bourdieu 1991a, 66). The notions of wealth and authority do not just come from the text, but, as Derrida has indicated earlier, from the context and from the negotiation between text and context. It is their part in the institution of literature that makes these texts and utterances valuable. Bourdieu believes that ‘the social world presents itself as a highly structured reality’ (Bourdieu 1989, 19), and these hierarchical structures are perceived to be natural. I would suggest that it is the parergon, or cultural context, that has meant little critical attention being given to Howard’s work, and I believe that this leaves a gap in the analysis of contemporary Irish culture. To recontextualise Howard’s work by offering it to academic analysis, is, I

44  Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition would contend, to open up new areas of meaning in the Irish cultural conversation, especially in the context of our understanding of the Celtic Tiger. To do this is a matter of placing the ergon of his work within the parergon that has been sketched out in this chapter. This involves recontextualising his work so as to locate it within two very strong, high-cultural discourses. Hence, this study will locate his work as part of a Classical satirical tradition that dates back to the founding of Western civilisation in the texts and thought of ancient Greece. In addition, his work will be seen as a development of an Irish satirical tradition that spans linguistic change, colonisation and conquest and which is highly thought of in academic writing. Looked at in this way, the work of Paul Howard is an intriguing window into the class and social structures of Irish culture and society, and it will be of great value in enunciating fictive truths that are often occluded by official discourse: in a lot of ways, Howard gets to the real of Irish life, and this journey begins with the education of the eponymous central character (I am reluctant to use the term ‘hero’), Ross O’Carroll-Kelly. Howard’s work provides something of a cultural context for this period as he has been writing during the buildup to the Celtic Tiger and throughout the boom and bust of the Tiger itself. Indeed, the raison d’être of his book series is to document this period of time across two particular social classes in the Dublin area. Writing introductions to his earliest books, reprinted in 2016, Howard noted two seminal incidents that sparked his desire to write the books. We have already noted how the young ‘buck with the confident bearing of a five-star general’, demanded that his father ‘crack open the wallet’ (Howard 2000, 8), and one can almost hear Ross’s voice in this comment. Howard also speaks of hearing from a friend who discovered ‘his plumber snorting cocaine off the top of his toilet cistern at eleven o’clock in the morning’; this is a picture that Howard has called ‘the defining image of the period of temporary economic buoyancy that we refer to as the Celtic Tiger’ (Howard 2003, 8). Now while these incidents may be marginal to the broader economic narrative, they nevertheless speak to the feelings and the unconscious attitudes that were rife in the period in question and that, to a large degree, fuelled it. Given that his writing is contemporaneous with the period, what different viewpoints can be gleaned from the books that might not be so obvious in the other fictional and non-fictional (a far more numerous group) accounts of the Celtic Tiger? Perhaps the most interesting one is that this was a period that people enjoyed, and it was a time when Ireland gradually seemed to, in Robert Emmet’s words, take its place among the nations of the earth. What Howard portrays is a period when a ‘sharply defined and aggressively self-conscious middle class displaced the petit bourgeois, Catholic homogeneity of the previous generations. An affluent, secular, self-absorbed multinational-fueled materialism unimaginable a few decades ago has become a commonplace’ (Gillespie 2008, 43).

Howard and Ireland’s Satirical Tradition  45 Ross is very clear about his own feelings about the period: ‘I seem to be one of the few people in this country who remembers how amazing it was while it lasted’ (Howard 2011, 62–63). In the aftermath of austerity, it is easy to forget the vision of Ireland that came with this period. The Gerry Stembridge film About Adam (2000) saw a bright, cosmopolitan Dublin brought to the screen, showing confident and poised young people who looked European and postmodern, and this was an image that cohered with a new sense of self in the country. U2’s albums All That You Can’t Leave Behind, Vertigo and the volume of hits from 1990 to 2000, released in 2002, could almost be seen as a soundtrack to the Celtic Tiger, so ubiquitous was their playing in private and public spaces. Howard sees the period as one where Ireland changed, at all levels, and where consumption became significant: ‘Fionn’s telling me about this coffee shop, roysh, it used to be called Kennedy’s and now it’s called Bon Espresso and Patisserie and I’m like, “And your point is?”’ (Howard 2003, 61). The point is that we were now, as a country, looking to move beyond the colonial and into the postmodern. Ireland, as a place, was now looking beyond history and our love-hate relationship with Britain to Europe and the world, and Howard’s charting of the schooldays of a young Ross O’Carroll-Kelly would be a part of that process.

3

The Best Years of Our Lives – School and College

The Mis-Education of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly (2000) Roysh Here, Roysh Now… The Teenage Dirtbag Years (2001) The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years (2003)

The Mis-Education Years deals with Ross’s last two years at the fictional Castlerock College and the all-important Leinster Senior Cup victory in rugby. The Teenage Dirtbag Years sees Ross attend college at UCD. The Orange Mocha-Chip Frappuccino Years presents Ross leaving home and working for his friend JP’s father as an estate agent. It is no accident that the eighth book in the series, Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box (Howard 2008), deals with Ross undergoing psychoanalysis, and when this is added to the series of interviews in We Need to Talk About Ross, where the other characters fill in blanks in our knowledge of his childhood and his relationship with his parents, it becomes clear that there is a Freudian sub-theme rippling through the series. Given the conceit that Ross is telling Paul Howard all of the stories, there is a confessional dialectic already at work throughout the books. In this sense, Ross, even though he is telling us horrible things he has done, is establishing a rapport with the reader as he is taking us into his confidence. This narrative style is perhaps part of the reason why Ross is not as hateful as he should be, and, interestingly, Howard tells us that he set out to make him hateful. The columns, which lampooned the privately educated scions of South Dublin, were originally a lot ‘harder edged’, says Howard, as he had been carrying ‘a lot of chips on [his] shoulder about class’, as Dublin in the 1980s had a clear dividing line between working, middle and upper classes. As he says ‘I think it was clear [in the early books] that I hated Ross’, but that changed with the longevity of the series as ‘to write about a character for so long you have to have sympathy for him’ (Freyne 2014). Speaking to Paul Kimmage in 2015, Howard recalls his initial experience of a rugby match between ‘Skerries Community College and Gonzaga or somebody’, and Howard, having gone to a soccer school, had no sense of the importance of the game: DOI: 10.4324/9781003124993-4

The School and College Years  47 When our school played soccer there’d be 40 people and a dog at the match but you had all these men who should have been at work watching this game. And these incredibly well-dressed ladies wearing baby seals and standing in the mud with big heels shouting (adopts a posh voice): ‘Well done Traylock! Get your foot under it Traylock!’ (Kimmage 2015) This voice would become that of the South Dublin yummy mummies whose offspring could do no wrong: ‘her voice has that congested, adenoidal timbre so often associated with South Dublin women of a certain social class’ (Howard 2009b, 1). Traylock (a male version of those female Irishlanguage names already cited), would be the progenitor of Ross, and there would be other experiences of the real Ireland that would help to build up the character and the worldview of the series. He speaks of a Blackrock rugby match that he attended, where there were ‘hundreds, maybe thousands’ of people there and not just parents but ‘past pupils who seemed to have taken an afternoon off work to go back and support the old alma mater’ (Howard 2000, 7). The audience was very different from what he was used to seeing at local football games; now mothers looked like they were dressed for dinner, ‘standing in the mud in their four-inch heels and seal fur, while many of the fathers wore camel-hair coats’, and talked ‘at an annoyingly high volume into brick-sized objects that were truly the stuff of science fiction back in 1989 – mobile phones!’ (Howard 2000, 8). The first three books take Ross through school, a year in university, a trip to the USA on a J1 visa and then his time working as an estate agent in the burgeoning Celtic Tiger period, when property was becoming both expensive and desirable. It is a process that so many young Irish people now follow – school to third level to a middle-class job – though Ross only takes the job having been thrown out by his parents after offering them yet more abuse. Howard places him in his familial and social circle very well here, and, by the end of the three books, we have become familiar with all of the characters. To be accurate, many of these are more types than characters at this stage; their development occurs quite gradually across the series, so in this chapter we will look at their ‘origin stories’ to coin a phrase, and see how Howard sets up the character and plot profiles of Ross and his family and friends. The whole setting is that of teenage concerns, and, hence, the chapter titles, always worth noting in Howard’s carefully constructed comedic world, guide us into the cultural context. The chapter titles in The Mis-Education Years all refer to comments from a school report: ‘Comes to class unprepared’; ‘Has minimal attention span’ (Howard 2000, 7); those of The Teenage Dirtbag Years refer to Exam questions which are all about Ross, hence signifying his rampant narcissism: ‘“Ross is, like, such

48  The School and College Years an orsehole to women.” Discuss’; ‘“Ross, like, so loves himself it’s not funny.” Discuss’ (Howard 2001, 7), while those of The Orange MochaChip Frappuccino Years all refer to an episode title from the TV show Friends, but with Ross mentioned in each one: ‘The One Where Ross Does a Shitty Thing’, ‘The One Where Ross Grows a Heart’ (Howard 2003, 7). So before we even read one of the books, the sense of a character with rampant narcissism, who sees himself as always being watched by others, and as someone interesting enough to have people interested in him, becomes clear. The fact that the majority of the comments about him in all chapter titles are negative is something of which he remains largely blissfully unaware throughout the series, as evidenced by his own view of himself as ‘Dead Eye Dick with a rugby ball’ who is ‘good-looking, amazing body, big-time chormer, great with the ladies and absolutely loaded’ (Howard 2000, 10). In the early books, rugby is the master signifier of all that Ross is and wants to be. It is as a rugby player that his fame will come and his attractiveness, and this is something that has been moulded in him in Castlerock (an invented name which has strong resonances of private South Dublin schools such as Blackrock College or Castleknock College). Ross is the Out-Half, also called Fly-Half, on the College senior team, the ‘S’ as it is termed, and he is the player who directs all attacks and takes all of the penalties and converts three tries. It is a position of seminal importance on any rugby team, and Ross fills it with aplomb. His teachers prioritise the Leinster Senior Schools Cup, the competition in which Castlerock will be competing, and his coach ‘Sooty’ – Mr Sutton ‘who is the coach of the S’ (Howard 2000, 42) – stresses the importance of the game, telling the team that their final exam, the leaving Certificate ‘doesn’t matter a damn. You can sit it again next year’ (Howard 2000, 44). Mr Sutton is a teacher in the school, and it is interesting to see him decry educational achievement as opposed to sporting achievement. This deconstruction of the normative values of the education system is at the core of Howard’s satire, and this is set up from the outset. His history teacher, Mr Crabtree, is unwilling to encourage Ross’s casual attitude to learning. Ross arrives late for a history lesson and the following exchange takes place: ‘he goes, “You’re late,” and of course I’m there, “No shit, Sherlock,” giving him the same amount of attitude back’ (Howard 2000, 57). When asked about the causes of the First World War, which he was supposed to have learned off by heart, he replies: ‘I don’t think you understand. I’m on the S’ (Howard 2000, 57). It is interesting in the book that the abbreviation ‘S’ for senior cup team is not in inverted commas; instead, it is just accepted as a word in the language of the school, an example of how language is skewed in this fictional universe to reflect the classist and patriarchal culture with which the boys are imbued. As a further satirical

The School and College Years  49 twist on the norm, the teacher is later forced by Ross’s principal, Father Fehily, to apologise to him: He goes, ‘Em, yes, class, I’d just like to, em, apologise to Ross for the way I spoke to him here in class a couple of days ago. It was wrong of me and I’m, em, sorry’. I’m there, ‘Louder’, and he’s like, ‘SORRY’, and then I go, ‘Proceed’. (Howard 2000, 67) Howard notes that the status of these players among teachers, partners, fellow pupils and female fans was something very new to him, as was the swagger and the arrogance these players demonstrated, and it is with this very arrogance that the series began, and here the satire is quite Juvenalian, as these schools charge high fees for attendance and yet seem to prioritise sport over education, something that is accepted by both parents and student alike. The attitude is critiqued in a very Menippean manner as it is not just one or two teachers but the whole school ethos. In the world of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, all forms of high culture and learning have become unnecessary window-dressing for the maintenance of hierarchy and the pursuit of gain’ (Kelly 2017, 67). Ross is stopped by a member of the Gardaí, and he is arrogance personified, telling the Garda that he will not use L-plates as they are a ‘passion killer’ while using the licence of his female passenger, with whom he has just done ‘the bould thing’, but whose name he cannot remember as he refers to her as ‘a total randomer’ (Howard 2000, 12). The first line of the book asks ‘what’s my name?’ (Howard, 2004, 9). Contained within those three words are multiple issues of the nature of identity, and the probing of these is a central narrative trope in the novel as a genre. There are also intertextual references to the opening of Moby Dick and Catcher in the Rye. Subsequently, Howard refuses to quench the reader’s anticipation for an answer by stating ‘I don’t even bother answering him’ (Howard, 2004, 9). The law holds no fears for Ross, as his father’s solicitor friend, Hennessey Coughlin-O’Hara, is constantly at the ready to take up cudgels on his behalf. In his own view, Ross has the situation totally under control: I’m too smart to get caught doing more than forty, but what happens is they see the baseball cap, they see the Barbie doll next to me and they hear ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ blasting out through the windows at, like, a million decibels. Boggers or not, they’re not thick, these goys, and because it’s a focking Micra, they know straight away that it’s a young dude driving his old dear’s cor and – probably out of total jealousy – they end up pulling me over. (Howard 2000, 10)

50  The School and College Years From the outset, then, the self-styled ‘Dead Eye Dick’, who has it all, is obnoxious, vain, self-satisfied and entitled. He is a character with whom it is very difficult to empathise, and, in a number of other parodies, such a character would have a very short shelf life. Here Howard would seem to be a satirist of the satirist of the ‘hard bitter Juvenalian school’ (Highet 1972, 16), and, indeed, as we have noted, he set out to lampoon a particular social class. The whole school setting is there to show how the markers of this class are imprinted on succeeding generations, and how social capital, to cite Bourdieu, or privilege, is retained and enculturated; it does this through that ongoing negotiation across those ellipses between the real and fictive Ireland. Howard does this through satire and comedy and through a number of father figures in Ross’s life, because, if the South Dublin Weltanschauung of the book is anything, it is solidly patriarchal. Ross’s own father, Charles, is very much of the view that men are better than women and that middleand upper-class men are better than anyone else. His desire for Ross to be a rugby star is clear from the opening of the series, as is his unrepentant capitalism and classism. So he loudly opposes ‘a halting site in Foxrock’, by saying that it’s ‘just not appropriate. I’m thinking about them as much as anyone else. They wouldn’t be happy here’ (Howard 2000, 28). He is also a developer of housing estates who has been part of an endemic culture of bribery and corruption: ‘there were times, of course, when all you had to do was pop a few hundred pounds in an envelope and hey presto you had the council on your side’ (Howard 2000, 28). All of his prejudices combine around his ongoing involvement in rugby, and his genuine horror when there is a rumour that the Irish rugby stadium is to be moved: ‘they’re moving them to … God, I can’t even say it … the northside’ (Howard 2001, 25), and he blames former Irish Taoiseach Bertie Ahern, who hailed from working-class Drumcondra, for this ‘oh you should have heard that blasted Bertie Ahern on the one o’clock news, so bloody smug. A national stadium. Quote-unquote. And all to boost his popularity out in, what’s this you and your pals call it … Knackeragua?’ (Howard 2001, 26). When Ross lays a game of rugby, Charles is a vociferous presence on the sideline (the loudness is rendered by putting his comments in upper case): ‘HERE HE COMES! HERO OF THE HOUR! ANOTHER MILESTONE IN THE HISTORY OF IRISH RUGBY. AND NO SIGN OF GERRY THORNLEY. THE PAPER OF RECORD HAVE SENT A FREELANCE!’ (Howard 2000, 83). The fact that Charles never attempts to chastise or rebuke Ross for his obnoxious behaviour is a strong motivator of that behaviour, and while Charles is a figure of fun and very much the classic doting parent, nevertheless he represents a lot of opinions that are deeply held, but not so loudly expressed, in contemporary upper-class and upper-middle-class Irish society. Charles is the voice of the entitled, of

The School and College Years  51 the privileged, and he and his ilk still retain significant control and power in Ireland. Howard voices them in an exaggerated hyperbolic manner that makes us laugh, but the underlying classism and sense of entitlement undercut the laughter and show us something that is very strong in Irish culture. For example, when a homeless asks him for money for a cup of tea, Charles, without irony, tells him that he drinks too much tea: ‘Bad for you, all that caffeine. Makes you sluggish. Probably why you’ve no home and no job’ (Howard 2003, 90), and his opinion of the poor is equally politically incorrect: Think of the northside and you immediately think of unmarried mothers, council houses, coal sheds and curry sauce. You think of cannabis, lycra tracksuits and football jerseys worn as fashion garments. You think of men with little moustaches selling An Phoblacht outside these wretched dole offices, mothers and fathers in the pub from morning till night …. What’s next? A methadone clinic in Foxrock? (Howard 2001, 27) This is so hyperbolic that it makes us smile, and, yet when we think back to Séan Fitzpatrick’s comments about single mothers, it becomes clear that these opinions, while they are expressed in a way that makes us smile, are, in fact, obnoxious, and part of Howard’s real skill is to make us like Charles as a character even as he voices these opinions (full disclosure: he is my favourite character in the whole series), a hallmark of the Horatian mode. As a father, he offers Ross unconditional love and support, and he is always there to make sure that he is financially solvent. During Ross’s J1 visit to the United States, it is Charles who makes sure that he has sufficient money to enjoy his sojourn there: ‘the old man is a dickhead and everything, roysh, but the money comes bang on time’ (Howard 2001, 236). Ross has been taught that relationships, even family ones, can be commodified and that human contact can be replaced by money: it is a lesson that will leave deep marks on him. In many ways, Charles is at the core of the moral climate of this book as he is a capitalist who has risen to wealth by circumventing laws about planning, taxation and decent treatment of workers. He is the voice of a proto-Donald Trump, praising himself and his cronies for their independence of spirit and using every aspect of the law to help him gain advantage until that no longer works, when he will then feel quite free to break that law with impunity. To cite one of his more memorable quotations about tribunals investigating corruption, he is speaking about Hennessey, who is ‘an innocent man’ forced to flee to ‘Rio de Janeiro to escape the Star Chamber down at Dublin Castle’.

52  The School and College Years If you can’t hold bank accounts under twenty-eight different names in seventeen different countries, then somebody go and wake up Mr A. Hitler Esquire and tell him they’ve reversed the result of 1945 after consultation with the video referee’. (Howard 2005, 210) Money is important, but, as will be seen throughout the series, it is not important in itself, and, in a bizarre way, not even for what it can buy. Rather, it is important because it acts as the one defining marker of class left in a secular and largely post-Catholic Ireland. It is interesting that the two sacred cows of Irish identity, and, indeed, of much Irish scholarship in the twentieth century, are eloquent silences in the world of Ross. I refer of course to religion and nationalism. In this Ireland, it is money, what one wears, where one lives and the nature of one’s life that act as markers and signifiers of identity. Money is more about exchange-value or, to be more accurate, about symbolic exchange-value. This term derives from the writings of Karl Marx, and from the first volume of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy he makes this point about how wood changes qualitatively once it has been made into a table. It is still wood ‘an ordinary, sensuous thing, but as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness’ (Marx 1990, 163–164). The point for Marx is that the use-value of the table, a four-legged raised platform at which people can sit, work and eat, has been surpassed by what he calls its exchange-value. A table is not just a table, it can become a classic piece of furniture, it can become an antique and it can be exchanged for far more money than it took to purchase and manufacture because it has now attained some extra form of value. This value is largely imaginary – a diamond, qua rock, is no better or worse than a piece of quartz, but issues of rarity and cultural and symbolic capital have made it valuable to the point of almost being a fetish. To revert to Charles’s world, having a piece of quartz on his finger as jewellery is not valued by society; having a diamond is and it serves to differentiate him from those peoples’ lycra tracksuits and football jerseys worn as fashion garments. Dealing with workers as being less than human is also a part of his identity, as he rants to Ross about his workers and their anger at having a coffee machine removed. The workers go on strike and Fionnuala tells him to just put the machine back, but he refuses ‘but that’d be a climbdown I told her. They see one sign of weakness in me and we’ll have that minimum wage nonsense all over again’ (Howard 2001, 232), and as he goes on to say: ‘The gloves are off. I’m not giving in to the unions. Oh, no. Give them back their blasted machine and it’ll be breast-feeding stations and gluten-free bread for the world and his mother next’ (Howard 2001, 235). Again the hyperbole is amusing but the core

The School and College Years  53 is clear – these people mean very little to Charles, but they are signifiers of value to him, not as use-value employees, but as signifiers who have little agency themselves but are reflections of his own power in the workplace. He is able to provide or take away, and this gives him a sense of power – ‘the worker works for the capitalist instead of for himself’ (Marx 1990, 291) – and it is this ownership that is at the core of Charles’s desire to remove the coffee machine; he wants to own their time and their agency as much as the work they do within his company. Giorgio Agamben has made the point that Marx was in London during the first Universal Exhibition in 1851, and here he would have seen how various commodities of the Industrial Revolution were set out in Joseph Paxton’s all-glass Crystal Palace, a structure that was meant to add an aura to the commodities displayed therein: In the galleries and the pavilions of its mystical Crystal Palace, in which from the outset a place was also reserved for works of art, the commodity is displayed to be enjoyed only through the glance at the enchanted scene. Thus at the Universal Exposition was celebrated, for the first time, the mystery that has now become familiar to anyone who has entered a supermarket or been exposed to the manipulation of an advertisement: the epiphany of the unattainable. (Agamben 1993, 38) In a capitalist culture, there needs to be more than just a value placed on the material and labour of any commodity, as otherwise the levels of profit will not be huge. Companies like Apple are classic examples of this. Apple not only met a market demand with their iPad, but they also created that demand by making a beautiful, sleek product and then suggesting ways in which people could use it. So people bought the iPad, not to meet a challenge, solve a problem or complete a task more efficiently. They bought it because they wanted to buy this sleek and desirable object: ‘the transfiguration of the commodity into enchanted object is the sign that the exchange-value is already beginning to eclipse the use-value of the commodity’ (Agamben 1993, 38). What was being sold was not a cutting-edge technological problem-solver but a lifestyle accessory, a way of differentiating the owner from others as someone very much in touch with the technological Zeitgeist. There is an aura to owning an iPad, and this same aura is at the core of the narrative of money, location and privilege that Charles embodies and passes on to his son. People are commodities and have value only inasmuch as they relate back to you – this is a lesson that Ross will internalise throughout the series. The second father figure who is a huge influence on Ross is his school principal Father Denis Fehily, who will be a pervasive presence in the

54  The School and College Years series. In the early books, he is seen as the rugby-loving elitist whose primary desire is to win the Leinster Senior Schools Cup. It is often said that Howard rarely critiques the church, but having a Nazi sympathiser in charge of an élite all-boys school whose whole attitude to Rugby and the other school they play is both militaristic and classist would certainly seem to hit the satirical button. That Fehily is a Nazi supporter is made clear in the book. He is happy to quote Hitler in terms of educational ideology ‘A violently active, intrepid, brutal youth – that is what I am after… I will have no intellectual training. Knowledge is ruin for my young men’ [italics original] (Howard 2005, 43), and he sees the introduction of schools like Newbridge College in the Leinster Senior Cup as ‘social ecumenism’, again citing Hitler who ‘considered the theory that all men are created equal to be the most deceitful lie’ (Howard 2005, 98). In Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade, we learn that he has been arrested in Paris for war crimes as a member of the Milice française (Howard 2006, 143). Fehily speaks of his time in Vienna and in Paris during the rise of Hitler and there is a fondness and nostalgia expressed by him about these times: ‘The colour. The atmosphere. The uniforms. Lines of storm troopers marching in perfect goose-step. You couldn’t help but be swept along by it all’ (Howard 2006, 146): There were millions of people – millions – on the streets. Women, children, grown men, weeping tears of joy. It seems crazy at – what? – sixty, seventy years’ remove, to think that a man with so much … evil in him could excite such happiness in people. But history’s mistake is too often to divorce events from the context of the times … (Howard 2006, 146) He goes on to explain that it was in Vienna that he fell in love with a girl called Vianne, who looked like Constance Bennett and was French, from Clermont-Ferrand, not far from Paris (Howard 2006, 147). Her father was quite senior in the Vichy regime, and he was ‘close to Philippe Petain, Joseph Damand, all those boys. He took me under his wing and I joined the Milice française’ (Howard 2006, 148). However he was unable to support the torture of people by the Milice, ‘they loved their work, those boys. I mean, they were worse than the Gestapo, worse than the SS’, and, having watched them torture an old man, a baker from Saint Paul, he told Vianne he could not stay: ‘We were different people. I had my beliefs. She had hers. We said goodbye’ (Howard 2006, 148). Once again, Howard takes a caricature and gradually shapes a character as a man, in love with Nazi ideology and aesthetics, who sees something of the light in the torture of a fellow human being and can no longer support the regime. What makes the critique interesting, though, is that

The School and College Years  55 he is willing to acknowledge the thrill and the power of the Nazi sweep through Europe. Their fusion of aesthetics and politics, what Paul de Man (someone also attracted to this fusion in his early years in Belgium) has termed ‘aesthetic ideology’, was very popular at the time, winning many admirers, who later recoiled from the horror of how this ideology acted in real human terms (De Man and Warminski 1996). Fehily embodies this contradiction, and he is further complicated by the fact that his recoil has not dampened his attraction to many of the aspects of Nazi ideology that first attracted him. How such a character can retain any fondness on the part of the reader is interesting, but, as ever, Howard gradually builds up layer upon layer of complexity until notions of black-and-white judgement become blurred. So after hearing all of this, as we, in our turn, recoil from the thought that this man should be in any way in charge of the education of the young, we find that he has written a letter to Charles (whom he also taught) about his grandson Ronan, whom Charles has been unwilling to acknowledge; he speaks of Ronan’s ‘charisma’ and how he is ‘funny and a joy to be around’, but also of a sadness in his heart, and he makes the telling point that his non-relationship with Ronan is hurting Ronan and in time will hurt Charles ‘and I know it will upset you to hear that because you’re a good man’ (Howard 2006, 260). As ever with Howard, the fluency and humanity of his writing will gradually humanise Fehily throughout the series and make him, like so many others, take that step from caricature to character. Here, even as he is dying, he seeks to do some good for the people he loves, and this is something that remains with the reader. So from the outset, his pep talks to the senior team are a mixture of Nazi reminiscence, utter classism and touches of the Bible, which he seems to have altered to fit his theme: this chaotic juxtaposition of discourses is carnivalesque, to use a Bakhtinian term, and, hence, impossible to take seriously, thereby diminishing the impact of the ideology contained therein. For Bakhtin, enormously creative, and therefore genre-shaping, power was possessed by ‘ambivalent carnivalistic laughter’. This laughter could grasp and comprehend a ‘phenomenon in the process of change and transition, it could fix in a phenomenon both poles of its evolution in their uninterrupted and creative renewing changeability’; such laughter does not permit a single one of these aspects of change to be absolutised or to congeal in one-sided seriousness (Bakhtin 1984, 164). Thus, Fehily notes that the Sermon on the Mount would probably have said more about the Leinster Senior Schools Cup had ‘Our Lord had a little more time’, maybe ‘leaving out the bit about the meek inheriting the Earth if he was under some class of time constraint. For verily, I say unto thee that schools rugby is truly blesséd. Tend it, guard it and nourish it, for it is written’ [italics original] (Howard 2000, 46). He is able to ironically hope that these boys

56  The School and College Years will take with them the ‘moral principles and Christian lessons’ when they go out into the world to ‘to work for investment banks that destroy the Third World, or management consultancies that close down factories and throw poor people onto the dole’ (Howard 2000, 46). While again, the hyperbole is humorous, the humour becomes more Juvenalian when we realise that the barons of the Celtic Tiger would have been largely people who were educated in some Catholic or Protestant private school and went on to bankrupt a country and cause untold damage to Ireland’s future. Fehily’s over-the-top comments look less over-the-top when placed in that context. The sense of entitlement that was seen through all of the reports on the banking crisis can again be traced back to ideological perspectives that were first learned in schools such as this, and, for Fehily, as for Charles and Ross, rugby is a weaponised form of class warfare, where schools can inculcate this sense of their pupils as some form on Übermensch as they defeat other schools. He makes this very clear in an early pep talk against Gonzaga College, telling his students that: ‘you are the very best of your species. The élite. You are better than everyone else in the whole world’, and while hyperbolic and satirical, anyone listening to the phone conversations from the Anglo-Irish Bank, and the sense of entitlement that oozes through all of the reports, can see the results of this kind of ideological indoctrination where privilege is foregrounded, and, for Fehily and the success of the school’s rugby team, ‘is an expression of your superiority over people from other schools’ (Howard 2000, 46). If the boys are being told they are far superior to other private schools, then the distance they are taught to feel from children in public schools can only be imagined. With a father figure such as this, someone he genuinely admires, it is no accident that Ross has an inbuilt sense of superiority and arrogance. And it is no accident that he will linguistically and ideologically emulate his patriarchal exemplars Fehily and Charles. Howard is offering a metanoia here in terms of making connections, through humour, between the type of education offered to upper- and upper-middle-class boys and girls, largely by religious orders, and the type of society in which we live, where homelessness is rife. For Louis Althusser, society achieves its aims of perpetuating the subjective identities, which it desires, through ideology. In Althusserian terms, society interpellates the next generation in its own image through sociocultural and linguistic signifiers. and success comes when individuals voluntarily set out to become what society wishes them to be. The process of interpellation begins with ‘hailing’, a calling to participate in a form of ideology: ‘the existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as subjects are one and the same thing’ (Althusser 1971, 175). Ideology recruits individuals to become what their society, or societal class, wants them to be to perpetuate patterns of power. Ideology is

The School and College Years  57 such that when it hails a person ‘Hey, you there!’ (Althusser 1971, 174), it has already created the qualities that comprise that person. In Fehily’s speeches, he knows that the boys in front of him already subscribe to his ideology as he has been teaching it to them in school for six years. A successful hailing occurs if the individual ‘recognises that the hail was really addressed to him, and that it was really him who was hailed’ (Althusser 1971, 174). This recognition, for example, may be the acceptance of a particular social practice or label, such as an advocate of Christian religious ideology terming himself a Christian, or someone seeing themselves as upper-middle-class. If a hailing is successful, an individual becomes a ‘subject’ of a particular ideology. Thus, when Ross sees himself as like Charles and Father Fehily and not like the people living in ‘Knackeragua’ (Howard 2001, 26), such a successful hailing has taken place; when Ross sees himself as part of an elite, then such a successful hailing has taken place. He has been interpellated into his parents’ view of working-class people as almost less than human, as Charles notes about the lottery winners who move in next to him: ‘the pigeon loft, the Nissan Bluebird …. What’s next? Horses wandering around the streets here?’ (Howard 2003, 137); while Fionnuala postulates what the house will look like: ‘Oh, I can just picture it, Charles. The horror. Net curtains. Brass flower pots in the windows. Clothes drying on radiators …’ (Howard 2003, 138–139). Ross will internalise these attitudes, as he speaks of the new neighbour as having ‘Slip-on shoes and a football manager jacket. The windfall’s obviously done fock-all for the goy’s dress sense’, and on being addressed by that neighbour, responds by saying ‘“I’m sorry, I don’t speak working class,” ripping the piss out of him’ (Howard 2003, 189). Language is an important aspect of ideology and social class structures; Lacan notes that the ‘moment at which desire is humanised is also that at which the child is born into language’ (Lacan 2006, 262), and it is through language that we can see how Ross follows his two father figures. We have already noted the way he sees working-class people in a manner similar to that of Charles, and it will quickly become clear that he also follows Father Fehily’s views in terms of rugby and its value. Before the final of the Senior Cup, Fehily tells the students that ‘books, education, learning, these things have their place in the life of young men, of course. But not in yours. Because you are an élite’ (Howard 2000, 159), and he goes on to spell out how interpellated privilege will shape their lives as money, social and symbolic capital will flow to them through their parents and inheritance: Many of you will go on to play rugby for clubs and form new alliances. A good number of you will meet a fellow at your new club who will get you a highly paid, yet unfulfilling, job that requires you to

58  The School and College Years wear a suit – perhaps in a bank or some other such financial institution – where you’ll open envelopes for fifty or sixty thousand pounds a year. Others will discover that the inability to spell the word lager is no hindrance to getting a job as a rep for a major brewing company if they happen to sponsor your team. Some of you will go on to manage your father’s business. (Howard 2000, 160) He goes on to spell out the sense of ‘brotherhood, and of ‘fraternity’ that ideologically bonds the members of such schools together, that sense of an élite whose actions are largely immune from responsibility, as wherever they find themselves ‘in the world’, and ‘irrespective of what trouble’ they are in, all they need to do ‘is make a call’ and they ‘shall have succour … because you are Rock and Rock isn’t merely the name of a school. It’s an institution. A way of life. And it is underpinned by rugby’ (Howard 2000, 160). Ross is very affected by this ‘I’m basically bawling here, roysh’ (Howard 2000, 160) as are all the students – all of this is textbook ideological interpellation, and it goes some way to explain the attitudes of those involved in the Celtic Tiger crash and its aftermath. To the mixture of rhetoric and a bowdlerised version of the Bible will be added Nazi overtones, as, at the end of the speech, Howard has Fehily veer into rhetoric where the sentences about victory and the fight are taken verbatim from a speech made by Adolf Hitler in Munich on 16 September 1930, two days after victories in the election of 14 September 1930, as the following extracts show: It is not for seats in Parliament that we fight. But we win seats in Parliament in order that one day we may be able to liberate the German people. Do not write on your banners the word ‘Victory’: today that word shall be uttered for the last time. Strike through the word ‘Victory’ and write once more in its place the word which suits us better – the word ‘Fight’. (Howard 2000, 161) IT IS NOT FOR SEATS IN PARLIAMENT THAT WE FIGHT, BUT WE WIN SEATS IN PARLIAMENT IN ORDER THAT ONE DAY WE MAY BE ABLE TO LIBERATE THE GERMAN PEOPLE [capitals original].... Do not write on your banners the word ‘Victory’: today that word shall be uttered for the last time. Strike through the word ‘Victory’ and write once more in its place the word which suits us better – the word ‘Fight’. (Hitler 2021, 31)

The School and College Years  59 All that has been changed is the capitalisation and some of the ellipses. The tonal, modal, historical and philosophical aporias that conflate in this speech say a lot about Howard’s hyperbolic technique. A pastoral figure who cites Hitler and blithely misquotes the Bible to suit his purposes would seem to be a figure of fun and he is, but here is also someone who can move a bunch of students to tears and thence is someone capable of transmitting an ideology to them in a very direct manner. The almost farcical fusion of biblical, educational, classist and Nazi ideology is a classic of Menippean satire, where ‘the unfettered and fantastic plots and situations all serve one goal-to put to the test and to expose ideas and ideologues. These are experimental and provocative plots’ (Bakhtin 1981, 26). Both Fehily and Charles share a view that victory is worth all effort and also worth defying and denying all rules and regulations. Castlerock, whose school song has the lines ‘Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Rock. / Castlerock above all others, / Castlerock above all others’ (Howard 2000, 47), must win and win they do, as Ross and his friends on the team are asked to repeat Sixth year just for that reason. They are each to be paid ‘five hundred pounds a week’, with no requirement ‘to sit exams or even to attend classes’ (in Ross’s case ‘some of the teachers have asked that you don’t’) (Howard 2000, 193), and, just to be sure, Ross and the team are given steroids: ‘fifty milligrams stirred into a glass of water five times a day’ (Howard 2000, 207). What we see here is that the ideology of the school is such that winning is all and rules are for breaking. Howard is critiquing the win-at-all-costs outlook that sees young men, especially in the world of rugby, overtraining, eating all sorts of supplements and taking various legal, quasi-legal and blatantly illegal performance-enhancing substances. With these two paternal influences, it is little wonder that Ross sees the end as justifying the means. We will see that Charles has flouted planning regulations to get estates built: ‘Conalswood is the infamous dormitory suburb on Dublin’s westernmost outskirts, built by Charles and Hennessy with the aid of bribes to politicians’ (Howard 2009b, 65); that he is jailed for tax fraud, and, in the later books, he becomes a Trump-like political demagogue, in league with Russia, while Father Fehily will do anything to win, including paying students to play in an amateur game and offering them drugs to increase performance. In his own speech before the final, Ross makes it clear that he has been very much interpellated into this particular bourgeois ideology as his words echo those of his mentor: This is the biggest day of our lives, goys. We’ve been through a whole lot of shit together but we’ll probably never be all here together like this again. When we leave Castlerock, most of us will go on to fivegrand-a-term private colleges, where we’ll be given qualifications

60  The School and College Years without having to sit exams. We’ll all get jobs through people we share a shower with at the rugby clubs we play for. We’ll keep on scoring the birds’, and that gets a roar and I’m like, ‘until we reach our midthirties. Then we’ll marry the youngest and prettiest of them and continue to sleep with all of her friends. We all have big futures to look forward to, because we are the élite. But today is the last time we will ever have to work hord for anything in our entire lives. So let’s make it count this time. Let’s do it for Fehily. Let’s do it for Castlerock. But most of all … let’s do it for us’. (Howard 2000, 232) It is speech that shows that even Ross, not the ‘sharpest tool in the box’ (Howard 2005, 161) on his own admission, has internalised the message of his two father figures, and when he accepts the cup, his winning exclamation is emblematic: ‘FOR FEHILY! FOR ROCK! FOR GOD!’ which he admits probably ‘sounds a bit wanky’, but it was ‘the first thing that came into [his] head and the crowd didn’t seem to mind, they went totally ballistic’ (Howard 2000, 236). Like so many armies in war, his cry that God is with them echoes feelings of specialness and of being an élite, and it is a popular and populist message. Howard is critiquing that essentially neo-liberal cult of pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps (bootstraps that are generally heavily subsidised by family wealth, privilege and social and cultural capital), and it is amusing to see this in action, especially the complete lack of any sense that rules or laws have been broken: the rules do not apply to ‘people like us’ (Howard 2009b, 169). However, such a sense of entitlement is not always funny, especially when looking at people not like ‘us’. In 2003, a Limerick man, Liam Keane, a member of the Keane-Collopy crime gang, walked free after a number of witnesses refused to testify against him in a murder trial due to intimidation. Bribes had been offered and threats made to an eyewitness who had signed a statement saying that he had seen Keane stab the victim, but this was then withdrawn, as ‘prosecution witnesses developed collective amnesia’. As he left the court, ‘Liam Keane offered two fingers to the waiting cameras – and, it has been suggested, to the justice system’ (O’Connor 2003). This is one example of the outrage that this act caused: there was a sense that the crime gangs were subverting all of the forces of the state, and that this gesture was both a literal and a metaphorical two-fingered gesture to society as a whole. Keane, in 2009, was sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of a firearm, and he had also served some time for road traffic offences. His behaviour was criminal; he seemed to benefit from further criminal behaviour in causing a witness to commit perjury (the witness was convicted of perjury in 2007 and received a one-year sentence). The public outrage was intense at

The School and College Years  61 the initial mistrial, and there were numerous media accounts of the trial, the perjury, the ongoing feud in Limerick and, finally, the sense that justice was done. In The Force of Law, Derrida stresses the aporetic relationship between the law and justice, using the Kantian dictum of ‘no law without force’ to syncretise these positions (Derrida 2002, 233). Clearly, the sense that law is used by a dominant social class to ensure that its hegemonic position is engraved in statute is what is at stake here, and Derrida is not averse to discussing the Realpolitik of such legal discourses. He analyses Pascal’s rhetorical conflation of justice and strength: ‘Justice, force – It is right that what is just should be followed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be followed’, and goes on to cite the rest of the text: ‘it is necessary then to combine justice and force; and for this end make what is just strong, or what is strong just’ (Derrida 2002, 238). Derrida points to the aporia that most laws must have been created through an act of violence (another example of the force of law), whereby control and power were won. There was a parallel media interest in another murder trial one year earlier in Dublin. In August 2000, a young Dublin man, Brian Murphy, was out with friends in Club Anabel, a wellknown club in Dublin City. That same night, a group of former students of Blackrock College were also in the club. As the disco ended and people made their way out of the nightclub, a fight broke out; Murphy was involved and subsequently was killed through a series of kicks and blows on the head. Four young men, Dermot Laide (22), Andrew Frame (22), Sean Mackey (23) and Desmond Ryan (22) from wealthy, affluent families were under investigation for the death of this young man. The trial went on for seven weeks in the Circuit Criminal Court. The four men were all charged with manslaughter and violent disorder, and each pleaded not guilty to both charges. On the direction of the judge, Michael White, Frame was acquitted; Ryan successfully appealed his nine-month sentence for violent disorder and the sentence was quashed; Laide appealed his four-year sentence, and he finally served 19n months while Mackey served 18 months. Another aspect of this story, seldom commented on, is that over three hundred people were in the vicinity of Club Annabel that night, but the evidence given has been fractured and contradictory, and it is highly possible that the person or persons who delivered the fatal kicks has or have actually not been charged. Interestingly, in contrast with the previous example, no contempt of court or perjury case was brought against any of these witnesses. And within two years of Brian Murphy’s death, there was no one serving a sentence for this crime. Looking at this in the context of the previous case, one can almost hear the outrage as a lawless district gives the metaphorical finger to the forces

62  The School and College Years of law and justice, and one imagines a lot of the force of law would be brought to bear; this was not the case in the Brian Murphy trial – the people involved in this were ‘our sort of people’, and, as Howard writes about their ongoing and increasingly egregious dealings with the law and with financial and planning regulations in his jovially Horatian and Menippean manner, that Juvenalian sense of outrage is still there for those who have eyes to see it. Indeed, fiction has possibly reacted more strongly to this crime than any other medium, with Kevin Power’s fine book Bad Day in Blackrock (Power 2008a) and Lenny Abrahamson’s interesting film of the book entitled What Richard Did (Abrahamson 2012). It is ideology that is on trial here, and throughout the series, Howard offers us a bifurcated vision where the characters see themselves as moral and upright and bastions of society, whereas as we the reader, through the varying satirical lenses created by the author, see something different inter-dit: we laugh at them and sometimes with them as Howard has the true comic gift of making his characters in some way likeable and of creating meaning through the carnivalesque laughter. He also causes us to think metanoetically about ideological, political and cultural issues. However, even from the outset, Ross is able to deflate our dislike through narrative context. Directly after his quoted internal monologue about how unperturbed he is about the Garda’s presence, he analeptically sets out to us that he was not always this cool or confident, and this level of undercutting will be an ongoing trope in the series. Just as we really dislike him because of something he has said or done, he deflates our dislike with a glimpse of self-knowledge or some comment that will retain some of our sympathy. So here, he tells us that in his early years in Castlerock College, he was seen as coming from a poor (relatively speaking of course) area of Dublin, Sallynoggin, and he was being bullied all the time by having his head pushed ‘down the toilet’ by other boys due to a very narrow form of snobbery. Up until his fourth year at school, Ross seems to have been bullied because of this, and he recalls how two fifth years grabbed him in a headlock and taunted him about ‘getting a spice burger in the Noggin Grill’, when his best friend Christian Ford, a complete Star Wars obsessive appears: ‘To get at him, goys, you’re going to have to come through me first’, and I look up and it’s, like, Christian. So all hell breaks loose and the two of us end up decking the two fifth years and afterwards he tells me that Obi Wan has taught me well and I tell him he’s the best friend I’ve ever had, which he is, roysh, even if it sounds a bit gay. Of course the word went around, roysh, that we’d basically decked two goys who, it turned out, were on the S, and nobody laid a finger on me after that. (Howard 2000, 11)

The School and College Years  63 This is a good technique by Howard as we now see Ross initially as a bullied boy who is from the wrong side of the tracks (relatively speaking) and who is made suffer for it: there is a Horatian notion of redemption here in embryonic form, but it is a trope that will prevail through the series. It places him in the footsteps of so many heroes and heroines of school stories where bullying takes place, and it arouses sympathy for him. It is not quite straightforward as Sallynoggin and Glenageary are both very affluent areas of Dublin, although they are not in the league of the South County Dublin homes of most of the students of Castlerock College. It is through rugby that he achieves the social capital in his later years in school that makes him into this unpleasant and arrogant person. Rugby in Leinster is more than just a game. It is a marker of social class and a marker of connection and power that is very hard to expunge. Being on the senior cup team, as we have seen, turns the expected discourses of school life upside down. These players are like gods of creation in their schools and often can do no wrong. Being a rugby player is a get-out-of-jail card for everything – as Ross demonstrates when being asked a question by Ms Cully in Irish about the Nobel Peace Prize in 1998, ‘“Tá me on the S,” which I have to say, roysh, I’m pretty pleased with. Everyone cracks their holes laughing’ (Howard 2000, 64). There are numerous references in all of the books, but especially the earlier ones, about how stupid and/or uninterested in education Ross is. For instance, he is unsure whether Ms Cully’s question is in ‘French or Irish or what’ (Howard 2000, 64), while he also tells us that The Irish Times had, like, six paragraphs on the Skerries game, which described his ‘kicking as unerring – whether that’s good or bad is anyone’s guess’ (Howard 2000, 90). Narrative irony is probably the defining stylistic element in this series. We the reader are told things by Ross, but we can see that Ross, even as he tells us, is actually missing out on a lot of what is happening. Like Chaucer’s narrator in The Canterbury Tales, there is a lot going on of which he is not aware, and part of the fun of the books is that we are. So when he and Oisinn are making out false identity cards for students in UCD who want to travel to America for the summer, and he tells us that they would print an Irish phrase ‘Póg mo thóin’ on the fake driving licenses, and he goes on to explain that ‘Póg mo thóin is actually Irish for All Cops Are Bastards, which basically completely rips the piss out of them without them actually knowing’ (Howard 2001, 178). Of course, the irony here is that the phrase means ‘kiss my bottom’ so that as Ross is supposedly mocking the American police, he is actually being mocked by Oisinn in his turn. There is little doubt that he is the dimmest of all of his group’s friends with Fionn being seen as the most intelligent and, hence, reviled by Ross as the ‘specky focker’ (Howard 2003, 33), or as a ‘nerdy-looking sap’

64  The School and College Years (Howard 2003, 46). Fionn is not above pointing out Ross’s lack of intellectual depth at many points in the series, but especially in the early books. Despite his mockery of Fionn, Ross is intimidated a little by his intellectual prowess, as he is ‘doing Orts – we’re talking psychology and Arabic and we’re basically talking brains to burn here’ (Howard 2001, 24), and Fionn, despite his nerdy appearance, is popular with girls. Ross has an interesting habit of only looking at girls who remind him of famous singers, actors or models. Initially, any woman to whom Ross is attracted has to be equated with a television, film or musical personality who is widely seen as attractive and desirable. Indeed, even if he is speaking about a girl, he immediately equates her with some beautiful actor or singer, and this is rife throughout the series but especially in the first three books: ‘looks like Anna Friel this bird, I’m telling you’ (Howard 2000, 21); ‘She looks like Kelly off 90210’ (Howard 2000, 24); ‘She looks like Liv Tyler’ (Howard 2000, 134); ‘Looks like Elize Dushku, or so you said’ (Howard 2001, 95); ‘You wouldn’t know her. Looks like Holly Valance’ (Howard 2001, 133); ‘She looks like Sofia Vergara except with even bigger bazookas, if you can imagine that’ (Howard 2001, 205); ‘the bird behind the counter, roysh, mid-twenties maybe, looks a bit like that Kimberly Davies who used to be in “Neighbours”’ (Howard 2003, 45); ‘I made the mistake of telling him that Rosa looks like Shakira’ (Howard 2003, 111). In this world, girls and women are codified and commodified in terms of appearance, and many of the girls involved are obsessed with appearance, especially weight. In the early books, the amount of discussion about the number of points that particular foods rate in a diet is huge. The notion of food points was developed by Weight Watchers as a way of measuring one’s calorific intake and attempting to eat healthily. The system factors in calories, fat and fibre to determine a point value for each food. However, as Howard notes, among young South Dublin girls, as is the case with so many others, the whole notion of points has become an end in itself, leading to obsessions and neuroses about weight: Sorcha orders the New York toffee cheesecake with ice cream and cream. ‘Aoife goes, “OH MY GOD! Do you KNOW how many points are in that? Have you, like, TOTALLY lost your mind?” and Sorcha goes, “I’m not counting my points anymore,” but before it arrives the guilt gets to her, roysh, and she takes one mouthful, then pushes the rest across the table to me. (Howard 2000, 25–26) Here the notion of making sure that one is conventionally attractive has become almost a fetish for these young women: Sorcha, Emer and Sophie

The School and College Years  65 seem to be obsessed with how much they weigh and how much they eat, and Howard mercilessly repeats this throughout the earlier books, which follow these young women through their late teens and early twenties. The word ‘guilt’ is telling in this case, as patriarchal ideology has now internalised a sense of guilt in not looking as thin and attractive as one can, and Ross, who is definitely not the shrewdest social observer, has also internalised how she feels guilty and grazes on her leavings. In this sense, the girls are embodiments of Luce Irigaray’s notion that ‘woman is never anything but the locus of a more or less competitive exchange between two men, including the competition for the possession of mother earth’ (Irigaray 1985, 30–31). The monotonic conversation about food and its effect on their bodies is ongoing in these books, as even the most banal act of eating a muffin is fraught with angst: ‘Emer’s there, “Oh my God, that reminds me, how many points is a muffin?” and Sophie’s like, “Five-and-a-half.”’ (Howard 2001, 80–81). Later in the series, we see that Emer is still obsessing as she moves onto the topic of sweets: ‘“And what about, like, sweets?” Emer goes. “One Quality Street is, like, one-and-a-half. You could eat, like, twenty of those without realising.” And Aoife’s like, “Well you certainly could,” and Emer gives her this filthy, roysh, and Erika breaks it up, going, “If I’d wanted to listen to bulimics and anorexics bitch-fighting, I’d have stayed home and watched “Ally McBeal”’ (Howard 2003, 192). Erika here seems to be the voice of reason, but this is because, in the competitive ranking of the women in these books, Erika remains the most beautiful, the most desirable and the one who is least willing to try to please the men in her life. She is introduced as one of the long-term objects of Ross’s affection: ‘We’re talking Erika who’s the image of Denise Richards Erika. We’re talking Erika as in total bitch Erika who never sleeps with anyone who’s never been on “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”’ (Howard 2000, 30–31). Ross tries to have sex with her many times, but she generally just ignores him, and her put-downs are a strong feature of the early books, as exemplified by the following exchange, as Ross texts her to ask her out: ‘Wud u lik 2go4 a drnk?’, and her response is ‘I’d rather be boiled alive in my own spit’ (Howard 2000, 110). Howard is one of the earlier users of phone texting in his books, and in the early mobile phones, with real buttons and tiny screens, mostly made by Nokia, this kind of textual shorthand became the norm, and his characters use it all the time. It is a further example of how his work is very much in touch with actual contemporary modes of communication, which we seldom saw in literary fiction until far more recently, notable in the work of Kevin Power, Sally Rooney and Naoise Dolan. So Erika, being a queen bee so to speak of the group, does not need to compete for male attention: she has it as

66  The School and College Years of right and so can laugh at Emer, Sophie and Aoife as they count their points and compete. In the opening pages of The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf, who has since achieved some notoriety having been banned from Twitter as an antivaxxer, comments on how, ‘inside the majority of the West’s controlled, attractive, successful working women, there is a secret “underlife” poisoning our freedom; infused with notions of beauty, it is a dark vein of self-hatred, physical obsessions, terror of aging, and dread of lost control’ (Wolf 1991, 10). What is interesting in the context of this chapter is that she sees one of the effects of this as an almost fetishisation of dieting and ‘fashionable thinness’, which has an extremely negative effect on women’s self-esteem and health (Wolf 1991, 196), and she goes on to suggest that, at ‘a certain point inside the cult of “beauty”, dieting becomes anorexia or compulsive eating or bulimia’ (Wolf 1991, 127). Wolf goes on to show that, despite women’s seemingly free motivation of images of beauty, as evidenced by the multibillion-euro cosmetic industry, in actuality this pursuit is dictated by patriarchal interests and by male desire and the male gaze, and it is ultimately very harmful to women’s health and to notions of female agency. So while the points and the comments made by the girls may seem harmless, cultural theory would suggest that these comments are really symptoms of something more underlying in terms of gender politics and difference. In these books, the girls seem to be a lot smarter than the boys, and they also have a stronger work ethic as they discuss the arcane aspects of biology for their leaving certificate examinations, and they all take extra classes to improve their grades. But even so, issues of appearance and attractiveness remain at the centre of Howard’s satire as he has grasped that even people in this rarefied social class, with so many advantages and privileges, are still enculturated through gender stereotypes and expectations: it is not enough to be smart; one must also be attractive: Chloë says that – OH! MY! GOD! – she has been eating SO many sweets since she storted work on her special study topic for honours History and Sophie says – OH! MY! GOD! – she’s become addicted to Smorties and Skittles and is getting SUCH a study orse it’s not funny. (Howard 2000, 37) Instead of feeling a sense of achievement through her hard work, Chloë is worried about how her figure has suffered through all of the sedentary study being done. In this instance, Howard is offering quite a sophisticated critique of feminist theory. Irigaray, writing in 1985, makes the point that in traditional patriarchal societies, women are ‘products’ that

The School and College Years  67 are ‘used and exchanged by men’ and are used as ‘products which are exchanged by men and are therefore deprived of agency. According to her thinking, ‘women have to remain an “infrastructure” unrecognised as such by our society and our culture. Use, consumption, and circulation of their sexualised bodies underwrite the organization and the reproduction of the social order, in which they have never taken part as “subjects”’ (Irigaray 1985, 84). Of course, this was written nearly 40 years ago, and times have changed as have societal structures. None of the young women in this book would see themselves as commodities or as pieces of a silent infrastructure, and yet, seemingly by choice, here they are starving themselves so that they can appeal to the male gaze. Howard is pointing to the ironies of people in a very privileged social class still being part of a patriarchal structure, albeit a patriarchal structure that has changed with the times, and one that exercises its gender control in far more subtle but equally destructive ways. While debating about points and whether one’s ‘orse’ is too big may seem trivial, one of the most interesting aspects of Howard’s style is that, despite this being a very comic universe – a Horatian or Menippean world where the satire is gentle, at times – a sharper, darker tone is injected into the narrative flow. We discover that the notion of fatness is very much one that can be used to hurt women in this world, so when Ross has an issue with Aoife, he tells her she is a ‘fat bitch’, and he tellingly goes on to explain that he says this ‘not because she is, roysh – she’d need to walk around in the shower to get wet – but because I know it’s what’ll really hurt her, roysh’ (Howard 2000, 138). He is all too aware that being fat is the ultimate way to hurt a woman’s self-esteem in this world. Later when he is with an unnamed drunk girl in a nightclub, she starts ‘bawling her eyes out and asking me if I think she’s fat’ (Howard 2001, 34), showing how this is an ongoing issue in the lives of young women. Body-image issues seem rife in the book, and a darker turn is taken in the case of Sophie, who, along with Aoife, has always been more conscious than the others of body issues. Her friends are speculating that she is having a ‘liposculpture operation’ because she felt conscious ‘about still having a fat chin and fat thighs no matter how much weight she lost’ (Howard 2003, 178). Interestingly, Sophie’s attempts at bodily improvement become the talk of the group, with suggestions going from a tummy tuck to a breast enhancement procedure: ‘Definitely boobs. God knows she could do with them’ (Howard 2003, 178–179). It turns out though that there is something much more serious afoot, and Howard does not shy away from looking at the serious health issues involved in what might be seen as attempting to keep up with the image culture that is rife in society. Sophie has an ‘illness that’s called Distorted Body Image Syndrome’, which is a ‘psychological disturbance that manifests in different ways, sometimes

68  The School and College Years it’s an aversion to food, other times it’s just hating the way you look’, and as Sophie poignantly says in a letter to Ross: I’ve hated the way I looked since I was about fourteen. I thought my chin was too fat and my thighs as well. I hated the lines around my eyes and I hated my nose. I thought I knew the answer and I asked Mum and Dad to get me aug. for my 21st. I spent a week in hospital. And do you know what I discovered? When I took off the bandages and looked in the mirror, I still hated the way I looked. I still hated myself. (Howard 2003, 199) This is poignant and confessional and quite dark, and early in the series, Howard shows that, while ultimately his world is comedic, he will not shy away from the darker aspects of life. Howard is confronting issues that often remain silent in strands of Irish society here as he looks at the effects on a frail young woman of a culture of physical beauty and the demand for women to be as perfect as they can be to attract the attention of men. Ross’s equating of all girls with desirable personalities or actresses denudes individuals of agency and of individuality: it is as if he would prefer to have sex with Denise Richards, but Erika, her lookalike, will have to do, so even Erika, who is very well regarded by him, is at best a poor substitute. It is this harsh light of comparison that has caused Sophie’s illness, and it will later have deleterious effects on Aoife. The theorist Laura Mulvey has made some very cogent observations on the way that women in contemporary culture are created and, in many ways, shaped by what she terms the male gaze. For Mulvey, ‘women are constantly confronted with their own image in one form or another’, but what they see is shaped very much by male desire and by the male gaze, as opposed to their own ‘unconscious fantasies, their own hidden fears and desires. They are being turned all the time into objects of display, to be looked at and gazed at and stared at by men’. She goes on to spell out the idea that women are not seen as subjects but rather as objects, a point underscored by the following passage, where Ross recalls teachers telling girls to stay away from him: ‘He might be very good-looking, have an unbelievable bod, be an incredible rugby player, have loads of chorm, blah blah blah – but basically you’ll end up getting hurt. That’s as sure as your dad’s going to buy you a cor for your eighteenth’. Did the warnings work? They did not. I did so much damage out there the Red Cross had to set up a focking shelter to deal with the brokenhorted. (Howard 2007b, 268)

The School and College Years  69 Here, women are just ‘women are simply the scenery onto which men project their narcissistic fantasies’ (Mulvey 2009, 13). To be successful in Ross’s eyes, and it is exclusively through his eyes that we see the world in which he lives, women must be beautiful, and then he will break their hearts. Both in terms of having their hearts broken and of being bought a car, the agency of these young women is not seen as important by this very male gaze. It is interesting, in his Guide to South Dublin, that as Ross describes three girls’ schools in the Kiliney-Dalkey area (all private and fee-paying), he gives us their nicknames as well: ‘we’re talking Holy Child Killiney (Collars Up, Knickers Down), we’re talking Loreto Dalkey (Virgins on the Rocks or Whores on the Shore, depending on how lucky you get) and St Joseph of Cluny (the Rich Teas)’ (Howard 2007b, 268). All of these nicknames refer to the girls as almost objects to be enjoyed or consumed in terms of sexual availability (the exception being the Rich Teas – slang for ‘plain’ looking girls) (Howard 2007b, 360), so Irigaray’s notions of women as commodities, while changed, is still relevant as Ross sees all of these as places where he and his friends can achieve a form of sexual satisfaction. The commodification of women and using them as indices of their own virility is encapsulated in Ross’s game of petty pilfering, where after each sexual conquest, a CD was stolen from the girl’s bedroom: ‘I’ve got nearly a whole shelf of them at this stage’ (Howard 2003, 38–39). This is the ultimate image of women as units of exchange in the books, as their value can now be tabulated by the number of stolen CDs on the shelf. There is very little character growth in the books, though, by the end of the third book, the reader has begun to form a relationship with Ross as the main character. He is a total snob, living in the insulated bubble of Dublin 4 and still very much the butt of the jokes of his friends. As they drive ‘to the northside or wherever the fock Tallaght is’ to retrieve a mobile phone, Ross is horrified by what he sees as the horrible conditions of what he assumes to be the northside of Dublin: ‘Oh my God, what the fock is this place? Where have you brought us, man?’ and Ryle’s like, ‘Calm down, Babycakes. Take it, like, easy’, and I’m there, ‘Are you telling me people actually live like this? Oh the poverty, the squalor. It’s focking inhuman’, and Ryle goes, ‘Ross, this is Terenure. We haven’t got there yet’. (Howard 2003, 22) Terenure is quite a leafy suburb of Dublin – but of course, it is not Dublin 4. These three books have introduced the character and his friends, and they have set out the satirical context of the books: it is a carnivalesque world where we will watch them laugh, love, fail and rise again. The satire

70  The School and College Years is underlying a rich vein of comedy as Howard is one of the very few writers who can make a reader laugh out loud. In the next three books, we see him ‘mature’ (though in Ross’s case, if ever a word deserved scare quotes, this would be it) as he grows older. He will still be in confessional mode, and we will still see him through that bifurcated vision that sees what he says and means, but also a lot more.

4

Married in the Celtic Tiger

PS, I Scored the Bridesmaids (2004) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress (2005) Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade (2006)

PS, I Scored the Bridesmaids describes his marriage to Sorcha (his recurring love interest), while The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress deals with Ross’s discovery that he has a son called Ronan, living on the north side of the city. Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade tells of the birth of his second child, Honor, and Ross’s business investment in a night club called Lillie’s Bordello. In these books, it becomes clear that Ross will actually grow as a character and will not, like the William or Billy Bunter series, feature a schoolboy or College boy who will remain frozen in time. In a way, it is a brave decision for the writer, as people had become very comfortable with the character of the Dublin 4 wild child and asking him to grow up might have put pressure on the readership, who might not have been looking for such a change. The chapter titles of each book locate the books in their cultural context through references to largely popular culture. So we find titles such as ‘The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Tosser’; ‘The Unbearable Plumpness of Being’; ‘Unputdownable’ and ‘Consider the Lillies’ and ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E’. In PS I Scored the Bridesmaids, the titles are thematic, as all refer to parts of the wedding ceremony, something that will recur throughout the series: ‘To Have and to Hold’; ‘For Richer or Poorer’; and ‘All the Days of Our Lives’. Writing the introduction to the 2014 reissue of the book, an older Ross, now 34, looks back on his 24-year-old self somewhat wistfully. He recalls with some nostalgia the previous ten years, feeling ‘like an archaeologist, digging my way through the mountain of shite that the seven years of the recession dumped on top of us and finding golden memories of our Celtic Tiger past’ (Howard 2004, 9). With that pithy sense of narrative description that has become his trademark, Ross recalls looking at a period of Irish life, ‘the early noughties’ (the period from 2,000 to 2,009) when DOI: 10.4324/9781003124993-5

72  Married in the Celtic Tiger optimism seemed rife, that ‘we were giddy innocents, drunk on cheap credit and expensive cocktails’, and: America was about to invade either Iran or Iraq – I can never remember which. Bertie Ahern was planning to build a stadium in a part of Dublin where children learn to count in eighths and the baby seat in a supermarket trolley is for riding shotgun to the local off-licence. (Howard 2004, 10) Ross’s quite bland summary of the period is interesting for a number of reasons – the ‘optimism’ of which he speaks was definitely a factor, and one often overlooked by commentators who speak of the Celtic Tiger in funereal tones as the calm before the storm: Ross, correctly, and more accurately in my view, sees it in its historical context, and the word ‘giddy’ is accurate, as Irish people seemed a little bemused at seeing themselves compared to the Tiger economies of the Far East, but then they began to enjoy the experience. His inability to understand, or even spell, many global issues remains strong and of little relevance to his sense of selfhood, and his class-based contempt for all of those living outside of South Dublin remains a core trope of his class ideology. It is in these books that Sorcha will develop significantly as a character, as she moves from being an almost flat South Dublin princess to a more rounded character, a process that will continue steadily throughout the series. Their wedding and marriage, which will be the main subject of these three books, have not significantly changed Ross, though in the close of his retrospective comments in 2014, he seems to think that this is not the case: But I can look back and say there’s at least one thing I own that didn’t lose its value during the recession – and that’s my marriage to Sorcha. I often take a quiet moment out to reflect on the promises we exchanged on our wedding day, and as the years go by, I can honestly say that I cheat on her less and less. (Howard 2004, 10) In The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress, Ross and his friends buy Lillie’s Bordello Nightclub, for ‘four million bills’, as they are all Trustifarians (their parents have created large trust funds for them), and so they can all easily ‘lay their hands on a couple of hundred Ks tomorrow’ (Howard 2005, 271). Later in the book, as Ross is watching the door, Bono looks to come into the club. The bouncer tells Ross that ‘he says he’s the lead singer with U2, Mr O’Carroll-Kelly’, and Ross gives the memorable response: ‘Tell him I’ve never heard of them. Then tell him to fock off’ (Howard 2005, 291). Here we have the Celtic Tiger in

Married in the Celtic Tiger  73 all its brashness and its materiality. Ross embodies that attitude that we can have it all, and this was rife during the Celtic Tiger. Interestingly, there is a plaque erected in Lillie’s Bordello that reads: ‘Ross O’CarrollKelly broke the hearts of more than 1500 women between 2001–2006’ (Gorman 2015, 27). Howard is ever alert to such foibles and folies de grandeur, and part of his satirical structure in the books is the certainty that after hubris comes nemesis. However, he is one of the very few writers to capture the fondness for a newfound prosperity and the sense of joy and almost weightlessness that it brought. Ross telling Bono to ‘fock off’ stands in synecdoche for Ireland telling the developed world to do much the same thing. In the Introduction to From Prosperity to Austerity, a book on the Celtic Tiger, co-edited with Eamon Maher, we cited the following possibly apocryphal story. An Irishman walks up to a concierge in a top London hotel: ‘Who owns this place?’ he asks the doorman in the top hat. ‘Don’t know, Paddy’, is the reply. ‘Well, you do now’, says the Irishman and turns on his heel and walks jauntily away from his investment. (Maher and O’Brien 2015, 4) I think the key word here is ‘jauntily’ as there was a jauntiness, paralleling Ross’s giddiness, about Ireland during this time that has since been repressed, but which Howard expresses repeatedly in his writings about the period. Howard expresses the joie de vivre of so many aspects of that time, especially the materialism and the attempts to sate desire through commodity fetishism. One thinks of the car sales, the apartments, the foreign property, the Christmas shopping trips to New York, the Jacuzzis in the garden. It was a time when Ireland was seen as the Wild West in economic terms, and for a postcolonial country that had always been the poor relation in European terms, this was indeed a heady period, when people made new rules and the country seemed almost weightless in terms of being bound by existing regulations and laws. It was also a time when Irish people became more globalised. Hence, it is a misnomer to see the books as just satirising Dublin 4 and Dublin 24; instead, they satirise a global Ireland. The denizens of Dublin 4 are just as at home in Los Angeles as in the Vico Road. The sense of the Celtic Tiger cubs as a privileged élite is very well caught as one of Ross’s friends, JP, drives around the poorer areas of Dublin shouting ‘Affluence’ (Howard 2001, 132). JP is wealthy because he got a job working with his father’s estate agency, the wonderfully named Hook, Lyon and Sinker Estate Agents, and his academic achievements are laconically described in terms of his ‘doing an MDB – Managing Daddy’s Business’ (Howard 2003, 75).

74  Married in the Celtic Tiger Like all satirical writers, Howard’s work makes us laugh and then makes us think. Humour and comedy have received considerably less attention from academic criticism than tragedy, but some serious thinkers have looked at the underlying philosophy of humour. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for example, in his Lectures on Aesthetics, noted that what is often at the core of humour ‘is a personality or subject who makes his own actions contradictory and so brings them to nothing, while remaining tranquil and self-assured in the process’ (Hegel 1975, 1220). It is the clash between the ordered personality, and the chaos brought about by this personality, that Hegel sees as humorous. Similarly, Sigmund Freud sees jokes as working through their linking together of ‘ideas or scenarios that we normally keep separate or apart from each other’, resulting in laughter as a discharge caused by this excess of psychic energy (Freud 1960, 228). In Howard’s case, such humour is parodic but also quite linguistically creative; he is especially fond of unusual metaphors, as will be clear from these examples from his earlier books. He calls a girl he knows ‘sappier than an entire Irish debating team’ (Howard 2004, 30), and he describes another one as being ‘as happy as a Tallafornian on Mickey Thursday’ (Howard 2004, 31), while another is ‘as happy as a northsider with ten wombs’ (Howard 2004, 43), and, as we will see, for Freud such humour allows for the expression in a socially sanctioned way of ideas and prejudices that have been repressed, so here class insults can be voiced freely as they are humorous. Hence, when he is speaking of someone running away, he is able to again voice the view that working-class people are inherently lazy: ‘suddenly he’s pegged it, roysh, like a northsider from a job centre’ (Howard 2006, 17), with the humour masking deep-seated classism. In terms of the consumerism of the Celtic Tiger, the following synecdoche provides a sense of the mood of the time: Thick and all as she is, roysh, Fearne is loaded. She asks me to pull into the Shell in Stillorgan, roysh, because she needs water for her wipers. She comes back out, roysh, with a bottle of Vittel, and as I’m watching her pour it into the little bottle where the window washer fluid goes, I’m thinking, that is definitely the most Celtic Tiger thing I’ve ever seen. (Howard 2006, 198) Rather than the consumer price index or spending figures or tax take, this example, fictional though it is, captures something of the essence of the Celtic Tiger in a very evocative manner. By laughing at issues of class and racial prejudice, as well as topics like corruption, hypocrisy, political chicanery, money laundering and snobbery, Howard brings them out in the open and allows us to see ourselves awry in his satirical, cracked-looking

Married in the Celtic Tiger  75 glass: the carnival of voices makes us stop and think. The release of psychic energy, to cite Freud, is often an escape valve and, in this case, it allows release of the anger and frustration that can accrue from watching personal and banking debt being socialised at the stroke of a pen. As we have seen, Ross worked in an estate agency – Hook, Lyon and Sinker – during the height of Celtic Tiger, which was founded by his friend JP Conroy’s father, and he learned estate-agent-speak as a way to sell property: Innovative use of space – pokey as fock. High specification fit-out kitchen – cooker and fridge. Tranquil waterfront setting – overlooking the Dargle. Parkland setting – grass verge nearby (for now). Dublin 24 –Tallafornia. (Howard 2003, 36) In his father’s eulogy, in Schmidt Happens, JP expounds on how his father went to court in 2007 to establish the right of estate agents when quoting the measurements of a property to include the width of the bricks and the cavity wall space in their calculations, and while the court case failed, it landed Conroy a place in the Sunday Business Post’s 20 moments that defined the Celtic Tiger era – ‘along with Seán FitzPatrick calling on the Government to tackle the sacred cows of children’s allowance, old age pensions and medical cords for the over seventies, and Gerald Kean dressed as Louis XIV’ (Howard 2019, 117). Here, he is pointing to the fact that people consumed conspicuously, and that it was a time when those who had experienced an Ireland of the 1970s and the 1980s, and the assorted economic restrictions and constrictions of those decades, were now able to consume and enjoy the fruits of capitalism. For all its faults and iniquities, there is a reason why capitalism is perhaps the most enduring economic theory in the developed and developing world: it is the one that gives full rein to desire, which Freud and Lacan would both see as one of the most constitutive drives of the human being. There is a fetishistic joy in consumption, and the Celtic Tiger allowed Irish people to experience that joy. Howard’s work gives voice to this, and, historically and culturally, it is important that all aspects of the period be remembered if we are not to fall into the Freudian repetition compulsion and repeat the cycle again. It offers a record of the period that, post-austerity, we have repressed but which is necessarily true. As Ross puts it in Nama Mia, ‘they were just the times – everything seemed possible’ (Howard 2011, 99). In the Celtic Tiger period, working hard became something of a trope, as the ‘work hard; play hard’ mantra was one that swept Ireland. Even the most woke (avant la lettre) character in the series, Sorcha, parks her social conscience and becomes a manager for Charles in his company, and, as

76  Married in the Celtic Tiger is always the case with Sorcha, she takes the process to extremes: ‘Sorcha Lalor, Human Resources’ (Howard 2004, 53), and decides that one of the employees, Niall Nolan, ‘he’s a goy who takes €25,000 a year from the company for doing nothing’, and has had 48 sick days (Howard 2004, 53), needs to be sacked. She is exerting all her energy on this, and Ross is horrified, telling her that this new persona is not what she really is. In a comment that will presage her ongoing growth as a character in the series, Sorcha shows a surprising sense of self-awareness, noting that all Ross sees in her is a ‘South Dublin princess in a pink shirt with the collar up’, whereas now, she is doing something she is good at: I’m like, ‘What about Shut Sellafield? And the World Wildlife Fund? That dolphin you were telling me about?’ She goes, ‘The North Island Hector’s Dolphin? Huh! If they’re dumb enough to swim into dragnets, then they don’t deserve to live. It’s called natural selection, Ross. A bit like this Niall Nolan ... it’s going to be hard to prove he doesn’t have emphysema. Unless we can get pictures of him running a marathon or something’. (Howard 2004, 54) This is part of the strength of the series as characters who seemed to be one-dimensional and shallow gradually develop depth. Up to this, Sorcha could be seen as a flat character, well caught by Alan Clarke’s illustration on the cover of We Need to Talk About Ross, where she is sitting literally at Ross’s feet, in her school uniform, as he poses heroically in his Castlerock Rugby gear, holding a rugby ball and staring messianically into the middle distance. She is holding onto his knees and looking demurely at the ground, clearly thrilled to be the woman behind, or in this case below, the man. The above retort demonstrates that there is more to her as a character than that, and it is part of Howard’s technique to make the reader like and empathise with a number of characters, however flawed they may be. So while, as the introduction to this chapter noted, Ross feels that he cheats less on her as the years go by, which seems to make her a victim, in this book she begins to assert herself: there is a negotiation between who she was and who she can become. So when Ross asks her if she has sacked anyone lately, she responds with the jargon so loved by HR and big companies and parodied beautifully here: ‘We’re realigning the workforce to make it better suited to a more competitive morket environment, Ross. Rationalisation is necessary to guarantee efficiency’, and when Ross (wittily in his own view) responds ‘I liked you more when you were nice’, Sorcha is well able to put him in his place: ‘and she looks me up and down and goes, “No you didn’t, Ross. And we both know it”’ (Howard 2004, 58), in a Horatian reversal.

Married in the Celtic Tiger  77 Because of the mock-biography genre, there would be a greater expectation of truth in this book, and this is why it is used to describe the end of the Celtic Tiger through the fictive voices of Ross’s extended family and friends. Hence, there is the anecdote of a ‘man who pulled on a pair of jeans he hadn’t worn more than a year and discovered six hundred euro, neatly folded, in the front pocket’ (Howard 2009b, ix). In another of the books, when it is revealed that there is ‘a hundred grand missing’ from Ross and Sorcha’s current account, it is Ross who says ‘I, er … well, I bought a couple of apartments. In Bulgaria’ (Howard 2007b, 219). This aspect of the Celtic Tiger property fetishism, where foreign property was almost a social necessity, is disarmingly captured in this scene, as Ross had not told Sorcha about this purchase. Material consumption is rife in the books, for example, when Sorcha is pregnant in Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade, she experiences cravings, and one would expect these to be biological as a desire for unusual food combinations is often a factor of pregnancy. However, in this case, the cravings have been transposed into more materialistic ones: Being up the Damien gives birds all sorts of cravings. In the last week alone Sorcha’s had cravings for a pair of Dolce & Gabbana knee-high boots, a pair of Christian Dior black, rimless shield glasses, an Emilion Pucci faux mink scorf, the new Marian Keyes, an Olympus MJU mini digital camera in pink, a Bodum deluxe cappuccino frother and a tub of Crème de la Mer, as in, like, the large one. (Howard 2006) All of the clothes worn by people have designer labels and the cars are detailed throughout; he begins with a Volkswagen Golf GTI, ‘we’re talking black, with alloys’ (Howard 2005, 13), and even this seems not to be enough as he will go on to get a more valuable and prestigious car: a BMW Z4 (Howard 2006). Fionnuala, who begins writing chick-lit books in Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade, books that will eventually be so true to life as to get Charles arrested for fraud and corruption, itemises all of the commodities that are taken from her fictional avatar, Valerie Amburn-James, in a way that is almost sensual: ‘their home in the well-to-do area of Foxrock, their apartments in Stillorgan, Ticknock … to say nothing of their cars – her Volvo XV90 and his BMW 5 Series, Lexus ES, Audi A6 Avant and, his pride and joy, the 1952 Bentley R-type Continental’ (Howard 2006, 42). For the group under discussion, things have value as not only bringers of comfort and ease, but also as bringers of status and as signifiers of difference between them and the lesser beings near whom they live, and the series is quite merciless about these signifiers of status. In such a world,

78  Married in the Celtic Tiger communism and Marxism are very much to be feared, and, indeed, it is linguistically no accident that in the rhyming slang that is part of the idiolect of South Dublin the connections with communism are both negative (in Ross’s eyes at least), as the connoting faeces and menstruation: the ‘Leons: noun diarrhoea: Leon Trotsky, the trots’ (Howard 2007a, 347), while women being in bad humour due to period discomfort are seen as having ‘fallen to the communists’ (Howard 2004). However, Marxist theory underlines a lot of the satirical thrust of the books, and even the ultra-capitalist Charles is willing to acknowledge Marxist wisdom about recessions, ‘It isn’t so much that hard times are coming; the change observed is mostly soft times going!’, before attempting to attribute the quote ‘Marx said that. Karl or Groucho, I can never remember, though I can check it for you’ (Howard 2010, 64), in a manner that gently critiques the politics of the left in Ireland, where many are Marxist in allusion and rhetoric but not in practice. For Marx, the commodity form is ‘the value-form of the commodity’, the commodity considered not as a physical entity but as a value ‘whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very simple and slight in content’ (Marx 1990, 90), and he goes on to compare this to notions of religion and the magical powers that can be attributed to a relic or a place or a specific item, a process that he terms ‘commodity fetishism’ (Marx 1990, 165). For Marx, it is in the exchange of commodities and the ascription of value to them that society as a whole gradually unfolds as it is through such relationships between consumers that connections are made, and social stratifications are created and enforced. Use-value is very much second to exchange-value when a market is saturated. So when Tina, Ronan’s mother, realises that Sorcha is pregnant, she offers her pram ‘“I’ve Ronan’s pram saved. I’ll give it ye. I’ll let ye have it for half what I paid for it”’, and Ross imagines ‘a big focking rusty contraption, like something out of Angela’s Ashes, a focking bathtub with four wheels and a handle’ (Howard 2006, 37). Interestingly, he also knows that Sorcha has an ideal pram in mind: ‘and at the same time she’s thinking about the Bébé Confort Windoo Infant Carrier with air re-circulation system that she’s had her hort set on since she saw them in Mothercare’ (Howard 2006, 37). Here the use-value of the item – something in which to place a baby so it can be moved around – is subsumed by the exchangevalue of the item, namely the cachet that attaches to a high-brand pram, or ‘infant carrier’ when it is seen by other parents who look at such things and not, obviously the baby itself, which remains oblivious. The fetish character of which Marx speaks is clear here, as it attaches to ‘the products of labour as soon as they are produced as commodities’ (Marx 1990, 165), and, in many ways, this relationship is both reflective of, and is also constitutive of, social class divisions.

Married in the Celtic Tiger  79 As well as associating the infant carrier with middle-class commodity fetishism, Howard adds moralistic class ideology to the satirical mix. In a ham-fisted attempt to stop Sorcha from having to accept this gift, he says that Tina should probably keep the pram ‘You know, in case you end up, you know ... again’, with the ellipses suggesting that Tina will probably be pregnant again soon, implying that she is sexually promiscuous: ‘I’m saying, you know, think about where Tina’s from. Lot of pregnancies out that direction – some of them for the money, some of them for other reasons’ (Howard 2006, 37). This immediately recalls the already cited comments by Sean Fitzpatrick about single mothers getting too much money from the state, and it is clearly a strong undercurrent of ideological opinion in middle-class Ireland; however, it is an opinion that is generally felt but not voiced, which is well caught by Howard as after his comment, ‘Sorcha, the focking backstabber, actually makes me apologise to Tina’ (Howard 2006, 37). The pram stands in synecdoche for the mores of two social classes: Dublin 4 and Dublin 24, and one is in many ways defined by not being the other. Howard has grasped that both classes need each other, and there is a strong Freudian dimension at work here in sociological terms, as Ronan Masters, Ross’s son with Tina, is very working class, and there is great humour derived from the interaction between him and Ross’s middle-class family. However, there is also a mutually defining process going on, as each is defined by the relationship to the other, a point that echoes Marx, who speaks of ‘the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products, and, through their mediation, between the producers’ (Marx 1990, 165). Unlike Freud’s famous comment that, at times, a cigar is just a cigar (Dufresne 2006, 112), here a pram (or infant carrier) can be very much more than a pram. Commodity fetishism is rife throughout the series, as the brands worn by characters are always foregrounded ‘I throw on my beige Dockers, my light-blue Ralph and my Dubes’ (Howard 2005, 13), which offers an homage to the work of Brett Easton Ellis in American Psycho, but it is deeper than that. We have seen Sorcha’s pregnancy cravings, where biological desire cravings are replaced by materialistic ones, but such overt fetishism was also a trope in her wedding: ‘Paris for the dress, Milan for the underwear’, and her desire to be the cause of jealousy in her friends: ‘Can you ACTUALLY picture Erika’s face when she finds out I’m, like, going to New York to buy my dress?’ (Howard 2004, 121). Indeed, the wedding itself becomes a commodity, a visual commodity for Sorcha where this spectacle will outshine all others and make her desired and envied. This aspect of fetishism in capitalism, the desire to be envied for one’s ownership of a commodity, is central to Howard’s work as almost all of the characters set out to gain even more wealth than they already have and make

80  Married in the Celtic Tiger themselves successful. The wedding dress has a use-value, ‘a property that satisfies some human need’, in that it is an expected mode of attire, but it is its exchange-value ‘a quantitative measure of the value of a commodity in relation to other’ (Osborne 2005, 12) that is attractive to Sorcha. It is the possession of exchange-value that makes a product a commodity: ‘to be produced as a commodity is to be produced for exchange. Commodity production is production for exchange’ (Osborne 2005, 13). The wedding is set out to be a festival of commodity fetishism, and the characters are unaware of how silly and entitled they look. It is this double perspective that underlines the whole satirical programme of the series. For example, Sorcha’s gift list features ‘one David Campbell soup tureen in elm. One Louis Vuitton clutch bag in cherry blossom satin. One Louis Vuitton business bag in monogram glacé leather’ while Ross asks if they should put in items that are useful, such as ‘a kettle? Pots and pans? A PlayStation?’ (Howard 2004, 185). When Ross is the one making sense, it is clear that there is something awry. For Sorcha, it is not the handbag as such, but the branded and beautiful, and perhaps more importantly, enviable handbag that is at issue. She has been captated by the consumer process of ‘advertising, design and display – a whole apparatus of “commodity aesthetics”’ (Osborne 2005, 12). Such fetishism moves away from the material item itself, and Howard deftly delineates this in terms of the photography and the music at the wedding. Sorcha talks to the photographer about mimicking a photograph of Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston (the Hollywood dream couple of that period): ‘I want my Brad and Jen. And you two better not fock it up’ (Howard 2004, 177). What Sorcha wants is not the photograph, the material entity that will look good on her mantlepiece; instead, she wants to infuse the glamour, passion and love (all true in 2004) of the Pitt/Aniston relationship into that which she shares with Ross. This has nothing to do with ‘any of its sensible, perceptible, material features. Metaphysically speaking, exchange-value is thus ideal’ (Osborne 2005, 14). And for Sorcha, Brad and Jen symbolise her ideal: she wants what they have in terms of both glamour and love, but also to be the envy of her own particular social set, and in this she is enacting the Marxian tenet that ‘not an atom of matter enters into the objectivity of commodities as values … their objectivity as values is purely social’ (Marx 1990, 138), and reinforcing the idea that notions of value are not ‘branded on its forehead’ but rather transform ‘every product of labour into a social hieroglyphic’ (Marx 1990, 167). Throughout the series, it is this notion of a social value, a transcendental value that accrues to objects, that distinguishes Ross’s social class and indeed his own aspirations. Oddly enough, he is least concerned with material goods because he can just go to his father anytime he needs money. Charles is the gift that keeps on giving, even though their relationship is

Married in the Celtic Tiger  81 at best dysfunctional at this stage of the books. Ross sees Charles as a source of money and insults him at every opportunity. On the night of his 21st birthday, Charles brings Ross out into the carpark of the Berkeley Court hotel, and he cannot believe that the gift is ‘the BMW Z4 here, as in the one that Pierce Brosnan tore the shit out of in Goldeneye’ (Howard 2005, 219). Ross tries very hard to say thank you but has been so indulged by Charles over the years, and he is so habituated in his passive-aggressive relationship with him, that he is unable to get the words out: ‘I’m like, “Tha … Tha … Tha …. Than … Than … Than … YOU’RE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST FOCKING TOOL”’ (Howard 2005, 220). Charles is able to find a commodity exchange that will leave his son, who is incapable of displaying either verbal or physical affection to his father, almost speechless. That the car is the same as the one driven by James Bond places it, in terms of commodity fetishism, in a parallel role to Sorcha’s idolised photo of Brad and Jen: both commodities allow a fetishisation that injects the owner into the fantasy: so just as Sorcha sees herself and Ross as a Dublin 4 Brad and Jen, so Ross sees himself as a Dublin 4 James Bond, complete with a range of accessible, beautiful women and a lavish lifestyle. Howard is setting them both up here, but he is also pointing out a fictional truth, namely that to young people in this Celtic Tiger era, these Celtic Tiger cubs, to use the term, heroes are global and not confined to Irish people. Their materialism is to the fore in their lives and notions of history and religion that dogged so much of the previous Irish cultural space are eloquent silences in their worldview. It could be said that they dived into the globalised commodified world of the Celtic Tiger and the ‘giddiness’ of which Ross speaks was very much a part of this. He reminds us of a cocktail that was available at the time in the ‘Mint Bor in the Westin on, like, Westmoreland Street’, which was a vanilla chocolate martini, made from ‘vanilla-infused vodka, 200-year-old cognac and actual flakes of, like, 23-carat gold’ that was ‘served in a glass of designer crystal, with chocolate truffles on the side’. Just to add to the conspicuous consumption on display here, it was called ‘Minted (a slang term for being really rich) and cost €500 each’ (Howard 2007a, 91). The attempt to make the commodity special is key here, and Giorgio Agamben, speaking of the Great Exhibition in Paris in 1889, shows how this process has a long history, noting that the Eiffel Tower, ‘by offering a reference point visible every-where’, transformed the whole city into a ‘commodity that could be consumed at a single glance’ (Agamben 1993, 40). Here Agamben has a more nuanced view of the duality of the commodity than Marx; Marx felt that use-value was the most significant aspect of a commodity, and that exchange-value was somehow a deviant quality, which allowed for the abuse of the labourer. While many would agree that capitalism does abuse labour, and that it is inherently unjust

82  Married in the Celtic Tiger as a socioeconomic system, and one has only to cite the socialisation of private debt in the Irish banking and financial crisis to prove this point, nevertheless, Marx displays only a partial analysis of the semiotic value of a commodity in his analysis. As Agamben notes, while Marx alluded to the ‘fetishistic character’, the ‘metaphysical subtleties’ and ‘theological witticisms, of the commodity (Agamben 1993, 42), he seemed to be suggesting that this came after the idea of use-value (just as his own critique came 12 years after his initial one), but this belatedness is more to be found in Marx than in the semiotics of the commodity. I would argue that from the beginning of time, that metaphysical or magical qualities were an important factor in the creation of any commodity. Derrida has made the telling point that the two are, in fact, conjoined; he speaks of the place where ‘the values of value (between use-value and exchange-value), secret, mystique, enigma, fetish, and the ideological form a chain in Marx’s text’, and he goes on to analyse ‘the spectral movement of this chain’ (Derrida 1994, 148). He sees use-value and exchangevalue as being not clearly separated from, but ‘haunted’ by culture, and by each other. Derrida takes this as a classic example, which has very general application, and reasserts his plea for ‘hauntology’ rather than the usually carefully separated and compartmentalised ‘ontology’. Exchangevalue haunts use-value, for example, by expressing repetition, exchangeability and the loss of singularity (Derrida 1994, 161). Use-value haunts exchange-value because exchange is possible only if the commodity might be useful for others. In this sense, use-value and exchange-value are temporally connected: we buy a product to fill a future need – as I purchase a Minted cocktail, it is with a view to drinking it after its being bought, and, as such, we purchase products in terms of satisfying a future desire, a desire Derrida suggests is predicated on a better, more sated us in the future. Of course, it is also due to a desire to be part of a club effect, to display my cultural capital and my symbolic capital. So I am not just drinking a liquid that is poured out in three seconds and plonked onto the bar counter; instead, I am participating in a ritual with its own special glass, its own bespoke ingredients, its own special almost sacramental reparation time and its own special crystal chalice. In a way, it is a commodified secularization of the consecration of the Catholic mass, where bread and wine are turned into the body and blood of Christ in front of a sharing community; here, these expensive ingredients are turned into a desired but very rare cocktail that stands, in synecdoche, for Celtic Tiger materialism, and, as I order it and pay the exorbitant price, I am participating in the conspicuous consumption that is central to the period. It is less about consumption per se and more about symbolic consumption, as I am communing with the aura of the Celtic Tiger, and this aura is what is so well captured by Howard.

Married in the Celtic Tiger  83 The term ‘aura’ was first used in this sense by Walter Benjamin, when he spoke of how a religious or magical context is often what gives the work of art its aura, and by this, he means that ‘the earliest art works originated in the service of a ritual-first the magical, then the religious kind’, and he goes on to add that the ‘existence of the work of art with reference to its aura is never entirely separated from its ritual function’ (Benjamin 1968, 223–224). Benjamin has spoken at length of how mechanised reproductive techniques have meant that this aura is gradually lost, but Agamben has made the interesting observation that this aura does not just apply to works of art but to any commodity once the criterion of use-value has been satisfied. This means that the distinction, the borderline ‘that artists from the Renaissance forward had indefatigably worked to establish, by basing the supremacy of artistic creation on the “making” of the artisan and the labourer became extremely tenuous’ (Agamben 1993, 42). Agamben noted that the decay of the traditional idea of the aura in the work of art just meant the ‘reconstitution of a new “aura” through which the object … became charged with a new value, perfectly analogous to the exchangevalue, whose object is doubled by the commodity’ (Agamben 1993, 44). The value of drinking a Minted cocktail is that it allows you to consume the essence of the Celtic Tiger, and the upper-middle-class aura is passed on to you. Of course, all such auratic processes are subject to deconstruction, and, in Ross’s case, at the height of his very commodity-fetishistic wedding, his connections with the working-class Tina are revealed in a moment of high-camp drama, as Sorcha’s desire to have a day that no one will forget is realised, but not as she would like it. It is revealed that Ross has a child with a woman called Tina Masters, dating back to a period when he was in fourth year in Castlerock. He took part in a programme called ‘The Urban Plunge’ (and the connotations of diving into the depths are telling here), which Ross describes as ‘an exchange programme we did with this skobie school out in the middle of Pram Springs’, as a way for them to see how ‘the fallen in society live’, as Brother Augustus put it (Howard 2004, 267). Ross swapped with Anto ‘the youngest person I’d ever seen with a moustache’, who he describes as ‘a focking one-man crime epidemic. Went through Brighton Road like a dose of liver salts’ (Howard 2004, 267). Ross had sex with Anto’s older sister, Tina, ‘let’s just say I chanced my orm one night and all her dreams came true and I ended up being a ledge when I got back to school’ (Howard 2004, 267). It seems like just another of Ross’s many conquests where he has casual sex with a woman and then leaves. However, in this case, there were consequences. Tina became pregnant and Ross’s parents got Hennessy to send a letter to Tina, ‘warning her away’ (Howard 2006, 246). Ross is horrified but looks to be as strong an influence on Ronan as he can, and Sorcha is very much by his side in

84  Married in the Celtic Tiger this. It is another example of the gradual growth of the characters as he assumes a parental role that makes him a more rounded character, despite what might be termed an idiosyncratic view of parenthood, and Sorcha shows layers of depth that are belied by her often quite shallow discourse and opinions. Ronan himself is something of an infant terrible in the series, having a maturity far beyond his years in the early books. He sees himself as a gangster and something of a charmer, and he is even able to win over Erika, who has spent a long time threatening to ruin Ross’s wedding, and he takes great joy in making cutting comments to Sorcha in the wake of the reveal: ‘Hi, Sorcha. Hi, Ross. Look at love’s young dream. All back together and everything. No more secret children out there, I hope?’ (Howard 2005, 184). On first meeting her, Ronan addresses the scowling Erika with the following greeting: ‘But, see, if you smiled, you’d probably bring the roof of this hotel down’ (Howard 2005, 216), and smile she does. As is often the case in a comedic world, social and familial issues that can be traumatic and sources of real conflict become the stuff of fun, so the class interaction between Sorcha and Tina is rife for satirical exploitation. It is another area where Howard is especially on point, as social class is often not seen as a significant factor in Irish writing, though new studies in working-class literature are happily addressing this gap. Sorcha, as ever, is keen to do the right thing, but, like Ross, she is an irony-free zone. She admits she knows ‘hordly anything about these types of people’, except that they are ‘different’ and wonders ‘what do they eat?’ Ross’s stock response is ‘anything as long as it’s got focking curry sauce on it’ and Sorcha goes on to muse that she ‘can have a chat with Claire. She’s from Bray. I suppose that’s an underprivileged area. She could give me some tips’ (Howard 2005, 170). It is the sense of the working class as almost subhuman and completely other that is interesting here, especially as Sorcha is not looking to demonise or be hateful towards them: Howard is pointing to the genuine lack of interaction between these two classes: between Dublin 4 and Dublin 24. However, the narrative dialectic in the series complicates matters. Generally, we hear and see the world from Ross’s perspective, so his view that working-class people eat anything as long as it has curry sauce becomes, to a degree, our view. Except Howard always leaves an ironic gap through which the reader is offered a counterview that undercuts the story that Ross is giving us. So when they go to church for Ronan’s communion, the comments are quite denigratory about the fashion and the style of both parents and children there: One of the first things I notice, roysh, is that all the little girls look like they’re from focking Loompaland, they’re, like, tangerine, which – as anyone who’s spent time hanging around the Orts block in UCD knows – is a sure sign that they’ve been on the sunbeds. Sorcha, whose

Married in the Celtic Tiger  85 tan came out of a tube this morning, turns around to me and goes, ‘OH! MY! GOD! They’re only children, Ross. (Howard 2005, 172) Here the class prejudice is clear, but it is at the same time deconstructed. Sorcha looks down on children getting false tan from sunbeds, but the comparison is made with the predominantly middle-class girls in the ‘Orts block’ in UCD who sport the same shade, and Sorcha herself sports a false tan from a bottle. Howard does not judge, but he leaves these gaps in perspective wherein the reader can come to his or her own conclusions. The suggestion is that these groups are less different than they might at first appear. This is despite the binary opposition that appears throughout the series, especially in Charles’s political career, where both he and Fionnuala propound really fundamentalist, almost segregationist, views of separating ‘us from ‘them’. Fionnuala wants Ringsend designated as ‘Dublin 4E’, while Charles is standing for the Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council. Both hold doctrinaire views on what Fionnuala calls ‘the fallen’ and she goes on to say that ‘many of them won’t work. They claim multiple social welfare benefits under various … aliases, I believe they’re called by the criminal classes’ (Howard 2005, 202), while Charles laments the tendency of the poor to look for bailouts: ‘we didn’t have any home insurance because we spent all our money on stone-cladding and these fearful Lucky Streak lottery tickets, quote-unquote’ (Howard 2005, 202). These are opinions that would be beyond the pale for most readers, and when we remember that they kept Ross’s son from him as well, and threatened Tina if she contacted Ross, then the picture becomes darker. However, good comedic writing, like a Shakespearian comedy, does not leave anyone outside of the holistic dance at the end of the play, and the same is true here. In We Need to Talk About Ross, we discover from Tina that both Charles and Fionnuala disavowed Hennessey’s letter, and they paid a certain amount every month (‘I won’t tell you how much it was, but it was a lot more than I would have ever asked for’ (Howard 2009b, 205)). They also said they would pay for Ronan’s education and ‘Birthdays, Christmases, holidays – money always arrived’ (Howard 2009b, 205). The contradiction here is interesting but also very telling; most people manage to hold wildly contradictory views in their lives without finding anything odd about this, and, indeed, it makes the characters more human. Howard gradually humanises so many of the individuals in the series, and one of the aesthetic pleasures of the books is tracing this growth and development from caricature to character, and a fully rounded character at that, across a range of people.

86  Married in the Celtic Tiger This is nowhere truer than in the case of Marty in Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade, where a thief who breaks into Lillie’s Bordello is captured by Oisinn, and Fionn suggests keeping him captive so that he can use him as a subject for his master’s thesis on working-class connections between Jamaica and Northside Dublin in Trinity College. He studies the etymology of the derogatory term ‘skanger’ and traces it to ‘skanker’ which is ‘an old Jamaican term for an untrustworthy or dissolute person’ (Howard 2006, 20), and goes on to say that his masters will be ‘a comparative analysis of the Rastafarians of Kingston and the Skangers of Dublin, comparing and contrasting the cultures’ (Howard 2006, 21). The beauty of this is that it is not light years away from the titles of many theses in sociology or social studies, and the increasing engagement in academic circles with global comparisons based on often seemingly tenuous connections, and Howard, in the confident poised tones of Fionn, just leaves this there for us to read and ponder. Marty, who is seen as typical working class, is kept upstairs in Lillie’s, and a number of experiments are carried out on him. He is connected to an electroencephalograph, a ‘non-invasive means of observing human brain activity’. There are electrodes attached to his scalp and these are connected to ‘a series of galvanometers, which detect and measure electrical currents’, which are, in turn, attached to a ‘series of coloured pens, which move up and down and give us a read-out on a piece of graph paper’ (Howard 2006, 56). It is the study of the mad scientist, and the stimuli that are measured are ones grounded in class prejudice. So when he is told that Jason Sherlock has been dropped from the Dublin Gaelic Football panel, and Marty goes berserk ‘kicking and screaming and going, “Noooooo!” and calling us all the fooken wankers and doortylooken doort boords’ (Howard 2006, 57). Marty, interestingly is one of the first times we see Howard phonetically imitating the speech patterns of working-class Dublin, providing a stylistic counterpoint to the middleclass idiolect for which the books have become rightly famous. Again, the eye-dialect necessitates reading the words aloud to make sense of them. The research is really conformation bias, as his questions are loaded with prejudice. This is clear when Marty is unconscious, and they are looking to see what his name is by examining his tattoos: Oisinn’s going, ‘Mum ... IRA ... Aslan ... Ah, here we are ... He’s called Henrik Larsson’, and Fionn’s there, ‘I suspect that might be a red herring, Oisinn. Henrik Larsson, I’m inclined to believe, is a football man who once played for Glasgow Celtic, a team that shares a place alongside Bob Morley and The Wailers in the imagination of almost every Dublin skanger. He had dreadlocks as well, you know. That’s got to be more than a coincidence’. (Howard 2006, 34)

Married in the Celtic Tiger  87 It is as if Marty is a different species, and one reading would be that this is quite a sharp Juvenalian satire of research ethics and public money funding projects of dubious value. However, as is always the case with Howard, gentler Menippean and Horatian strains are also heard as Marty turns out to be not just a caricature, but something of a character as he adopts the role of quasi-guru in dealing with problems and issues. The humour and the connections between the characters, with clichés bursting out of the sentences, tend to dull us to the fact that this is kidnapping. Oddly, the only person who sees this as kidnapping is Ross, ‘I mean, this business with Marty, it’s wrong’ (Howard 2006, 90), and the whole process definitely speaks to an attitude that dehumanises people from lower-class settings. How many times have we heard people say how horrific a killing is when it is reported on the news, but the horror is rapidly attenuated when the stock phrase ‘the victim was known to the police’ is added? This is very much the same idea, as Marty is seen as someone on whom experiments can be carried out without his full permission. Marty’s humanisation proceeds during his captivity, advising Christian to send off his script to George Lucas: ‘he said it was time I stopped living in a dream world and did something about it’ (Howard 2006, 156), while he also soothes Ross’s anxieties about Sorcha’s pregnancy and his own false pregnancy symptoms ‘de brudder had dat …. See, it’s all psychological, man. Dee don’t know de reasons for it. Probly yer feelin’ sympity for yisser boord, reet, and yisser body starts to copy de symptoms’ (Howard 2006, 82). Ross eventually tries to set him free, but we discover that Fionn is getting an EU grant for this research and has promised all of the money to Marty. Again, through a neat change in perspective, our revulsion at what is essentially kidnapping is attenuated as Marty is almost volunteering to remain in captivity. It is a tactic that still allows us to retain sympathy for people doing something horrible, and, of course, it also feeds into attitudes that a lot of people have towards the working class; as Ross notes, ‘he’s still got the same rights as every one of us. Well, probably not as many as me and the goys, but I’m pretty sure the dude is entitled to his freedom’ (Howard 2006, 90). Even as he is being more moral than his friends, that inbuilt prejudice is gently lampooned in him and, I suspect, in many of his readers as well, keeping in mind the ‘known to the police’ mantra of which we spoke earlier. When Marty is finally set free, the writing style is that of an injured wild animal being set free back into the wild, in one of the ‘townships on the M50’ with the usual scenes of poverty and deprivation, all seen through the eyes of Ross: ‘I think it’s pretty fair to say that none of us can believe what we’re actually seeing’ with boarded-up houses and shops, ‘we’re talking dogs running wild. We’re talking gangs of kids hanging around, looking to make eye contact with you for an excuse to deck you. It would basically

88  Married in the Celtic Tiger come as no surprise to me to find out this place has a Lidl’ (Howard 2000, 217). At the zenith of the Celtic Tiger, discount stores such as Aldi and Lidl were seen as idiosyncratic and not for the likes of middle-class people – they were laid out in a manner that harked back to earlier Irish supermarket chains and here they signify food for people ‘not like us’. After Marty has finally left, the final comic turn is that he has robbed the ‘goys’ of a lot of items: ‘Phone, wallet, iPod ... Fock!’, but they find it endearing, ‘but I can feel, like, the corners of my mouth turning up into a smile. Suddenly the goys are all smiling too and shaking their heads, basically admiring the cheek of the focker. We’re going to miss him’ (Howard 2000, 219). The use of phonetic spelling to capture a particular idiolect has been a feature of the books and one that is highly comic; as the series progresses the number of accents that are parodied increases, and another protean feature of the series is the mimicking of different writing and narrative styles. Howard is quite a gifted stylistic mimic, and in Normal Sheeple, he will do a really funny pastiche of the repressed and minimalistic dialogue used in the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, but this trend has quite a long history in his writing, and it begins in the early books. He expands his range to include different styles of speech, notably that of working-class Dublin here. Tina’s father is voiced in a complex phonetic discourse, and, to grasp what is being said, it is often necessary to read the words aloud. This notion of different voices is central to the Menippean nature of his writing. For Bakhtin, polyphony is at the core of comedic writing, and he contrasts this multi-vocal style with the epic novel, and notes that this style was ‘formed in an epoch when national legend was already in decay’, and in an ‘epoch of intense struggle among numerous and heterogeneous religious and philosophical schools and movements’ (Bakhtin 1984, 119), in other words in a period very like our own. Bakhtin sees Menippean satire as being essentially constituted by these dialogical voices and different genres cohabiting within the same overarching work – the polyphonic novel. Thus the ‘Menippea absorbs into itself such kindred genres as the diatribe, the soliloquy, the symposium. These genres are all akin to one another in the external and internal dialogicality of their approach to human life and human thought’ [italics original] (Bakhtin 1984, 119–120). While popularly seen as just mimicking the Dublin 4 Dorshspeak, in fact different ways of speaking, and their representation in eye-dialect, abound in the Howard universe, and they are placed into mutual dialogue. Hence, Tina’s father’s diatribe about young people is given in the phonetic eye-dialect that Howard uses to such telling effect: An’ if you went home cryin’ to yisser mudder or fadder, deed say ye musta deserved it so ye must, den deyd pump six bullets into yisser head as well. But he had de respect of de comyooo-nity, knowhorramean? (Howard 2005, 67)

Married in the Celtic Tiger  89 The quasi-nostalgic hyperbole of a harder but better past is beautifully caught here, and this is as accurate a recording of the working-class Dublin accent as are the ‘royshs’ and the ‘orms’ of Dublin 4. The nostalgia for a simpler time, even a nostalgia that is full of violence and oppression, speaks in a subtle way to how populist parties with oversimplified messages promising a return to such a simplified past can become electable, as we will see later in the series. Similarly, he sets out a standard discourse of older people for comic effect, by mimicking Mrs Wells (Sorcha’s grandmother) ‘a typical old biddy’ who is always talking about the weather: ‘filthy weather, isn’t it? Always raining. And what are they doing about it, these politicians? Nothing is right. Sure they’re only after your vote’ (Howard 2006, 8). It is this polyphonic richness of voices that is part of the reason for the longevity and success of the series; these books are far more than a focus on one entitled South Dublin man: instead, they create a rich and highly diverse comedic universe, and a central part of that universe is the voice, or possibly voices, of Fionnuala O’Carroll-Kelly. Criminal Assets is a book she writes that deals with a woman, Valerie Amburn-James, whose husband, Richard, has been arrested by the Criminal Assets Bureau and who has had all of her wealth confiscated. She has a liaison with a man, Lovell Power, and there are some very ripe sex scenes in the book, scenes that cause Ross, whose relationship with Fionnuala is highly Freudian, to really become distraught. The style is overblown, with lots of tautology and a narrative voice that is very pompous and self-regarding; for example, she talks about crouching down and speaking ‘through the embrasure of the letterbox’ (Howard 2006, 92). The thinking in the books is full of cliché, in terms of both class and race: ‘Yes’, the pretty black girl said acquiescently and she smiled in a way that left Valerie feeling quite guilty. Who knew what circumstances had forced her to leave her home in Africa to come to Ireland – the poor girl had probably seen her entire family brutally butchered in front of her eyes by men with machetes – and here she was, bemoaning her lot in life. (Howard 2006, 41) Perhaps the funniest thing about this piece is that Valerie (the narrator) does not see herself as racist; in fact, she sees herself as quite enlightened, and she cannot really take in the idea that this young black girl could be Irish. The stereotypical image of Africa as a single entity, the imagery of violence and brutality, along with the almost dog whistle term ‘machete’ is revealing – but to the reader and not to Valerie, or one suspects, to Fionnuala. Similarly, the tautological nature of the narrative is immediately obvious: ‘she asked, inquisitively’; ‘the pretty black girl said

90  Married in the Celtic Tiger acquiescently’. At this stage, the narrative complexity of Criminal Assets must be acknowledged as it is a multi-frame narrative. Valerie is telling her story, which is written by Fionnuala, which is told by Ross which is written by Howard. The light tone and the focus on parody and pastiche camouflage quite a complex and multi-layered narrative structure across the range of the series. Interestingly, like the commodified characters in the primary narrative, Valerie, in this secondary one, is similarly obsessed with the material, as she feels suddenly lonely, a ‘sense of isolation’, when there is nothing in front of her on the table, and she strives to fill that loneliness by having a cappuccino and some tiramisu. Like the Minted cocktail earlier, these foods are not just for biological consumption; rather, they signify taste, discrimination and a global palate on the part of the consumer, as they classify the classifier. Given Fionnuala’s gifts as a cook, it comes as no surprise that food becomes something of a fetish in the books, as the senses are given over to tastes and smells that are very much exaggerated. One of the sex scenes is interspersed with Ross’s comments and this ironic counterpoint adds to the comedy: And their quivering bodies instinctively finding the same rhythm, fast and furious. And both of them gorging on the luscious fruits on the table, sinking their teeth into juicy quarters of Gallia melon and soft, sweet squares of papaya as he took her doggy-style. (Howard 2006, 75) Given Ross’s own sexual predilections, it seems a little rich that he would have an issue with this, but, as we can see, he has major problems with it. His own relationship with Fionnuala is highly charged, as we have seen, and in Mr S. and the Secret of Andorra’s Box and We Need to Talk About Ross, this issue is addressed more fully. As a parody of an overblown style of romanticised and eroticised writing, it works really well: Soon, the perfect breaker arrived and they rode it together, before collapsing into a sticky embrace and savoured every second of the postcoital peace. Then they went upstairs and did it again. (Howard 2006, 94) The lavishly extended metaphor of a powerful incoming wave, which is capable of breaking down all barriers, is parodic in the extreme, as the sentence performatively builds to a climax followed by an exhausted collapse, but it is the bathos of the almost declarative, monosyllabic, flat description of the final sentence that really makes the style work. Such juxtaposition

Married in the Celtic Tiger  91 of styles is very much part of the Menippean satirical genre, and Bakhtin explains the carnivalesque dialogic sense of truth, the interaction and clashing of different styles, frames and discourses, as a ‘creating and testing of ideas and persons, and he explains the new position of the author of the polyphonic novel as the position of an equal participant in a dialogic relationship with the characters and the reader’ (Zappen 2004, 53). Here the division between parergon and ergon is permeable. Just as Ross is embarrassed by his mother’s overt sexuality in these books, JP’s father is embarrassed by his son’s finding of God. JP has had a religious experience and now wants to be a priest. This is signalled in the book by another of those stylistic strains that run through the series, wherein he constantly quotes the Bible at people: ‘that those who live like this will not inherit the kingdom of God’, and just as I’m about to tell him he’s a freak he goes, ‘Galatians, 5:19’ (Howard 2005, 151). His father’s reaction is interesting as he says that if his son actually becomes a priest, ‘“I’ll never be able to hold my head up in court again. Ross, talk to him, will you? You’re the closest one to him,” and I go, “I’ll try. Not sure it’ll do any good, though”’ (Howard 2005, 158). In these two areas, Howard is marking the societal and attitudinal changes that have occurred in Irish society. Traditionally, Irish women’s sexuality was kept under firm patriarchal control; the Irish constitution specifies the role of the man in the home, and, in classic patriarchal controlling mechanisms, women were generally confined to the private realm. Catholic teachings frowned on female sexuality and the country was dotted with Magdalene laundries and homes where ‘fallen women’, that is women who became pregnant outside of marriage, were incarcerated and kept away from the rest of society. Clearly, Fionnuala’s book would not have found a warm home in that culture, so even as he mocks the style, Howard has a real point here as women can now voice sexual desires in Ireland without fear or favour. Similarly, in the Ireland of the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s and even the 1970s, to have a son be a priest or a daughter a nun was a very real form of social and symbolic capital in Irish society. Clearly, in the case of JP and his father, this has changed radically. In the materialistic world of the Celtic Tiger, there seems to be little understanding of any philosophy or worldview that is not predicated on money, so JP’s repentance at selling overpriced houses sounds hollow to his father and to Ross: ‘People who want to get rich fall into temptation and a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction’ [italics original] (Howard 2005, 159). In contrast to JP’s sudden finding of God, the series points to a very Celtic Tiger iteration of religion, as Oisinn wants to market a new type of perfume: ‘Perfumed holy water!’ (Howard 2006, 67), which he calls Scent from Heaven: ‘There’s Give Us This Day Our Balsam Wood. Take Up Thy Bergamot And Walk. Love One Another As I Have

92  Married in the Celtic Tiger Loved Yuzu …’ (Howard 2006, 67). Here is the commodity fetishistic imperative of the Celtic Tiger in its most transcendental phase: even the spiritual has now been put in a form of exchange-value relationship. The satire here, of course, is that so much that has to do with religion in Ireland has already been commodified, but not in quite so crass a manner: to be born, to be married and to be buried in Catholic ritual all costs money; every mass has a collection, and sometimes two; and the Vatican is one of the richest countries per capita in the world. In recent years, in terms of paying reparation to children and women abused by priests and nuns, the Catholic Church has been quite legalistic in terms of defending its own assets, and there are still significant amounts of reparations left unpaid. So Howard is pointing, obliquely but sharply, to the materialistic core behind much religious structuration in Ireland, and Oisinn’s flippant paronomasia in the title of his perfume bottles, and, indeed, the whole range, ‘Scent from Heaven’, can be seen as just bringing into the open a very material trend in Irish Catholicism. So the materiality and commodity fetishism of the period are well caught, and one wonders how a character like Ross, who has been so mean and using of so many people, who has, indeed, treated so many characters in the books, especially female ones, as commodities to be used and exchanged at his whim, can be possibly likeable, but again, Howard reels the reader in by offering a more positive conclusion to Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade. These three books conclude with the birth of Ross’s daughter, Honor, who will herself become a significant character in the series. Howard writes the closing scenes of Ross with his new baby beautifully, and he sets up the beginning of an ongoing comparison between Ross and Charles, something that even Ross is able to see: ‘I whisper to her, “Your mummy has to sleep now, so you’re going to have to put up with your old dad telling you how much he loves you,” and for a minute it frightens me how like Dick Features I sounded just there’ (Howard 2006, 284). Just as Charles, for all of his many faults, offers complete and unconditional love to Ross, so Ross, in turn, will be an inadequate, farcical and, sometimes, a downright bad father – but he will be a consistently loving one to all of his children: And I’m standing there, roysh, as she drifts off in my orms again and I’m looking at Sorcha, sleeping peacefully in her bed, and Ronan, snoring his exhausted little head off in a chair in the corner, and I’m there thinking, As someone who spent the first twenty-five years of his life focking things up, that here, in this tiny little ward in Mount Cormel, are just about the only three things I ever got roysh. (Howard 2006, 285)

5

States of Denial

This Champagne Mojito Is the Last Thing I Own (2007) Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box (2008) Rhino What You Did Last Summer (2009) We Need to Talk About Ross (2009)

In these books, we see a real sense of growth and development in Ross, as the transition from flat to round character, or from caricature to character, proceeds. In This Champagne Mojito Is the Last Thing I Own (Howard 2007b), Ross’s father Charles is imprisoned, Ross is forced to work for a living as the economic crash coincides with his father’s downfall and his wife Sorcha leaves him after yet another affair, this time with their nanny. In Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box (Howard 2008), Ross becomes the coach of the Andorra national rugby union team, and it is revealed that Erika is his half-sister. He also attempts psychotherapy as he tries to cope with his separation from Sorcha and Honor. Immaculata, the African orphan that Sorcha once sponsored, arrives at the door; JP leaves the seminary; while Fionnuala becomes a TV chef. In Rhino What You Did Last Summer (Howard 2009a), Ross travels to Los Angeles to win Sorcha back, and he and his family become reality television stars on Ross, His Mother, His Wife and Her Lover. He undergoes cosmetic surgery due to pressure from his agent, and Honor becomes addicted to caffeine. Fionnuala’s novels begin to earn popularity in America. Ross’s fictional birthday is 6 January 1971, so, in these books, he is in his late thirties, and it would seem to be time for him to be growing up, but he is an eternal adolescent in many ways. The titles of the chapters all locate the books quite precisely in their respective cultural Zeitgeists, channelling popular songs, films and sayings in each one: ‘On Us Thy Rich Children’; ‘You Caught me Smiling Again’; ‘The New Black’; ‘The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious’; ‘Right Back Where We Started From’; and ‘Ross, His Mother, His Wife and Her Lover’. The satirical pen is quite sharp and the cult of personality with which we are now so familiar is seen in embryo here, as is the American DOI: 10.4324/9781003124993-6

94  States of Denial obsession with the military and with war. The satire can be both scathing (Juvenalian) and comic (Horatian) at different stages, so we laugh at Trevion, a 1991 Gulf War-veteran-turned-celebrity-agent in Rhino What You Did Last Summer, and at his card ‘Trevion Warwick. Agent to the Stars … It ain’t show friends – it’s show business’ (Howard 2009a, 99). Through a paparazzi shot where he is seen in the same place as The Hills star, Lauren Conrad, Ross becomes suddenly famous, and Trevion acts as his agent (they meet after Ross has slept with Trevion’s girlfriend). Trevion peppers his conversation with rhetorical questions about his military past, and Ross’s response to these is amusing, to say the least: You ever charge a machine-gun nest with a hole in your back so big your commanding officer can put his hand in and tickle your liver?’ ‘I’d have to be honest’, I go, ‘and say no’. (Howard 2009a, 111) ‘You ever pull a Korean bayonet out of your own stomach?’ ‘No – it’s on the list, though’. ‘Laugh it up, Smart Mouth. What I’m saying is, when you look at that knife and you see, smeared all over it, the fucking shit you had for breakfast, it changes you. You never see the world through the same eyes again’. (Howard 2009a, 176) Trevion is very much the fast-talking, high-energy agent that we would expect, and he insists that Ross needs to have plastic surgery to make his career as a Z-list celebrity in the USA have any traction, enlisting the skills of his friend San Sancilio, who is from Ecuador: ‘he was a butcher, but he ain’t a butcher now. No, now he does plastic – best in the fucking business’ (Howard 2009a, 153). Trevion also falls for Fionnuala and proposes marriage to her by the end of the book. However, we also see the pathos in his relationship with a 25-yearold former high-class prostitute called Sahara, who is with him because of his money and because he has promised to make her into a film star. In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein controversy, this is prescient writing, as she is with Trevion only for his money and for the parts he can get her in films: ‘A 75-year-old man with a talent agency full of nobodies’ (Howard 2009a, 110). Ross’s comment ‘The LA focking PD, I’m thinking, I’ve seen some of their work on YouTube’ (Howard 2009a, 45), further highlights the global society in which these characters live; we have all seen the pictures. The same is true of the celebrity messages that Sorcha gets, which make her feel like she knows these people. When she sees Britney Spears getting her hair shaved off, she screams: ‘It’s the paparazzi – they’ve driven her to this’, and then I hear her going, “Leave her alone, you vultures! That’s all you are! Actual vultures!” and it’s obvious that Britney’s not the only one who’s lost it’ (Howard 2009a,

States of Denial  95 146). This trend, of identifying with celebrities, nowadays very much on social media, is one predicted here by Howard, as it was nascent in the USA before becoming the global phenomenon that it is now, and Ross and Sorcha fit right in, suggesting a globalised middle-class identity wherein national traits and characteristics seem far less important than class and technological connections and similarities. Around this time the docudrama The Hills was popular, and, in this book, Ross and his family become part of a similar television show entitled Ross, His Mother, His Wife and Her Lover …’ (Howard 2009a, 213), and with Cillian having a meltdown, Erika working through her feelings for Ross as his sister and Ross and Fionnuala constantly sparring, one can see why such a programme would be watched. As Trevion puts it: ‘they make the Manson family look like the fucking Brady Bunch’ (Howard 2009a, 215). What is especially interesting about this book is how easily and effortlessly the Dublin 4 worldview can assimilate to an American one: there is very little need for any acclimatisation, and all of the characters just fit in perfectly, especially in terms of what we would now call upper-middleclass woke consciousness. All are consuming materials in a lifestyle that is ostentatious in its commodification, but they are still very keen to identify with causes and to flag their credentials on issues of the environment, sexism and racism. Howard is happy to skewer these as he shows how Ross is demonised for giving his daughter, Honor, coffee and clearly developing a form of addiction in her. He makes headlines and attends addiction education classes, where he is vilified by all, including a man called Brett, who has been in prison and who threatens to beat Ross ‘unrecognisable with a tyre-iron’ (Howard 2009a, 139) if he ever gives his daughter coffee again. ‘Bret even apologises for earlier – the tyre iron, blahdy blahdy blah. He says he’s been pretty wound-up since the police seized his fighting dogs’ (Howard 2009a, 140). Once again, Ross manages to talk his way out of trouble, seeming to put youthful mistakes behind him as he blunders his way through more adventures in America. He is very much a Peter Pan figure who still sees himself as young and feels he should be forgiven for any errors, and this idea of an ever-young hero (even though he is 29 in this book) is interesting thematically. The thinking of Franco Moretti on the Bildungsroman has already been mentioned, and the notion of an almost eternal youth is very much at the core of this genre. Commenting on Dicken’s Great Expectations, Moretti points out that this sense of a golden future is important to the character himself more than to others, since it is Pip ‘more than anyone else entertains “great expectations” concerning his own youth’ (Moretti 1987, 184). Moretti went on to make the claim that Western society has ‘invented’ youth, ‘mirrored itself in it, chosen it as its most emblematic value’ (Moretti 1987, 27), but for a growing-up story to span this number

96  States of Denial of books, the notion of youth has to be extended and Ross, at 29, is still, in his own eyes, waiting for a lot of adult life to happen. This would be unbelievable as adult life will invariably make its mark on characters, and a character who is so blind as not to see this will lose the reader’s interest and sympathy. To avoid this, Ross gradually morphs into what Moretti, citing the French thinker Philippe Hamon, a ‘polyparadigmatic character’, which means that, as the series develops, he becomes ‘an entity defined by various, heterogeneous traits that may even contradict one another’ (Moretti 1987, 42). He goes on to explain that this means by putting such a polyparadigmatic character in the story, ‘every event becomes automatically attracted into the orbit of “personality”’, which means that at some level, the plot is mostly concerned with the multilateral development of the protagonist’ (Moretti 1987, 42). I think this is as good a way of explaining the development and growth of the series as I have seen; Ross’s development is what allows the other characters to develop and become characters in themselves. Howard’s plots are intricate and have interlocking dimensions, but it is around the characters that the books cohere, and, in these three books, that character is affected by the trials of adult life in a way that would have been unimaginable for the younger Ross. Unusually in a comedic universe, there are two deaths in these books: Fr Fehily and Aoife, whose health has always been frail, and there is a definite darkening of perspective here. In terms of plot (and, of course, character as already noted), there is a huge reveal in We Need to Talk About Ross that shows just why Fehily was such a seminal figure in Ross’s life. We hear of Aoife’s death after Ross and Ronan have gone to Bulgaria to try to extricate Ross from a property deal that he can now no longer afford. It is as they leave that Ross hears by phone that Aoife is dead. This is most unusual as, in comic universes, characters seldom die and, if they do, there is normally a reason for it or some drawn-out narrative thematic arc, but Aoife has always been one of the girls obsessed with her weight who has been part of the group and who has had a relationship with Fionn. We are given a hint that all is not well when Fionn sees her dentist who asks him if Aoife is being treated for her eating disorder as ‘the enamel on her teeth has been worn away – stomach acid’ (Howard 2007b, 284). However, it would seem unlikely that someone so young would die in what is generally a sunny universe. However, as Howard develops the series, more serious aspects do come within its ambit, and the writing about the death of this body-obsessed young woman is very well caught – no overt sentiment but a picture of a vulnerable, frail caring person who was loved by all of her friends. In a way, it is as strong a statement about the ideological evils of fashion and weight obsession that is seen across the curated world of an increasingly filtered (in every sense) social media sphere that I have read.

States of Denial  97 The funeral is written very well, with the grief and the pain of her absence, especially for Fionn, her partner, being well caught by a series of analeptic accounts of how they came to know that she had a problem. Ross can only ever remember seeing her eating popcorn and drinking water, and he recalls how Sorcha and Erika staged an intervention to try to get her to take control of her eating, and he goes on to add that it was they who called her parents and said she was going to hospital – the first of many such visits. Sorcha, as Aoife’s best friend, reads a poem by Dylan Thomas and manages to remain in control of her emotions, and interestingly and not for the last time in this book, Ross has a small moment of self-knowledge, as when she comes down from the alter, Cillian puts his arm around her and whispers in her ear as an act of comfort. Normally, Ross would be angry about this, but now he is just happy that she has someone, noting that he is glad ‘she’s got somebody who knows all the right shit to say, today and every day from now on, because fock knows I don’t. And never did’ (Howard 2007b, 310). This self-knowledge gradually allows us to see more layers in Ross as a character and, at times, to actually like him more. But this part of the book is not about him, as he muses on what he knew and did not know about Aoife: I didn’t know she played the aeolian horp. I didn’t know she loved The Beatles, or that she was learning Russian from tapes, or that she adopted a mountain gorilla who she called George. I did know she was in Amnesty and that she failed her driving test nine times and that her hero was Alanis Morissette. (Howard 2007b, 309) As is so often the case with Howard, he undercuts any chance of relapsing into sentiment by having Chloë and Amie gossiping about how she died and magnifying the symptoms, and clearly they are just there for show, so there is that mixture of the genuine and superficial in terms of mourning and loss throughout the funeral. By the end of it, Ross tells us he does not ‘have the words for this kind of scene. It’s grown-up shit. But being there – just focking being there – is the closest any of us is going to get to saying goodbye’ (Howard 2007b, 314–315); he finds it hard to face this grownup world, and he has had to do it earlier in the book as well with Fr Fehily. As was shown in Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade, Father Fehily was arrested in France for war crimes, and we learned that he had been in love with a young French woman called Vianne and that he had joined the Milice française. He is coming back to Ireland to die, and he is being visited by Ross and Ronan and his friends. Ross is in deep denial while Ronan asks why he refused chemotherapy, and the response is interesting: ‘dying is something I’m going to have to get around to eventually, don’t you

98  States of Denial think?’ (Howard 2007b, 38). Later in his hospital bed, he goes on to reminisce and add to the backstory that we already have, stating that he had been a singer as a young man, and he had auditioned in a theatre in Vienna singing ‘César Franck’s “Panis Angelicus” – the one that John McCormack did in the Park in 1932’, but the critics hated him, and he asked Vianne to go for coffee in a ‘little coffee house on Gumpendorfer Strasse’ (Howard 2007b, 104). This happened on 28 February 1938, two weeks before the Anschluss. Fehily is unrepentant about his views on Hitler: ‘Vienna was abuzz because we knew it was coming. Everyone was tired of listening to Schuschnigg – they wanted Hitler. I saw grown men weep tears of happiness the day he drove into the city’ (Howard 2007b, 104). In a long conversation with Ross, Fehily unburdens himself of feelings and memories that are very personal, and, again, we see how Howard allows him to develop from the Nazi-headmaster caricature to something more nuanced and regretful. He explains that by the age of 25, he had done a lot, singing with José Luccioni and shaking Georges Carpentier’s hand. ‘I’d met kings and queens. I’d fallen in love. Lived through a war. Saw the world. And it burnt me out. What was there left to impress me after that?’ (Howard 2007b, 106) Ross’s response is understated and typical: ‘this is heavy shit’, but it acts as a counterpoint to a man bearing his soul on his deathbed: He’s there, ‘Watching you in action was like watching a great orchestra play’ … and that makes me sad, roysh, because I know it’s always been a bit of a disappointment to him that I never got an IRFU contract. ‘I was von Leeb’, he goes and he looks me hard in the eye. It’s a look full of meaning and what it means is, goodbye. Because somehow we both know that this is the last conversation we’re ever going to have. (Howard 2007b, 105–106) The writing here is sparse and minimalist and quite moving; the Nazi affiliation is now seen as a synecdoche of a time when Fehily last felt alive and fully himself, until Ross and his friends arrived to win the Leinster Senior Cup. The fact that they cannot speak personally about his death is a very Irish phenomenon, especially among men, and the fact that Ross grasps what is going on is a marker of his growth, however gradual, as a character. Fionn has brought the elderly Vianne and her son Didier to visit him, and this brings some closure to Fehily’s life, and the last we see of him alive is him sitting in the bed after Vianne’s visit, alone ‘with his thoughts’ (Howard 2007b, 127). Ross is in denial and talks about how ‘Eddie O’Sullivan’s going to have some focking job rebuilding that team’s confidence for the Six Nations’, when Fionn pins his arms to his side and says, ‘Ross, it’s alright to be sad’,

States of Denial  99 and ‘the next thing, roysh, for no reason at all, I just feel my eyes storting to fill up: And I end up just, like, blubbing like a focking bird for maybe an hour, roysh, and Fionn’s got his orm around my shoulder going, “It’s okay, big man. It’s okay”’ (Howard 2007b, 127). This is the first time we see real emotion that is not centred on himself in Ross as a character and it is a poignant moment. He also is asked to speak at the funeral and he stands up to this very well, offering an affectionate and admiring tribute to his old headmaster, referring to his ‘big booming voice’, something that immediately reminds us of Charles, and describing his very optimistic view of the world in some of his aphorisms: ‘it’s a wonderful world – full of kindness and hope and love and charity’, and ‘People – they’ll confound your worst expectations (Howard 2007b, 132). He dwells on how sad Ronan is and how much he will miss Fehily, as the third generation of O’Carroll-Kellys who is influenced by him. The humanisation of Fehily proceeds with a meeting after the funeral with an old Frenchman called Daniel Shum, whose father ran a patisserie in Paris in a place called St Paul. Fehily had drunk coffee in the café and they spoke about the great tenors. Shum was in the resistance, and when Fehily found out there was going to be a Milice raid on the patisserie, he warned Shum to leave, but Shum, who ‘was proud – to be a Jew and to be a member of the Resistance’, refused and was taken. Shum never saw him again, but that night, ‘Denis came to the shop that night and collected us – my brother and I. He arranged for us to come here, to Ireland. He had friends. They looked after us’ (Howard 2007b, 134–135). The final memory we have of Fehily is in an Oskar Schindler–type role, which, of course, lessens our disgust at his Nazi sympathies. Howard here is making the point that people are complex and have many different qualities. The affection that Ross has for Fehily is clear throughout the series, and in the current chapter, we will see how Fehily’s influence transcends his death for Ross. But it is in Mr S and the Secret of Andorra’s Box, where Ross undergoes a programme of analysis, that the core of his relationship with Fehily is laid bare. He is undergoing a programme of analysis with Conchita, the wife of Bernard Dussourd, who has hired him to coach the national rugby team of Andorra. She looks like Eva Green and is ‘stunning’, so, of course, Ross wants to have sex with her: ‘I mean, she totally oozes class and I’ve a pole on me like a focking guard-rail’ (Howard 2008, 186). She is also significantly younger than her husband. ‘Bernard is fortyseven and you find it difficult to believe that a man of forty-seven could be luffed by a woman of twenty-seven’ (Howard 2008, 186). In analysis, Ross describes his mother as ‘a focking wrasse. Move on’ (Howard 2008, 210), and subsequently he calls his father ‘penis’; ‘dickhead and knob features’ (Howard 2008, 211). Conchita notes that this could represent a ‘fixation with the male phallus, the rival phallus’

100  States of Denial (Howard 2008, 211). This is not the type of quote one expects to find in what is termed popular diction. However, it demonstrates that significant human conflicts and issues are to be found in these books. Given the psychoanalytic context, one cannot help link Freud’s Oedipus complex with Ross’s attitude towards his father. The key word here is ‘rival’, leading to the question as to whether Ross feels in competition with his father for his mother’s love. According to Freud, the (male) child must separate from the mother and identify with the father on his way to entering the Symbolic order, and the Oedipal complex is displayed by those males whose failure to negotiate this stage of development leaves them deeply attached to their mothers, and often feeling rivalry with their father. Ross does not seem deeply attached to his mother, as he continually describes her in very negative terms, referring to her as a ‘pollock and wrasse’ (Howard 2008, 211), but Conchita suggests that ‘these are fish’ and ‘many believe – especially in dream interpretation – that fish is a symbol of sexual repression’ (Howard 2008, 211). It can be interpreted, on an unconscious level, that Ross has a deep attachment to his mother; however, it has been repressed and sublimated into something more socially acceptable, condemning his ‘old dear’s’ actions when ‘she posed for a yummymummy calendar’ and when she wrote these ‘books full of basically filth’ (Howard 2008, 210). Ross also learns that Erika is his half-sister, and he exclaims that ‘shock doesn’t even begin to cover it. This scene is, like, too focked up for words’ (Howard 2008, 337). This is also because he has had sex with Erika, and the whole incest taboo has been one of high culture’s predicates from Greek tragedy through the work of Freud, Levi-Strauss and, indeed, Derrida. In their sessions, Conchita diagnoses Ross as a narcissist, and she later explains to him what qualities he has that lead her to this conclusion, citing his self-importance; his being a fantasist; his sense of being special; his need for admiration; his sense of entitlement; his exploitation of others and his arrogance She then asks him if he feels that these symptoms sound like him: ‘Sound like me? I thought you were reading my CV there’. She doesn’t even give me that one, just shakes her head, like she doesn’t know why she’s even orsed. (Howard 2008, 279–280) Putting the central character into analysis and laying bare some core motivational themes is an interesting narrative technique, and I would argue that Ross’s polyparadigmatic development proceeds apace in this book, as does the complexity of his relationships with others. It is in these sessions with Conchita, where she struggles to see why he is so angry at his parents all the time, that he finally blurts out the reason: ‘I

States of Denial  101 couldn’t read’ (Howard 2008, 292), and it is important to remember that he was 14 at this stage. He goes on to explain that one of the most difficult things about not being able to read was the need to disguise this and avoid people finding out, so he had a lot of strategies set up: ‘excuses for not handing in essays, not turning up for exams, not reading in class. You’d be pretty focking exhausted’ (Howard 2008, 29). He recalls being asked to write on the blackboard the difference between ‘stalactite’ and ‘stalagmite’, and while he knew this, he was unable to write it, and the geography teacher, Mr McGahey (no fan of Ross), went on to compare him to a ‘sea squirt’, a ‘fish that finds a rock, sits down, eats its own brain, then lives the rest of its life as a vegetable’, and, of course everyone laughed. He voices his anger at his parents for not noticing that ‘their fourteen-year-old son couldn’t write his own name’, and he blames their obsession with the move from Glenageary to Foxrock and also their preoccupation with ‘making money’ (Howard 2008, 293). He then explains, in answer to Conchita’s question, that it was Father Fehily who actually took an interest and taught him to read, calling him into his office and saying: ‘Let’s see can we get a handle on this reading thing, shall we?’, and then for two hours a day, three days a week for a whole year, he taught Ross to read. It now starts to become clear why Fehily has a father-figure role in Ross’s life – he fills in the gap that Charles left while he focused on business (interestingly, both of them have booming voices). The description is quite poignant given that priests in contemporary Ireland are no longer seen as idealised figures in general; indeed, we only have to remember how horrified Barry Conroy was when JP found religion, and Ross makes this very point, noting that priests in Ireland: get a pretty bad rap – kiddy-fiddling, blah blah blah. But you never hear anything about the ones like him the ones who, like, teach you all the shit that makes you, I don’t know, a better person. I mean, the worst thing you could have said about Fehily was that he was, like, a Nazi sympathizer.’ (Howard 2008, 293) The irony and lack of contextual awareness of the final comment cut through any sentiment the reader may be feeling, and they bring us back to Ross and the present, which is a negotiation, an emotional shuttling that is central to Howard’s portrayal of Ross. He will not let us hate him, but nor will he let us see him as being redeemed: Ross, like la navette, is always shuttling between extremes. Fehily is of huge significance and his death does not lessen it; indeed, in many of the metanoetic moments of Ross’s life, those where he actually takes stock, criticises where he has come from and tries to make a change for the better, it is a comment or

102  States of Denial saying from Fehily that will be the touchstone. Figures who will influence him all resemble Fehily, who will be a hauntological presence throughout the series. I use the term haunted deliberately, as it refers to Derrida’s concept of hauntology, already noted in our discussion of use- and exchange-value, which is first discussed in Specters of Marx, in answer to his question ‘What is a ghost? (Derrida 1994, 10), where ghostly hauntings are seen as traces of possible alternative meanings. Derrida’s spectrality involves acknowledging the other that haunts the self; it involves acknowledging the possibility that the h in hauntology is a hovering presence over the certainties of ontology, and, above all, it is predicated on the future. Speaking both of the ghost in Hamlet and the ghost that haunts Marx’s Communist Manifesto (where the first noun is specter), he makes the point that, at bottom, ‘the specter is the future, it is always to come, it presents itself only as that which could come or come back’ (Derrida 1994, 39), and Fehily’s voice is the one that seems to shape Ross’s future, and it is something in which he has intrinsic and unshakeable belief. Time and time again, Fehily will be invoked, and when someone speaks whom Ross respects, it is often because what they say reminds him of Fehily. Hauntology has become a sub-genre of deconstruction studies; it is ‘a science of ghosts, a science of what returns’ (Macherey 2008, 18), and, throughout the coming books, Fehily, or more precisely, Fehily’s words, will return hauntologically to guide Ross in a better direction. This is a writing tactic that Howard uses a lot, bringing the reader to a point of almost empathy with a character, and bringing the character to a point of self-knowledge, before using bathos to rapidly enforce the necessary satirical distance between reader and character again, and we see this in the way in which Ross’s opening up about Fehily and his own vulnerabilities, which bring us closer to him, is rapidly undercut by his bland remark about Nazi sympathisers. Humour, as Freud has noted, has both an ‘intimate connection to reality’ and a ‘distance from it’, and its immense power to subvert authority and protect the individual is often done from a ‘safe comedic distance’ (Colletta 2003, 9). Paul Simpson, in his comprehensive On the Discourse of Satire, speaks of the necessity for an ironic distance being in place with respect to the ‘ostensible speaking source of the text’ (Simpson 2003, 9). The same process can be seen in the relationship between Ross and Charles, the other father figure in This Champagne Mojito Is the Last Thing I Own. In this book, Charles is sent to jail for corruption and tax evasion, and Ross forms a new and different relationship with him. Howard is again treading that empathic line as he develops Charles from a linguistic caricature with his mantra of ‘Full stop. New para’ to a much more fully rounded character in these books. Charles tells of his reasons for corruption, and it is

States of Denial  103 a robust defence. He speaks of a postcolonial ruling class who took Ireland into an economic war with ‘our most important trading partner – they hated Britain more than they hated being poor’ (Howard 2007b, 168). He speaks of the Ireland of the 1970s as the ‘Albania of western Europe’, and as ‘Third World in every way’, experiencing not just material poverty, but also ‘poverty of thought, poverty of imagination’ (Howard 2007b, 168). He makes the point that in the early 1990s, when Ireland’s economy was at a very low ebb, he was employing 2,478 people, and he genuinely feels that he should be in the Seanad or on the board of semi-state companies and not in jail ‘because I broke rules, cut corners’ (Howard 2007b, 169). Howard puts in Charles’s mouth that endemic sense of entitlement that upper and middle classes feel in society who sense that they have made a contribution beyond what was expected and that, even as they enriched themselves, they also enriched other people to a lesser degree. The fact that their tax evasion was part of the reason that the economy was in such a dire state is conveniently forgotten. Throughout the series, Charles equals Ross in his denial of facts that do not fit in with his own narrative, and it is part of the technique of the series that Howard reminds us of this often, but seldom in the middle of a cri de coeur like this one. Charles, like so many eloquent people, is well able to offer a rationale for his actions, and he does so here at length. His argument is that corruption, breaking the law, counterviewing planning and bribery are necessary if a country is to develop to any great degree ‘you name me a country that wasn’t built on – as these people call it – corruption’ (Howard 2007b, 169). He may be in jail, but he is unapologetic as to the reasons he was sent there. Of course, now that his money is gone, he is unable to provide for Ross’s trustifarian lifestyle, and so the latter must find a job. The new principal of Castlerock, Tom McGahy (no fan of Ross’s as we have seen), directs him to a former pupil, Gus Williams, who has his own business Pearse Street Sanitary Services, where Ross will be ‘collecting tampie bins’ (Howard 2007b, 236). For a character who treats women so badly, this is the ultimate humiliation, and there are numerous possibilities for humour. He is part of a three-person team, and the other two are also both former Castlerock rugby stars: ‘Terry Graubard, who was the full-back on the team of 1978, and Felim McEvoy ... as in, probably the best centre ever to play for Castlerock College? As in, won a cap for Ireland on the 1974 development tour to Argentina and Uruguay?’ (Howard 2007b, 238). Gus enjoys taking on and humiliating former rugby stars, and Ross, who is still talking about possibly playing for Leinster and Ireland, finally reaches a moment of anagnorisis when he is faced with reality by Felim: I’m like, ‘Can’t see myself being around that long, if I’m being honest. I’m expecting a call from Michael Cheika any day. I know they made

104  States of Denial shit of Toulouse at the weekend, but there’s no denying they need me. Especially with Munster in the semi-final . . ‘. ‘Would you ever stop talking out your arse?’ Felim suddenly goes. (Howard 2007b, 245) Ross is angry and hurt by this and, of course, refuses to see the truth of it: ‘he’s the one who’s bang out of order here’; but Felim tells Ross that he sees similarities between them, noting that he was ‘waiting for a call from Ronnie Dawson’, and then, ten years later, he was ‘waiting for a call from Jeremy Davidson. One morning I woke up and realised there wasn’t going to be any call’ (Howard 2007b, 246). Showing Ross a mirror of himself is a classical satirical trope and having him not recognise the resemblance at first is another ironic device, but Felim also makes the point that they are both doing this job to provide for their families and that is important. For the first time, we see Ross as part of a polyphony, to use Bakhtin’s term: he is part of a group of players who were good, but just not good enough and who spent a long time in denial about this in their lives. It will be near the end of the novel before Ross fully internalises this message. His journey towards self-knowledge will be a slow one, with many twists and turns. Conchita and Felim are both guides on the way, while another character, Cillian Mongey, Sorcha’s partner, who is ‘a senior adviser in international risk assessment’ (Howard 2009a, 25), assumes a Cassandra-like role in Rhino What You Did Last Summer, as he predicts with unerring accuracy the collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market. However, like so many other areas, Ross remains unaware of what is happening, while Cillian has a breakdown, is sacked from his job and writes a warning letter to George W. Bush. At the end of that book, as Ross leaves in a taxi for McCarron International Airport, the driver, Pat, turns on the radio, and ‘there’s some shit on the news about home repossessions’, and Pat says, ‘You hear Bear Stearns said today they got serious problems with two of their hedge funds?’ It is a question that will reverberate across the world’s financial services, but Ross’s response is typically egocentric: ‘Er, this affects me how exactly?’ (Howard 2009a, 40). The next set of books will show exactly how this affects him, and we smile at his naiveté, but for most of us, the tales of financial ruin seemed to be the stuff of fairytales as central banks, governments, oppositions and media organisations all seemed to feel that the Celtic Tiger would last forever, or, at worst, that the country would have a ‘soft landing’ back from this period. Various politicians and economists who took credit for the whole economic boom, as we have seen, were very reluctant to take any blame, and the Irish systemic response was not to really blame anyone for the collapse of our economy and the need for international monetary fund intervention. Charles is very

States of Denial  105 much the voice of this entitled class, both before, during and after the Celtic Tiger. Indeed, listening to Charles, one would be tempted to agree with him: he has made money for other people and if he bent the rules a little, where is the real harm? This is where the satirical pen works so sharply, as, even as we agree, we are lulled into being part of Charles’s ethical worldview, and we are then jolted to remember that this is the worldview that thinks the best response to a systemic financial crisis in the real world is to cut down on the benefits to single mothers, and which is unable to prosecute one of the largest cases of alleged financial irregularity in the history of Ireland because some documents got lost or shredded and because the office involved was under-staffed. Charles, like Ross, is someone who divides the classes into severe binary oppositions. It is the worldview that feels that people like us should have priority access to all services, and that people like them should not. When that other perspective, that ironic distance, is brought to bear, then Charles can be seen as self-serving, and the satire is very keenly observed; when that distance is not there, we can find ourselves sympathising with Charles and his ‘sacrifices’ to make Ireland a more modern place. However, Charles is undeniably correct when he asks if there would ever have been a Celtic Tiger without ‘all those material contraventions of the County Development Plan?’, and he goes on to proudly admit that the reason for the boom was partly that ‘we paid councillors – bribes, if that’s what you want to call them – to turn those fields into shopping centres, factories, private housing estates’ (Howard 2007b, 170), and he goes on to say that many politicians were quietly acquiescent in this process: ‘Charlie Haughey got it. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael get it, but of course they can’t just come out and say, “Look, this is how economic booms happen. Now enjoy your lobster bisque and stop worrying your little heads about it”’ (Howard 2007b, 170). Part of the strength of Menippean satire is the polyphonic nature of the genre; many different and often contradictory voices engage in dialogue and sometime invite us to make comparisons and judgements based on the tone and tenor of those voices, and ‘the dialogic angle at which these styles and dialects are juxtaposed or counterposed in the work’ (Bakhtin 1984, 182). Andrew Renfrew notes that ‘polyphony’ was originally a ‘musical term that indicates the presence of many voices (or parts) in a given composition’ (Renfrew 2015, 56–57), but it is taken by Bakhtin to oppose the notion of a novel with a single voice and a single world. Using the notion of the carnival as a locus where all sorts of different voices interact, Bakhtin sees this as core to the Menippean satirical mode, and, in this case, one of the other voices that we need to listen to with regard to Charles’s views on his own role as a progenitor of the golden phase of the Celtic Tiger can be found in We Need to Talk About Ross, a mock series of

106  States of Denial interviews ostensibly carried out by Paul Howard with the other characters in the books in order to write an authorised biography of Ross O’CarrollKelly. It is an ingenious device to show different perspectives of Ross as well as offering quite a Freudian recursive analysis of why Ross is the way he is, and it also stylistically serves as a means to tie up a number of loose narrative plot aspects that contradicted each other. In this book, we see the Horatian shifting satiric speaker in evidence as other characters are telling their stories to Howard, just as Ross does in the rest of the books. It also allows him to point up some issues that are not immediately obvious in the series proper, as, in these interviews, it becomes clear that Ross, not to mention Charles, are not reliable narrators. In these books, the fiction is that Charles has lost all his money, whereas we find in Mr S and the Secret of Andorra’s Box that this is not, in fact, the case, and he has been lying to Ross all the time. His familiarity with Andorra stems from using the banking system there to hide his ‘forty million’ euros (Howard 2008, 286). In We Need to Talk About Ross, Howard cleverly adds yet another perspective to what is going on in the books, with the fictional premise that Penguin, having been let down by Ross who was supposed to be writing a book for them, have asked Howard to do a biography and to interview other characters to get a different perspective on Ross. The piece on class is especially interesting, and we discover that Ross’s depiction of Anto’s reign of terror and theft in Foxrock and of Tina’s ski-pants wearing Chav is actually not the case. ‘Howard’, the ostensible narrator of this series of interviews, moves from being a heterodiegetic narrator (narrating but not part of the actual narrative) to becoming a homodiegetic narrator (narrating and being part of the story) in this book, as he is actually a character in it, further layering the whole process of the telling of the story. Meeting at Antonio’s, on Lower Ormond Quay, the Howard character/narrator tells us that Anto is ‘nothing like the caricature Northsider that Ross has drawn for me’; he is not ‘angry and threatening’, nor does he have the ‘pronounced Dublin accent that Ross slips into whenever he’s mocking him’ (Howard 2009b, 197). We hear that Fionnuala is a fifty percent partner in the restaurant with Anto himself, and this sustained partnership would give the lie to the version Ross gave of Anto going ‘through Foxrock like a crimewave’ (Howard 2009b, 198). Later in this conversation Tina (Ronan’s mother) arrives and again, she is not quite the caricature that Ross has described, as she has ‘No ski pants. No perm. No machine-gun laugh’. She is described as attractive rather than pretty in the conventional sense: ‘short and busty and bristling with personality. The mystery as to where Ronan got his brains and sense of humour is cleared up immediately’ (Howard 2009b, 201). Of course interesting as this is, there is a narrative sleight of hand at work here as it is not, of course, Ross who has ‘described’ Tina in particular way, nor

States of Denial  107 is it he who has been spinning a different story about Anto and Tina: it is, of course, Howard himself. So what we actually have at work here is quite a sophisticated layering of narrative perspectives, as Howard the homodiegetic narrator is proving that Howard the heterodiegetic narrator has been lying about the characters. But of course, he cannot be lying as he is the author who has created these characters in the first place. Because it is so smoothly written, the reader is inclined not to be aware of this until much later. It is part of an ongoing process, characterised earlier as an Augenblick, wherein the characters are provided with more and more layers as the series progresses so that they become Moretti’s ‘polyparadigmatic character’, developing heterogeneous, contradictory traits. And in this book, Howard becomes something of a polyparadigmatic narrator himself. In Bakhtinian terms, this would be an example of what he termed ‘syncrisis’, which is ‘the juxtaposition of various points of view on a specific object’ (Bakhtin 1984, 110) as the characters each become a carnival in themselves in all its complexity. Ross becomes more complex and contradictory, and his relationships with other characters change, allowing these characters to develop more fully as well. Charles receives the same treatment throughout the series, as he is betimes, a figure of fun, a stylistic synecdoche ‘Full stop. New para’. But also, he becomes something deeper, especially during his stint in jail for tax evasion, where he seems to form a bond with his son, something he was never able to do before. Initially Ross is horrified that Charles is set to plead guilty, and that he will not let Hennessey defend him in court. Ross’s major worry is that he will lose all of his money, which, of course, comes from Charles, as well as his: ‘cor, dosh, gaff, wife, daughter ... possibly even my son’, but Charles has assumed a Zen-like sense of acceptance, telling Ross that he will find ‘wonderful comfort and peace of mind’ when he learns ‘to let those things go’ (Howard 2007b, 222). Charles refuses to argue his own case: ‘There isn’t going to be any trial. I’ve pleaded guilty. It’s an open-and-shut case. Habeas corpus, caveat emptor, if you’ll pardon the French’ (Howard 2007b, 274). From the man whose first impulse in the face of any threat to his status or money is to write one of his ‘worldfamous letters to The Irish Times’ (Howard 2007b, 131), or get Hennessey to issue a legal writ, this is a very different response, and it deepens his character. Even Ross, whose oedipal relationship with Charles or ‘Dick Features’ (Howard 2000, 26) as he calls him, has been a narrative engine of the series, is starting to feel a sense of connection with his father: I’m there, ‘To be honest, it’s the old man. It’s weird, roysh, but I was actually storting to like him, if that makes any sense? Now he’s talking about admitting everything – settling with the Criminal Assets Bureau. I still don’t think he’ll do it, but if he does – fock! – I could end up

108  States of Denial losing a lot of money, we’re talking seven hundred and fifty Ks. And yet there’s a port of me – we’re talking deep, deep, deep down – that actually admires him for, like, just thinking about it. Even though he’s a dickhead obviously’. (Howard 2007b, 198) To expect Charles to turn over a new leaf is as naive as to expect Ross to do the same thing. Howard will pile layer upon layer onto these characters, making them protean mixtures of the likeable and the hateful; the comedic and the serious; the unredeemed and the redeemable. Charles’s mode of speaking has already been established, but in Mountjoy prison, he begins to affect the argot of the inmates, and in the following extract, the stylistic fuses with the thematic as his normally quite pompous mode of speaking blends with the slang of the prison, suggesting that his character is also a blend of numerous different aspects: ‘There’s a chap in here, three cells down from me – he be me and Lex’s new ace dude. He doing an alphabet for armed robbery’ (Howard 2007b, 221). Charles goes to trial and as he pleads guilty it only takes four days and the judge outlines the severity of the charges, noting that by unplanned building and offering bribes to various people, Charles had contributed to a ‘legacy of social problems in many of the city’s poorer areas’, and how, as a councillor in Dún LaoghaireRathdown, he had ‘solicited bribes from property developers’ [italics original], making him part of a ‘general culture of avoidance’ that was rife in the Ireland of the time. The judge also notes that Charles pleaded guilty, and he had made a settlement with the Criminal Assets Bureau and the Revenue Commissioners, which meant that, when released, he would have ‘a considerably reduced lifestyle than that to which you are accustomed’ (Howard 2007b, 334). Charles is given a two-and-a-half-year sentence. In jail, he mounts a rooftop protest as a planned rugby game is cancelled as it is found out that Bunter, one of the prisoners, was using it as an escape plan. Charles tells Ross that prison has been good for him: ‘but I’ve found myself in here. Me is clicked up. Me no ready to hit the bricks’, and he also notes that not having money to hand has been good for Ross: ‘and you’re standing on your own two feet now’ (Howard 2007b, 357). They have probably their first meaningful discussion of their lives on that prison rooftop, and a reader familiar with them will hope to see a change in their relationship. Both men have confronted demons – Ross finally realising he will never play rugby for Ireland and Charles losing all of his money. Both have learned from their environments, with Ross learning from his work and from the deaths of Father Fehily and Aoife, while Charles has learned a lot in prison, where, despite his background and accent, he has made good friends who made him welcome and never judged him, and he goes on to quote Denis Fehily about people: ‘“they’ll confound your worst

States of Denial  109 expectations,” we go, at exactly the same time’ (Howard 2007b, 358). The fusion of Ross and the two father figures, the sense of optimism and realism, the sense of male bonding is all here, and we are seeing, we think, a new dawn for both of them. However, the final conversation of the book is with the prison guard, Hughie, who asks if Charles is coming down from the roof. Ross says not any time soon, and then he nods at the fire truck, saying, ‘I think you’re going to have to give him the focking water cannon’ (Howard 2007b, 359). Howard’s writing will not allow any easy reconciliations or redemptions; instead, the layers of different emotions and experience accrete on the characters so that they become more fully devolved and human. The same is true of the context of the series as having been very much at the heart of the Celtic Tiger boom. The next books will let us see how the characters cope with the ‘bust’ that followed as the country, and the characters, move inexorably from prosperity to austerity.

6

From Prosperity to Austerity

The Oh My God Delusion (2010) NAMA Mia! (2011) The Shelbourne Ultimatum (2012)

Things take a darker turn in the next books as the boom moves towards the bust after the demise of the Celtic Tiger. In Rhino What You Did Last Summer, we saw the beginning of the end of the Celtic Tiger as Sorcha’s boyfriend, Cillian, predicted the implosion of the American subprime mortgage structure, with the ensuing knock-on effects, while in This Champagne Mojito Is the Last Thing I Own, his father has been imprisoned and he is broke, as he asks Hennessey what he is going to do for money and the response is: ‘I’m sorry if this sounds a touch oldfashioned, but have you considered working?’ (Howard 2007b, 226). The next three books serve as a Celtic Tiger trilogy, dealing with the crash: The Oh My God Delusion (2010), NAMA Mia! (2011) and The Shelbourne Ultimatum (2012). Again the chapter titles reflect the connections between the context of the books and the overall context of the series. Hence, The Oh My God Delusion features references to David Bowie’s ‘A New Career in a New Town’; the television series The Wire; as well as beauty products ‘Crème de la Total Mere’, while NAMA Mia! channels some slogans of the time: ‘We are where we are’; as well as text shorthand ‘2G2BT’ and The Shelbourne Ultimatum has mostly film titles for chapter titles: ‘Meet the Fockers’ and ‘Don’t Cry for me Orgentina’, and this mirrors the connections between the titles of the books and the context to which they refer. The Oh My God Delusion sees the narrative progress as Ross and his family continue to struggle financially, with Ross moving to a ghost estate, the Rosa Parks Apartments, which, ‘if you can believe the bumf, is a development of highly prestigious aportments in the rapidly maturing South Dublin suburb of Ticknock’ (Howard 2010, 5). The marketing brochure is classic Celtic Tiger, speaking about ‘this stunning, well-appointed development is, at once, elegant, stylish, intelligent and creative. But, unlike her, it’s no trouble at all when it comes DOI: 10.4324/9781003124993-7

From Prosperity to Austerity  111 to public transport’ Having read this rather cheesy blurb, Ross asks what kind of people write this, and JP responds. ‘“Back in the day,” he goes, “you and I did”’ (Howard 2010, 5). As is the case with so much Celtic Tiger property, the reality is far less impressive than the marketing, as one of the benefits of this estate was that it was supposed to become part of the UCD campus, but as JP acerbically puts it ‘We’re in Ticknock, Ross. You couldn’t see UCD from here with the focking Hubble Telescope’ (Howard 2010, 121). Additionally, he and his friends face being stripped of their 1999 Leinster Schools Senior Cup medals, as allegations of methamphetamine abuse come back to haunt them due to an interview given by Ross ‘that the drug methamphetamine had been administered to him prior to matches’ (Howard 2010, 275). Of course, Ross uses his connections, and Hennessey obtains an injunction preventing the Leinster Branch from taking the medals until he is offered an opportunity to plead his case, but, gradually in these three books, there seems to be a sense that in the new Ireland, an Ireland of austerity, the old nexus of private school and business connections, where illegality is governed by a very light touch regulation or control. Ireland is another country, and indeed, Ross and his friends will lose their medals, a medal that Ross has worn every day since the day he won it. Oisinn has gone bankrupt, with The Irish Independent reporting that he had debts of ‘seventy-five million’ euros (Howard 2010, 12), and part of the darkening perspective of this aspect of the series is seen when Ross realises that his old school, which has a really strong esprit de corps, may be able to help Oisinn, and JP recalls the name of ‘The Castlerock College Benevolent Fund for Rock Boys Who’ve Had, Like, a Bad Bounce of the Ball’ (Howard 2010, 253). One thinks of the Brian Murphy case, where, on the following day, two of the boys who were outside the nightclub, Dermot Laide and Alan Dalton, went to see their old Blackrock College principal, Alan McGinty, to explain what happened (Examiner 2004), which is interesting in terms of what it says about the bond between private school and former pupils: in extremis, pupils can always turn back to their alma mater. However, in the austere mood that is portrayed in these books, the old school no longer sees its role as being a protective one for past students. The new principal, Tom McGahy, shows little sympathy for Oisinn’s ‘greedy speculation’, and he sees him as someone who has fled the jurisdiction to avoid facing his ‘responsibilities’ (Howard 2010, 272), and when Father Fehily is invoked, he is dismissed by McGahy. The Ireland of these books is becoming a colder place for Ross and his friends. It is one of the few books to address the changes in an Ireland of austerity across a range of issues. Living in the Rosa Parks Apartments, Ross becomes involved with Terry and Larry Tuhill (or ‘Tetty and Laddy Tuhill’ as Ronan calls them), leaders

112  From Prosperity to Austerity of the criminal gang, the New Westies (Howard 2010, 184). The accents and attitudes of Larry and Terry are set up in juxtaposition to those of Ross, and, in a typical comedy of class, it is the different perceptions that clash and make us laugh, and, as Bakhtin notes: ‘the corrective of laughter and criticism’ to when applied to ‘existing straightforward genres, languages, styles, voices’, forces us ‘to experience beneath these categories a different and contradictory reality that is otherwise not captured in them’ (Bakhtin 1981, 59; Bakhtin 1984), and this is what happens here, as a polyphonic reality s created between the two apartments. Ross is interviewed on television about living in a ghost estate, and he ends up watching the programme with Larry and Terry, so they can see what he says about them, much to Ross’s discomfort, something noted by Larry, who ‘hopes that Ross is not arthur sayin sometin derogatoddy abour us and he doesn’t want us to see it’ (Howard 2010, 193). The eyedialect again brings authenticity to the description, but, of course, at a deeper level of satire it makes the point that communication between social classes is predicated on them speaking the same language and, clearly, there are large elements in the discourse of each group that are mutually indistinguishable. In a further broadening of the narrative perspective, it is Larry and Terry who will point this out in the interview, that it is ‘de language baddier that is the main problem as ‘e does use diffordent words. But then we’d often say royid – “Did you get the royid off her?” – whereas he does say scooore’ (Howard 2010, 194). They also praise Ross while he, of course, gives voice to all of his class prejudices, and again the narrative deconstruction places the sympathy on the side of a ‘hoort’ Larry and Terry, with Ross feeling ‘major guilts’ even though he knows that ‘are the country’s two biggest dealers in, like, illegal drugs and fireorms?’ (Howard 2010, 196). While this connection is played for laughs a number of times, with significant social class comedy occurring, there is nevertheless a change of emotional register. Ronan idolises Larry and Terry, and he wants to become a solicitor so he can act for them, and Ross is naturally worried. However, the brothers decry that idea. They both laugh and tell him that they will be ‘gone’ by then. Ross wonders if they are going to retire to Spain, but he is told ‘no … we’ll be dead’ adding that ‘it’s a showurt career, Rosser – and no one ever retires ourrof it’ (Howard 2010, 400–401). We find out in NAMA Mia! that the darker atmosphere is sustained as Ronan tells Ross that Terry and Larry Tuhill were ‘mordered … this arthur noon. Riddled with bullets, so thee were. At a traffic light on the Portmeernock Road’ (Howard 2011, 395). This moment of metanoia suddenly shatters our comic view of Larry and Terry, and it inserts a sharp jab of the real world of drug gangs and the consequences of criminal activity. In Bakhtinian carnivalesque terms, he is presenting perspectives not often seen as the self-awareness of Larry

From Prosperity to Austerity  113 and Terry is deconstructive of the normal presentation of gang members in fiction. The title of NAMA Mia! refers to the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), a financial vehicle that was used to attempt to limit the damage of the construction sector collapse and to the Catherine Johnson stage musical Mamma Mia! In this narrative, the financial crisis has bitten deeper, and Ireland is in recession. In a very symbolic gesture, Ross and his father open a mobile shredding business, which will allow for the shredding of any incriminating files that businesses and banks may wish to hide in the aftermath of the Celtic Tiger – the business is entitled ‘Shred Focking Everything’. Perhaps the core of the books is that sense of a certain class of people being immune from the consequences of their actions: As Ross says in The Oh My God Delusion: ‘They’re saying even people like us are going to have to stort tightening our belts …. I mean, a year ago, who would have seen Habitat being gone from Suffolk Street?’ (Howard 2010, 36). Ross becomes involved with Regina Rathfriland, a wealthy older woman with a very strong Northern accent, which allows Howard to broaden his range of eye-dialect writings, so Regina’s version of ‘I also want to apologise’ is written as, ‘ay also wanted tee apalajays’, and ‘I feel bad about it’ is ‘aye feel bawd abite ut’ (Howard 2011, 92). As his work develops, we have seen the broadening of range in terms of accents, and Regina’s Northern Irish twang is well caught phonetically, and, again, one finds oneself reading it aloud in order to fully appreciate what is being said. Ross’s apolitical nature also comes through as he talks about the Northern accent, saying that he dislikes it usually and offering a quick parody ‘may fawther dayed in a Brotush prosun for somethun he dadn’t doy’ (Howard 2011, 112–113). Regina, though living well, has huge debts and a number of her properties are in NAMA. Ross, wearing a robe in her house, notes that the logo on the breast pocket is from the ‘Bel Eire Health and Wellness Spa’, which Regina and her husband Toddy had built near Urlingford in County Kilkenny, but ‘it’s supposedly focked now’ (Howard 2011, 122). The idea of Ross as a toy boy is an interesting development, and it definitely plays off his Freudian relationship with his mother, which has been developing throughout the series. The scene where he and Regina have sex in a toilet at a Michael Bublé (or as Regina calls him ‘Meekle Beeblay’) concert is very funny, juxtaposing the public and the private, youth and age and the proper and the improper use of a bathroom cubicle. As he explains, while he is ‘no stranger to performing in ladies’ rooms’ the added difficulties of Regina wearing a cat-suit, a toilet with a sensor flush, and Regina’s desire not to miss the song ‘Cry Me a River’ make the whole experience rather fraught. People outside hear what is going on and are very disapproving. When finally they exit the cubicle, they find Fionnuala as one of the aghast audience. The slagging match that ensues is underpinned by

114  From Prosperity to Austerity the really good pictures of women in the bathroom by Alan Clark, where all one can see are cartoonish faces with very plumped lips and phenomenal amounts of makeup, while Fionnuala and Regina are seen haranguing each other, with Ross peeping out from the cubicle. Clearly many of his Freudian feelings towards his mother are brought out in his relationship with Regina, as well as in the pleasure he feels in making Fionnuala jealous. But this is not just a narrative insert to art up a bitch fight in the bathroom; Regina and her family have a narrative arc that also brings in Erika. Portrayed as the classical ice-cold blond who despises men even as she allure attracts them, she is very much the unattainable woman for Ross (even though they did have sex once after her parents’ divorce), and his feelings for her are even more confused now that she is his half-sister. Erika has had an affair with Toddy Rathfriland, the restaurateur and husband of Regina, and has been cited in their divorce case (Howard 2010, 15). As his new half-sister, Ross has a difficult relationship with her, and he is jealous of the attention that Charles is giving her. Charles, in typical fashion, is completely on her side about the divorce, with Hennessy looking for a High Court injunction to keep her name out of the newspapers. The affair becomes a significant aspect of The Oh My God Delusion, with Ross finding Regina’s deposition, wherein she recalls hearing Toddy call Erika ‘Sugar Tits’ as a pet name on the phone (Howard 2010, 49), and outlines how she caught the two of them in bed with Erika’s body covered in cardamom pear sorbet, noting unironically ‘I remember thinking Toddy’s never been a sorbet eater’ (Howard 2010, 50). Charles will pay one point seven million euros to Regina to keep Erika’s name out of the divorce proceedings, and Ross is there when Erika finally tells Toddy that there is no future for them, as she is now with Fionn. In the next book, in keeping with the darkening theme, we learn that Toddy has committed suicide. Through this affair and its sad consequence, we meet Regina and her daughter Hedda, who, at the funeral, clearly blames Erika for her father’s death, ‘she was the one screaming the odds at me and my sister’ (Howard 2011, 196). The Celtic Tiger crash was the cause of suicides, depression, and a lot of domestic and social problems, and, despite the humorous perspective, Howard is not afraid to confront these aspects of the period. On 28 November 2010, the European Commission, the European Central Bank (ECB) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – colloquially called the European Troika – agreed with the Irish government in a three-year financial aid programme on the condition of far-reaching austerity measures to be imposed on the Irish society in order to cut government expenditure. The agreements were signed on 16 December 2010 by the Irish government and the European Commission. This, in effect, meant a loss of sovereignty that people found hard to encompass, and there was a lot of anger. Howard also grasps the anger and bewilderment felt by the suddenness and starkness of the transition from a time where names like ‘Bel Eire’

From Prosperity to Austerity  115 seemed to symbolise a globalisation and an Americanisation of Irish culture, and when commodification, allied to the surge in mobile technology and social media, seemed to offer a brave new future, to the world of the troika, where, to cite Ross’s apophthegm, everything is ‘focked’. One scene captures this in parvo, as in the middle of flirting with a bank worker, called Aithne, and piqued at having his 50-euro note checked about being counterfeit, he launches into a cri de coeur that had echoes all over the country: ‘Can’t be too careful? Hello? The focking mess that your crowd have made of this supposed country’, even though he does not really grasp what has happened, as he says, he is just ‘parroting the kind of shit that everyone’s saying’, before finishing with ‘Our taxes are going up to bail out this useless shower of cowboys – and they’re throwing people out on the street for not being able to pay their mortgages’ (Howard 2011, 2). This is the very anger that will fuel New Republic’s electoral appeal in later books. The next book, The Shelbourne Ultimatum conflates the film The Bourne Ultimatum with the Shelbourne Hotel on St Stephen’s Green in Dublin. Ross survives the shooting depicted at the end of NAMA Mia!, but he has to deal with Gardaí who do not believe his story. He aims to sabotage the oncoming marriage of Fionn and Erika, while Sorcha gets a job in a pound shop. Honor becomes a child star, while Fionnuala continues to seek fame with her misery memoir. Ross refuses to change his ways, while all around him people are affected by the recession. While there is disappointment and bitterness all over the country, humour pervades in the books, and this is perhaps significant as dark humour is one of the ways that Irish people have dealt with the very sudden jolt that has moved them from prosperity to austerity. It is a very human way of dealing with the difficult, the problematic, that which is hard to express. Humour, according to Sigmund Freud, can be ‘purposive’, and he goes on to define this purposivity in terms of its ‘tendency’ to run ‘the risk of ruffling people who do not wish to hear it’ (Freud 1922, 128). Howard’s work is an example of such tendency-wit. Even the rhyming slang has an exclusionary quality to it, as those who are part of the élite group are aware of the rhyming significations, while those who are not part of this group are not. In all of these books, it is very much a case of the élite talking to itself, with little room left for interaction with any other social class. Freud has noted that crises or trauma are often not signified in ordinary social discourse, they are often repressed: We designate that form by the term ‘repression’. It is characterised by the fact that it excludes from consciousness certain former emotions and their products. We shall learn that tendency-wit itself is capable of liberating pleasure from sources that have undergone repression. (Freud 1922, 205–206)

116  From Prosperity to Austerity I would suggest that the trauma of the whole financial collapse, the plummeting of property prices and the catastrophic level of debt in Ireland was so intense that a collective emotional repression has taken place, which explains why there have been so few systemic consequences of this whole affair in Ireland. The inability to confront what has happened through discussion and understanding, and the ensuing imperative towards repetition of previous actions, has been the ongoing trope of the Irish response to the crisis. Governments have repeated decisions; bankers and auditors, who were unable to see what was happening, remain in power and still offer guidance despite their bad advice; the culture of secrecy, borrowed from the private-sector obsession with not allowing competitors access to information, is still operative; and perhaps, most worryingly, the resistance to any real changes in how finance and policy are managed has remained obdurate, despite scandal after scandal. For Freud, compulsive action is ‘a repetition of what is forbidden’ (Freud 1918, 86), and he sums it up in the terms ‘fixation to the trauma’ and ‘repetition compulsion’. He gives the examples of a man who has had a long-forgotten mother-fixation in his childhood but who will later ‘seek for a woman on whom he can be dependent, who will feed and keep him’, and of a girl who ‘was seduced in early childhood’ who may in later life ‘orient her later sexual life towards provoking such assaults over and over again’ (Freud 1939, 122). Such compulsive repetitions serve to mask our access to the root cause of the problem, to what I term the real. We have already referred to this Lacanian term, which refers to aspects of experience that cannot be accessed in normative language: what does not ‘come to light in the symbolic appears in the real’ [italics original] (Lacan 2006, 324). Due to legal and societal constrictions and strictures, very often information is not fully signified in the symbolic order. For Lacan, the ‘real’ refers to the world beyond language, to that which cannot be symbolised in language, it is ‘what resists symbolisation absolutely’ (Lacan 1991, 66); therefore, it is that which is ‘without fissure’ (Lacan 1988, 97). One can take the example of a bitter and acrimonious meeting, where insults are hurled, friendships are sundered and there are vicious verbal exchanges; the minutes of the meeting, however, bound as they are by the symbolic order, will merely record that there was ‘frank discussion’, that there were ‘verbal interchanges’, and this is followed by a series of ‘noteds’ and ‘agreeds’. The Lacanian real of that meeting, and the emotional depth of feeling, are absent from the symbolic order of the minutes, and the same is true of the signification of the Celtic Tiger, as set out in official documents. It is interesting that Charles is very much of the view that ‘current economic what-are-you-having’ merely means that ‘Ireland needs to do now is to change its lifestyle. Live more – yes, I’ll say the word – frugally’, and it will ‘emerge leaner, healthier and wiser for the experience’ (Howard

From Prosperity to Austerity  117 2011, 6). Insulated from the effects of recession by his tax-fraud money, he is able to look at future profit, noting that for people like himself, Dermot Desmond and J.P. McManus, this recession represents ‘a financial opportunity’ (Howard 2010, 29), and it is interesting that the examples are from both sides of the ellipses – from real and fictive Irelands. Much has been written about the period in terms of political and economic studies, but no attempt has been made to understand the underlying factors that allowed Ireland to feel that it had somehow inverted and destroyed the global economic models and that growth would be ongoing. No one has been charged with fraud or malfeasance; no one lost their job or pension because of incompetence; and a certain sociocultural élite (colloquially termed ‘the golden circle’) has remained insulated from the effects of the recession and the budgetary austerity. I would argue that this is due to what can be termed societal repression, as we have been very reluctant to face the ‘real’ of this crisis, and I will further argue that it is through Howard’s tendency-wit that we have some chance of understanding the cause of the failure of the Celtic Tiger. We do not point to the stupidity of the sovereign taking on the private debt of speculators and capitalists. Instead, the symbolic order chooses its words far more carefully. So in a reply to a government committee, the chief executive of the National Asset Management Agency, which was set up to manage grossly over-valued property, whose mortgage debts could not be paid said that: ‘the information given by banks did not turn out to be the reality’: McDonagh chose his words carefully. He did not call the banks liars or cheats – he said that ‘a lack of awareness and denial … was prevalent’ – but the implication was clear: Ireland’s bankers, who remain in business because the State saved them from collapse, have lied to the government and its agencies from the very beginning of this financial crisis and they have kept lying all the way through. (Ruddock 2010) The real of the situation is only addressed by the reporter, Alan Ruddock, who sees it as implied. The real questions arising – why are the Irish people paying for the bankers’ folly? why are people who lied to the government and NAMA not in jail? why are many of the same people on the boards of the banks, on whose watch these events took place, still on the same boards four years later? why has it taken so long to bring charges of fraud against a very small number of banking executives? why has our society been so passive in its acceptance of all of this? and why has there been no understanding of how all of this happened? – have not been addressed.

118  From Prosperity to Austerity I would suggest that this is because the ‘real’ of the situation has never been accessed. It is resistant to explanation, but there are ways that it can be accessed ‘in the symbolic order, the empty spaces are as signifying as the full ones’ (Lacan 2006, 327). I think that the novels by Paul Howard are just such a glimmer of signification. The lack of regulation that was so formally referred to in the Regling and Watson Report, and also in the comments by Brendan McDonagh, speaks to a sense of an élite at work in the Irish financial and political spheres. What was lacking was any sense of responsibility to the future and to the Irish state. The responsibility of the bankers on the night of the bank guarantee was to themselves and to their organisation; the same was true of the developers and of the government, who gave a guarantee that included all bondholders and all creditors. Their responsibility was to the élite figures of global capital as opposed to the people who elected them. Private debt, incurred by venture capitalists, and senior debt and bondholders has been transferred to the public, and the present Fine Gael–Labour government, who decried this guarantee in opposition, promptly renewed it in government: another example of repetition compulsion. There is a strong sense of an élite ensuring that errors of other members of that élite are borne by the rest of the population, and there is no major difference between either government in terms of action (or one might say inaction) on ensuring that people who ventured their capital in the hopes of profit should now take responsibility for their losses: the colloquial terms for this being ‘burning the bondholders’. JP’s father has started a new business ‘Last Resort Asset Reclaim’ (Howard 2010, 29). Again, this sense of disbelief that such a catastrophe can happen is captured in a scene where Ross discovers that his father, Charles, is about to go bankrupt. To fully understand this, we will not find the answers in sociological surveys or political analyses: we will find it in a speech made by Father Fehily in The Mis-Education Years, as he interpellates the boys into that sense of ideological superiority. He tells them they are ‘The élite. You are better than everyone else in the whole world’ (Howard 2000, 46), and he goes on to decry the value of ‘Books, education, learning’, which: have their place in the life of young men, of course. But not in yours. Because you are the élite. You don’t ask a pure-bred stallion to drag a cart uphill into town and similarly we here at Castlerock would never conceive of encumbering such fine athletic specimens as yourselves with such fripperies as schoolwork. (Howard 2000, 159) So notions of adhering to facts derived from books and education, of valuing experience and learning from it are not part of these boys’ lives, and

From Prosperity to Austerity  119 this is made explicit at a crucial time in their lives. The fact that the hailing has worked is clear in Ross’s own ventriloquised version of Fehily’s ideology before the Leinster Senior Cup final, as he tells his team that ‘we all have big futures to look forward to, because we are the élite. But today is the last time we will ever have to work hord for anything in our entire lives’ before exhorting them to ‘do it for Fehily. Let’s do it for Castlerock. But most of all ... let’s do it for us’ (Howard 2000, 232–233). Here is the metanoetic moment of understanding the Celtic Tiger and the lack of consequences: the ideologically smug élite feel that the success is all theirs, but the blame is not. Nothing is to be learned from books, education or experience – all that matters is ‘us’, or as Fionnuala might say, ‘people like us’. What emerges is a ‘portrait of a man and his friends who are centred around their formative experiences in schools rugby and as such inhabit a world which, although affluent, is dominated by ideas of an aggressive and over-sexualised masculinity, who are routinely selfish with little conception of community’ (Cronin 2009, 309). Work, like responsibility, or a sense of ownership of debt is very much for other people, who are seen as being like-exhibits or a different form of life. Thus, while Ross visits his father in Mountjoy Jail, he speaks of the people he sees as if they were beings from another planet. Mountjoy is ‘like the Ilac Centre, but with focking bors on the windows. We’re talking Adidas everything and Lizzy Duke Bling and it hums of, I don’t know, defeat – defeat and desperation and Lynx’ (Howard 2007b, 5). These are the people who belong in prison, not the likes of Charles or Sean Fitzpatrick or the CEOs of banks who lied to the government about the liquidity and solvency of their banks. These people were all being paid huge salaries for their expertise, yet, they have suffered no consequences for the appalling nature of that advice and financial stewardship. Such a level of societal dysfunction is frightening, as generally there is a sense that people who are in charge of political and financial systems are paid their very large salaries because they are competent; to face the fact that they are not, and that the people who might replace them are similarly incompetent, is a truly appalling vista, and this is why it is repressed. In terms of repression, Freud has made the point that civilisation represses many pleasures as being vulgar or wrong, and that ‘tendency-wit furnishes us with a means to make the renunciation retrogressive and thus to regain what has been lost’ through laughter (Freud 1922, 147). Humour, then, according to Freud, is one way of accessing the real, which has been masked by repetition and avoidance. In terms of the real of the situation, we are back in the dressing room of The Mis-Education Years, where the notion of an élite who will be forever cosseted from the consequences of their actions is vividly set out across the series. It is often through fiction that the real is accessed, and ‘the true aims at the real’ (Lacan 1998a,

120  From Prosperity to Austerity 91), and I would argue that it is by looking at events through the fictive lens that aspects of the real will become clear. Before we look at the fiction, it is salutary to look at the fact that, before he resigned, and keeping in mind the questionable financial practices that were to be found in the Anglo-Irish Bank, the CEO, Sean Fitzpatrick, called in 2008 for the government to ‘cut services, cut wages, and increase “competitiveness”’ (Kerrigan 2010). In other words, despite the fact that his bank would soon be a causal factor in the collapse of the Irish economy, he was suggesting that the best possible reaction to any financial downturn would be to punish those on lower incomes. Ironically, or perhaps not, this is exactly what the government did, introducing swingeing budget cuts in the Irish economy in successive budgets while ensuring that the banks were fully capitalised and paying back all of the senior and junior bondholders. While not overtly stated, what happened here is precisely the sense of loyalty to an élite group that was spelled out by Father Fehily. This is the real parallel of Paul Howard’s fictive universe, where the focus is on the affluent inhabitants of Dublin 4, who speak a very different language to the ordinary Irish people and whose loyalty is very much to their own class as opposed to the general public sphere. Through a very distinct use of phonetic spelling, Howard is able to catch this through the different idiolect spoken by these affluent Southsiders. While this is humorous in terms of delineating a specific upper-middle-class accent, it is another signifier of an élite group with its own identifying matrices. The accent, of course, is one. The insertion of phatic markers in speech is another, so many of Ross’s sentences are concluded with the term ‘roysh’, which is a phonetic version of ‘right’, a term that is often used as a modifier but which also acts as a badge of élite linguistic identity. Ross is a prototype of this community; he has been brought up in affluence, and he is devastated when his father loses everything after being convicted of tax fraud: ‘the money, the cars, the boat, the golf-club membership, the apartments in Villamoura, the box at Leopardstown’ (Howard 2007b, 219). He is a synecdoche of a social class of privately educated, affluent and responsible only to its own idea of itself. His attitude to money is very much that of a certain social élite in the days of the Celtic Tiger, as Ross calls to see his parents because ‘my cor insurance is due, roysh, and there’s no way I’m paying three Ks out of my own pocket for it’ (Howard 2006, 25). He sees his parents, despite his low opinion of them, as an unending source of money. He only puts up with his father’s conversation here in order to get him to write a cheque for him, and he is appalled that his father has changed the combination of the family safe. We find out that this is because Charles reveals that €5,000 went missing from that very safe a month ago, and Ross immediately tells him that he

From Prosperity to Austerity  121 had taken it. When Charles asks why he needed it, the response is ‘does it matter? And Charles replies, ‘Oh, I, em, suppose not’ (Howard 2006, 27). It transpires that Fionnuala, Ross’s mother, had blamed their Italian cleaning girl, Maria, for stealing the money and she was subsequently sacked, with Charles making some comments on the ‘Italians and their lack of moral fibre. Changing sides in wars and so forth’ (Howard 2006, 27). The interesting response from both father and son to this treatment of an innocent person is paradigmatic of the attitude that has seldom been voiced in the literature of the Celtic Tiger. Ross is thinking about his need for a new phone, as he has had his present one for ‘three months now’ (Howard 2006, 27), while Charles is equally cavalier: ‘still, hey ho, I’m sure she’d have stolen something eventually’ (Howard 2006, 28). This tendency-wit cuts to the real of the social unconscious of the Celtic Tiger. Banks that have been bailed out by the taxpayer have routinely flouted the pay cap as senior executives are given packages beyond the €500,000 cap set by the government. However, the same government is hiring advisers whose own salaries breach the government-imposed pay cap of €90,000. In a cost-cutting move, the Irish health service executive (HSE) suggested cutting home help and home-carer allowances, while consultants earn salaries of some €220,000. Rather than burning the bondholders, the current government are merely repeating the golden circle system of their predecessors, cutting the weak and the vulnerable and hoping that things will get better. The attitude of the recession-proof élite here is best encapsulated by the ‘hey ho’ of Charles, as opposed to a number of government reports, expert groups, position papers and policy documents. Howard describes the real of this cultural élite in a mock travel guide to South Dublin: Bathed by the warm currents of the Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift, South Dublin has a hot, humid climate, not unlike that of the Cayman Islands, with whom Southsiders share a natural affinity. Add in the 365 days of guaranteed sunshine per year and it’s not difficult to see why houses here are changing hands for the equivalent of the GNP of a small, backward country, such as Albania, Chad … or the rest of Ireland …. South Dublin is not only the cradle of the Celtic Tiger, it is also a land rich in cultural diversity, where barristers live next door to stockbrokers, where judges live next live next door to stockbrokers, where judges live next door to businessmen and where heart surgeons live side by side with brain surgeons. (Howard 2007a, 12–13) Here the satire offers access to the ‘real’ of the sociocultural élite in Ireland. This sense of entitlement that is never made overt in state or organisational

122  From Prosperity to Austerity documents is clear here. Like a comment about ‘The Star’ being a ‘newspaper read by poor people’ (Howard 2007b, 71), there is a sense that a social contract has been torn up in terms of South Dublin being seen as a sovereign state in itself. Any sense of a community is non-existent, and this has been clear in the utterances of the élite. While golden circles gambled money and lost, it is the people at the bottom of the socius who bear the brunt of the suffering, though, of course, this is never stated in government documents, which always talk about sharing the burden equally. The mantra ‘we all partied’ during the Celtic Tiger is used to make people feel that austerity is the correct policy, though it is those in poorer areas who bear the brunt of these policies. In this respect, the fictive social comments of Charles O’Carroll-Kelly enunciate the real through their tendency-wit: ‘On Travellers – I don’t know why they call them Travellers. The ones on the Sandyford Road have been there for fourteen years. They never travel anywhere. On the Hill of Tara – why is something worth keeping just because it’s old? If I’d adopted the same attitude to my Lexus GS 430, well, then I would never have driven the Lexus IS 300. And you can quote me on that…’ (Howard 2007b, 21) In terms of tendency-wit, there would seem to be very little difference between the fictive Charles and the all-too-real bankers and developers of the Celtic Tiger. Charles gives voice to a real that is generally occluded in the symbolic order of the cultural élite; he is voicing an aspect of the real of the Celtic Tiger mentalité, namely the ‘withering away of the HegelianDurkheimian view of the state as a collective authority with a responsibility to act as the collective will and consciousness, and a duty to make decisions in keeping with the general interest and contribute to promoting greater solidarity’ (Bourdieu 2005, 11). Freud has noted that ‘the realm of jokes has no boundaries’ (Freud 1920, 199), and it is in humour that the repressed real of the Celtic Tiger can be made to return. Like dreams, jokes use the same techniques of condensation, indirect representation and displacement. But unlike dreams, which are unintelligible, asocial and opaque in terms of motivation, joking is highly social, quickly understood, and it explicitly exposes the underlying thought in defiance of accepted modes of conscious expression. The real of the Celtic Tiger was a fracturing of the social contract and a sense of class-based élites who were free from the consequences of their actions. Despite the addictions and the fallout, it was a time of possibility, and this has not really been accounted for in much of the literature – fictive

From Prosperity to Austerity  123 and critical – of the period. By looking awry through comedy and satire, Howard is able to gently, but firmly, remind us that the Celtic Tiger was something of a guilty pleasure, where possibilities were rife and where there was, as Ross says, a sense that ‘everything seemed possible’. As a voice from the margins, he is able to help to redefine the centre and to offer a more comprehensive notion of the truth of the time. Freud tells us that to avoid repeating the past, we must understand the past and fully come to terms with it. Howard’s honest assertion that we did enjoy aspects of this period is important if we are to avoid making the same mistakes again, and his location at the margins of critical discourse is something that needs to be addressed if a full picture of this period is to be created. The Shelbourne Ultimatum begins with Ross recovering from being shot at the end of the previous book and having a dream where ‘the entire northside of Dublin City Centre is one giant, sprawling slum, where there is no law and the only businesses still operating are those dealing in smelting stolen gold and fencing stolen phones’ (Howard 2012b, 2). He also imagines Erika as a Lady Godiva figure riding a horse with Fionn’s face on it. Freud would suggest that these dreams were very residual in that they show his lust for Erika, forbidden as she is now his sister; his jealousy of Fionn, who is now Erika’s partner, and his terror that the Dublin that he knows and loves is succumbing to recession. The dream is well caught as a lot of people in Ireland feared for the future and felt that austerity might be something that would never end. People remembered earlier recessions and high levels of unemployment and emigration, and unconsciously those fears remained. In this book, the recession has come home to bite even those in Ross’s charmed circle. His former wife Sorcha, who had previously worked in her own shop in Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, has now lost the shop, the bank is threatening to repossess her own home, and, when she last put her card into the ATM, she was told she has ‘no actual money’ (Howard 2012b). Ironically, she will become a manager in the same unit in the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre, but this time of a Euro Hero discount store – a far cry from Sorcha & Circe Boutique. Even the great and the good are suffering, as Charles tells Ross, outlining the case of a prominent hotelier who has fallen on hard times, and Charles, while sympathetic, has contacted the receiver as he is aware of a number of prize possessions, such as a Ming vase and a pair of duelling postils that he would like to own. The whole tenor of capitalism is individual success at the expense of others: social solidarity, Howard seems to be saying, is fine, but for those who are successes in the capitalist framework, such emotions will always be trumped by the desire to acquire more capital, regardless of the context of such acquisition. The same is true of Regina Rathfriland, who is sitting in a restaurant eating monkfish, which brings a wry rhetorical question from Ross: ‘so this is life under NAMA,

124  From Prosperity to Austerity is it?’ (Howard 2012b, 45). We will later discover that Regina and Hedda, her daughter, are living in the Shelbourne hotel (hence the name of the book), something that causes a lot of anger: ‘taxpayers paying the bill and that crowd still living it up like nothing ever happened. Make you angry, wouldn’t it?’ (Howard 2012b, 66). Because Charles has money, however illicitly gained, he is able to deny, in a Freudian sense, the current recession and what it is doing to the country. Similarly, Ross, who at the end of Rhino What You Did Last Summer, on being told about the collapse of Bear Sterns remarks ‘Er, this affects me how exactly?’ (Howard 2009a, 409), felt able to talk about the recession in an abstract way. However, in these books, we can see that it does affect him as he has to work for a living, and he is now something like tabloid fodder, with headlines such as ‘Former Schools Rugby Star Shot’, and accounts of this being because he was part of a ‘mother-and-daughter love triangle’, though it is also suggested that the shooting could be ‘gang-related’ (Howard 2012b, 15). Because we see the narrative through Ross’s eyes, the declarative newspaper lines make it clear that he has been involved with dangerous people, and that actions have consequences, even for people like him. Like his father, Ross has spent so many years in denial that we the readers are lulled into the same perspective due to the empathy created by the first-person fallible narrator. Both father and son displace and deny throughout the texts to a very significant extent, thereby parodying the classes in Ireland for whom ‘recession’ or ‘cost-of-living crisis’ are really just words. In such a context, Charles is an uber-capitalist, collecting money and possessions as he moves through life, and disregarding laws, social mores and tax regimes with abandon. Ross, by contrast, can be seen as a sexual capitalist, collecting sexual encounters with women in a manner that parallels his father’s materialist consumption. Just as possessions signify power and identity for Charles, so too do sexual encounters with women signify Ross’s own sense of self-worth and identity. As his shooting at the Rathfriland house is being investigated, he is keen to let the investigating Garda know that he has been sleeping with Hedda, but also ‘sleeping with her mother as well’ (Howard 2012b, 11), and, in terms of suspects, he is also keen to let the Garda know that he had been sleeping with Larry Tuhill’s girlfriend, Saoirse, in the ‘stairwell one afternoon’ (Howard 2012b, 13). Ross’s nightmares, in one of which a nurse tries to shoot him, and his amnesia about how he actually was shot and by whom signify the extent of his repression and denial of reality. It is interesting that father and son are both defined by their commodification of property and sex, and also interesting that as the books develop, Ross’s own children start to take on a more important role in an increasing ensemble cast of characters. His daughter Honor will play a progressively important part in the series: ‘she

From Prosperity to Austerity  125 can be a bit of a bitch and I’m saying that as her father’ (Howard 2012b, 14), and his son, Ronan, is very much involved in these books and wants to introduce Ross to his new girlfriend, Shadden (Sharon) Tuite. This introduction will expand the satirical universe as the Tuite family will pay an increasingly large part in the subsequent books. Despite all of the trauma he has undergone, Ross remains Ross throughout the book, as his focus is still on physical appearance and his similes still make us smile: ‘the nurse is no scene-stealer … she actually looks like Boris Johnston with tits’ (Howard 2012b, 21). The family dynamic continues as Honor bonds with Charles, who is speaking in texting acronyms in order to connect with her ‘LMFAO indeed, little one. Even ROFL. With a generous helping of CSL’, but of course doing so in his own unique verbal style (Howard 2012b, 30). Moving back in with Sorcha while he recuperates sees Ross reengaging with the Lalor family: Edmund, her father who has always hated him; her mother, who gives him the benefit of the doubt; and her sister ‘Hafnium or Arnica or whatever the fock she goes by’ (Howard 2012b, 47). The fact that he can never remember her name, even though he has slept with her, is indicative of the value he places on women as people. We discover that the Lalor family home on the Vico Road, Honalee, will have to be sold, as they had borrowed money to buy bank shares. Despite being a successful barrister in the family law courts, Edmund had effectively remortgaged the house to speculate on shares, and the fall of the banks left him seriously in debt. There is a huge row as the daughters blame their parents in an angry scene in a restaurant: ‘You were greedy’ (Howard 2012b, 53), and they bemoan the vanishing of their inheritance. Edmund points out that he has bailed out Sorcha’s shop in Powerscourt for years, and that the other sister has never actually worked as he has paid for everything for her. The entitled sense of anger is well caught across both sides, as the insulation that wealth brought for upper-middle-class people is shaken by the recession, and even ‘people like us’ are having rows about money. A bubbling sub-plot in this book is the planned wedding of Erika and Fionn, an event that Ross refuses to believe is going to happen, as Erika has always been high maintenance ‘shop and awe’ being one of her nicknames ‘back in the day’ (Howard 2012b, 58), and Ross’s jealousy of Fionn is enacted as he attempts to seduce Eleanor, Fionn’s sister. In the middle of being fitted for their groomsmen’s suits, Ross has one of those sporadic epiphanies, those moments of clarity that stop the reader from hating him, as Howard changes narrative pace and offers us what passes for introspection, as he looks at his friend and how they have changed, as they have experienced ‘Unemployment. Divorce. Bankruptcy. Near-death’: Oisinn was once Ireland’s one-hundred-and-seventy-third richest man – now he’s not even allowed to own a bank account. Last Resort

126  From Prosperity to Austerity Asset Reclaim, the repossessions business that JP ran with his old man, is about to go into voluntary liquidation – they’re being sued by a fifty-five-year-old Blackrock housewife, who claims that JP drove her repo’ed Lincoln Navigator back to a motor dealership with her still sprawled across the bonnet. There’s talk of, like, six figures. And as for Fionn, he’s out of work and – like I said – in for the land of a lifetime. (Howard 2012b, 64) The almost fraternal bond between the ‘goys’ is the one constant in Ross’s life – along with the unending and unconditional love of his father, and Howard reminds us of this even as Ross’s life unravels in serious and destructive ways, paralleling that of the country. It all adds to the polyparadigmatic development of Ross, and his relationships, which keeps the reader interested. The Lamborghini that Charles gave Ross as a gift becomes a lightning rod for some of the anger that was bubbling in the country. Ross has been unable to drive it, and it has had the word ‘wanker’ painted on as well as the slogan ‘ANGLO – YOU PLAYED, WE PAID’ (Howard 2012b, 72), but Ross remains unperturbed. He goes on to have sex with Eleanor, but when her boyfriend, David (with whom she has broken up but is still sharing the house), unexpectedly returns, Ross pretends to be a plumber, putting on an inner-city Dublin accent, and then admitting ‘I have no idea why I assume a plumber would talk like that. Again, probably prejudice’ (Howard 2012b, 82). This again is part of Howard’s way of keeping Ross before us in a somewhat positive way. He at least has glimmerings of selfknowledge, which shows that while he may be entitled, he at least knows this at some level. He also has lied about not remembering who shot him, and in the eponymous moment of the book, he confronts both Regina and Hedda in the Shelbourne Hotel and gives them an ultimatum: he wants the one point seven million euros that his father gave her to keep Erika’s name out of the papers. Regina pleads penury and Ross responds with perhaps the most telling satirical line in the whole series: ‘come on, Regina, people like us are never really skint. Not the way ordinary people are’ (Howard 2012b, 87). This sense of entitlement, of privilege, is at the structural centre of all of Howard’s work. His writing skewers this, but not in an overt way: we still actually like most of these people, while being very aware that they feel entitled to hover over the vicissitudes of life, observing other people suffering but never being affected themselves. It is a significant moment, and it is underlined by the presence of Hennessey, Charles’s friend and crooked solicitor, who will do the actual work here but for a fee of 25 per cent. The fact that he will be taking money Charles provided is not a problem for him – again that sense of entitlement and of selfishness of an élite.

From Prosperity to Austerity  127 Fionnuala, in this book, has become a writer of what is termed misery porn, sad tales in keeping with the times, and her new book, entitled Mom, They Said They’d Never Heard of Sundried Tomatoes, has been made into a film. Her filmscript speaks of ‘sleazy-looking men standing about – clearly working class, generally idle’ (Howard 2012b, 94). The stylistic simplicity allows Howard to paint in broad brushstrokes, while at the same time drawing our attention to the subtlety of his own signification of the recession. So when Zara Mesbur, the young heroine, asks for organic truffle butter, we discover that the premises are no longer a gourmet food shop, but rather a Subway sandwich bar, and when she asks where she can go to get organic truffle butter, she is derisively told ‘Try 2005’ (Howard 2012b, 95). Fionnuala’s relationship with Ross is still poor, but his own relationship with Ronan and with Honor is strong: ‘I like that you’re living here Daddy’ (Howard 2012b, 99). His relationship with Sorcha – a fixed point in his turning world despite his many infidelities and lies to her – is also strong as he supports her as she works in Euro Hero. In a way, it is as strong a synecdoche of the new realities of austerity as the dialogue in Fionnuala’s film. Howard points to the different reactions people have to the recession: Sorcha’s stoic new job for a new condition is contrasted with Honor’s scream when she sees her mother working in the discount store: both offering real representations of how people felt. Ross’s own reaction is interesting in that, while he respects what she is doing in responding to the recession by getting a job, ‘it kind of disgusts me’ (Howard 2012b, 106). The mixed emotions about this period of time have never really been represented fully in fiction – we have seen sadness, depression, anger, frustration across a range of texts, but it is the fusion here of anger and regret and confusion that really catch the Zeitgeist of the Irish situation. These feelings, I would argue, still have a resonance today as we see homelessness, which can be traced back to this period, become a huge issue in contemporary Ireland, and there is still a very strong sense that the people who were central to the collapse of the Celtic Tiger have not really been held accountable. The self-loathing that Ross speaks of is still strong as there are elements of guilt, blame and also regret; indeed, Fionnuala has called discount stores ‘the potato blight of the modern age’ (Howard 2012b, 114), another example of the negotiation where the real is shown inter-dit, as the recession is matched to the single horror of a famine in which millions were killed or displaced. Many characters voice this in the books, with Sorcha being, as ever, the most vocal. She is talking about Claire (from Bray) and her partner Garret looking to open a small café in Bray and looking for a bank loan but have been refused, and Sorcha thinks ‘it’s – oh my God – so unfair. ‘Er, sorry, remind me who it was again who bailed the banks out?’ (Howard

128  From Prosperity to Austerity 2012b, 66). Later in the book, she goes on to extrapolate, putting words on feelings that so many people in Ireland had at that time and continue to have: ‘we’re living in a country where the Government has squandered the National Reserve Pension Fund bailing out the banks’ (Howard 2012b, 124). Part of the value of these books is that such statements, which voice the seriousness of the broader context, are interfused with the personal, as comedy is interfaced with serious issues. So Honor, whose sardonic comments and poor relationship with Sorcha ‘is life just one big period for that woman?’ (Howard 2012b, 124), asks Ross when he is going to have to leave as she responds well to his parenting, which involves repeating the role of Charles, giving her everything that she wants, and she is sad at the thought of him not being in the house. Howard spends a lot of narrative effort in giving Honor some really funny if cruel lines, for example on Princess Beatrice: ‘If she ever becomes a mother, can I have one of her puppies?’ (Howard 2012b, 171). Ross, again in those rare moments of introspection, notes despite her being ‘such a little wagon most of the time’, she is still just a ‘child who can’t understand why her mummy and daddy aren’t together anymore’ (Howard 2012b, 126–127), and he takes the blame for this, telling Honor, in a real moment of clarity, that ‘she was a better wife to me than I was a husband to her. And she’s a better mother to you than I am a father’ (Howard 2012b, 127), mirroring the pain of so many divorces and separations that happened during and after the Celtic Tiger as Ireland, entering a period of increased secularization and modernisation, became a more sexually active culture and new relationships were made, as social taboos about couples living together or separating became regularised and normalised. The books reflect how people have had to negotiate a landscape with blended families, new partners and a sense that marriage was no longer something that had to be endured until death. For a series to last as long as this one, there has to be an expansion of the narrative space and the number of characters involved, and Sharon (Shadden) Tuite’s parents, Kenneth and Doreen (or Kennet and Dordeen), are part of this process. Their introduction to Ross is to look for money to ‘mind his car’ while he is taking Ronan to a GAA match; Ross refuses and then returns to find the wheels from his Lamborghini missing. Needless to say, he is not impressed. The Tuites are petty criminals, and Kennet has a stammer, which is mercilessly parodied in the mimetic narration, and also by Ross, and this is far from being politically correct. Howard milks the speech issue for humour, but he also paints Kennet as quite a dark character as the books develop, so our sympathy for him is diminished, and we are less likely to blame Ross for being unpleasant to hum. As is often the case, satire and comedy can hurt as well as inform, and it is interesting that there has been little to no outcry among reviewers or critics over making fun of a character with a speech impediment. Ross’s comments on

From Prosperity to Austerity  129 the family are scathing. On hearing that Dordeen is thinking of buying a hat for a prospective wedding of Shadden and Ronan, he notes ‘say the only hat that anyone in Shadden’s family has ever worn is a focking balaclava’ (Howard 2012b, 147), while he recalls that Kennet drank a bottle of Jameson whiskey before cutting off his index finger with a breadknife and claiming that he got it caught in an elevator and got ‘ninety focking Ks out of some hotel or other’; Ross goes on to add that Kennet is ‘actually down to seven fingers now. The insurance companies have nicknamed him Edward Scissorhands’ (Howard 2012b, 148). This is a connection that will endure in the series as Ronan and Shadden remain close, and the Tuites and the O’Carroll-Kellys will also be connected; indeed, it turns out that Kennet and Charles knew each other when the latter was in prison ‘he was an un-fooken-beleafable support to the likes of m ... m ... me and a lot of utters in ta Joy. That’s norra woort of a lie, Cheerlie’ (Howard 2012b, 289). The blending of classes is central to the Menippean satire, and Ross’s impression of a plumber results in a running gag in the book as people keep ringing him up to come and fix their leaks, as they have been given his number by Eleanor’s boyfriend. On the other side, an ex-boyfriend of Erika’s, Fabrizio Bettega, has arrived from Argentina and is charming all the women, especially Erika, just as Ross did in his heyday. He is an Argentinian show-jumping Olympic gold medal winner, and Ross feels that he has designs on Erika, who is, of course, due to be married to Fionn. Fabrizio, on a whim, offers to bring a party of them to Paris, recalling the excesses of the Celtic Tiger in a very symbolic way. Ironically, it is Ross who tells the group that ‘it’s supposed to be a recession, can I just remind you?’ (Howard 2012b, 153). Through a series of changes – Ronan’s first sexual experience with Shadden; Christian’s return from the United States; a hilarious tryst with Blodwyn, a Welsh woman (who brings fresh eye-dialect: ‘a professional shoplift air – a recidivist offendare’) (Howard 2012b, 207); and an unpleasant meeting with Sorcha’s new boss, Mr Whittle ‘He’s one of those, I don’t know, cockney wide boys – like you see in EastEnders’ (Howard 2012b, 188) – Ross experiences a series of events where he has very little control or agency and, again, this reflects the sense of many people in post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. Even Ross’s trip to the Leinster-Northampton rugby game in Cardiff is now undertaken by ferry, and they are staying in a bed and breakfast as opposed to a ‘five-stor hotel’. As they watch Leinster come back to win an exciting match, and they are all drinking like they used to, the reality is expressed in an almost unseen way. Christian tells Ross, having come home from the United States where he had been working in a Star Wars-themed casino with George Lucas, that he has been sacked from his job, so he is in the same boat as the rest of

130  From Prosperity to Austerity them ‘four unemployed layabouts’ (Howard 2012b, 212). They deflect this by getting very drunk after the Leinster victory, and Ross puts an unconscious Fionn’s leg in plaster as a prank. Part of the strength of the series is that, like Chekov’s gun, characters seldom make a one-off appearance, and Blodwyn will return again later in the book, looking to meet Ross again. She appears in Kielys the day that Wales beat Ireland in the World Cup, blaming him for the fact that she has ‘just spent four months in fuck ken priss zen’ (Howard 2012b, 402), attacks Ross, slips and falls and becomes unconscious. Ross puts her in the boot of his Lamborghini, forgets about her and, at the end of the book, thinks she has been killed by Nudger, who he has finally asked to burn the car. As a comedic world is a warm world, of course, this is not true, and Nudger and Blodwyn become romantically entangled: ‘we went for a drenk. Within aboat ten mannets, I was thin ken, “Where’s he been hay den all may lafe?”’ (Howard 2012b, 413). As a couple, they will figure later in the series. The mixture of a new normal and an old normal permeates the book, as, despite Sorcha’s debts and having to work at Euro Hero and wanting to get Honor used to the new circumstances, her ‘Vietnamese nanny is collecting her from her very expensive primary school and bringing her to her Italian bel canto singing class’ (Howard 2012b, 232). There is also the chance for Honor to play the part of Zara Mesbur in the film of Fionnuala’s book, Mom, They Said They’d Never Heard of Sundried Tomatoes, but when her parents decide it is not a good idea, Honor turns nasty, calling Sorcha ‘a bitch and a pig in a pant-suit’, and when Ross, taking what is, for him, an unusually firm line, tells her she was ‘being possibly unfair’, she tells him that she is embarrassed that he is her father (Howard 2012b, 235). One of the most interesting aspects of austerity is the bringing together of social classes in a way that was not the case in the Celtic Tiger period. Shadden, Ronan’s girlfriend is very obviously working class, as Ross puts it, her family are not what his mother would call ‘PLUDs – or People Like Us, Dahling’, but Ross realises that ‘in fairness to her, Shadden very, very nearly is’ (Howard 2012b, 239), while a social worker feels that Honor is at risk of poverty, something to which Sorcha plaintively responds: ‘Honor’s not at risk of poverty. She ... she plays the Viola’ (Howard 2012b, 243), as her mother is working in a Euro Hero. As a personal parallel to the broader social situation, Fionn’s relationship with Erika goes from prosperity to austerity as well, as the plot that sees her being infatuated with Fabrizio reaches its dénouement at the wedding, where she arrives at the altar to tell Fionn that she is leaving with Fabrizio to live in Argentina. Ross, who has been long suspicious, had been texting her, having switched Fabrizio’s number for his own, and so he is aware of the situation. Indeed, he arranges a tryst with Erika, again in the persona of

From Prosperity to Austerity  131 Fabrizio, and he arrives to confront her in the Westbury hotel. He intends to take a picture with his phone and send it to Fionn and expose her, but when she opens the door and sees that it is Ross and not Fabrizio, she is not angry but crushed: ‘it’s like all of the energy that basically is Erika suddenly leaves her – happens right in front of my eyes – like the air being suddenly let out of a balloon’ (Howard 2012b, 248). He knows that he has really hurt her and despite his intentions being good ‘I wanted to stop you and Fionn making the worst mistake of your lives’, his methods have been horrible, and he has left her devastated: ‘I can still hear her through, like, three inches of solid wood, sobbing her hort out, in her underwear’ (Howard 2012b, 249). However, after all of this subterfuge and trauma, in typical procrastinatory fashion, she has not been able to tell Fionn, who is blindsided on the wedding day, as she literally leaves him at the altar and says she is going to live with Fabrizio in Buenos Aires (‘I don’t know if that’s a real place or if she’s just trying to throw us all off the scent’) (Howard 2012b, 254), with Ross’s internal monologue invariably lightening the dramatic moment. This juxtaposition of the dramatic and the comic has become an increasingly strong trope in the series, and here, comically, Ross’s plumber persona is also unravelled, as David slowly realises how he knows Ross’s face, and he asks Eleanor ‘Hang on. If he’s Fionn’s best man, how come you didn’t recognise him when he came around to fix the heating?’. Fionn, enraged, explains: ‘Wise up!’ he screams at David – this is without even looking at the dude. ‘He wasn’t there to fix the heating. He was having sex with Eleanor – you walked in on them’. There’s, like, a huge collective intake of breath. I’m telling you, Erika knew what she was doing getting the fock out of here. (Howard 2012b, 256) Ross’s reaction to this is typical, as even though Fionn and Eleanor are now both broken-hearted, his only real concern is himself – as ever. It is the ongoing parallel commentary that is so interesting and that makes the series fresh and relevant, as Ross’s internal monologue is normally very much at odds with what is actually happening, though all the time, reminding us, in an implied way, that his own sense of being special and part of an élite means that other people’s problems never really impact on him. Of course, this sets up the plot of the next book as Fionn, devastated at losing Erika, will take a teaching job in Uganda, as he announces later in the book. It is as if there are two narrative streams flowing in the same direction that every so often intersect and interact: what is happening in the world and Ross’s very idiosyncratic view of it.

132  From Prosperity to Austerity There are certain constants in the books, and Charles’s gradual deepening is one that we have followed. In the wake of Erika’s flight from the wedding, he blames himself, feeling that what she did took a certain coldness and asking how could she have been any other way when ‘her father watched another man raise her for twenty-whatever-it-was years, just a few miles up the Stillorgan dual-carriageway, and never said a word’ (Howard 2012b, 271). Another is Sorcha’s desire for a mother-daughter relationship that is positive, and Honor’s getting the part in the film seems to have achieved that ‘they’re both dressed in identical – what turn out to be – tangerine Baby Phat maxi dresses, blue-and-white-striped ballet flats and humungous Jackie Os’ (Howard 2012b). Honor begins acting and is seen as being really good. As Howard keeps his dialectical structure of positive and negative moving, balancing Honor’s acting debut is the controlled explosion levelling the Rosa Parks Apartments, a metonymy of the literal collapse of the Celtic Tiger, which reminds Ross of the great promise of the time, as he recalls the big billboard on the M50 at the exit for Ticknock with the three photographs of the new development; and the advertising and marketing images of ‘A dude putting on cufflinks. A woman sipping a pomegranate Bellini. A Newbridge Silver fork with a bit of asparagus on the end of it’. He then asks the rhetorical question, which again is the Lacanian real that will fuel the votes for New Republic: ‘where is that bright future that we were promised now?’ (Howard 2012b, 285). The final section of the book sees the appearance of a new character, Ross’s grandmother (Fionnuala’s mother), called Aida, who has been ‘in a mental hospital for, like, fifty-something years. She’s whacka-fockingdoodle’ (Howard 2012b, 294). It turns out that she had been living with an order of nuns and thinks she is still living in the 1950s or early 1960s, according to Sorcha. She takes a shine to Ross, and he to her, and they bond about their shared dislike of Fionnuala: ‘she’s genuinely one of the soundest people I’ve ever met’ (Howard 2012b, 310). When Sorcha’s father is haranguing Ross outside The Queens restaurant, Aida pours her bowl of chowder over him, saying ‘this here is my grandson. And you will never, ever speak to him like that again!’, going on to add that she is 92, and is not willing to listen to ‘horrible little men like you’, going on to tell Ross not to let ‘anyone put you down like that’ (Howard 2012b, 313). Sorcha thinks that Honor’s acting career seems to have made her less toxic, and she feels that the recession possibly has something to do with it: ‘the current economic situation is affecting everyone – even people like us. Playing the part of little Zara Mesbur, I think, has helped Honor to see that. I really believe she’s stopped taking things for granted’ (Howard 2012b, 315). Of course, this is untrue, and the attention has made Honor worse than ever, as she makes the life of everyone, including Fantasia, an American movie worker, miserable, calling her a ‘dizzy bitch’ and asking

From Prosperity to Austerity  133 if she wants ‘cheese with that whine’. As Ross observes: ‘I’ve literally never heard a kid talk to an adult like it before – although me talking to my old dear is an obvious exception’ (Howard 2012b, 322–323), and, again, it is the narrative irony of Ross not seeing how responsible he is for Honor’s behaviour that makes us smile. There is also the fact that some of her most hurtful insults – ‘you’re so fat, your car has got stretchmarks’; ‘he was so far in the closet that he was practically an accessory bag’; ‘Body by Fisher-Price, brains by Mattel’ – belong to Ross ‘actually my lines’ (Howard 2012b, 346), and rather than being horrified, he is strangely proud. Towards the end of the book, Fantasia and Ross have sex in a chemical toilet which, is picked up by its articulated truck in the middle of their tryst, dumping the two of them, covered in excrement and urine, onto the street. Part of Ross’s motivation was to try to get a file wherein Fantasia has recorded all of Honor’s horrible comments to avoid her staging an intervention with Honor (as Sorcha would see where Honor had first heard these insults). The same is true of his relationship with Ronan; as Tina points out, Ronan worships Ross ‘and he sees you sleepin arowunt’ (Howard 2012b, 334), thereby blaming him as a parent for the fact that Shadden is pregnant, which is another narrative strand that will resonate throughout the series. The pregnancy will result in a connection between Ronan and the Tuites and, by extension, between Ross and the Tuites, and no one is impressed by that family. Ronan’s friend Nudger, one of Ross’s ‘favourite workingclass people full stop’, is especially worried, calling them ‘fooken doort boords’, and, for Ross, this is significant as he notes that when someone ‘who sets fire to things for a living thinks you’re a scumbag, well, it’s a bit like finding yourself one morning having breakfast with a stripper – you’ve got to ask yourself what you’re doing with your life’ (Howard 2012b, 350). Again, the narrative for future books is seeded here, and the same is true of Aida and her painting. Ross buys her oils and an easel, and she gets her first sighting of the Lalor family home Honalee, a sighting that will have significant narrative consequences. It is only by looking at these techniques that we see the art at work in the construction of the series and the expansion of the dramatis personae; Ross tells her the house is called ‘Honalee. It’s from that song, Puff the Magic Dragon’, and he points out the house as the ‘big massive one with the turrets’ and when Aida is taken aback, he comments that ‘it is a focking eyesore’ (Howard 2012b, 341–342). He sets Aida up on the hill and she begins to paint and talk about her own relationship with Fionnuala, who she wants to meet. As the novel comes to its final stage, the different strands are drawn together very carefully, and a meeting between Fionnuala and Aida is set up, with Fionnuala being touched that Aida remembered the letters she had written to her up to the age of ten. The meeting is a success, ‘they seemed to really hit it off’,

134  From Prosperity to Austerity with Fionnuala texting Ross that Aida ‘can really drink!’ (Howard 2012b, 383). Aida is the one who brings Ross and Sorcha back together again, using the Socratic method to ask Sorcha lots of questions about why she ever married Ross and why they are now apart. Sorcha explains that Ross has fractured the trust between them, and Aida responds: ‘Well, I’m only an old woman, so what do I know? Except that you’re a beautiful, beautiful girl. And you’re married to a man who’s an auld fool – anyone can see that – but he’s got so much love in his heart’. I’m actually on the point of tears here. Imagine if Aida had been my old dear – as in, what would I have achieved in life if I’d had this woman in my ear pointing out my amazing, amazing qualities? (Howard 2012b, 365) The connection with Aida is well crafted, and it adds a dimension to Ross that we have not seen before in the series. The trope of the recession is ongoing, as Oisinn is now dismantling decking that had been erected in the Celtic Tiger, as Ross notes, decking and outside dining is problematic when one lives in a country ‘where it pisses rain three hundred and fifty days a year’; he also perceptively sees removing decking as ‘a metaphor’ for the ‘end of the Celtic Tiger’, what he calls ‘The Fall of Deckland’ (Howard 2012b, 366–367). Honalee is sold and Sorcha takes a last farewell trip there, and, as they leave, Ross plays Puff the Magic Dragon on his iPod for her and ‘that’s when I feel her hand on my leg and I hear the sound of her quietly sobbing’ (Howard 2012b, 376). Hennessey has got one point seven million from the Rathfrilands, but he buys a yacht with the money instead of giving it to Ross, and, as blackmail is illegal, Ross can do nothing legally, but he gets Nudger to burn the boat. Ronan, who has been pushed by his mother and school principal to do the junior cert early, fails every subject, and Christian and Lauren buy a sandwich franchise, called Footlong, as the narrative speeds to a close. They watch the Ireland-Australia World Cup game and are lost in the excitement of the victory: ‘we’re, like, dancing around like focking lunatics, with everything – me getting shot, JP and Christian losing their jobs, Oisinn losing everything, even Fionn being jilted – totally forgotten in a moment of pure joy’ (Howard 2012b, 395–396), but, as has happened so often in this section of the series, there is a darkness brought into the balance, as Aida, who had been watching the game with them, has died. At the funeral, Ross and Fionnuala bond once more; his car has graffiti written on it ‘Prosperity for you means austerity for us!’ and ‘Rich prick!’ (Howard 2012b, 398); while news comes in that Hennessey’s yacht has been burned. In a surprising dénouement, it turns out that Aida was also an artist known as Francis Weyermann, who had been painting in the

From Prosperity to Austerity  135 convent in Wexford for years, and these paintings were very valuable. She had an estate of close to two million pounds and used the money to buy Honalee for Sorcha. Her thinking was that giving her the house would bring solidity to the relationship and that she and Ross would get together; as Ross puts it ‘she loved me but she also knew me’ (Howard 2012b, 408). Remembering that even in times of austerity, this is a comedic world, and at the end of every comedy there is a metaphorical dance of inclusion, Sorcha and Ross decide to remarry, with Ross promising to be honest and telling Sorcha about Honor’s behaviour, which Sorcha is reluctant to believe. He also tells her that it was Honor who called social services about being in poverty, and they decide they will have to do something. The book ends with Ross being told by Tina that he is about to be a grandfather. The end of this book sets up a number of plot lines for the next three, where there will be more optimism about the future, something that Ross is able to maintain even in the darkest days. At the Leinster-Northampton match, Ross turns to Christian and says, ‘these fockers are an example to all of us. Never stop believing that things can get better’ (Howard 2012b, 215).

7

Bouncing Back

Downturn Abbey (2013) Keeping Up with the Kalashnikovs (2014) Seedless in Seattle (2015)

In these three books, there is a little more optimism about the state of Ireland and the comic universe of the series is expanded as Ross travels to Uganda, Argentina and Seattle for different reasons. Clearly, if the series is to sustain itself, there needs to be a broader situational context, and these three books are a significant step in this broadening. The title of Downturn Abbey refers to the television series Downton Abbey and the ongoing economic downturn. In this book, Ross becomes a grandfather, and his teenage son Ronan becomes a father. Honor is dropped from one of Fionnuala’s Hallmark Channel films and expelled from school. Charles and Fionnuala’s divorce is finalised, and Sorcha throws a Downton Abbeythemed party. Ronan comes under the sway of a local gangster, while Fionnuala moves from misery porn to MILF porn, with Fifty Greys in Shades, and she begins a relationship with Oisinn, while Ronan falls in with a local gangster. Keeping Up with the Kalashnikovs conflates the reality television programme Keeping Up with the Kardashians and the Kalashnikov rifle. Apparently, Howard finished writing the book on Valentine’s Day 2014, and he named it Raiders of the Lost Dork, a reference to the Harrison Ford film Raiders of the Lost Ark and the insult ‘dork’. A month before publication, the title was changed to Keeping Up with the Kalashnikovs, as the original title was considered an outdated reference (O’Carroll-Kelly 2014). In this book, Fionn is taken captive while teaching at a school in Uganda, and Ross and his friends go out to rescue him. Meanwhile, Sorcha has given birth to triplets and Honor is more difficult than ever; in a bizarre sub-plot, she echoes the film Willard by creating a little army of rats to wreak revenge on her school. The final book of this section, Seedless in Seattle, refers to the 1993 film Sleepless in Seattle. In this book, tying up some loose narrative ends from DOI: 10.4324/9781003124993-8

Bouncing Back  137 The Shelbourne Ultimatum, Charles decides to go to Argentina to find Erika. Ross is dealing with Fionn’s new personality, making an enemy of his daughter, and, when he gets caught writing ‘The Fock-it List’, this is the final straw for Sorcha, who now insists that Ross get a vasectomy. Clearly, we have moved a long way from Dublin 4 here, as the world of Ross expands, and the plots become more and more divorced from realism, the prominent mode of Irish fictional writing for quite some time. In Menippean satire, the unfettered and fantastic plots and situations ‘all serve one goal – to put to the test and to expose ideas and ideologues. These are experimental and provocative plots’ (Bakhtin 1981, 26), and these will help the series to develop and grow. In Downturn Abbey, the recession is still a significant factor, with political speeches being the backdrop to a number of the novel’s developments, as is the confused responses of some Irish politicians to the recession. Charles, whose increasingly national political positions set up a significant character development later in the series, makes the point that the Taoiseach is ‘telling the ladies and gentlemen of the World Economic Forum, no less, that we all went mad borrowing. He’s changed his bloody well tune, hasn’t he, Fionnuala? What happened to, “You’re not responsible for this crisis”? Quote-unquote, indeed!’ (Howard 2013, 178). Irish politicians often veered from blaming the banks, the markets and developers when making speeches in Ireland, whereas while abroad, as in this case, they tended to adopt a more penitential perspective. Ross, as the person who is sailing through it all, touched by the recession but still relatively immune from the consequences, can offer a wry response to some of these. In The Shelbourne Ultimatum, he notes Sorcha’s anger about the ‘We all portied line’. And she continues that some of us ‘didn’t lose the run of ourselves’: I’m just remembering the time she paid some Chinese dude in Crumlin nine hundred snots to have her Tao recentred while his wife burned eucalyptus candles and played Bridge Over Troubled Water on the Tibetan bells in the kitchen. I decide not to mention it, though. (Howard 2013, 69) The narrative perspective is important for satire like this as while he is in this world, he tends to glide through it, and even in a recession, he is gifted a Lamborghini and a mansion on the very posh Vico Road in South Dublin. However, one of the actual consequences he faces, set up in the last book, is that Shadden is pregnant, and Ronan is the father, which means that Ross will be ‘a grandfather at thirty-one. Jeremy Kyle would kill for an hour of airtime with me’ (Howard 2013, 2). Ironically

138  Bouncing Back this would be more of a social pattern in working-class families, where couples tend to be younger when having children, and it is another example of the comedy of social class that is a significant factor in these books. Needless to say, Sorcha is keen that Ronan, Shadden and the baby, called Rhianna-Brogan, after the singer and the Dublin footballer ‘one of his heroes’ (Howard 2013, 88), should live with them. In terms of signposting the chapter titles are always significant. In Downturn Abbey, where class is significant, the upper-class use of ‘How’ as a descriptor is in all the titles: ‘How Nice’, ‘How Marvellous’, ‘How Horrid’, while in Keeping Up with the Kalashnikovs, popular culture and music gives us versions of the chapter titles: ‘Hit me Baby, Three More Times’ or ‘Quizzy Rascal’, and the popular culture theme, especially film, is carried on into the chapter titles of Seedless in Seattle, where chapter titles such as ‘Gone Goy’ and ‘The Fraud of the Rings’ can be found. The comedy of social class comes in as Shadden and Ronan are clearly too young to get a house of their own, so they will have to live with one of the families: the Tuites or the O’Carroll-Kellys. Clearly, living in Honalee, Sorcha feels that they can offer the young family the very best possible home, and so her plan is to invite the social worker, Patriona Pratshke, to Honalee to see the environment and ‘especially when we get the floors polished and all the antique cornices painted – that this is the perfect environment in which to bring up a child’ (Howard 2013, 38). However, Ross had insulted Patriona on the N11 on the Stillorgan Road, and Patriona has remembered his shouted comment: ‘you want us to look for the G spot, but you couldn’t be bothered looking at your blind spot?’ (Howard 2013, 73), and this does not bode well for Sorcha’s plan. Patriona is shown the wealth that Sorcha and Ross can offer, or by Sorcha’s outlining of their ‘amazing house in Killiney’, in an area that ‘would be considered privileged’, and in which Sorcha had a childhood filled with ‘wonder’; however, Patriona is not impressed: Did you think you could just walk in here, tell me you lived in a big house in a privileged area and I’d agree to remove a sixteen-year-old girl from a stable home environment and make an order that she lives with you?’ (Howard 2013, 74) Patriona arranges a home visit and, again, the comedy of class is developed as, at this Christmas brunch, the Tuites will be present. However, again, Patriona is left unimpressed by the very ornate Christmas-themed buffet that Sorcha has set out, making the point that the visit is more about the suitability of them as people, ‘rather than the house’ (Howard 2013, 122), and she does not make any automatic assumptions that the middle-class

Bouncing Back  139 home offered by Sorcha is any better than that offered by the Tuites, who arrive en masse: Kennet, Dordeen and their children Eddie, Dadden, Kadden, Shadden and Enrique (Howard 2013, 123). For Ross, their very appearance is enough as they look like ‘ID parade fodder’, and when ‘you look at them … you instantly remember that you meant to increase the value of your contents insurance’ (Howard 2013, 123). The meal becomes a competition as to who Patriona likes better, the O’Carroll-Kellys or the Tuites, and it is very much played for laughs. When Kennet says he came ‘on de Deert’ Ross translates for Patriona ‘he means the Dort’, while she tartly tells him that she does not need a translation. The eye-dialect here is ironic as the actual spelling is ‘DART’ an acronym for ‘Dublin Area Rapid Transit’, and her remark makes it clear that in her mind, one eye-dialect does not carry any more symbolic capital than the other. In Bakhtinian terms, this is heteroglossic in that different voices and different languages are allowed to confront each other and achieve some kind of dynamic interaction, or dialogisation (Bakhtin 1981, 263). For Bakhtin, language or culture undergoes ‘dialogisation’ when it becomes ‘relativised, de-privileged, aware of competing definitions for the same things’ (Bakhtin 1981, 427). Ross and Sorcha clearly feel that they are the best home for RhiannaBrogan and her parents, but so do the Tuites, and Patriona, cast in the role of adjudicator, is open to either option. Possibly given the recession, there is a levelling out of attitudes and the old class-presumptions, while still very much present, are perhaps no longer normative or hegemonic. Kennet and Dordeen speak about the difficulties in Ross and Sorcha’s marriage, and Ross’s infidelity with ‘the nanny, wadn’t it?’, and contrast this with their own long marriage ‘we were oatenly noyunteeyun’, but ‘we were terribly in lover, but’ (Howard 2013, 125). Ross addresses the insurance claim culture of the Tuites (two of the boys are wearing collars on their necks), but Kennet retorts by reminding everyone of how Ross was shot by ‘a couple of big toyum crimiddles – mates of yooers, werdent thee, Ross?’ At this stage, Ross is desperate, and he says that the main suspect was the daughter of a woman he was seeing at the time, when Kennet comes in with the coup de grace: ‘you were trowing the b ... b ... boat of tum a length, werdent ye? Ta m ... m ... mutter and ta thaughter’ (Howard 2013, 126). Here Kennet is making the point that the habitus, to use a term from Bourdieu, that is created in Killiney may not be any better than that which is created in Finglas, and that while his family may have criminal tendencies, Ross is not clean either, and it is a good narrative technique, as readers tend to forgive Ross’s outrageous decisions because we have some insight into the decent man buried deep inside. However, this more objective, if spiteful, rendition of what happened in the last book is an

140  Bouncing Back interesting objectification of his life, as well as a satirical poke at the attitude that sees working-class crimes as bad, whereas middle-class, whitecollar crimes are seen as unfortunate. The term ‘habitus’ speaks of the ‘constraint of social conditions and conditionings, right in the very heart of the “subject”’ (Bourdieu 1990, 21); it is ‘social life incorporated, and thus individuated’ (Bourdieu 1990, 37); it is ‘as society written into the body, into the biological individual’ (Bourdieu 1990, 63). He sees it as a way of explaining how an individual is conditioned by society while, at the same time, contributing to the changes in that society. Different fields all contribute to the nature of the habitus; thus, in an academic field, the rules of the game include teaching, publishing, service at meetings and, at a more unconscious level, having the ‘correct’ attitudes, namely certain middleclass liberal values that are not written down but would be expected of any initiate into the system. Ross and Sorcha feel that their habitus is automatically better than that of the Tuites. They possess cultural capital, which, as has been already noted in Chapter 2, is a ‘form of value associated with culturally authorised tastes, consumption patterns, attributes, skills and awards’ (Webb, Schirato and Danaher 2002, x). Their habitus is structured according to middle-class tastes, ideas and values. It is ‘a structuring structure, which organises practices and the perception of practices’ (Bourdieu 1984, 171), and it describes the way structures are embedded in an individual and, indeed, a collective of individuals, so that they structure the individual as a person in a culture as well as internalising external structures. For example, the huge real Christmas tree, ‘Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra doing ‘O Tannenbaum’ and other Christmas classics’ (Howard 2013, 120), the fine-dining buffet that greets Patriona all speak of a middle-class habitus, which, almost by definition, is ‘better’ than a working-class one because of its good taste, and, as we noted in Chapter 2, ‘taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’ (Bourdieu 1984, 6). However, the list of personal decisions and actions taken by Ross deconstructs this habitus and makes the satirical point that, even for middle-class people, there are some consequences to actions, and the ultimate consequence is the arrival at the meal of a very annoyed Honor. Honor is jealous that they seem to want to replace her with a new baby: ‘you tried to swap me for that other baby. The one that Ronan had with that skobie girl’ (Howard 2013, 211). Since her part in the film, Mom, They Said They’d Never Heard of Sundried Tomatoes, Honor has been behaving even more badly than usual, although Ross notes that even before the film, ‘she was a little wagon’, recalling how she had contacted Childline and said she was a poverty risk because her mother was managing a Euro Hero discount store in the Powerscourt Townhouse Centre’ (Howard 2013, 5). Honor

Bouncing Back  141 has not tested well in preproduction, as her Irish accent was not seen as sufficiently ‘Irish’, and it did not match the expectations of the Hallmark channel audience ‘Where were all the begorrahs and the have-you-a-dropof-anything-wets and the sure-’tis-a-bold-colleen-you-are-indeeds? That’s what they wanted to know’ (Howard 2013, 93). This is a shock to her, as Honor had already been planning a spending spree using her ‘movie money’ (Howard 2013, 113). Blaming her parents, Honor sets off on something of a rampage in the novel, making horrible comments to everyone she meets, and she is expelled from school for bullying; she then has an injunction taken out against her for bullying other children; and she gets the family banned from flying after she insults the ground hostess: ‘Honor – out of the side of her mouth – goes, “Fock you, you patronizing bitch”’ (Howard 2013, 298), before going on to ask the woman ‘Have you ever wondered what your life would have been like if you’d been given enough oxygen at birth?’ (Howard 2013, 299). Ross and Sorcha have to send her to a state school in Ballybrack, something about which neither of them is happy, and the principal, Riobard O’Fathaigh, is not willing to listen to Sorcha’s very woolly notions about a broad curriculum, as she asks if the school teaches French or Mandarin or ballet, and if they have a ‘Peace and Justice Committee or a Yearbook Editorial Board’. He tells Sorcha that he is aware that Honor ‘comes with quite a reputation’, and that she is only in his office because ‘no fee-paying school is going to take her now’ (Howard 2013, 342–243). Honor, having already made the school secretary cry, ‘she’s mopping her eyes with a piece of tissue’, decides to confront the principal as she does everyone else, saying ‘how did you end up as headmaster of such a knacker school? I’d say your mum and dad must be rul proud!’; however, Mr O’Fathaigh is made of sterner stuff, and ‘literally explodes’, banging his fist ‘down hord on the desk’, and shouts at her ‘Don’t you dare address me unless you are asked a direct question!’ Honor is genuinely frightened of him and behaves better: ‘I have honestly never seen my daughter frightened of anything until that moment’ (Howard 2013, 344). Honor goes to the school, but very unwillingly, and she tells both Ross and Sorcha that she hates them, but they steel themselves and return to the car, where, as they pass the old Killiney Court hotel, Sorcha asks him to pull over and then ‘she storts just really sobbing … with the sadness of knowing that all the dreams she had for our daughter have died’ (Howard 2013, 356). Of course, the indulgent and over-complicated parenting strategies of attempts by Sorcha and Ross to buy off Honor’s affection are causal factors in her behaviour, and, while they can both occasionally see this, they generally are in denial about it and just hope that she will grow out of her current state of mind. Sorcha keeps waiting for the transformation, while Ross admits that she is awful and just avoids confronting her. The fact

142  Bouncing Back that the manner in which she speaks to him parallels the way he speaks to his own parents, especially his mother, is very much lost on him, though Sorcha has seen the connection: ‘but the way you speak to your mum and dad …. it’s the same way that Honor speaks to us’ (Howard 2013, 312), and this is a dynamic that will play out across a number of the books as Honor becomes a character in her own right. At the end of the book, as Ross and Sorcha prepare to renew their vows, Honor switches off the fridge the night before and the result is that there is ‘green slime everywhere …. Everything is ruined’ (Howard 2013, 401), and she also cut up Sorcha’s dress ‘there’s, like, pieces of it all over the bedroom floor’ as ‘a revenge for sending her to a national school’ (Howard 2013, 402–403). The Menippean satire of parenting is well set out, and, while Sorcha tries to be on-brand with modern parenting strategies, Ross just takes the easy way out; ironically both are behaving to their daughter as their own parents behaved to them. In this book, a number of relationships begin to unravel, especially those of Ross and his friends. His relationship with JP sours as Ross is dismissive of JP’s new girlfriend Shoshanna, an American, ‘a ringer for Diana Agron’. She is a ‘fat whisperer’ who persuades ‘fat cells to leave the body’ (Howard 2013, 140–141), and she uses the phrases ‘sad story’ and ‘happy story’ to summarise all situations; she does not like Ross, who sets up a situation with a baby monitor where he has the fat cells talk back to her while she is giving Claire from Bray a fat whispering treatment: ‘I WANT A BIG MAC FOCKING MEAL!’. Needless to say, the three run screaming from the room ‘They’re genuinely terrified. It’s one of the funniest things’ (Howard 2013, 210). Ross sees Oisinn having rather graphic sex with Fionnuala and is horrified: Jesus, he was going at her like a ‘fat dude with a bucket of chicken’ (Howard 2013, 372). He is very upset and is very angry and refuses to engage with Oisinn anymore, which is a pity because it was Ross who went to Monte Carlo to bring Oisinn back when he had left in disgrace and assumed a different name – Johnny Keith (Howard 2010, 416), as he tried to escape his debts of some 75 million euros. Indeed, in quite a moving moment, Oisinn, speaking about losing their Leinster medals, says he does not actually care, asking the question ‘what happiness did it ever bring us?’, as he has seen his whole life disintegrate at the end of the Celtic Tiger (significantly Ross has not yet reached that level of maturity, as he notes ‘I actually think he’s bang out of order there but I don’t say it’) (Howard 2010, 418). Poignantly, Oisinn takes out his own Leinster medal, and he gives it to Ross as a gesture of thanks and of friendship ‘He’s there, “I want you to have it ... Captain”’ (Howard 2010, 420). Given this level of friendship, it is especially sad to see Oisinn and Ross split over this relationship with Fionnuala. He is also very cruel to Christian and Lauren’s son Ross, telling him that he is a ‘sissy’ and that

Bouncing Back  143 his parents would be ‘ashamed of him’ if he was not able to play rugby: ‘you told him he was going to get the shit kicked out of him in school’ (Howard 2013, 366). The breakdown in possibly the strongest relationships in his life is another example of a downturn, and a way for Howard to show that even the Teflon Ross has taken on some damage in the fall of the Celtic Tiger. Financially he is still fine but emotionally he is becoming unmoored from his friends, and his role as a parent is also coming increasingly into question, as an angry Christian tells him: your son had a baby at fourteen …. your daughter was expelled from school for bullying. At six! You’ve raised a promiscuous teenage father and an obnoxious little bully who nobody – and I mean nobody – can stand the focking sight of. (Howard 2013, 367) The only person with whom he is still on good terms, despite the events of the last book, is Fionn, who comes back from Uganda for his sister’s wedding and tells Ross ‘you’ve got to sort it out – the four of you. I said it to them. We’re all too old to start falling out now’ (Howard 2013, 310). The comments on Honor are interesting as she is set out as a character that no one likes, with the possible exception of Fionnuala. When Ronan and Shadden organise a family portrait, and the Tuites arrive, it is Honor who compares them to ‘the Chamber of Horrors in Madame Tussauds’, and Fionnuala finds this hilarious (Howard 2013, 230). This is another stage in the broadening and deepening of the narrative- and character-base of the books, as Honor now gradually becomes a character in her own right, with quite a complex personality, swerving between being obnoxious but with occasional bouts of human kindness, just to keep the reader off balance. Honor will develop more fully over the next three books, and she is part of that gradual growth of the comic universe that makes this series so successful and so fresh, even after all of the books produced. Another relationship that develops very strongly in this book is that between Ross and Fionnuala. Up to now in the series they have been cast as some kind of Freudian nightmare, with occasional moments of connection, and in this book that connection becomes overt again on a radio programme. Howard uses a real programme where the RTE personality Miriam O’Callaghan has a show where she ‘meets’ two people who have some form of connection, and, in this case, she decides to meet Fionnuala, in her persona as a best-selling author, and her son. In this scene, we see the usual barrage of insults from Ross to his mother, which leave the radio host quite shocked. When he is asked about his earliest memories of her, he outlines ‘the smells of Eternity by Calvin Klein, extreme sexual frustration and the fistfuls of fresh

144  Bouncing Back mint she used to chew on to try to hide the smell of drink off her breath’, and he also describes her face as something that Tim Burton would ‘draw in a bad mood’ (Howard 2013, 245). So far so normal, as Fionnuala ghosts these comments, and she carries on telling her own romanticised version of her life. Part of the format of the programme is that the guests play some music that has personal significance for them, and Fionnuala plays and sings ‘Living in These Troubled Times’, by the folk singer Maura O’Connell, as she goes on to talk about how the whole country will get through these troubled economic times. Miriam then asks her about her son, this ‘fine young man’ who must rank as one of her crowning achievements, and Fionnuala stuns host, guest and reader by saying ‘no I wouldn’t say that at all, Miriam’, and Ross, who retains the ability to be hurtful at the expense of others, and yet is quite easily wounded himself, expresses that he feels he has been ‘kicked in the stomach’ and wants to call her a ‘hatchet-faced pronk, but the words won’t come out’ (Howard 2013, 247). The reader expects Fionnuala to speak about how awful he has been to her, but she does not do this; instead, she goes on to talk about their troubled relationship and blaming herself and her other interests and causes for this ‘it was entirely down to me’, and Ross is stunned into silence as he puts it ‘all my basic life I’ve been waiting for her to admit that and now the moment is finally here’ (Howard 2013, 247). Fionnuala goes on to humble brag, saying she has sold 37 million books worldwide and responded to ‘nineteen natural disasters on four continents’, which is what we expect from her, before she opens up about being a ‘reluctant mother’, someone for whom children were never part of her ‘life plan’. She admits that she could respond to natural disasters and bake for ‘poor children in Mexico and in Ethiopia and in Cambodia and in, em … I’ve forgotten what country Chernobyl is in’, but she could not connect with her ‘little baby – who was my own flesh and blood’, whose own ‘cries for attention and love and, yes, occasionally food went unanswered by a mother who was up to her elbows in self-raising flour and just self-importance’ (Howard 2013, 248). It is a searingly honest and very public confession and develops the revelations we saw in We Need to Talk about Ross. Ross himself is left speechless and surprised, and his reaction is priceless: ‘these are lovely things to hear, by the way’, but also sad in that he has so craved her attention that even this admission is a win as far as he is concerned. His Freudian love for his mother has never really been worked through, and this, of course, explains his anger at how well Fionnuala and Charles are getting on so well, even as they go through a divorce. He is appalled that they are celebrating the coming through of their divorce in The Gables restaurant, with champagne; as Fionnuala says ‘we’re still terribly fond of each other’ (Howard 2013, 179). Fionnuala goes on to make the point that seeing Ross with his own children and grandchildren has shown her the value of parenting: ‘He’s so

Bouncing Back  145 wonderful with them. So caring. So giving. So full of love. He really would do anything for them’, and she feels that he learned this, not from Charles, who was ‘a wonderful father’, but from her in a negative way: he learned ‘how to be a good parent from watching his mother be a completely disastrous one’ (Howard 2013, 249). Ross is very taken aback by this, and the irony of his former attitude to her is clear when his first song is introduced, a song he has told Miriam that reminds him of his mother whenever he hears it: “Fat Girl” by Niggaz Wit Attitudes; however, he demurs at this, and they have a nice conversation wherein he tells her that it was not all bad and that he has great admiration for her too. Miriam asks: would he prefer a different song, like “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien”? However, Fionnuala wants the original one: And she continues on holding my hand, while I dry my eyes with my other hand, and we end up listening to the entire song, the two of us just staring into each other’s eyes and smiling and wishing things had been maybe different but knowing that we wouldn’t be the people we are today if they had been. (Howard 2013, 251) Given that Ross’s strong male relationships are all broken at this stage, due to his own fault, Howard cleverly relocates him within his family since, while we dislike him in some areas of his life, in this comedic world it is very important that we still like him in other areas, as this gentle form of satire can really only be effective if Ross is still a character with whom we can, to some degree, empathise: we need to be laughing both with him as well as at him. This scene develops his polyparadigmatic dimensions and also allows us to see the nascent development of Fionnuala as a character because while his relationship with her shows his development, it also shows hers. This is carried on in his relationship with his own male family members and, in a negative way, in his relationship with Kennet. We discover that Ronan has borrowed 30,000 euros from Kennet to decorate the house in which he, Shadden and Rhianna-Brogan are living, and, as Kennet is a loan shark, Ronan is now working at minimum wage for him in a car-clamping release business just to pay the interest ‘which works out at ‘Tree hundoort percent ober ten yee-er’, according to Kennet, or ‘a hundred and twenty thousand euros’ (Howard 2013, 233). Kennet, who has been a comic character, attains a level of malignity in this book, tricking Ronan into a form of financial servitude and beating him by giving him a black eye. Ross, in a classic coincidence redolent of comic farce, is a jury member in Kennet’s trial for insurance fraud, and Kennet has threatened and bribed him that if he is found not guilty, then he will absolve Ronan of his debt.

146  Bouncing Back Ross goes along with this, until he finds out from Tina that Kennet has hit Ronan: ‘Do you remember the black eye he had the day of the family photo? …. It was because he missed a payment’ (Howard 2013, 390). Ross changes his plans at this stage and goes to his own father, looking to borrow the money: ‘So’, he goes, ‘is everything okay?’ I’m there, ‘I need thirty grand’. It’s incredible. He doesn’t even blink. He goes, ‘I think there’s exactly thirty thousand in the safe’. I follow him up to the study. I watch him dial the combination, open the door, then whip out a humungous knacker roll. He counts the fifties out on his desk, then goes, ‘Thirty thousand exactly! What are the chances?’ He shoves it all into a white envelope and all I can do is just, like, shake my head. I’m there, ‘Do you not want to know what it’s even for?’ He goes, ‘Well, I presume it’s important, Kicker. Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked’. (Howard 2013, 391). After not rigging the jury, which goes on to find Kennet guilty, Ross confronts him in the toilet, and he explains that he is the reason why the jury found Kennet guilty. Ross explains that he knows that Kennet ‘beat my son up. Your daughter’s boyfriend’, adding that he felt he could have rigged the jury but on hearing about the beating, decided to ‘get rid of that focking scumbag from his life once and for all’. Of course, Kennet threatens Ross with violence – ‘You’re gonna spent ta next few yee-urs lookin overt your sh ... sh … sh ... showulter’ – but in one of those unusual moments in each book when Ross actually does the right thing for the right reason, his response is impressive: No, I won’t. Because I’m not scared of you. See, I’m a lot of things, Kennet. I’m a liar and a cheat. I’m as thick as shit in the neck of a bottle and I’m a total bastard to women. I’m a total waste of rugby-playing talent. I’m a bad son, a bad husband and quite possibly a bad father. But one thing I’m not and definitely never have been is a coward. (Howard 2013, 396) Here, despite everything, he is standing up for his son in his own way and taking on the role of fatherhood, even as he acknowledges that he is a very poor father. This level of self-knowledge, a light that rarely, but regularly, peers through the clouds of narcissism that comprise Ross’s personality

Bouncing Back  147 is largely redemptive in that it provides us with a sense that there is more going on here. Over the books, Ross has moved from a flat character, an arrogant fool who is undone by a narrative irony of which he is not aware, into a more layered and complex character, capable of not only great cruelty but also great kindness. By getting him to own up to his many flaws after a book that sees him fall out with all of his friends, Howard keeps him in our readerly good graces, and he adds to this by burnishing the relationship with his father. After Charles unquestioningly gives him the 30,000 euros, Ross muses that while he has always been hard on his father, there were very good aspects to him, and he recalls a time in 2002 or 2003 ‘during the whole Celtic Tiger thing anyway’ when a car had stopped on the bridge on the dual carriageway just outside UCD. It had been there for an hour, indicating to turn but not moving, causing lots of angry motorists to honk their horns and call him ‘him every prick under the sun’ (Howard 2013, 392). The reason the car did not move was that the driver had just had a heart attack, and two or three hundred people had driven past him. And then Charles O’CarrollKelly blunders onto the scene. ‘The only man to get out of his cor. You can picture him, can’t you? Approaching the passenger door, going, “What’s all this how-do-you-do? Are you okay, old chap?”’, Charles gave the man CPR and waited with him, and he went to the funeral and contacted the family every year on the man’s anniversary: I never read that story in any of the, like, acres of coverage my old man got at the time of his trial. I read that he kept money from the Revenue and that he paid bribes and solicited bribes, too. But there’s also an incredible kindness in my old man. (Howard 2013, 392) When taken in tandem with the self-knowledge of the earlier quote, what is going on here is that gradual process of character growth and complication that Howard has gently and steadily achieved throughout the series. Ross is developing into something quite complex in terms of fiction. In this respect, he is unlike Bertie Wooster, who remains the same throughout the many hilarious books that bear his name but who does not really experience any emotional growth. Ross, however, does, as he develops polyparadigmatically, and we will see this as the series progresses in the later books. He will never be redeemed fully, and he will always have a nature that looks for short cuts and women with whom to have sex. He recalls having sex with Bernadette, a woman on the jury, with whom he had sex ‘that big lump of Tipperary beef – muzzle to focking hoof’, who he was trying to get to vote Kennett as being not guilty. He confesses that normally he would

148  Bouncing Back ‘would never cheat on Sorcha with a girl who looks like that’, but that he was trying to win her over to vote not guilty; however, he goes on to admit that though he is a ‘dirtbag’, he will try ‘to be faithful to Sorcha’, and as he reads his vows he will say internally ‘I’m going to do my best. I’m going to do my very, very best’ (Howard 2013, 398). In this description we see all of Ross: the misogyny in his description of Bernadette; the classism that comes through, as people from outside of the South Dublin enclave are somehow less human than others; the fact that he was having sex with her as part of a plan; but also the growing self-knowledge that he seems to be almost pre-programmed to cheat, to prove to himself that he is still attractive. He says he would never normally cheat on Sorcha ‘with a woman who looks like that’, which is telling as the implication is that if a woman looked attractive or desirable, he would have no problem cheating, which, of course, is the truth. The book ends on a positive note. The much-planned renewal of vows has been ruined, as we have seen, by Honor’s destruction of the food and the wedding dress, and Sorcha is distraught, but Ross, oddly, saves the day in his own unique way and in a manner that is typical of this comedic world. Sorcha sees only disaster, but Ross quotes Father Fehily, who said that ‘you can’t rewrite your past – but you can have a hand in directing your future’ (Howard 2013, 404). Once again, his words have a haunting meaning for Ross, and he goes on to give a quite moving declaration of love to Sorcha in his own voice, and very much as someone who knows that he will have difficulty in living up to what he is saying. He kneels down and takes her hands and declares that all of the trouble in their marriage was his fault: But there’s never been a day, Sorcha, when I stopped loving you. Not a day, not an hour, not a minute. The first night I met you – shit, that was a lifetime’s worth of luck right there. Look, I’m probably going to fock up again, Sorcha, because that’s just genuinely how I am. Old too soon and wise too late – another Fehily quote. I was stupid enough to lose you once. But I won’t be stupid enough to let it happen again. I’m going to give our marriage everything I’ve got. (Howard 2013, 404) It is as genuine as he can be, and all the more so as there is no audience: they are alone together and, as he puts it himself, ‘it’s a definite moment’, and Sorcha is moved by it. She realises that all of the preparations, ‘The God’s knot. The songs. The caterers. Ecclesiastes. The frozen affogato’ have really been displacements ‘and I’ve just realised that what you just said is all I really wanted to hear. And it doesn’t matter to me that no one else was here to hear it’ (Howard 2013, 404).

Bouncing Back  149 Will he keep his promises? Of course not, but in that moment he is sincere, and Howard gets us rooting for this couple again, and that is perhaps the core reason for the success, popular and literary, of the series. In an Ireland where religion has really become tainted by scandal and by its seeming inability to deal with the contemporary world, what we see in this fictive world is forgiveness writ large: characters here make many mistakes, and they get things wrong and do hurtful things to each other, and yet there is always forgiveness and that is such an essential human quality, at both the conscious and the unconscious level, that readers are drawn to it. It is why we still like Ross even after all he has done, and in the certain knowledge that he will continue to do wrong, because, generally, he is motivated by a strange sense of trying to help when he is not motivated by trying to get yet another woman to sleep with him, and it is this complication that makes the satire Horatian, in that we laugh with him probably more than we laugh at him. In an effective narrative segue, as he goes to the gate to put up a notice that the renewal of vows has been cancelled, he finds Oisinn, Christian and JP at the gate, and, thinking they have come to reconcile, he is pleased; however, in fact, they have come to tell him that Fionn, working in Uganda, has been kidnapped. This slides us into the next book, Keeping Up with the Kalashnikovs very nicely. Despite the cover of the book and the plot premise that is suggested in Downturn Abbey, much of this book focuses on Ross and Sorcha and Honor, who is gradually developing as a character, and the advent in their lives of a pregnancy with triplets. Ross has been reintegrated into the friend-group, but it is a slow process as they all still have issues with him. However, in this world, we know that reconciliation of some sort will ensue, and the advent of Fionn’s kidnapping, and what they can all do about it, is the glue that will gradually bind them together. Howard’s satirical blade in this book is directed at issues of racism, as Ross, typical of his class, is what one might call blindly racist in that he harbours no animosity against people of other races or against foreign places any more than he does against people or places in Ireland outside of South Dublin. His ignorance, of course, leads him to make serious errors, referring to Uganda early in the book as ‘Ooma Gananga’ (Howard 2014, 1), and in the previous book as ‘Ruganda’ (Howard 2013, 406). From the outset, Ross is anxious to just go to Uganda and get Fionn, with the others mocking his Liam Neesonesque voice as he says this, but this is not seen as possible. Fionn’s girlfriend Jenny arrives in Ireland to coordinate the efforts to find him, along with Fionn’s parents, Ewan and Andrea. As they all meet in the Orangerie Bor, in the Radisson St Helen’s, Ross, seeing a Chinese girl dressed in black, assumes she is a waitress and orders drinks from her: ‘the Chinese bird just stares at me like I’m talking in a foreign language. Which I possibly am to her. Some of them don’t have

150  Bouncing Back great English’ (Howard 2014, 15). Of course, it turns out to be Jenny, Fionn’s girlfriend, who takes umbrage and calls him a ‘royshulust’, as he is presuming that ‘ivvery Choynoyse person yoy moyt is a waiter or a waitruss’, and Ross, as ever, replies ‘All I’m saying is that that’s the way it usually is. And there’s a lot of them in petrol stations as well’ (Howard 2014, 16). Jenny, who is of Chinese descent but who was raised in New Zealand, offers Howard a chance to broaden his use of eye-dialect and, as ever, when one reads the words as written, it is very hard not to do so in an Australian/New Zealand accent. Ross’s relationship with Jenny will oscillate between active dislike to passionate sex in ‘the cor pork’ of Kielys at a Table Quiz to raise funds for Fionn’s rescue, in her ‘little Mazda, with the front passenger seat pushed back – me going at it like a porn stor, and her digging her heels into my orse and screaming shit into my ear’ (Howard 2014, 148). Once again, this demonstrates that his declarations of faithfulness to Sorcha are always frail, as he engages in the repetition compulsion by having sex with Fionn’s fiancée, even as his life is in danger. She is angry and asks him, ‘what koynd of a bahsturd moyks a moyve on his frind’s girlfiend whoyle hoy’s boying hild hustage?’, but she still continues to kiss him, which lessens the ethical import of her question, and as Ross wisely notes, ‘it’s one of those questions that doesn’t have an actual answer. Rorratorical’ (Howard 2014, 148). It will play out badly for him, as Jenny develops a real passion for him and wants him to leave his wife, which, of course, Ross will not do, so she threatens to reveal their affair to Sorcha. As he notes, ‘one of the things that I’ve never liked about women. It can never be just sex. They’re always testing you to see how much of a shit you actually give about them. It becomes annoying’ (Howard 2014, 190). There follows an intricate plot where he takes the money she raised in the Table Quiz and her credit cards and proceeds to gaslight her by sleeping with her again, and then taking her passport number and her credit cards ‘she’s got, like, a Visa cord and Mastercord. I put both numbers into my phone, including the expiry date and the three-digit security code on the back of each’ (Howard 2014, 193). He then opens her laptop and puts in a number of Google searches about cruises, books a three-and-a-half-week cruise, ‘taking in Busan, Singapore, Tianjin and Fukuoka’ for a total of 7,000 euros, paying for it on Jenny’s Visa card (Howard 2014, 194). Once the money is found to be missing, it is a small step for Fionn’s family to suspect her and the cruise searches and the cruise tickets are damning evidence and they ask her to leave, thereby saving Ross from having to tell Sorcha about his affair with her. It is unusually clever for Ross to be able to engineer this, but, of course, it is also horrific emotionally to do this to the girlfriend of a man who has been kidnapped. By making Jenny quite unlikeable, as she drops Fionn for Ross very quickly and changes her relationship with Fionn from

Bouncing Back  151 ‘girlfriend’ to ‘friend’ (Howard 2014, 173), Howard again saves Ross from opprobrium. He also provides a narrative escape clause, as we discover that Jenny has ‘Munchausen’s syndrome’, which involves ‘a compulsive need for attention’ (Howard 2014, 211), so when she tells everyone that she loves Ross and that he has slept with her, no one believes her, and she leaves for her plane angry and in tears. Ross’s response is interesting: ‘I should possibly feel sorry for the girl, except she focked with the Rossmeister General and threatened to take away everything I basically have. And I couldn’t let her do that’ (Howard 2014, 213). Again we see the oscillation in response from Ross, who sleeps with Jenny because the appetite strikes him at the time and who then has to go to enormous lengths to redeem the situation. His levels of denial are epic in that all the time he blames Fionn for picking someone like her – as if it is Fionn’s fault as opposed to his own ‘again, I can’t tell you how disappointed I am with Fionn. He deserves better’ (Howard 2014, 192). The Jenny saga is not done, however, as another female nemesis, Shoshanna, has found out about them, saying that he had sex with her and then took her money and set her up: ‘I’m there, ‘Those are some pretty serious allegations, Shoshanna. And if you’re going to be an allegator, you better make sure you have a certain thing called evidence’ (Howard 2014, 238). Shoshanna is angry with Ross, as he is the only person who will call out the fact that her baby, the interestingly named Ezra Dumpling, which purportedly has JP as its father, ‘is black …. Black or a black – or whatever the PC expression is’ and is told by JP to ‘get the fock out of here’ (Howard 2014, 105), with Ross wryly noting that the baby is more ‘Jay-Z than JP’ (Howard 2014, 75). Shoshanna tells Ross that Jenny has explained how during sex, he seemed to be ‘naming a team, maybe a rugby team, by rote’ (Howard 2014, 239), and she threatens to share this detail with Sorcha, who would know that it is something Ross does during sex to avoid finishing too quickly. In a parallel manner to his gaslighting of Jenny, Ross searches for the father of her child as a way of stopping her from telling Sorcha, and he finds out that her previous boyfriend, Kevin Plessy, a cardiologist, was black, and he sends him Ezra’s picture ‘to the Galway Clinic, with a unanimous note telling Kevin the joyous news that he is someone’s daddy’ (Howard 2014, 245). Despite the misspelling of ‘anonymous’, this is another example of Ross achieving a form of control over another woman who he feels is trying to ruin him. He is happy to cover up his own actions by doing harm to others and this is an ongoing pattern in his life. One could see this not only as a development of a negative character trait but also as a satirical comment on how people in Ross’s social class seem to have very little empathy for others, especially if such empathy would impact negatively on themselves: we are back in the world of an élite who look after themselves at the expense of everyone else.

152  Bouncing Back The theme of women causing him trouble continues in this book as Honor, fresh from her ruining of their vow-renewal ceremony in the last book, seems to have become something of a reformed character in this one. Her school reports are good, and she seems to be behaving better in all classes. However, her remarks are still very hurtful, noting when she hears that Ross Junior is still breastfeeding ‘Hashtag, Norman Bates much?’ (Howard 2014, 108), and telling Ross that she hates her school as she has to sit beside a boy whose ‘father is unemployed’ and wondering ‘what if it ends up lowering my educational expectations?’ (Howard 2014, 122). She has very little time for Rhianna-Brogan: ‘Can you shut that stupid baby up? Er, irritating much?’ (Howard 2014, 12), and when she hears that Sorcha and Ross are pregnant, she is horrified, calling Ross a ‘focking idiot’ and also asking how they could have been ‘so stupid’ (Howard 2014, 13–14). She is especially mean about the birth, asking Ross if he had ‘never heard of contraception’ and muttering to herself ‘hashtag, too focking dumb to breed. Something like that’ (Howard 2014, 28). Later in the book, after the Christmas concert episode has unfolded in its full awfulness, Sorcha wonders what they can do about her, noting that she is a ‘very disturbed little girl’ and Ross’s response is interesting. He agrees with her, ‘I know’, but then absolves them both from any parental blame: ‘when you think about it, we’ve given that girl everything she’s ever wanted. We’ve spoiled her, in fact. So we’ve no questions to ask ourselves’ (Howard 2014, 234). It is interesting that in his view, the job of a parent is to spoil their children, and when one thinks of so many of the women in this book who are spoiled – Sorcha, Erika, Honor, Fionnuala – then the reason for this becomes clearer and the satire, while overt in Ross’s case, is broader in looking at the class whole, critiquing in a Menippean manner attitudes to parenting in South Dublin. In terms of characterisation, Honor poses the same problems as Ross in that she is a perfect vehicle to satirise the spoiled, pampered, technologically savvy, environmentally conscious (but unwilling to give up any activities to improve the situation) middle-class girl, with very little empathy for anyone and a vocabulary that is increasingly divorced from what we might term normative English. So when Ross and Sorcha buy a Ford Transit Minibus because they need to be able to transport the whole family after the birth of the triplets, and her comment is ‘I can’t believe you’ve just agreed to pay eighteen grand for – oh my God – a special needs bus. Hashtag, lollers!’ (Howard 2014, 62), while she queries the environmental credentials of Sorcha in buying this car as her ‘mom gets very upset about people driving what she calls big gas-guzzlers’, before tartly adding ‘although that was before she storted doing her bit to overpopulate the planet’ (Howard 2014, 61). As he has done with Ross, Howard allows us to start to like her by first feeling sorry for her as we think she is being bullied at school. Ross notices

Bouncing Back  153 that the neck of her school jumper is ‘all torn’, which Ross, as a former school bully (though also bullied himself as we remember), takes to mean that someone has ‘grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and swung her around’; Sorcha has already complained, but the boy in question, Derek Drewery, grabs her jumper and says ‘this is what happens to little fooken poshies who can’t keep their mouths shut’ (Howard 2014, 196). She also bonds with a rat, Pippa, that Sorcha and Ross catch in the house. Pippa has a litter of fifteen rats, and Honor is told to get rid of them all, but she manipulates Ross into letting them all stay in the coach house, where she practices her piccolo for her rendition of ‘O Holy Night’ in the Christmas concert. This seems to show a new and nurturing side to Honor, in contradistinction to her attitude to the impending birth of the triplets, which is very negative. However, on the day of the concert, Ross eventually goes down to see them and discovers that there are now 94 rats, and that Honor intends to use them to gain revenge on the school, and especially on her bully, by releasing them in school through the ventilation system. She has kept them hungry so they will run riot ‘I always play my piccolo while they’re eating, so they associate the sound with food’ (Howard 2014, 216). Ross demurs, but Honor blackmails him as, in a plot originating from the previous book, Christian and Lauren’s sandwich bar has been shut down because they found ‘human matter in one of the subs’ (Howard 2014, 120), and Hennessey is representing them and looking to see what caused the problem. Of course, it was Ross who spat into a sandwich of a customer who was annoying him, and, terrified that the CCTV would show that he was to blame, he broke into the shop, using Honor to get in a window and toss out the video tapes to him, paying her 750 euros (also promising her more cages for the rats) in the process (Howard 2014, 125). So on the night of the concert, as Honor plays ‘O Holy Night’, a plague of rats descends on the school hall through the ventilation system and panic ensues. Alan Clarke’s drawings are, as ever, caricaturish but extremely evocative, showing the panic in the room. Honor keeps playing while the hall is in pandemonium, and, of course, at that time, Sorcha goes into labour, paralleling how something similar happened at the launch of Fionnuala’s Criminal Assets book while Honor was born. As they rush to the ambulance, Ross looks back at the stage and sees ‘this Drewery kid who’s been bullying her – lying flat on his back, blood pouring from a cut in his head and Honor’s piccolo lying on the floor beside him’ (Howard 2014, 227). In terms of parenting, given that Ross has actually driven the rats to the school and also made his daughter an accessory after the fact in a burglary, it is clear that huge amounts of blame attach to him, but his self-image is wrapped in a very thick layer of denial: ‘I feel shit about what I’ve just

154  Bouncing Back asked her to do, although I still see myself as an amazing father who just happens to be having an off-day’ (Howard 2014, 126). This ongoing level of denial is endemic in the books, and one of the moments of clarity he gets is when he realises that Honor’s plan is ‘actually my style. As in, it’s exactly like something I’d do?’ (Howard 2014, 217), and we have seen this in his dealings with Jenny and Shoshanna – in Honor’s case, the apple does not fall far from the tree. One of the things that Ross does, in this vein, is to break up the relationship between Oisinn and his mother Fionnuala, who is developing a cocaine habit in this book, talking very quickly and looking for drugs, as Ross gets ‘a phone call from the Gords in Store Street, to say that my old dear has been caught in possession of 30,000-euro worth of cocaine’ (Howard 2014, 247). He enlists the aid of Sorcha’s sister (whose name continually escapes him), paying her 5,000 euros to fix one of her breasts, which is sagging after poor plastic surgery, to seduce Oisinn, and he engineers that Fionnuala will walk in and catch them in the act, seeing ‘Oisinn standing with his back to us and his chinos around his knees, while Sorcha’s sister, with her legs wrapped tight around his waist, rides him like Frankel’ (Howard 2014, 186). This ‘style’ of dealing with people is definitely something that Honor has learned from him, and she is keen to make her views heard. Sorcha’s father and mother are getting a divorce, and Edmund has gone to England to file for bankruptcy; however, the birth of the triplets brings him home, and he and his wife reconcile and are asked by Sorcha to live with them in Honalee. He is no fan of Honor, and she reciprocates this view; Sorcha tells Ross ‘she told my dad to fock off this morning’ (Howard 2014, 259). However, as they wait for the birth of the triplets, Ross and Honor share some moments. He is ‘killing myself with guilt, basically’, as he thinks about how he has ‘cheated on her and lied to her and broken her hort so many times. And how if I lost her, I genuinely don’t know what I’d do. I’d be half a person’ (Howard 2014, 231). Sorcha has a hard labour, and one of the triplets is very ill his heartbeat is very low’, while Sorcha is also weak ‘the next few hours are vital for her’: I suddenly hear the sound of crying and I’m surprised to discover that it’s me. I’m crying and I’m doing it in great big heaving sobs. I cry so hord that it feels like I might not stop. Then I suddenly feel Honor slip her hand into mine and she gently squeezes my fingers. (Howard 2014, 232) Sorcha’s father, Edmund, confronts both Ross and Honor about the rats in the school, as he blames them for Sorcha’s being rushed to hospital, calling her a ‘stupid, stupid girl’ and saying that his ‘daughter could have died

Bouncing Back  155 because of you’, and seeing her as like Ross: ‘twisted and conniving and utterly self-centred’ (Howard 2014, 242), and he goes on to tell her that she nearly caused her mother’s death and that if the baby dies it is her fault and ‘you’ll have to live with that for the rest of your life!’ (Howard 2014, 243). This is too much for Ross, who grabs hm and slams him against the wall, with Honor shouting ‘Hit him, Dad! Punch him in the face!’ and Ross is very tempted, but he knows that Edmund would use this assault as a way to remove him permanently from Sorcha’s life. As they were walking away, Edmund comments: ‘You’re peas in a pod, you two’, and you can tell he’s delighted with himself: Honor turns around, looks her grandfather up and down and goes, ‘You’re an asshole. You’re actually a bankrupt asshole?’ And I know I shouldn’t laugh, but I end up, like, having to. (Howard 2014, 243) It is easy to understand Edmund’s anger and hard to blame him for his taking Honor and Ross to task; yet, Howard’s writing never really encourages us to empathise with him as he is often quite unpleasant and has threatened to kill Ross, ‘he has made two attempts on my life’ (Howard 2014, 242). Howard’s style will push us, mimetically as opposed to diegetically, to empathise with Ross, and increasingly with Honor, as the series progresses. Ironically, Edmund is correct as they are two peas in the dame pod, and this will become clearer as the series progresses. So in this scene, oddly enough we feel more sympathy with Honor and Ross, though possibly we should not. The balance of good and bad acts undertaken by Ross, and laterally Honor, is carefully achieved to entertain us but never to completely alienate us. In a way it is addressing the attraction that people can have to characters, in fiction and in real life, who are often seen as being far from morally good – one thinks of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson who have both been part of scandals that would sink many other politicians, and yet both of these men have won elections in two of the most strongly democratic countries in the world. So while we like Ross and Honor, a point is being made in this comedic world about the nature of our own decisions and preferences. Such points are implied but are not made explicit, though Charles will do a little more of that later in the series. The family dynamic of Honalee is made even more complex by Edmund and his wife staying there, as well as by Sorcha’s very real fear of Honor’s behaviour, ‘I’m scared ... she might hurt ... the babies’ (Howard 2014, 234), which is understandable, but again, in that character dialectic with which we are now familiar, Howard gradually softens her character so that we sympathise more with her more fully then we did before, so that we reserve our judgement as we see hints of redemption in her character.

156  Bouncing Back Perhaps it is the lack of judgement of any of the characters that makes Howard’s work, like that of Wodehouse and Pratchett, so enduring. He seems to just present what the characters do and then leaves us to adjudicate on them, offering them numerous chances of redemption, and in the comedic world, redemption, inclusion in the dance of characters at the end of a text, is always available. So just before Edmund shouts at her and blames her, this interaction takes place just outside of the intensive care unit, looking at the very weak and the very ill Leo. She notices the birthmark on Leo’s face, and Ross is expecting her to say something like ‘Hashtag, deformed much?’, but she surprises him, saying ‘I love him the most. She is terrified that if he dies’, It’s my fault. I know it’s my fault’, and then she all of a sudden bursts into tears (Howard 2014, 240). This puts Edmund’s comment in a completely different context, as we now know about how the triplets will function as, partly, a redemption trope for Honor, but Edmund does not. There is also a strong contrast in terms of how the triplets’ other grandfather responds to their birth, and narratively and ethically this also puts Edmund’s contribution in a more negative light. Charles is just happy at the birth, ‘They’re beautiful. They’re the most beautiful bloody well babies I’ve ever seen in my whole ridiculous life’ (Howard 2014, 251). The triplets and Honor and Fionnuala’s drug habit are one side of this book; the other side is the kidnapping of Fionn as he worked as a teacher in Uganda. From the outset of the novel, Ross is keen to go to Africa, but he has not been supported to do so. Fionn’s parents have called in an expert, Fred Pfanning of the Walsk group, who specialises in hostage negotiation and who will try to extricate Fionn. He offers Howard another chance to use his range of eye-dialects, as Fred talks like the airmen from Allo!: ‘Hellay’ (Howard 2014, 87). He forms an instant dislike for Ross, who he labels as ‘an all-round bed egg’ (Howard 2014, 88). Howard again weighs the balance here, as Fred turns out to be a cheat and a coward, denounced by Julius as a criminal who wants to take all of the money raised by Fionn’s parents and sister, half a million pounds sterling (Howard 2014, 308), and split it with the kidnappers. Much of the novel is about Jenny and Fionn’s parents looking to see how to save him, but the pivotal moment is when Fionn calls Ross from captivity, and he tells him that Father Fehily said to him once, ‘If ever you’re in trouble, just pick up the phone and ring Ross. He’ll know what to do’, adding ‘Ross, you’re my last hope ... I don’t want to die’ (Howard 2014, 265), and this will not be the last example of Fehily’s spectral presence in this book. At the end of a book where we have seen the worst of Ross, this is his chance to be a hero and, in his own idiosyncratic way, he achieves this through trial but mostly error. The rescue of course goes wrong, and Ross and friends are also captured by the same five kidnappers: Julius is the leader, who chews ‘khat’,

Bouncing Back  157 a stimulant, all the time, which ‘probably explains the mood swings’ (Howard 2014, 286), his sister Judith (likened by Ross to Forrest Whittaker the actor), Ibrahim, an older man, and Benjamin and Rolly, two younger men. The plot turns almost into an adventure story with heads being covered as they drive through bumpy terrain and a long walk through the jungle before being put on a pirate ship in the Indian Ocean, which is then attacked by a Russian gunboat. In the interim, Fred has also been captured and is confirmed as a low character as, when the group arrange an escape, and Ross, while having sex with Judith, manages to open Fred’s cell door, the plan was that he would let the others escape, but Fred just ran away ‘he focking pegged it’ (Howard 2014, 327), and the last we see of him, as a Russian gunboat opens fire on the pirates is as a ‘speck in the sea’ (Howard 2014, 374). Ross’s interactions with all things African are what might be expected. He asks a taxi driver about how long a journey will take, and he asks it ‘in English but with a foreign-sounding accent’ and, on being told three hours, he is ‘delighted with myself for being able to communicate across the old language barrier. I’m amazing in a lot of ways’ (Howard 2014, 273). Similarly, he buys a pair of Gulf War II desert camouflage trousers in the Hugo Boss store in Heathrow, and he is nonplussed to find that where they are going it is all jungle, so his trousers will ‘stick out like a focking pork chop in a mosque’ (Howard 2014, 272). He describes a run-down street as ‘kind of like Pornell Street, except a more extreme case’ (Howard 2014, 274), while as they drive for six hours across scrubland, which he describes as ‘a kind of hot Cavan’ (Howard 2014, 328). When there is danger, and there is real danger here as a number of the kidnappers are killed either by the pirates or by Russian fire, Ross is at his best, looking after his friends, saying about Christian ‘we look out for each other. When one is weak, the others stay strong. It’s how it’s always been. It’s how we were raised’ (Howard 2014, 333), and when Fionn feels that they are finished as bullets whizz all around them, Ross defiantly announces: ‘finished? I wouldn’t even know how to spell the word’, before disarmingly adding ‘I actually do know how to spell it, although I wouldn’t be a hundred percent sure about the number of Ns’ (Howard 2014, 372). Part of the reason for Ross’s confidence is his unwavering faith that Father Fehily is guiding his steps. It is a trope that develops as the series progresses and harks back to the dual father role of which we spoke in the early chapters of the book. He feels that they will find Fionn because ‘Father Fehily is going to lead us to him. He’s watching over us’ (Howard 2014, 278), and it is the quoting of one of Fehily’s sayings: ‘What is a mighty oak but a little nut that held its ground?’ (Howard 2014, 332), that causes one of the kidnappers, Ibrahim, to start at this phrase because he too was taught by Fehily and remembered the words (Howard 2014,

158  Bouncing Back 370), and it is Ibrahim who takes the handcuffs from Ross and his friends as they try to escape from the gunfight on board the boat, with another of Fehily’s phrases being used as a trigger, ‘he used to say it’s never too late to do the right thing. He definitely wouldn’t want to see us die’ (Howard 2014, 371). Once again, the hauntological effect of Fehily is apparent. It is a case of cometh the hour, cometh the man, as Ross leads them to safety, though, in the end, JP, Christian, Oisinn and Fionn deliberate about leaving him to drown, as he had just confessed all of the horrible things he has done to them all in the recent past, due to stirrings of conscience. Now Ross’s conscience is possibly the most repressed emotion in Irish writing, as he has sailed through many horrible actions and avoided guilt. Here, Howard allows that little bit of emotional development that will make Ross a character with whom we can empathise again, which is necessary after we have seen the horrible things he has done: ‘and it’s at that point that something passes over me, like a wave of nausea, which I recognise straight away as the stirring of my conscience’ (Howard 2014, 356), a stirring further strengthened by nightmares about Jenny in a straight-jacket, which he realises is his conscience, ‘which is now fully awake and tapping me on the shoulder to remind me what a complete and utter dick I am’ (Howard 2014, 365). In an orgy of confessional zeal, he decides to admit all that he has done. He tells Christian that is was he who spat in the sandwich that got their Footlong restaurant closed down; he tells JP that it was he who contacted Shoshanna’s boyfriend, and JP’s response (he has had teeth kicked out by the kidnappers) is to shout ‘Hoo hucking mastard’; he tells Oisinn that it was he who paid Sorcha’s sister to seduce him and that he brought Fionnuala back to the house on purpose to catch them in the act, and, having already admitted that he had sex with Jenny, he tells Fionn that it was he who stole the Table Quiz money and gave it to Sorcha’s sister to have her breast augmentation replaced. After this cathartic speech, and faced with all of their anger, he blithely comments that ‘if it’s any consolation, I’m actually feeling much better for having got all this shit off my chest’ (Howard 2014, 368). Part of the beauty of the fallible narrator is the dramatic and narrative irony that develops from his own perspective, usually quite a self-satisfied one, and here, as one can imagine, his friends gazing in horror at the man who has damaged their marriages, relationships and livelihoods, as he tells them how good he is feeling. A slight change of tone here and we are reading about a sociopath, but Howard’s comic ability ensures that, as we get to that point, we are pulled back into the comedic world again. It is this complete obliviousness to others’ feelings that prompts him to his final confession, ‘it’s good to get this shit out. The Jesuits were always big believers in the whole Confession thing’, and he goes on to tell

Bouncing Back  159 Christian that when he thought Hennessey would try to get them all free except for Christian, that this was not true, and immediately Christian sees the truth that it was, in fact, Ross whom Hennessey wanted to leave in Uganda for another six months. Christian tries to strangle Ross, and none of his friends try to stop him, and he is only saved by the deus ex machina of the Russian gunboat. The novel ends with the comic dance, that part of a comedy where all of the previous issues and problems are forgotten and the characters blend with each other in a form of harmony. Home for Christmas, the ‘goys’ gradually come together and there is forgiveness and redemption, with Ross reminding them that he had always maintained that they would be home for Christmas, ‘I had that belief. I’ve got incredible belief’. It is Fionn who offers the main words of forgiveness: ‘that’s why Father Fehily chose you to be our captain’, and for Ross that is ‘an amazing thing to hear’ (Howard 2014, 384). The book closes with an actual dance movement as they: end up forming a little circle, orms around each other’s shoulders, like a pre-match huddle, except no one says a word. No one needs to say a word. We take a little moment for ourselves before we rejoin the porty and before we’re pulled by different people in various different directions. See us five? We’re unbreakable. That’s the word for us. (Howard 2014) So, as Jenny might say a ‘sad story’ ends, broadly speaking, as a ‘happy story’ and Ross is at home again with his family in Honalee and is at peace, more or less, with his friends. In Seedless in Seattle, we see Ross as a father of triplets living in Honalee with Sorcha’s parents, and we also see Honor growing up as spoiled and unpleasant – it is as if she has all of the worst traits of Ross and Sorcha, allied to a frightening ability on social media to troll celebrities: ‘she was the one who called Little Mix “Pic n Mix” – this was when they were chubby. She’s got, like, eighty thousand followers’ (Howard 2015, 64), and she has tried to ‘provoke a reaction from James Arthur on Twitter by saying hurtful things to him about his face’ (Howard 2015, 9). Edmund is tired of her constant insults, and he has persuaded Sorcha to get her to see a child psychiatrist, Siofra Flynn, who has written a book called So Your Kid is a Prick (with the subtitle How to Create a BetterBehaved Child, and a picture of her own son, Jack, on the cover) and is a specialist in unspoiling children (Howard 2015, 5). Of course, Ross is against this, feeling that he has been an excellent parent and assuring Honor that she ‘won’t be going to see this woman, this focking so-called Siofra Flynn they’re all banging on about’ (Howard 2015, 7). As ever, Howard gently satirises Sorcha’s very carefully curated and on-point style

160  Bouncing Back of parenting by having her note that she thinks Honor has ‘Oppositional Defiant Disorder’ (Howard 2015, 52), as she looks for some external reason on which to blame her daughter’s bad behaviour. Sorcha is also eating heavily after the birth, and she has put on weight, something upon which Ross comments: ‘Sorcha piled it on during the final trimester. If I was being a wanker, I’d say I’m tempted to ask her to check there isn’t still a baby or two in there’ (Howard 2015, 22). Ross, noting that Sorcha had eaten a full Toblerone one morning, comments ‘she’s eating like an unemployed person’ (Howard 2015, 286). His default views on women as sex objects remain part of him, even as he tries to be a better person, though, again, the Horatian mode allows us, indeed encourages us, to give him credit for his efforts. Honor becomes more of a central character in this increasing ensemble cast, as her psychiatric sessions with Siofra are lampooned mercilessly. Of course, in reality, she talks to her parents in the exact same way that Ross talks to Charles and Fionnuala, and her snobbery and classism derive from her mother, whose 1994 Young Scientist project was a comparative study of the air quality ‘between the Northside and Southside of Dublin’ (Howard 2015, 16–17). The snobbery of both is unconscious and all-pervasive, and it runs through the language. Interestingly, Ronan’s daughter, Rihanna-Brogan, has an accent that blends South and Northside Dublin in equal measures: ‘she’s arthur spending half her life in Kulloyney and half in Fingerless, her accent is a birra boat’: ‘Hee-er, Rihatta-Burrogan’, Ronan goes, ‘what did you hab for yisser breakfast this morden?’ Rihanna-Brogan goes, ‘Poddidge’. Me and Sorcha laugh – you’d have to. ‘Reet’, Ronan goes, ‘so that’s normal, reet? Now, hab a listen to this. Rihatta- Burrogan, what’s yisser favourite foowut in the wurdled?’ And Rihanna- Brogan, in the most unbelievable Vico Road accent, goes, ‘Frittaaawta!’ Ronan and Shadden both laugh. Me and Sorcha laugh as well. It’s like those Nigerian taxi drivers you sometimes get who’ve managed to pick up a Dublin knacker accent – it’s genuinely funny. (Howard 2015, 237) The casual classism and racism are almost unconscious, but Howard, even in these asides, is underscoring the hard-wired class racial bias of this class of people even as he encourages us to sympathise with them: the Bakhtinian carnivalesque process of relativisation and de-privilegisation has come to Honalee and while there is judgement, interestingly, there is judgement on both sides, as just as Sorcha and Ross do not like the Dublin

Bouncing Back  161 24 accent, Shadden and her parents are appalled at the traces of her Dublin 4 accent. Notions of superiority are being poked here as there is no real reason why one is better than the other (neither are standard English in any way) apart from ideological ones. It is interesting that the inveterate snobbery of Ross and Sorcha is mitigated by his treatment of Ronan, who is very much a Northside boy, obsessed with 1916 and the Easter Rising, something about which Ross has remained blithely ignorant: ‘history was never my strongest subject at school. I was the one who thought the IRB was the IRA’s second team’ (Howard 2015, 19). When Ross discovers that they had a family ancestor, Donie Kelly, who was active in 1916, the delighted Ronan decides to do a project on him, and he is hugely proud. This book was written around the time of the commemorations and celebrations of the Easter Rising in 1916, an event that heralded the Irish War of independence and is seen as a seminal event in the genesis of the Irish republic. Ross, apolitical to a huge degree, has no interest at all, but, eventually, Charles tells him that Donie Kelly was not in the General Post office or Boland’s Mills, two sites wherein the Volunteers fought the British army, but was actually fighting for the British as he was on the gunboat Helga, which sailed up the River Liffey and shelled the Volunteers: The Helga was the ship that blew up Liberty Hall. He was the first gunner on the thing …. What I’m saying is that your great, great grandfather fought in the Easter Rising, Ross – but he fought on the side of the British. (Howard 2015, 54) Ronan is devastated: ‘You’re teddon me he was a fooken thraithor?’ (Howard 2015, 122), but Ross goes to the National Library and searches back through his family tree to try to find a member of the family who performed an act of heroism for his country, a search that causes Hennessey to drily remark ‘do they keep records from the Middle Ages?’ (Howard 2015, 139). However, with the help of Charles, he discovers another ancestor, Edward John Kelly, who was Ronan’s ‘great, great, great, great – and whatever else – grandfather’ (Howard 2015, 144). Ross has found that this man beat two British soldiers ‘to death with a rock at the Battle of Arklow and he supposedly stabbed another in the throat with a pike although the second one was never proven’, and the British went on to torture him by half-hanging (hanging him until he became unconscious, and then reviving him) to get him to betray his fellow rebels, but he refused to divulge any information, and so was hanged. Ronan is thrilled: ‘He was a marthur, Rosser. A marthur to the cause’ (Howard 2015, 145).

162  Bouncing Back The desire to trawl history for support of one’s own ideological position is satirised here, as is the over-simplistic trope that anti-Britishness is endemically Irish: the polysemic strands of identity unravelled in this episode speak, in parvo, to the more complex contemporary notions of identity in Ireland today and critique an over-simplistic nationalist politics that can be populist in the extreme. Charles is impressed by Ross’s parenting, and he goes on to try to find Erika, and a whole tranche of the book sees Ross, Charles and Helen go to Buenos Aires. It is Ross who finds her, working in a boutique called Ninos, and, after the shock of seeing Ross, Erika tells him that she is working in the shop, and as a nanny for a baby called Amelie. Ross is unimpressed: ‘Er, two jobs? That’s how poor people carry on. When they finally make good, you hear them going, “Back when my life was shit, I used to have to work two jobs”’ (Howard 2015, 186). She persuades him not to tell Charles and Helen, and it is only later in the book that the penny drops (ever a slow process with Ross), and he realises that Amelia is Erika and Fabrizio’s daughter (Howard 2015, 203). Erika runs away again, but she is reconciled with Charles and Helen in the comic dance at the end of the book, where Charles and Helen get married in the presence of all the family and extended family. The fact that Charles is willing to go to Argentina on the off chance of finding her speaks to some of his positive qualities as a parent, qualities grudgingly acknowledged by Ross, who remembers his father on the sideline of his rugby games telling everyone that they were watching the next Tony Ward even on one of Ross’s bad days (Howard 2015, 87). Notions of parenting are strong in this book with the different fathers doing what they all see as their best for their children, and the Horatian satire allows us to laugh at their errors while understanding their reasons for those errors. Hence, Ross assures Honor that she will not have to go to the child psychiatrist, while at the same time assuring Sorcha that he will take her. ‘Look, I’m on Team Honor. I’m on Team Honor all the way. But, unfortunately, I also happen to be on Team Sorcha’ (Howard 2015, 87). Honor is unphased by the meetings with Siofra, and she gleefully tells her about how Ross’s Fock It List, a reference to the 2007 film The Bucket List, directed by Rob Reiner, and a term that is coined in this context by JP, which is a fantasy list of all the women that Ross would like to sleep with before he turns 40. Ross had the list on his laptop, but, in a classic farcical scene, it is played on a 60-inch plasma screen TV at a family gathering of the Lalors, and Honor relates the effects with glee ‘it came up on the actual screen. Her granny was crying for, like, two hours solid! The priest had to throw holy water over the TV and the laptop! Oh my God, it was, like, so lollers’ (Howard 2015, 49). Siofra, like all women in the books, is described purely in physical terms: ‘she wouldn’t be the prettiest thing on the buffet’, as she has ‘two humungous warts on her face’, a point

Bouncing Back  163 noted immediately by Honor whose first comment to her is ‘Okay, give it to me, Siofra – warts and all’, which Ross, far from finding this embarrassing or out of order, finds funny: ‘I end up bursting out laughing – and it’s not me just trying to get back on Honor’s good side’ (Howard 2015, 30), though of course it is. Parenting as a popularity contest is gently lampooned throughout the series, both in terms of language and in terms of the type of children such an attitude develops. Siofra probes Honor to see if she is angry at Ross’s betrayal of Sorcha, but Honor responds in a manner that makes it clear she is not over-invested in the events: ‘Oh my God, you’re so good at what you do, Siofra! I’m looking around the walls here and I don’t see any qualifications. Did you even go to college?’ (Howard 2015, 50). Ross’s relationship with Honor tends to vacillate in the book, as aspects of her character make them warm to each other while at the same time, when he tries to be a parent, it does not work so well. For example, on being forced to have a vasectomy by Edmund Lalor, after the Fock It List episode, Ross takes revenge by burning all of Edmund’s books from his study, with Honor as a very willing participant. She takes some selfies and posts them on Twitter, saying ‘me and my dad just burned 4,000 books LOL!’, and for Ross, ‘it’s the “me and my dad” bit that really touches me’, and he hopes that in the future, Honor will look back and say ‘You know what? I’m glad I had that moment with the old man’ (Howard 2015, 76). It is the sheer vacuity of this that makes us smile, and yet there is a sense of feeling happy for him that he is finally reaching his daughter in some way, no matter how criminal or destructive the actual actions may be. There is satire, but it is gentle and Menippean, with some understanding of the reasons behind the actions. He wants to be popular, and he has no moral compass to show him that the lessons he is teaching her are very wrong. When she refuses to apologise to Edmund, he approvingly notes that ‘Honor doesn’t take Sweet Honey Iced Tea from anyone. I respect her for that’ (Howard 2015, 83). Their relationship is very skewed, as she hides his rugby tactics book and more or less blackmails him for money and fashion items. Ross goes on to bribe her into pretending to be good in order to stop the visits to Siofra, and Honor proves to be a good actor, convincing everyone of her changed behaviour, especially Sorcha, who had always wanted a mother and daughter as best friends scenario. Ross will do anything to keep up the appearances, and it turns out that Honor is keen to comply, as she offers a fake smile and an innocent expression, and Ross feels that ‘it would be possible to mistake her for a normal little girl’ (Howard 2015, 116). Honor fools everyone, going for organic chocolate facials with Sorcha and telling Siofra that she feels she has come ‘out from under a spell or something’, adding that she is very ashamed of her past behaviour (Howard 2015, 154), and the apogee of this is that Mount Anville agrees to take her back

164  Bouncing Back into their school. Siofra also addresses the issue of Sorcha’s parents living with them, noting that there is an unhealthy attachment between father and daughter that has implications for the marriage; she tells Edmund that he seems to have difficulties in ‘severing the father–daughter bond’, adding that she also does not think it is healthy ‘for in-laws to play such a hands-on role in parenting their grandchildren’ (Howard 2015, 338). While Sorcha is delighted that Honor seems to have changed, she is very unwilling to take on this aspect of Siofra’s expertise, and here Howard is pointing out faults on both sides. Ross’s behaviour towards Sorcha is poor, but having her parents living in the house and telling him what to do is a recipe for disaster, and, by drawing attention to this, that balance is kept in play in our changing attitudes as readers to Ross. Of course, her true nature will come back into play, as when Garret and Claire from Bray are at dinner, Ross plans to put flour in the sauce, despite knowing that Claire is allergic to gluten, but he discovers that Honor has ‘already done it’, with Ross saying that ‘you can’t fight your true nature. It comes out’, and this is born out as he had been planning to substitute Heineken for Garret’s craft beer, but Honor takes over and does it (Howard 2015, 295). In the final episode of the Siofra trope, her son Jack, the exemplar in her book, plays music with Honor but, from his quite obnoxious and critical behaviour, it becomes clear that, despite all of Siofra’s supposed expertise in the area of child rearing, ‘one thing is suddenly obvious. Little Jack is a focking dickhead’ (Howard 2015, 340), and after he is especially mean to Honor, she tries to stab him, being fended off by Ross at the last minute. Ross’s love for Honor is genuine, but, like so much else in his life, it is narcissistic, as what he loves about her is seeing himself in her. As he says, at times when he looks at her, ‘he is genuinely frightened for the world’, but at other times, when he looks at her, he sees ‘my own reflection looking back at me. And in those moments – I don’t care what shit there is between us – I love her like the day she was born’ (Howard 2015, 296). These moments are important as they help us to like Ross, and, in Horatian mode, liking the character is a significant aspect as it allows us to see them being satirised but still remain positively disposed towards them. Undeniably, it is central to his polyparadigmatic development as he ages and ‘matures’ (a word in necessary scare quotes), throughout the series. Honor’s attitude to Edmund is mirrored by those of Ross and by Charles. Edmund is very much in favour of Ross having a vasectomy, and he takes real pleasure in teasing Ross about it. Again, Howard is manipulating our feelings for Ross by having Edmund be such an objectionable character (though, to be fair, any man who had Ross as a sonin-law could be expected to be happy about the fact). In the aftermath of the Fock It List, he tells Ross ‘clearly you can’t be stopped from

Bouncing Back  165 philandering, but you can be stopped from reproducing’, which is fair enough from his point of view, but Howard adds to this by having Ross note that Edmund’s earlier very deliberate chopping up of sausages was a message to him (Howard 2015, 60). Throughout the book, Edmund teases Ross to the extent of showing him that the surgeon who will operate on him, Arthur, is something of an alcoholic, and he gets him drunk the night before the operation with Ross, just to add to his terror: ‘but he can’t. . . he can’t operate on me – look at the focking state of him!’ (Howard 2015, 161). His friends see the funny side of it, putting ‘one of those, like, lampshades they put on dogs to stop them licking themselves when they take their balls’, and noting: ‘It’s been a bad week for Leinster rugby – there’s no doubt about that. Johnny Sexton’s going to Paris and, in forty-eight hours’ time, they’re taking Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s balls’ (Howard 2015, 153). In the end, the deus ex machina is Charles, who had always felt that Edmund had been exerting too much influence. As Ross, thinking he has had the vasectomy as he has gone through the anaesthetic and the operation, reminisces with Hennessey about his father who had hardly ever let him down, he discovers that Charles asked Hennessey to sort out the situation, which Hennessey, the arch-fixer, promptly did by calling in a favour from the surgeon doing the operation, Eddie Chassay, a rugby and professional friend of Hennessey’s: ‘I hid a lot of money for him back in the eighties’, and tells him that his ‘best friend’s idiot son is having his tubes cut today’, and he would see an unsuccessful vasectomy as payment of all debts, and that is what happens. Ross points out that he has scars, but Hennessey explains that the operation is not a success ‘he made a few cuts. Said he had to make it look real, then he could always claim later that the operation just didn’t take’ (Howard 2015, 384–385). The old boys network strikes again, and the interesting thing here is that while Edmund has tried to play that card, it is Charles and Hennessey, who are both better connected than he, who actually triumph, and, once again, through no fault or action of his own, Ross is saved from the consequences of his actions. In terms of the architectonics of the series, there are some proleptic hints here as to future developments. Charles’s speech to a crowd about the horror of Johnny Sexton being allowed to play rugby in France is comical, as given all the contemporary social problems in Ireland, it seems very much a First World problem (though of course the people upset about it are the First World in an Irish context), but his speech-making and popularity hint at a broader political future. Hennessey says how much people love him ‘I said it in 1990. He could have followed Haughey, if that’s what he’d wanted’ (Howard 2015, 87), thereby planting the seed of the idea of Charles as Taoiseach which we will see

166  Bouncing Back happen later in the series. As a proleptic nudge towards the next book, Seapoint Rugby Club is mentioned in this one, as Ross tells Sorcha that there are teams ‘like Seapoint who would love to have someone like me in their firsts’ (Howard 2015, 84), while, later in the book, he again speaks about going ‘back playing rugby. Seapoint have been sniffing around me’ (Howard 2015, 328), and in Game of Throw-ins we will see Ross finally back on a rugby pitch but in a very different way.

8

Ross Grows Up (?)

Game of Throw-ins (2016) Operation Trumpsformation (2017) Dancing with the Tsars (2018)

These books focus, again, on the personal and on events that are close to his now extended family as well as to a sense of doing more things in the present as opposed to harking back to the dreams of the past. In Game of Throw-ins (2016), Ross finally returns to the rugby field with the Seapoint rugby team and plays, not as scrum-half and place-kicker, but in the forwards – a grudging admission that he is not 19 anymore. The title of the book refers to the TV series Game of Thrones and the rugby throw-in that is taken by the hooker, the player at the centre of the scrum, and Ross’s new position. In an increasingly ensemble cast, Ronan is in a turf war with a rival Love/Hate tour operator; Honor is in love with a Justin Bieber lookalike and Fionnuala is marrying a 92-year-old billionaire for her own reasons. In Operation Trumpsformation (2017), which channels the TV series Operation Transformation and American president Donald Trump, we see the development of Charles’s political career, moving from being an independent councillor who has been charged with corruption to a figure in national politics, something presaged by Hennessey in Seedless in Seattle. Charles sees Donald Trump as a role model, and he looks to build a wall around Cork, thereby bringing an Irish flavour to an American issue. Fionnuala is imprisoned, accused of the murder of Ari, her second husband, while Leo, Johnny and Brian develop an interest in soccer and Honor adopts a transgender identity, becoming ‘Eddie’, and taking up the cause for multi-gender toilet facilities. Dancing with the Tsars sees Ross and Honor enter a dance contest, with the title referring to the TV series Dancing with the Stars and to the tsars, former rulers of Russia, as Charles’s political dealings are moving towards dealings with Russian business, political and criminal figures. Sorcha is pregnant with a baby, though, in a twist to the normative narrative of Ross cheating on her, we see that the baby may not be Ross’s. DOI: 10.4324/9781003124993-9

168  Ross Grows Up (?) Meanwhile, Charles in government is at war with feminists, Sorcha is a senator, Fionnuala is making trips to Russia and Ronan deals with sex addiction while Ross and Honor aim to win the Mount Anville glitter ball. In Seedless in Seattle, Fionn, undergoing a reaction to his kidnapping, takes on the persona of a sub-Ross, a cocky, arrogant man, who treats women like dirt and tries to sleep his way through the women mentioned in Ross’s Fock It List. As he hopes to sell his story for a film, he maximises his own role, and he minimises that of his friends who rescued him: ‘Ross was there at the very, very end, when it was as good as over’ [italics original]; Ross is furious, claiming ‘I focking rescued you. We focking rescued you. We risked our lives. Me, Christian, Oisinn and JP’, and Fionn’s answer is revealing in terms of his own post-traumatic narcissism, but also in terms of the thoughts of an author whose own series is growing and developing in terms of characters and contexts: ‘It’s the story of one man’s ordeal at the hands of brutal captors, Dude. I don’t want to risk crowding the narrative with too many peripheral characters’ (Howard 2015, 253). The titles of the chapters are more thematically focused in these books, with references to Love/Hate and contemporary slang: ‘Nidge’s heir’ and ‘Netflix and Chill’; politics: ‘Eirexit’ and ‘Wiggyleaks’; and Internet clickbait hooks: ‘Twitter Responds to this Shocking Comment by Charles’; ‘Ross Makes a Discovery and it is Truly Stunning’ and ‘You won’t Believe What Yanet Garcia Looks like Now’. As Howard’s series unfolds more characters move away from being just extensions of Ross, or flat characters, and, instead, they become more fully rounded and take our attention away from him. As we have seen, Bakhtin considered that each utterance ‘having taken meaning and shape at a particular historical moment in a socially specific environment, cannot fail to brush up against thousands of dialogic threads ... it cannot fail to become an active participant in social dialogue’ (Bakhtin 1981, 276). The voices are ‘juxtaposed and counterposed in ways that can generate a creative energy, synthesis or productive outcome beyond the original’ (Baxter 2014, 36), and this is how Howard avoids the problem he has put in Fionn’s mouth; it is not just an accretion of characters but also a more choric collection and curation of voices, all of whom have agency and the ability to change and grow and shape the narrative. These new characters address new contexts and situations and make the series ongoingly relevant, something that satire necessitates, for as movements in society and culture change, so too do satirical and parodic targets. The choric voices create a polyphony that ‘calls attention to the co-existence in any text or talk of a plurality of voices which do not fuse into a single consciousness, but instead exist as different styles or registers, generating dialogical dynamism among themselves’ (Baxter 2014, 36).

Ross Grows Up (?)  169 Writing in 2008, Kevin Power of The Irish Independent stresses that Irish fiction has failed to keep up with Irish reality: ‘so we get literary novels about paedophile priests, novels about the Famine, novels in which farmers walk the fields – but who pops into Starbucks and orders a grande chai latte with soy?’ Power further argues that Howard is the first Irish novelist during the last decade to ‘have bothered to notice what modern Ireland is actually like’ (Power, 2008, 11). Certainly Howard ‘has a flawless ear for the verbal self-betrayals of our prosperous middle class’, something captured in the line from Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box, ‘it’s all, like, African, if that doesn’t sound too racist? (Howard, 2008, 118). Reading a line like that ‘you hear a whole culture speaking’ (Power, 2008, 11). The different voices, eye-dialects and class-based dialects and idiolects with which the series increasingly abounds reveal ‘the socially heteroglot multiplicity of its names, definitions and value judgments’ and so, the ‘writer confronts a multitude of routes, roads and paths that have been laid down in the object by social consciousness’ (Bakhtin 1981, 217). Part of this multiplicity is in the case of Honor, who in this book falls in love, who becomes less the very singular character whom we have come to know and who develops into something of a parody of a young girl in love. She begins asking Ross ‘do you think I’m ugly?’ (Howard 2016, 15), and she is mooning around. Erika finds out that she is ‘in love’ (Howard 2016, 30), and, eventually, Caleb comes to the house, who is described by Ross as ‘one handsome little bastard. If I had to say he looked like anyone, it’d be a young Justin Bieber’ (Howard 2016, 65), so just as we have a parody love story, so we also have a parody jealous-father story. Caleb is arrogant and insulting to Ross, channelling Ross’s own relationship with Edmund, something we can see but that completely eludes Ross. He asks if Ross is ‘a focking simpleton. You sound like a simpleton. All these dumb questions’ (Howard 2016, 66–67), but it is Ross who is the first to discover that it is Sorcha in whom Caleb is interested and not Honor: ‘it’s pretty obvious to me that the boy my daughter is supposedly in love with is head over heels in love with my wife’ (Howard 2016, 76), something that Sorcha denies though she blushes at the thought. Ross goes on to tell Honor as well. He meets Caleb’s mother, Flidais, who sports a very tight haircut ‘we’re talking a blade four all over’ and who has the features to carry it ‘I literally can’t stop looking at her’ (Howard 2016, 122). It turns out that Caleb has been taking Sorcha’s underwear and is using Honor only to be near her. Ross sets a trap and gives Caleb a chance to be alone upstairs, and then he searches his bag and finds ‘three pairs of knickers and one bikini bottom’ in the bag; Caleb denies taking them and pleads with them not to tell his mother, as she will send him ‘back to see that therapist’ (Howard 2016, 185). Caleb loudly protests his innocence, and he says that Honor asked him to go upstairs and get a bar of Galaxy that

170  Ross Grows Up (?) Sorcha keeps at the bottom of her underwear drawer and blames Ross, which we know not to be the case. Sorcha sadly explains that she does not like Galaxy chocolate. Flidais (with whom, of course, Ross will have sex), sadly explains that he had a similar previous obsession with their nanny Ainukka (Howard 2016, 188). It is a trope that is common in narrative, a young boy obsessed with an attractive older one; indeed, it has given the term ‘MILF’ to the language, but Howard deconstructs it later in the book when it suddenly dawns on Ross, in those rare moments of epiphany that he has, that it was Honor who set Caleb up, and Honor responds by taking a bar of Galaxy chocolate out of her bag. It was she who planted the underwear in the bag because she had seen through Caleb’s plans to be her friend so he could get closer to Sorcha. She explains that his motives were clear from the first night: ‘He was, like, all over her – and she was loving it, of course. Then every time he texted me after that, it was, Sorcha this and Sorcha that and, I’d love to see your mom’s letters from Nelson Mandela’ (Howard 2016, 203). Ross, of course, is delighted and tells her he is proud of her, and, in a manner redolent of Charles, he makes the point that: sometimes, we look at our children, and we hope to see the best of ourselves reflected back at us. But sometimes, we look at them and we see the worst of ourselves. And do you know what? That can be every bit as wonderful. (Howard 2016, 204) Honor will carry on her revenge by bullying Caleb, as she puts him in a headlock and forces him to lick the window of Ross’s car – again without any sanction from Ross, but, indeed, more of a sense of approbation: ‘there’s no real need, Honor. I had it washed this morning. I got the TriFoam Polish and everything. Hi, Caleb’ (Howard 2016, 278). We might ask why he would sleep with Flidais, and the reason can probably be traced back to the same emotions that gave rise to the Fock It List: a sense of getting older. When his birthday cake is produced with 35 candles burning on it, Ronan shouts ‘“Be careful the bleaten sprinklers don’t come on!” which everyone finds hilarious’ (Howard 2016, 50). Throughout the book, there are issues with ageing, indeed his whole return to rugby with Seapoint could be seen as some form of mid-life crisis, and, as is often the case with Horatian and Menippean satire, our liking for the character allows us to laugh with them as much as at them. Thus, he is given a camel hair coat for his birthday, and when he catches sight of his reflection in the mirror, he muses that ‘the process is underway. I’m turning into my old man’ (Howard 2016, 53). Hence, when in Copper Face Jack’s nightclub, he tries to chat up a young woman, who is a nurse, in ‘her

Ross Grows Up (?)  171 early twenties, with blonde hair and huge stonks’, called Denise, and he ends up leaving with her and her friends (Howard 2016, 40). However, in the bedroom he discovers that it is one of her friends, Breege, a ‘big focking barrel of a woman, with orms like Cian Healy, hair like Lisa Dingle and a wart on her cheek so big it has its own focking Eircode’ (Howard 2016, 45), that he is paired off with, and when he expresses his horror to Denise, her reply is revealing ‘I don’t know why you thought I’d be interested in a man of your age’ (Howard 2016, 48). His children become more central to the books, as Honor has taught the triplets to swear and they tend to punctuate all conversations with a stream of foul language ‘“Fock you!” Leo suddenly shouts. “And fock your focking Christmas”’ (Howard 2016, 22), and Sorcha feels that ignoring this is best in terms of parenting, so we are treated to a series of foul-mouthed rants from Leo, Johnny and Brian for the next number of books, as modes of middle-class parenting are once again parodied, and we smile at how very well-intentioned Sorcha, and very uninterested Ross, can both manage to influence their children for the worse. Of course, the ultimate in this mid-life crisis is Ross’s return to playing rugby with Seapoint. Here, after initially being highly disliked by his teammates, he becomes something of a hero, getting the new name ‘Rossi’ and trying very hard to keep up with his younger colleagues in the team, both on the field and socially, as he attempts to understand the new language; so, for example, when someone shouts ‘Wealth gag!’ everyone has to highfive every teammate who happens to be in the immediate vicinity (Howard 2016, 138). In his case, he is finally going to move forward in his life by actually playing rugby again, albeit in division two of the league with Seapoint and as a forward as opposed to a back. He is also highly personally aware that his life has been something of a failure, and again Howard makes us see a side of him that is very often occluded by his narcissistic stupidity. After a series of games in which he succeeds, and becomes something of a fulcrum to the team, he gets a concussion, and Christian, who Ross has pulled back from a destabilising alcohol addiction, feels that he should not play for his own safety. Here Ross has one of those rare moments of anagnorisis, far more common in a tragic character than in a comic one, but also a trope in the series where he is driven to change aspects of his life through a recognition that so much of what he says and does is actually a repression of the deep disappointment and repressed self-loathing that he feels. One of his phrases throughout the series, on being told something that the reader sees as negative, is ‘that’s a lovely thing for me to hear’, and we often mark this down as stupidity, but in the light of these epiphanic moments, perhaps they are just signifiers of that deep repression. Seapoint also provides us with a guru-type figure, the first of a number in the series, all of whom can be

172  Ross Grows Up (?) seen as avatars of Father Fehily, who still holds a cherished place in Ross’s mind. The coach, Byrom Jones, is from New Zealand, something that allows for more use of eye-dialect, and he wants Ross’s experience and guile, but, after an initially difficult training session, Ross is reluctant, and it is the connection between the words of Byrom and those of Fehily that brings Ross on board: And that’s when he says the most unbelievable thing. ‘Moyte’, he goes, ‘Oy doyn’t care uf yoy doyn’t beloyve yoy can doy thus – Oy beloyve you caahn’. Father Fehily used to say something similar to us: ‘Of course there’ll be times when you’ll stop believing in yourself. In those moments, I’ll just have to believe enough in you for both of us’. (Howard 2016, 81) Ross clearly sees Seapoint as redemptive for him and his life, and he tells Christian that he did not arrive ‘in the cor pork of Seapoint Rugby Club by accident’, noting that he does not ‘make a habit of driving through – let’s call a spade a spade – Ballybrack’, and going on to add that ‘He led me there, Christian. Father Fehily led me there … Yes, I threw it all away, Christian. But this is my chance to get it back again’ (Howard 2016, 314). The hauntological presence of Fehily is significant for Ross, as he feels that Fehily is in some mysterious way guiding his footsteps, and one thinks of Derrida’s idea that the haunting subject is not ‘identifiable’ but ‘one feels oneself looked at by what one cannot see’ (Derrida 1994, 169–170). In a moving moment, Ross admits that he has had a ‘hole in the middle of his chest all the years after winning the Leinster Senior Cup, and it was a hole that was the shape of rugby’, before asking Christian if he knows what it is like to be ‘shit at everything …. I’m a shit husband, a shit son – you know, there are days when I wonder am I even a good father?’ (Howard 2016, 313). This self-knowledge is something that allows for the possibility of redemption, a turning point for Ross, and it brings us close to him, as playing for Seapoint has in some way put him on that path to some form of redemption, however fragile: ‘that hole I was telling you about– it doesn’t feel as big now’ (Howard 2016, 314). As this is a comedic world, we know that, through trials and tribulations, Ross will eventually redeem himself and through a number of plot twists, in the final game, Ross actually gets to kick the winning point and relive his glory days as a kicker one more time at 35: I look at the middle post and I let myself become aware of the wind on my face, trying to work out how strong it is and how it’s going to

Ross Grows Up (?)  173 affect the flight of the ball. I take another breath – a deeper one this time. Then I run at the ball and I send it into the air with my boot. I know it instantly. I know it from the second I strike the ball. That’s experience. (Howard 2016, 368) The redemptive moment is not just the winning kick, it is the fact that he has realised that he cannot be what he was at 19, and that if his life is to change, both his behaviour and his attitudes have to change, and coming to Ballybrack and playing as a hooker in the second division is far more valuable than sitting on his couch, watching reruns of old rugby games. He is becoming active in his own life and living in his own present. Interestingly, just as Seapoint has become the turning point to reality for Ross, so Charles has a similar moment of anagnorisis when he finds a wig in the attic that ‘looks like actual hair’ (Howard 2016, 143) which makes him look like the Irish businessman and billionaire Denis O’Brien. This newfound confidence of Charles will develop in a very clear way in Operation Trumpsformation, but it is also in evidence in this book, as in the ongoing row between Ronan’s Love/Hate tour (an Irish television series about criminals in Dublin), and that of his rival Derek Tattan, or ‘Scum’ as he is known, which descends into violence, burning of buses and even Ronan’s friend Buckets of Blood being shot, it is Charles who comes to the rescue by proposing a sit-down between the two warring factions. They meet in a very working-class Chinese restaurant called Mister Wu’s, ‘and then underneath it’s like, “Beijing – Kowloon – Coolock”’ (Howard 2016, 329), and Charles works out a plan where ‘the Love/Hate Tour of Dublin and Love/Hate: The Tour could complement each other. You could encourage your customers to do both!’ (Howard 2016, 334). Derek, or Scum, is impressed ‘“you shoult be in poditics or something,” and I watch this register on my old man’s face’ (Howard 2016, 335). At one of his ‘Charles O’Carroll-Kelly’s May Day Political Think-Ins’, where friends from ‘politics, business and the Law Library’ drink Cognac and port and discuss ‘at a very annoying volume, various ways to make Ireland a better place for all of its citizens, but especially those who work in politics, business and the Law Library’ (Howard 2016, 338), he announces his interest in politics. Later, on foot of this, he will launch a new political party, and people are chanting ‘CO’CK for Taoiseach!’ (Howard 2016, 358), and this project will form the narrative core of the next five books as Charles becomes a nationally known politician. However the book’s main narrative addition to the series is, once again, the splitting of the relationship of Ross and Sorcha, who finds out that Ross is being sued for sexual harassment by a ‘woman from the Computer Laboratory in Sandyford’; she also learns that the letter from Nelson Mandela, one of

174  Ross Grows Up (?) her most-treasured possessions, was a forgery, and that Caleb said that he found the letter from Sotheby’s saying it was not genuine in Ross’s jacket pocket ‘while you were upstairs with his mother’. Unusually for her, Sorcha calmly responds but with a sense of finality, ‘Ross, I want you out of this house’ (Howard 2016, 351). The book ends with another bombshell as Fionnuala has been ‘arrested and chorged with Ari’s murder’ (Howard 2016, 369), leaving us on something of a cliff-hanger again, as has become the stylistic structure of the series. Operation Trumpsformation sees all of these narrative strands unravel further as Sorcha is looking for a divorce from Ross, while Charles is moving steadily up the opinion polls by espousing populist and right-wing rhetoric, paralleling that other bouffant, red tie-wearing politician, Donald Trump, and Fionnuala is languishing in prison though she refuses to call it that. Charles’s wig has given him new impetus, and New Republic has set out its stall as a populist party par excellence ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei and what-not!’ (Howard 2017, 9), and, as Charles makes a rhetorically strong speech, Helen notes that ‘he looks like that what’s-his-name – in America?’ (Howard 2017, 12), referring of course to the eponymous Donald Trump. Charles chooses Muirgheal Massey as his deputy leader, who had been a rival of Sorcha’s back in their schooldays in Mount Anville and who has sex with him in order to cement her position, and it is she who buys him a ‘red tie’ (Howard 2017, 163). Charles is positively Trumpian in his election promises, saying that he will abolish water charges, residential property tax and the universal social charge; he will restore public sector pay (which had been cut during the recession), he will provide funding to schools and hospitals, and then in a rhetorical echo of Trump’s election promises in the United States, Charles states that ‘we will put Ireland first! And we will make Ireland tremendous again!’ (Howard 2017, 15). Charles goes on to follow a well-trodden populist path as he looks for minorities to penalise and for other people to blame. In his case, he will blame the European Union – he wants to pull Ireland out of the European Union (which he calls ‘Irexit’, mirroring Brexit) and will penalise people from Cork. As well as connections with Trump, Fionn also notes connections between some of Charles’s speeches and a speech by Hitler. Charles spoke of ‘This idea runs like a red thread through our so-called bailout deal’ while Hitler had spoken of ‘A mad theory, but one which runs like a red thread through the whole Versailles Treaty’ and both speeches have the exact same final lines: to burden the economy of a great people with an unbearable load, and on the other, to destroy it as much as possible, to cut off all its opportunities’ [italics original] (Howard 2017, 263). Charles, as well as telling people not to pay water charges, is planning to build a prison (Aquatraz) on Lambay Island to incarcerate people who default on their water charges. In

Ross Grows Up (?)  175 the election, New Republic won 52 seats – including two in Cork where the locals are now seeing the wall, not as a means of ‘keeping them in, but as a means of keeping the rest of the country out’, and they have been offered an independence referendum by 2019 (Howard 2017, 219). The satire here is Juvenalian but in a reverse way; it is easy to lambaste people for being stupid to vote from people like Charles, but the fact is that here the fictive Ireland is less awful than the real world, where demagogues like Hitler and Trump, genuinely violent people with little respect for democracy, have been elected. What a lot of discourse, political and academic, fails to ask is why someone like him, with views that are clearly obnoxious and deleterious to the smooth running of a society, can still be so popular, and this book poses that question with regard to Charles. Throughout this series, Charles is popular with the reader – as we saw in the previous books, he is capable of great kindness and never seems to take anything personally, and he follows the populist mantra of promising everything and making up figures and numbers to suit his argument. In contemporary theory, writers like Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard have spoken a lot about the breakdown of grand narratives (Lyotard 1984, 37) and the proliferation of little narratives (petit récits) (Lyotard 1984, 60), and this is a view that has often been used in literary analysis. However, populist politicians have realised that this is also the case in society, as people who are homeless or destitute or living on a minimum wage have very little in common with the great and the good, and when they see that no one has been held accountable, for example, for the bank bailout and the problems that followed, there is repressed anger. Charles in the fictional Ireland, like other political parties in the real Ireland, is quick to attempt to form a coalition of the angry and the disenfranchised in order to gain power for themselves – once again, the real meaning is inter-dit, in that elliptical negotiation between the real and the fictive Irelands. What he is channelling is a feeling that our group is being forced to pay more than its share while others are not, so if a narrative can be devised that allows our group to gain at the expense of these, then we will follow it. And Charles makes this his aim, so just as Trump targeted Mexicans, so New Republic will target people from Cork. In a debate with Micheal Martin of Fianna Fáil, Charles calls him a typical Cork person, and then he extrapolates on this ‘When Cork sends its people, they’re not sending their best! They’re sending their whingers, their moaners, their complainers’ (Howard 2017, 176–177), echoing Trump’s comments about Mexicans, and he goes further in stating that ‘we’re going to build a wall around Cork – and we’re going to make the people of Cork pay for it!’ (Howard 2017, 177). Many people, disenfranchised by the austerity after the Celtic Tiger, are looking for a new paradigm and Charles and New Republic are very happy to offer one.

176  Ross Grows Up (?) The response to New Republic’s electoral success is the banding together of Ireland’s two traditional Civil War-era parties, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, in a historic coalition. Again, Howard is mirroring the actual events, as there is an oscillation – a negotiation – between the real and the satirised as in the real Ireland, it is Sinn Féin, and its electoral rise, that brings about this change after the general election of 2020, so Howard is prescient here. He seldom mentions politics in a real way, and Sinn Féin is seldom mentioned in the books. However, the orgy of promises and the idea that Ireland should stand on its own would have echoes of the translation of Sinn Féin (‘ourselves alone’), and the party was originally strongly against the European Union, and their vote would mirror that of the electoral targets of New Republic as being made up from the disenfranchised to some degree. While not directly satirising contemporary Irish politics, Howard is far more direct in his critique of the social revolutions that have run through Ireland in recent years. It is often hinted that Ross may be gay, and we remember his bromance with Harvey in Rhino What You Did Last Summer, and his detailing of clothes and brands, as well as his clear issues with overcompensation by listing the women with whom he has had sex; however, he is notoriously uncomfortable with gay people, and this is brought to the boil nicely in the context of the Marriage Equality Referendum of 2015. Ross’s discomfort is clear when he sees that Oisinn and Magnus, the ‘manny’ whom Sorcha hired to mind the triplets, have fallen in love. Ross is very much at pains to say that he is ‘cool with the whole gay thing’ (Howard 2017, 109), though he has issues with pronouns in a character called Broderek, a friend of Garret and Claire, as he is unable to come to terms with using ‘they’ to refer to Broderek who ‘favours they/them pronouns’ (Howard 2017, 63). Ross is unable to understand this, and he is immediately deemed to be insulting Broderek. In a misunderstanding that will be proleptic of a later one with Magnus, all of the others order a ‘deconstructed flat white coffee’ (Garret is taking a barista class), while Broderek orders a ‘regular latte’, Ross says ‘he’s the only normal one of you’, causing gasps of Horror from Claire, Garret and Sorcha, and when he tries to apologise, he only makes things worse: I’m like, ‘What’s wrong? I’m saying he’s normal because he’s having a latte’. Claire goes, ‘They’re having a latte, Ross’. I’m there, ‘What?’ ‘They’re having a latte’. ‘Who? Broderek’s the only one who ordered a latte’. Sorcha – I swear to fock – apologises for me? She goes, ‘I’m so embarrassed, Broderek’. (Howard 2017, 65)

Ross Grows Up (?)  177 Ross, despite having the best of intentions, falls victim to this form of liberal zealotry, with Broderek later telling him that ‘syntactic bigotry is a hate crime’, and Ross’s response is significant as he says, ‘I just used the wrong word, that’s all’ (Howard 2017, 79), as he is voicing a confusion often felt by people who are in favour of liberalising all sorts of previously repressed behaviour, but still find themselves being somehow on the wrong side of the debate. There is a Manichean urge to demonise or sanctify at play here, and Ross is demonised in this case, despite having good intentions. Sorcha’s granny, Mrs Wells, who figured in earlier books, pretends to be in favour of gay marriage but in fact is dead set against it, and we smile at the irony of Ross correcting her terminology at one stage. She is telling of how Sorcha came to their active retirement group and lectured them while she was playing dominos with Mrs Culloty and Mrs Rackard, saying that if they voted against the referendum ‘we were all homeo phobiacs’, to which Ross gently replies, ‘I think the phrase might be homophobists?’ (Howard 2017, 32). The fact that both words are wrong is funny, but less so is Sorcha’s Manichean view that any vote against the Marriage Equality referendum places one in the role of being a homophobe. The satire here is that despite her best intentions, Sorcha is something of a liberal zealot and someone who is not nearly as empathic and engaged with diversity as she likes to think. Similarly, Ross, who clearly struggles with the whole gay issue, is far more tolerant than he is generally seen to be. When Oisinn cried out, ‘I’m a gay man. I’m in love with Magnus Laakso-Sigurjónsson and I don’t care who knows it’, Ross points at Magnus and shouts, ‘You’re focking sick, do you know that?’, going on to accuse him of being into ‘warped shit’ (Howard 2017, 156). Of course, this is seen as a homophobic slur and Ross is attacked by all. It is only as we read the book that we see that he was talking about how Magnus introduced the triplets to soccer and to soccer cards about which they obsess: ‘when I mentioned Magnus being into warped shit, I was talking about soccer. I wish people would accept that’ (Howard 2017, 166). Here the satire is aimed across the different spheres as we see the pressure put on people to deny their own beliefs, as in Mrs Wells, Sorcha’s granny; we see people using these very personal and life-changing issues for their own ends, as in Edmund’s ‘witnessing’ of Ross burning the scarf; and we see Ross, who is genuinely not anti-gay but is uncomfortable with the new dispensation, being pilloried for this. Of course, the fact that he is not calling Magnus sick because of his gender orientation, but rather because he has made the triplets fans of soccer is just another prejudice, but not one for which Ross will suffer undue opprobrium. Sorcha’s zealotry, which will be seen in a different context in Dancing with the Tsars,

178  Ross Grows Up (?) also highlights and satirises a trend of crusading people not to see anything other than their own rightness. Ross is more nuanced and possibly catches the feelings of many people, who find themselves using the wrong word or not knowing how to react to situations: ‘I have nothing against gay people. Yes, I’m a nervous wreck around them. But one thing I am not is a homophobiac’ (Howard 2017, 168), and, again, the fact that he gets the word wrong is telling in itself. As he puts it, it is ‘just it’s so easy to cause offence these days without meaning to’: as all of these words and phrases are scattered around like focking landmines, waiting for you to stagger cluelessly up to them to blow you up. I’m not homophobic, Oisinn. I’m just a fockwit. I don’t give a shit if you like men, women or focking teapots, you’re my friend and I’d focking die for you … rugby, Oisinn … focking rugby. (Howard 2017, 312) He is voicing the confusion of many liberal-minded people here, who are genuinely on the progressive side of issues and social change but who nevertheless find themselves wrong-footed by an aggressive and, ironically, highly repressive policing and censorship of language and terminology by those who see themselves as the advance guard of any social change movement. That such repression and censorship are two of the Catholic and conservative values that these people abhor seems to be an irony that flies over their heads, and Howard traces this beautifully, if gently. Ross is not the only member of his family in trouble in this book, as Fionnuala is in prison and on trial for the murder of Ari, and it is Ross whose statements in court are part of what saves her, along with a picture from the honeymoon of a burn mark on Aris’s foot, as the claim is that Fionnuala dropped a two-bar electric heater into a bath, electrocuted him, and then dried the body and put him next to a treadmill where it was seen that he had a heart attack. Throughout the book, Ross wavers between believing she could have killed him and doubting it, and, because of no omniscient narrative perspective, we are in the same position as him. Under cross-examination, he explains that ‘the woman is a wagon. She’s a weapon of mass destruction. If she’d thrown me to wolves on the day I was born, they would have made a better fist of raising me than her. But she’s not a killer’ (Howard 2017, 345). The book ends, setting up another narrative trope for the future of the series when Ross, looking in the nuclear shelter in the family home, sees that on top of the pool table ‘all dirty and blackened, is the weapon my old dear used to murder Ari Samuels. It’s a two-bor electric heater’ (Howard 2017, 352). The polyphonic cast that is very much a development of the series is further established across the theme of new attitudes to gender roles that

Ross Grows Up (?)  179 are found in the actions of Honor, who has decided that her biological gender is not her gender of choice and decides ‘I don’t want to be known as Honor anymore. I want you to call me Eddie’ (Howard 2017, 222). As is his wont, Ross is emotionally open to this, but unsure of what to do or what to say, asking Sorcha ‘how do I talk to her?’, and she replies ‘Him, Ross’, and Ross wonders if he should just ‘talk about all blokey stuff?’ (Howard 2017, 226). As ever, he does his best and is as supportive as he can be whereas Sorcha, who is running for election, is loud in Eddie’s favour and terrorises the principal of Mount Anville, Mr Wade, as Eddie looks for more transgender and polygender toilets in the school. Mr Wade is keen to be supportive, but as the amount of different toilet requirements grows, he is having to close classrooms to ensure that there is enough space for all of these: ‘There’s Hermaphrodites’, Eddie goes, ‘who have male and female sexual organs; Germaphrodites, who have male and female sexual organs and an obsession with bodily cleanliness; and Permaphrodites, who have male and female sexual organs and big hair. There’s Drag Queens, Slag Queens, Skag Queens and Nag Queens’. (Howard 2017, 301–302) When asked how many actual toilets are needed, the number used is 64, and Eddie stresses that if these are not provided, then it shows that Mr Wade is a ‘bigot’. Sorcha adds her quite strident voice to this, shouting that if he does not provide these toilets ‘we will make a complaint to the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission. And you can all account for your hate crimes in front of them’ (Howard 2017, 302). The almost kneejerk invocation of legal rights and sanctions is typical of such middle-class discussions, and, again, Howard is lampooning the fact that even as people look to liberalise conditions for an oppressed and unvoiced minority in society, they can do this by blindly oppressing other people with whom they do not agree. Ross’s obtuseness does make us smile, as he is at times self-aware enough to know that he is not a smart man; Sorcha’s can be irritating, as with all her intellectual advantages, the reader expects more from her, and here the satire is especially pointed, as we the readers are prone to make excuses for Ross but not for Sorcha. As Honor, were she to break the fourth wall, might put it: ‘gender-bias much?’ Sorcha is very much in favour of this new orthodoxy, differentiating between ‘Lolosexuals’, who ‘find the notion of sexuality laugh out loud funny’, and ‘Hohosexuals’, who find the ‘notion of sexuality side-splittingly hilarious’. Ross calls it to use his own term by asking ‘could they not piss and shit in the same place?’; however, Mr Wade sadly intones that ‘your wife doesn’t think so. That’s why she screamed at me on the phone’

180  Ross Grows Up (?) (Howard 2017, 337). Sorcha’s efforts to be woke and ahead of the liberal curve, allied to a real need to find some issue about which she can bond with her daughter, means that she is very much Eddie’s standard-bearer in the issue of the toilets at Mount Anville, and she is happy to use the rhetoric of victimhood as she does so, quoting German Lutheran pastor Martin Niemöller’s evocative credo ‘Zuerst kamen sie …’: ‘First they came for the communists …’, but adapting it to the present cause: ‘First they came for the hohosexuals and I did not speak out …’ However, in a plot dénouement that is unexpected, but not shocking given what we already know, Eddie explains that there is no such thing as a ‘hohosexual’, the term is fictional; what she has produced is a carnival of gender creation, a lot of which is made up. Sorcha disagrees pointing out that she has read ‘their amazing, amazing stories on the Internet’, but the reply is telling: ‘Yeah, they’re only a thing in America. They’re the children of divorced parents who are looking for attention’ (Howard 2017, 338), which, of course, is exactly the perspective from where Eddie/Honor is coming. And I use the double identity as Honor makes it clear that she has no issues at all with her assigned gender, ‘“Yeah, mic drop!” he goes – or she goes, it seems to be again. “I was just taking the piss out of the whole transgender thing. I wanted to see how far I could push you”’ (Howard 2017, 339). Howard weighs the satire in Ross’s favour again, as he is wondering about whether Eddie’s love for rugby was real. Sorcha is horrified, not about the deception or about the state of mind that would allow Honor to perpetrate such a scheme, but rather about its effect on her electoral chances, reminding us that ‘having a genderqueer son was a huge port of my election Platform’, as she was ‘brought up to embrace diversity’. Honor’s bitter reply should, but does not, sting her to the core: ‘No wonder no one voted for you – you bogus bitch’ (Howard 2017, 339). There is a real hatred at work here, and Howard manages to get Honor to voice it but still remains in some ways a likeable character. To be fair, in many ways, the comments of Edmund ring true here narratively, as both she and Ross are very much peas in the same pod, as both should be hated by the reader but are not. Her connection with Ross is something of a saving grace for them both, even though Sorcha blames Ross for the way she has turned out, Honor denies it, saying ‘I’d be a bitch anyway. But he’s my dad. And he doesn’t give a shit what I am. He just loves me for me’ (Howard 2017, 342). The triplets, in their own scatological way, are also on Ross’s side contra Edmund: ‘“Fock!” Leo shouts, summing up my thoughts exactly. “Fock this focking focker” (Howard 2017, 6); ‘“Look at this focking prick!” Leo shouts at me from the other end of the hallway. He’s putting complete sentences together now. Where do the years go?’ (Howard 2017, 50), and even as we smile at the way in which a typically proud parental comment

Ross Grows Up (?)  181 praising linguistic development comes at the end of this stream of bad language, directed at the child’s own grandfather, we realise just how wrong this is in terms of setting down guidelines and guardrails in terms of appropriate behaviour – two of the core roles of a parent. Sorcha’s focus on her election meant that she had little time for Honor, except when using her as an election asset. In terms of the election, Sorcha got 27 votes, but, as she tells Brian Dobson of RTE, the bigger issue is that: populism won. Pandering to the lowest common denominator, playing to people’s fears, exploiting people’s ignorance – those are the real victors today. We have entered a dangerous phase. I think people will discover very quickly that making the lives of Cork people or women drivers or GAA players more miserable won’t make their own lives any happier’. (Howard 2017, 292) This pattern is seen in many developed countries, and, by drawing attention to it here, Howard is in some ways speaking the obvious, but in other ways is looking beneath the surface in a thoughtful manner. What many middle-class and academic commentators miss about populism is that it is ‘popular’: it is saying things that different tranches of people want to hear, and it is addressing diverse cohorts who feel largely silenced and voiceless by the current political groupings. Charles, despite his problematic views, is still likeable, and this is at the core of many populist politicians, though it is often overlooked. His ability to make us like characters we should not like is continuous but ever changing, so Ross’s stupidity is underlined by his challenging and challenged relationship with language, as he struggles with difficult words: ‘I think it’s a word – ruefully?’ (Howard 2017, 46); ‘I smile at him – I think it’s a word– speculatively?’ (Howard 2017, 92); ‘Although this whole – I think it’s a word – reasonableness thing will probably be knocked out of her in her teens’ (Howard 2017, 207); ‘I wouldn’t say I disgraced myself. It was the way it was edited – I think it’s a word– selectively?’ (Howard 2017, 245), while at Sorcha’s granny’s funeral, he speaks of Sorcha delivering ‘okay, I may have totally made this word up – but eugoly?’ (Howard 2017, 279). Despite all of his actions, this searching for words is endearing and adds to our fondness for the character. It is part of Howard’s narrative control to make us like characters who are objectionable, often by changing speaker in a Horatian manner to show another side of them. An interesting example of this is when Ross speaks of how much he admires the former Newstalk reporter Chris Donoghue, and outlines how, when he listens to him and Ivan Yates discussing world events on their show, he will ‘pretend to actually understand what’s being said, going, “Oh, good point! Good, good point!” and “You can’t argue

182  Ross Grows Up (?) with that logic!”, especially if I’m pulled up at a red light and a woman is checking me out’ (Howard 2017, 251). The pathos of this self-recognition is deconstructed by the need to pay an external female spectator, and it is with this balance of pathos, bathos and satire that the complexity of Ross as a character is maintained. In Dancing with the Tsars, we see the focus again on Honor and, again, on Ross being active in the present as opposed to harking back to his days in Castlerock. He is much more in the present and the other characters are also growing and developing personalities that are now adjacent to, but not necessarily stemming from, Ross as the central eponymous protagonist of the series. In this book, his relationship with Honor is central as they both take part in a ‘a father-and-daughter ballroom-dancing contest for students in fifth and sixth class, called Strictly Mount Anville’ (Howard 2018). Ross is a poor dancer and wants to give up, but he finds another guru figure, Mrs Leonard, who teaches dancing and who was a friend of Sorcha’s granny. Like Byrom in Game of Throw-ins, and Brother Ciaran in Braywatch, she befriends and reassures Ross, mostly through encouragement and belief and, again, is compared to Father Fehily. She tries to compare dancing to rugby, and she stresses that both involve endless practice ‘if knowledge is the treasure then practice is the key’, and immediately Ross feels a connection with his former mentor ‘it’s suddenly like there is a presence in the room’, and he tells her that she sounded like someone he knew ‘the greatest man I’ve ever met’, who used to say ‘winners are not people who never fail – they’re people who never quit’, and he agrees to go back. In an interesting insight, he tells her that the best way to get him to do well is ‘by boosting me. By telling me that I’m great all the time. You could also stop calling me Rod. Seeing as the name is Ross’ (Howard 2018, 175). Honor is delighted to see him back, and in this book, his relationship with her becomes stronger. He is the cool parent and allies with Honor against Sorcha: ‘It’s me and you, Honor. It’s me and you against the world’ (Howard 2018, 47). Sorcha’s parents, living in a Shomera at the end of the garden, are a constant presence, and Honor annoys them by turning off the electricity at random times, while Ross confesses that he has been ‘pissing in Sorcha’s old man’s favourite mug for about a year’ (Howard 2018, 75). In this book, we get more of an insight into Honor, as she is afraid that Sorcha’s baby (whose father could be either Ross or Fionn) could be Ross’s and a girl, and that this would ‘change things between us’ as she tells him. In a manner that would appal any child psychologist, Ross tells her that she is still his favourite, and that the birth of the triplets has not changed that, to which she responds ‘they’re idiots’ and Ross readily agrees: ‘They are idiots’ (Howard 2018, 75). Honor persists and wonders if the child is a girl and whether Ross might prefer her because, and again we see the

Ross Grows Up (?)  183 dawning of self-knowledge here: ‘I know I’m horrible. I’m horrible and I’m dark and I’m mean’, and bizarrely Ross sees this as a positive ‘Have you ever thought that you being horrible is one of the things I most love about you?’ (Howard 2018, 75). The notion that parents now need to be friends of their children instead of guides is lampooned here (in the TV series Modern Family, Phil, the father, calls it ‘peerenting’), and as long as she likes him, Ross will agree to anything she wants. The reasoning behind it is interesting, and it probably has a Freudian connection to the unconditional love and complete lack of sanction that Charles offered to Ross as a parent, but it does add another relationship dynamic to the book, and it serves to further isolate Sorcha from her daughter. They go through all of the dance rounds to the final, and Ross takes it seriously even going to the lengths of creating a practice partner from a pogo stick, a dress, some cushions and a Lolo ball for the head. He draws a face on it and says it looks like Yanet Garcia, the Mexican weathercaster (Howard 2018, 283). Later in the book, it will transpire that Sorcha will think he has ‘created a sex doll from bits and pieces of junk’ (Howard 2018, 322), as Ross practises so intently with it. The fathers of the other girls in the competition – and the names connote middle-class identity in a way that is beyond doubt – are all heavily invested in the competition: Ed and Desdemona Burke; John and Cloud Gorvey; Michael and Annora Finch; William and Currer Bell Whelehan; and Raymond and Sincerity Matthews (Howard 2018, 265). A series of accidents befall the competitors: a poisoned watermelon punch dish, a nail going up into William Whelehan’s foot and a bowling ball falling on Raymond Mathews’s foot. Eventually, Ross and Honor win, and, as Sincerity Mathews hands her the trophy, the Goatstown Glitterball for 2016 falls to the floor and ‘smashes into a million pieces’ (Howard 2018, 363–366). It is only after the fact that Ross realises that Honor is probably the cause of all of the accidents, and they have a conversation about it. Ross is upset because ‘It’s the first thing we’ve ever done together as a father and daughter. I’d love to think we won it because we were the best dancers in the competition. I suppose now we’ll never know’ (Howard 2018, 373). Honor feels he should be happy because she has turned out more like Ross instead of Sorcha, and even though Ross knows that ‘she’s right, I realise it’s not something to be celebrated’ (Howard 2018, 373). Parenting is clearly problematic here and the swift turns to legal threats that run through the competition allow us to smile at the pretensions of all of those involved, while it is also clear that the other children are far more pleasant than Honor, and the father-daughter relationships are probably a lot healthier. Honor’s relationship with Sorcha further unravels in this book. She is angry that Fionn and Sorcha have ‘decided to try and make a go of it’

184  Ross Grows Up (?) (Howard 2018, 40), as they had become close in the election, working for the issues that matter to the people of Dublin Bay South, such as a ‘legislation to ban greyhound racing and other working-class sports from areas like Ringsend and Harold’s Cross’, and a clear statement from the government on ‘where Terenure ends and where Dublin 4 begins’ (Howard 2018, 64). Edmund and his wife are living in the Shomera at the bottom of the garden. Now that she is in the Seanad, Sorcha has to give a maiden speech about banning single-use cups but there is no one in the chamber apart from her family, and the only comments come from the triplets, and they are scatological as ever, ‘shut the fock up and give your focking arse a rest’ (Howard 2018, 54), and, after this, in search of a new cause, she rekindles a friendship with Croía Ní Chathasaigh, a friend from UCD, who recalls looking at her maiden speech with another friend, Eithne Fennelly: Oh my God, we nearly set up a Women’s Rights in the Islamic World Society together, except we had a huge row over whether banning the burqa was an act of feminist liberation or yet another effort to restrict the rights of women to wear whatever they wanted, then she ended up getting glandular fever and missed so much college she had to repeat Second Year. (Howard 2018, 145) That Sorcha has never come to any conclusions or has thought this aporia through by herself is typical, as she espouses the latest on-theme set of ideas or ideologies with very little critical interpretation, or personal thought, and this is satirised throughout the series and is at the core of so many ‘-isms’, as human behaviour is often far more complex and polysemic than can be captured in a slogan. Of course in different circumstances, religious sects, social and political conditions, the burqa can be both emancipatory and restrictive, and the ironic juxtaposition of activism in terms of world events being stopped by glandular fever embodies the ‘find the next cause’ mode of Sorcha and the class of people for whom she stands. Croía is a firm feminist, and it is not long before, ever in search of meaning, Sorcha falls under her spell; Croía accuses Sorcha of being ‘not properly woke’, notes that the Irish word for women (mná) is an anagram of the English word ‘man’ and wonders why there are no streets in Dublin named after women. She is also very strident in her opinions of men, calling Fionn ‘another cisgender white male to help us fight for the cause of women’s rights’ (Howard 2018, 147). Howard is at his best with causes like feminism, where in applauding the goals, he takes sardonic issue with the modes and processes of such movements. In her desire for equality, Croía is stridently anti-men, and she uses language as a weapon to achieve this, a stylistic tic that Sorcha, ever amenable to persuasion, swiftly adopts, using words

Ross Grows Up (?)  185 like ‘manterrupting’ (Howard 2018, 163); ‘manjustment’ (Howard 2018, 251); ‘impri-man-tur’ (Howard 2018, 274); and ‘manterpret’ (Howard 2018, 304). Croía is forever castigating male privilege, and, in the end, a frustrated Fionn, very much a feminist ally throughout the series, responds angrily on being asked to check his privilege: ‘“My privilege?” he goes, roaring at her in front of everyone. “You grew up in Glenageary. Your dad made the Sunday Times Rich List last year” (Howard 2018, 297). Her aim is to destroy Charles’s political career, and, given his very misogynistic attitudes to women, this is hardly going to be difficult. Of his 51 TDs, only one, Muirgheal Massey, is female while the rest are all ‘upper-middle-class, privately educated, white men in their fifties and sixties’ (Howard 2018, 85). Charles clearly has a fixation with Charlie Haughey, the former Fianna Fáil Taoiseach, as the code for his house alarm is 1925, the year Haughey was born (Howard 2018, 292), while his computer password is the name of the house where Haughey lived A, B, B, E, V, I, L, L, E (Howard 2018, 293). His campaign is even stronger now in terms of change, and he casts the older parties as being very much the same, blurring their names to ‘Fianna Gael’ and ‘Fine Fáil’ (Howard 2018, 27) Interestingly, this is very much a contemporary social media tactic, with people referring to ‘FFG’ as almost one party. His aim is to create a large prison, Aquatraz, as noted in the previous book, and he hopes to fill it with people like Paul Murphy, of the People Before Profit party, for whom he has nothing but disdain ‘People Before Profit? Before Profit, Kicker! The gall of these people!’ (Howard 2018, 140). His comments on building a wall around Cork, and restricting travel rights for people from Laois, have caused a furore, but it is his remark about Countess Markievicz that is the cause of major trouble, and one that gives both Muriel and Croía their opportunity. Commenting on the fact that there is ‘no street or public monument named after Constance Markievicz’, he asks: ‘what about the Red Cow Roundabout?’ (Howard 2018, 177). Charles sees this as a joke, but he is highlighted on social media as misogynistic and as being anti-woman, and he comes close to being cancelled as he has to step down as leader of his party. He then faces a leadership challenge from Muirgheal as his stock plummets and other examples of sexism from his past – and as we have seen in the series, these are many – are located and brought into the light. It is odd that, despite his faults, we feel a little sorry for him, and the trawling of media history to bring out past instances of poor behaviour smacks of mob rule, even though in Charles’s case he is undoubtedly misogynistic. But applying the standards of the present to the actions of the past, with no caveats or allowances made for context, is something all too common in social media, and Howard brings it to light well, as he gives Charles a very strong speech questioning the whole process.

186  Ross Grows Up (?) In this satire, there is a great sense of complexity in that bad people can support causes that are good, even if their own reasons for doing so are questionable, while the opposite is also true. Charles says that he will not surrender his freedom of speech to a ‘new élite of unsmiling, humourless ideologues, telling us what we can and can’t say, what we can and can’t think! Exclamation mark, new paragraph!’ (Howard 2018, 318): ‘People died for my right to stand in front of you here today and say that women can’t parallel park! That people from Cork complain a lot! That from the southern border counties are – for genetic reasons that some would like us not to acknowledge – better line-dancers than the rest of the population! And that Constance Markievicz … was a bloody cow!’ Everyone laughs. He goes, ‘The right to say these things – right or wrong – is the rock on which true democracy is built! (Howard 2018, 318) While this is not strictly true, nevertheless he is voicing fears that people do have, and he will then play on these fears to bring in an even more repressive regime. He avoids being replaced as leader by suggesting that Muirgheal has links with Fianna Fáil while, at the same time, being fully aware of, and supportive of, Fionnuala’s connections with Russia, as they both are trying to sell off Ireland’s assets – Ireland’s gas, petroleum and peat reserves, as well as lead, copper, barite and dolomite – to Russian oligarchs. Erika, whose gallery has been burned down by Charles’s Russian associates, has worked out the process: Fionnuala’s speeches about human rights in Russia give rise to donations from oligarchs, and then Charles will sign ‘a secret deal awarding him the right to harvest one hundred million square acres of Irish timber in Laois’ (Howard 2018, 341). That Charles is totally unrepentant about this puts his earlier speech about free speech in an altered context, and this polyphonic contextual complication is part of Howard’s more mature style, as he keeps oscillating the moral tenor and position of the characters in the books. He seldom writes a character who is unredeemable or, at least not in some way, likeable. The triplets are still swearing, often quite imaginatively, ‘focking shitwaffle fock’ (Howard 2018, 22) and ‘focking orseclown’ (Howard 2018, 43), and Sorcha is persisting with ignoring them so as not ‘to create taboos around certain words in case it increases their appeal’ (Howard 2018, 119). In an interesting perspective on parenting, Ross has taken the unusual step of responding in kind: ‘Brian picks himself up off the ground and calls me a focking clownhole fock. I tell him he’s the focking clownhole fock’ (Howard 2018, 72). Of course this is wrong, but is it any

Ross Grows Up (?)  187 worse that Sorcha’s very woke non-interventionist, modish strategy? This is the implied question posed by Howard, and, while never telling us that Fionnuala killed Ari, we do find that she is very keen to find that ‘two-bor electric heater’ (Howard 2018, 271), and we are left to decide for ourselves whether or not she is guilty, just as, while she chokes on a Kalamata olive, Ross just stares at her, before Charles runs in and does the Heimlich manoeuvre on her. Fionnuala is in no doubt that ‘he was going … to let me die …. He looked … in my eyes, Charles … and he smiled’ (Howard 2018, 369), but there is no certainty here – it is left to the reader to judge. Lack of judgement is very much in the Horatian tradition of satire, and here this is foregrounded as neither Ross nor Charles nor Fionnuala are judged by the narrative, and the reader is very much not guided in terms of censoring them for their actions. Ross is still making mistakes, but, in the increasingly carnivalesque nature of the books, he is now one of a number of quite complex characters, both emotionally and morally, and in the final four books that will be examined in this study, that process proceeds apace.

9

A Family Man

Schmidt Happens (2019) Braywatch (2020) Normal Sheeple (2021) Once Upon a Time in … Donnybrook (2022)

These four books progress Ross’s life and career to the near present, and they all share that sense of him moving on with his life. The sporting events here are in the present as opposed to in his storied past as a Castlerock player, and the Ross who engages in these activities is a more rounded character than the boy who showed his abs and gave fans of the other school the finger in Leinster Senior Cup games. Schmidt Happens (Howard 2019) conflates the successful Ireland rugby manager Joe Schmidt and the expression ‘shit happens’ and sees Sorcha having given birth to Fionn’s child, with Fionn coming to live with Ross and family. Charles works with shadowy Russian interests in order to become Taoiseach, while Ross connects with Ireland coach Joe Schmidt. In Braywatch (Howard 2020), Ross becomes the rugby coach of Presentation College Bray, which is ironic, given his often-expressed disdain for Claire from Bray as well as his habit of calling the inhabitants of Bray ‘mouth-breathing funfair people’ (Howard 2020, 69), and Honor becomes obsessed with saving the planet. The title refers to the town of Bray, County Wicklow, and the TV show Baywatch. In Normal Sheeple (Howard 2021a), whose title conflates the Sally Rooney novel Normal People and its TV adaptation, with sheep, as Sorcha wants to ban sheep and cows to save the planet. Ross spends time in Kerry while Honor is in the Gaeltacht, learning Irish, and Charles is Taoiseach and still heavily involved with Russian interests. In the last book that this study covers, Once Upon a Time in … Donnybrook (Howard 2022), Charles is still Taoiseach and attempting to deal with the aftermath of the burning of Leinster House. Sorcha is still angry over Ross’s adultery with Honor’s Irish teacher when Ross becomes head coach of the Ireland women’s rugby team. In terms of style, we have moved a long way from the drinking and DOI: 10.4324/9781003124993-10

A Family Man  189 sex-obsessed early books, but a constant has been the confessional tone, and the first-person fallible narrator, who sees the world through a tunnel and who is often undercut by the views of other characters in the books. In Ross’s case, this is further complicated by his occasional awareness of his own faults and failings, an awareness that makes us respond to him more positively than perhaps we should, given his behaviour. In Schmidt Happens, his relationships with Sorcha and Fionn, as well as Hillary, are complicated with Fionn actually moving into the house with them all, with the baby sleeping in Ross and Sorcha’s room. While in the process of getting back together, they are not yet having sex, and, in an incident that foregrounds his very Oedipal relationship with his mother, Ross masturbates to a picture of ‘a sort of hot MILF’ on the cover of Irish Tatler: ‘she’s wearing a black, sort of, like, cashmere jumper dress with suede, thigh-high boots’ (Howard 2019, 32), who turn out to be Fionnuala, much to his chagrin. His relationship with her goes through quite a series of twists in these books, as she is very angry that he nearly let her choke, and she tells a TV show host that her only real regret in life was ‘that I never had children’ (Howard 2019, 33), and, later in the book, she will announce that she is going to have six children with surrogate mothers from ‘Chişinău, the capital of Moldova’ (Howard 2019, 228) who are called Lidia, Roxana, Szidonia, Brigita, Loredana and ‘another one called Lidia’ (Howard 2019, 225–226). As Sorcha says, ‘it’s like something from The Handmaid’s Tale’ (Howard 2019, 288). This plot will develop across these books in different and unusual ways, and it will change Ross’s relationship with his mother. As ever, the chapter titles have a signification of their own with the chapter titles of Schmidt Happens referring to television shopping channels and highlighting the commodification that is central in contemporary Irish culture: ‘Faux-pas to Avoid on Your Confirmation Day’; ‘Every Woman’s Absolute Must Have’; and ‘Don’t forget to Hit the Subscribe Button’. The chapters in Braywatch are all riffs on song titles and TV programme titles: ‘Ireland’s Fascist Family; ‘Bray Dream Believer’; and ‘Video Killed the Rodeo Stor’; while the chapters in Normal Sheeple all refer to titles of different media from popular culture, with twists: ‘a Pain in the Árus’; ‘A Baaahd Night Out’; and ‘Reese is the Word’. The final book’s chapter titles refer to films: ‘Hill, Bill’; ‘Man Go On Chained’; and ‘Prop Friction’. His relationship with Sorcha is very much taking place under the rubric of Freud’s repetition compulsion. Sorcha, who still has feelings for him but understandably finds him hard to trust, suggests that they start dating again. Ross, being Ross, takes this up as meaning they should date other people instead of attempting to rekindle their own relationship, which is what she had in mind, and he promptly makes a date with Eabha Barnes, who ‘hasn’t shut the fock up since she sat down at the table’ and who is

190  A Family Man either ‘very, very nervous or – more likely – coked off her tits’ (Howard 2019, 59). Eventually, he realises what Sorcha meant, and he gets Eabha thrown out of the restaurant, something for which he will suffer later in the book as she throws a bicycle through a window at him and pours the contents of a freezing vanilla malt down the front of his boxers (Howard 2019, 100). Eventually, they start dating and, on Valentine’s night, mostly by accident, he brings her back to where they had their first ever date, Eddie Rocket’s, where she told him he had played well and he bought her a vanilla malt and asked for her phone number. ‘Oh my God, I remember finally plucking up the courage to tell you that I thought you played an amazing game and you bought me a vanilla malt and asked me for my number!’ I’m there, ‘You’re definitely taking me back now. Talk about nostalgia’. I’ve no focking memory of any of that. (Howard 2019, 94) In this vignette, the essential difference in both characters is set out, as Sorcha is very much a sentimentalist, whereas Ross has little sense of sentiment at all. It is very hard to imagine how they can be together for so long, but, clearly, she always has the hope that he will be the man of her dreams, while he constantly lets her down. Honor comes into her own in these books, setting up her own YouTube channel, ‘Love Honor and Obey’, to broadcast fashion advice (Howard 2019, 10), and she is very reluctant to make her Confirmation, doing so in the end because Ross has asked her to do so. She goes through the motions of the ceremony, but she does not affirm her faith, and, when asked by the bishop why this is so, she responds ‘Because it’s all focking bullshit?’ (Howard 2019, 150). Ross and Sorcha and the boys follow her out of the church, and they decide to bring her home and Honor looks at him ‘the way every father dreams his daughter will one day look at him – like I’m her actual hero’ (Howard 2019, 151). Ross has no problem with her attitude to religion as he is almost sociopathic in terms of not really caring what other people, outside of a very select group, think of him, and even these people can be disappointed with impunity, as we have seen countless times through the series. Honor clearly shares a lot of these traits, though she does make more of an effort with other people at certain times. In this book, her relationship with her mother becomes seriously fractured, as Sorcha and Fionn think that she may be poisoning their baby, Hillary. The baby is vomiting quite a lot and is clearly ill, and the blame focuses on Honor, as in her Google search on her laptop, it is clear that she has been researching poisons, as Edmund gleefully points out (Howard

A Family Man  191 2019, 168), and when Honor admits she was doing this, but was looking to see how to poison Sorcha’s parents, Ross responds: ‘thanks for clearing that up, Honor. I knew there’d be an innocent explanation’ (Howard 2019, 170). Ross’s very lax nations of parenting are again clear here, as is Honor’s anger. She clearly resents Sorcha being the mother of Hillary, ‘well, I’m ashamed that you’re my focking mother! Because you’re a focking focking slut!’ (Howard 2019, 170). Because of these accusations, and her ongoing feud with her mother, Honor is sent to Australia to live with Erika. Ross is devastated by the thought of her leaving, and their relationship is one of the new dimensions of the current books, as she calls him her ‘best friend’ and the only one who ‘doesn’t judge me, even when I’m being really, really horrible’, a state of affairs that Ross assures her will continue (Howard 2019, 184). For one of the few times in the series, Ross breaks down and tells her everything is rubbish without her ‘it’s boring without you. I feel like I’m missing an orm or something’ (Howard 2019, 209). We find out later that it was not Honor who was making Hillary ill but the triplets, who were dipping his soother into the toilet. What infuriates Ross is that Edmund and his wife, Sorcha and Fionn knew this all summer but never told him. Sorcha admits that after the Confirmation debacle, she just wanted Honor out of the house ‘I love her because she’s my daughter. But I don’t like her – not even a little bit’ (Howard 2019, 331). Ross’s reaction is to demand that her parents and Fionn leave the house, and, reluctantly, Sorcha assents, as for once Ross has something of the moral high ground. In a different book, this would be quite a traumatic scene as a mother has lied to get her daughter out of the house and admits what every parent dreads, namely not actually liking the person that their child has become, and Howard, increasingly, handles quite difficult themes in the series while retaining the broad comedic context. That he is not widely known for addressing issues like death, anorexia, depression and family trauma is because he does it all in the parergon of a comedic world, and the final dance of integration, so that when Honor returns, she apologises to Sorcha and Sorcha apologises to her and we seem to be in that magic circle of the dance again: ‘I’m so sorry that I treated you so badly’ (Howard 2019, 363). However, later in the book, when the Shomera is flattened by a falling tree, which Honor has poisoned, we discover that the apology is far from genuine, as she tells Ross, ‘I haven’t even storted on her yet. She has no idea of the shit I’ve got planned for her’ (Howard 2019, 369). The characters may be comic, but they are becoming increasingly complex, as the next books will demonstrate. The triplets escape blame for this and their swearing continues apace with comedic effect, for example, Brian saying ‘There’s a smell of focking shite’, with Ross replying ‘That’s because we’re in Meath!’, while Johnny, as they reach Tayto Park, wants to go home, because Ross has taught

192  A Family Man his boys ‘to be wary of anything that happens north of Exit 13 on the M50’ (Howard 2019, 181). The now go to Little Cambridge, a Montessori School in Ranelagh, whose owner, Sasha Graham, formally from Holy Child Killiney, takes them only because she wants to have sex with Ross (she had taken him to her Debs ball when they were younger). She stops them from swearing by the simple expedient of shouting at them that ‘all they needed was a firm voice to tell them what was acceptable behaviour and what was unacceptable’ (Howard 2019, 326), and Ross manages to resist her advances using the line, unironically, that he and Sorcha ‘have very much clicked recently. And it’s made me think that I’m finally capable of being hopefully loyal to the girl’ (Howard 2019, 324), which possibly shows that there are elements within him that want to change. In terms of plot points for the series, we see that Kennet is having an affair with his sister-in-law, whom he terms ‘The Rowuz of Finglas West’ (Howard 2019, 74), something that Ross uses to blackmail him into letting Ronan see Rhianna-Brogan again. JP’s father, Barry, looks to Ross to take over the firm of Hook, Lyon and Sinker, but he dies of a heart attack, though not before he invents a new solution for the housing crisis, which is for people to sleep vertically in what he calls the Vampire Bed: The mattress would be set at a ninety-degree angle, with a footboard to stop you sliding off. The beauty of it is that it takes up exactly half the space of a standard single bed, turning a six-bed living space into a twelve-bed living space instantly. (Howard 2019, 103) As JP puts it triumphantly, ‘this is what the Government meant when they said they trusted the morket to fix the problem of homelessness’ (Howard 2019, 347). The satire here is Juvenalian as the sense that people can be stocked, like items on a shelf, is actually put forward as a solution to the homelessness ‘problem’ speaks volumes to the lack of care for people, real people, that is embedded in our economic system, where statistics about house building and health efficiencies are regularly belied by real people sleeping on the real street, and real people lying on trollies for up to 72 hours at a time in our real hospitals. The word ‘fix’ is heavily ironic here, and Howard, having all of the people involved seeing this as a stroke of genius, is making his point. Ronan falls in love with a girl in UCD called Huguette, who is the voice for the woke liberalism that has already been a target of Howard’s quizzical pen, and the same is true here. She closes down a restaurant in UCD because of the owners’ cultural appropriation of food from other countries, in this case Sushi. Later, when the restaurant serves only Irish food in response she thinks that ‘an Irish restaurant that serves just Irish food is actually guilty of monoculturalism’ (Howard

A Family Man  193 2019, 180). It turns out that Croía Ní Chathasaigh is her godmother, and, again, Howard moves from Horatian through Menippean to Juvenalian satire as she gets a lecturer, Phinneas McPhee, sacked for asking Ronan where he is from. This is seen as an act of microaggression, an indirect, subtle or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalised group, such as a racial or ethnic minority or someone who comes from a socially disadvantaged area. Once again, Howard shows how a cause that is in itself emancipatory, when taken too far, can become as repressive as the ideology that it seeks to replace. The lack of context of many of these interventions is aptly caught in a discussion of Huckleberry Finn, wherein the ‘N-word is mentioned 219 times’; which is seen as horrific ‘unless he’s black, of course’, and when Croía explains that Mark Twain is white and also dead, the response is ‘Right. Because my next question was whether we could call out this racist asshole on Twitter?’ (Howard 2019, 337). There is no contextual commentary from anyone, and it is left to the reader to see the lack of context, nuance and any form of auto-critique going on in this conversation. Charles is still connected to the Russians, with Hennessey asking Fyodor to tell the team to concentrate on ‘the fake Facebook accounts’ (Howard 2019, 106) and still tweeting to get his message across in spite of the mainstream media, a term all too familiar to those of us following the careers of Donald Trump and Boris Johnson: ‘We will be paying back debts that had NOTHING to do with us for CENTURIES to come’ (Howard 2019, 22). The social media messages segue into an acerbic account of the culture of social media companies, as Magnus develops an obsession with Facebook and its wrap-around blend of work-life unbalance ‘breakfasht, lunch and dinner – if you want it – ish free!’ (Howard 2019, 101), and Ross is asked to coach Facebook in their tag rugby game with Google: ‘everyone in Facebook hates Google and everyone in Google hates Facebook. They both hate LinkedIn, but LinkedIn pretend to be above it – except they’re not’ (Howard 2019, 160). The game is ‘tag rugby’s equivalent of El Clásico – or, as we call it, El Taxico!’ (Howard 2019, 241). This refers to the fact that social media companies working in Dublin pay very little tax, which is why Dublin is such a popular destination for headquarters for such companies. The ongoing joke in the book is that Magnus has left Oisinn for Facebook, as he never sees him, and the plan is to break into Facebook and ‘exfiltrate the dude’ (Howard 2019, 284). In terms of the book’s title, Honor has sent Ross’s Rigby tactics book to Joe Schmidt, the New Zealand-born coach of the Irish national rugby team, and Schmidt calls Ross, providing yet more eye-dialect ‘you’re obvoyousloy your daughter’s heroy’ (Howard 2019, 246). Schmidt will serve that guru-like role that Father Fehily initiated, as he is one of the few people Ross respects and to whom he will listen. Schmidt tells him to take any

194  A Family Man coaching job initially to gain experience ‘yoy have to staaht somewhere, Moyt’ (Howard 2019, 247). This has been obvious to all who have read the books, but Ross will listen to only a select few; however, Schmidt has a saying that is redolent of Father Fehily: ‘Loyfe us loyk rugboy un a lot of woys, Ross. Ut’s just a seeroys of moyves, all of them connicted’ (Howard 2019, 318), which Ross takes to heart, seeing Fehily as hauntologically guiding the interaction. Schmidt passes on the ‘noyms and numbers’ of some Leinster schools who might need ‘a coych with frish oydeas’, and this will lead, seamlessly into the next book, Braywatch, as Bray College needs a rugby coach. Of course, given all the negative comments that Ross has made about Claire from Bray, and indeed Bray in general, it is ironic that he goes to coach in Bray, but at a thematic level, it is a symbol of reversal, of a power to change and grow in a polyparadigmatic character who we might have originally thought did not have that power. He has taken on board Joe Schmidt’s advice that he has to start somewhere, and Bray is that place, even if he has previously put up memes about Bray ‘involving pictures of war and famine’ (Howard 2020, 47). The location of the book allows for more eye-dialect, as people from Bray ‘say “like” at the end of their sentences instead of in the middle like ordinary people’ (Howard 2020, 59). Presentation College Bray’s record in the Leinster Senior Cup is not good, and the principal, Brother Ciaran, hopes to keep the score down when they are playing St Michaels in the first round. But Ross makes it clear that he does not ‘set out to lose by any score’; he sets ‘out to win’ (Howard 2020, 50). There is little enough satire in the rugby arc of this book; it is more a redemption story for both Ross and for ‘Pres Bray’, as he calls it. The raw material, as one would expect in a redemption arc, is poor, so his scrum half has little in the way of technique: ‘I just fuck it as far as I can, like’ (Howard 2020, 71), and the team overall is poor, with Blackrock College putting up one hundred points in a friendly game – in the first half, with Bray’s players refusing to go out for the second half. In the aftermath, the players feel he has no real affection or commitment to the job, saying he is only there for the money; however, Ross responds that he will ‘tell Brother Ciaran. Not a focking cent do I want’ (Howard 2020, 143), and he goes on to take on Fionn as his assistant coach. Fionn discovers that he has a swollen testicle, which develops into cancer ‘I’ve got what’s known as a Stage IIB seminoma’; and, as often happens in the series, when disaster strikes, Ross and his friends come up trumps, and he tells Fionn that they are all going to be there for him because ‘we’re your family and we love you’ (Howard 2020, 163). Again, in spite of their often very fractious relationship, as Fionn ponders his mortality, he asks: ‘Ross, please listen to me. This is really important to me, alright? If I die … I want you to be Hillary’s father’ (Howard 2020, 227).

A Family Man  195 Another paternal aspect of this book comes when Charles’s Russian election fixer, Fyodor Shengelia, has a talented son whom he wants on the team, and he threatens Ross that if Sergei is not on the team, there will be consequences for Ross. Ross brings on Sergei at half-time, and he is astounding: The kid has it all. We’re talking skill. We’re talking courage. We’re talking acceleration from a standing stort. He reminds me of – I’m going to have to be honest here – me in my heyday? (Howard 2020, 236) …. They’re singing, ‘Allez, Allez, Allez’, except they’re changing the words to ‘We’re Bray, we’re Bray, we’re Bray’. (Howard 2020, 246) Fionn has been a real success in terms of coaching, and after he develops cancer, he wants to quit as assistant coach, but in a really emotional twist, the team shave their heads in a gesture of emotional solidarity with Fionn, and Ross is sincerely affected: ‘these are the greatest people in the world – and anyone who makes the mistake of slagging Bray off again within earshot of me will be the subject of a decking’ (Howard 2020, 300). His gradual identification with the people of Bray is part of the redemptions arc, and his desire to get the whole town behind the team stems from this, he gets two hundred Bray jerseys and asks all the shops in the main street to put them in the window. There is a real coming together of community here, and when Brother Ciaran tells Ross that he has never really been to Bray, as he is just passing through and needs to get to know the people if he is to understand them, Ross comments ‘Jesus Christ, he’s suddenly sounding like a Wicklow version of Father Fehily’ (Howard 2020, 129), as Fehily, hauntologically, is with Ross on this journey. At his core, as well as being eternally young in attitude, Ross is a dreamer. He loves sport because it can give people a chance to excel in the midst of a humdrum life, and, as he tells Honor, no matter what the form or the history, a game lasts for eighty minutes and ‘in those eighty minutes, Honor, absolutely anything can happen’ (Howard 2020, 366). After a number of games and a number of near-misses, and some good work by Fionn, Bray wins the Leinster Senior Cup in the last minute against Blackrock, and Ross is thrilled. In his captain’s speech, Barry Austin says that Ross will be ‘the coach of Ireland one day – I just know it’, and also praises the way in which Fionn has coped with his illness (Howard 2020, 377), and it is another example, in the later books, of Ross actually living in the present as opposed to his past fantasy life of waiting for a call from Leinster or Ireland. It is a sign of growing maturity and, while he retains many of his earlier characteristics, we do see levels of maturity and growth in the character. An interesting symbol of this is when Fyodor

196  A Family Man congratulates him and says that Sergei (who had been getting testosterone injections and became erratic and violent, and left for Russia having had sex with a teammate’s girlfriend) was glad to hear they won, Ross takes his own winner’s medal and gives it to Fyodor to pass on to his son. From a man who wore his own medal through about ten of the books, and who wanted to go to court in order not to lose it after the drugs scandal, this is a real sign of realigning to value the nature and process of the achievement as opposed to the signifier of that achievement. Despite his growing maturity, Ross’s main Achilles’ heel is his desire to have sex with any woman who crosses his path, providing she is beautiful; so he has sex with Fyodor’s wife, Raisa, ‘the most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life’ (Howard 2020, 242), telling us that she ‘looks like a young Melania Trump, except less frightened’ (Howard 2020, 259), and, a short time later in the book in a car in the Glen of the Downs, they have sex, which the dominant Raisa finds unsatisfactory, telling Ross that he has a penis like an AA or an AAA battery, and that he could ‘never satisfy a woman with a penis like that’ (Howard 2020, 260). Ross, of course, never takes umbrage or insult at comments like these, as he is completely uninterested in whether the women he is with actually enjoy the experience; for him, the chase and the sex are all – the other person is just a necessary, but interchangeable, part of the process. In the book, after quite a traumatic interchange about his childhood with Fionnuala, he turns to her friend, Delma, for comfort, and this comfort leads to them both having sex outside the house in Foxrock with Ross ‘standing there with my chinos and my boxer shorts around my ankles and Delma with her back against the vertical gutter, her short, muscly legs wrapped around my waist and the heels of her Chanel ballet flats dug into my orse for purchase’ (Howard 2020, 160). Unfortunately for him, the surrogates engaged by Fionnuala and Charles are looking to escape, and one of them videos the act and then threatens to blackmail Ross by sending the video to Sorcha unless he helps them to get their passports and drives them to Rosslare to get on a boat. Szidonia tells him that Loredana nearly choked after seeing the video and realising what Ross called Delma in the middle of the act: ‘You call her Mommy!’ (Howard 2020, 193), so his sex with Delma is clearly a displacement of intense feelings towards his mother. Ross’s issues with Fionnuala have been well documented, but in this book and the next two, they will be probed more fully. What has been quite a stock comic back-and-forth series of angry insults and put-downs, became much darker as Ross was unsure whether to try to help her as she choked, and, in the current book, he actually has a conversation with her about his childhood that is difficult for them both. As she celebrates the impending birth of her six new children, Ross’s anger and jealousy spill out, as he speaks of his desire for a brother or sister when he was young. ‘I

A Family Man  197 had no one’ (Howard 2020, 156), he explains, and he goes on to tell how he used to dress ‘the gorden rake up in your clothes and pretend I had a little sister called Brenda’; and when Fionnuala says he was always a strange boy when he was young, the repressed anger that has been condensed and displaced in insults and put-downs across the series finally erupts in a cri de coeur: ‘I was lonely. Jesus Christ, I just wanted someone to love me – I wanted you to love me, you focking drunken sow’ (Howard 2020, 157). This is a real moment of self-recognition and clearly upsets them both. In another genre or text, it would be seen as a soul-stripping interchange, and it is something generally missed in reviews and commentary, as there is a lot of real emotion going on in the world of the books. However, it heralds a sea change in their relationship in the book, and such changes in interaction are what make this series far more than comedy: there are real issues being dealt with here, at a visceral level, albeit parergonally situated in the comic world in which they occur. Ross becomes more introspective with the birth of his six siblings – Hugo, Emily, Louisa May, Millicent, Diana and Cassiopeia – and, as he holds Hugo, he realises, with sadness, that Fionnuala ‘really does love him – in a way, I fully realise, that she never loved me’ (Howard 2020, 230). The bond between them will grow, however, as he helps Fionnuala to mind the new children, and he is unwilling to help the surrogates escape with the babies, so while he does drive them to Rosslare, he tells Hennessey what has happened, and Hennessy and some fake Gardaí stop them and take the babies back. For once, Hennessey offers some faint praise for Ross, saying that ‘he rang me last night and laid out the whole sordid story. A rare instance of him using the brains that God gave him’ (Howard 2020, 305). In this book, Sorcha is part of Charles’s government, becoming minister for climate action, even though Charles does not believe in global warming. Sorcha, as ever, fully embraces her brief, saying that we are overreliant on cars, at which Ross wryly comments: ‘this coming from the girl who drives down to the front gate to collect the post if she doesn’t want to get her Uggs wet’ (Howard 2020, 101). In what is an interesting development, and one that seems to parallel the growing relationship between Ross and Fionnuala, Honor takes on the whole climate-action issue very seriously, and she becomes quite the activist, paralleling Greta Thunberg in her intensity. She begins by showing Ross a picture of a polar bear that drowns because of the scarcity of ice packs, which was originally shown to her by Sorcha, who ‘was trying to get her to watch that polar bear video for, like, six months’ (Howard 2020, 65). In school, she forms the Climate Justice Committee, gets the school ski trip to Pinzolo in Italy cancelled and blocks the car park to encourage parents to get their daughters to take public transport.

198  A Family Man Paralleling Thunberg, she organises ‘A National School Strike’, and, on that day, a Climate Justice Rally, which seems to be a big success. ‘According to the lunchtime news, the Gords are putting the crowd at somewhere between three and four thousand. Apparently, there isn’t a school in the country open today’ (Howard 2020, 288–289). The rally coincides with a farmers’ rally, as the farmers are complaining about beef prices being too low. The rallies clash and there is a lot of damage caused to some tractors. After the rally, Sorcha feels that she is proud of what happened, and that the violence was perhaps necessary to show the importance of the cause in question: ‘it’s time for action – and, yes, that includes drastic action’ (Howard 2020, 296). Ross explains that she has changed her tune because her first reaction was ‘shame and embarrassment’ (Howard 2020, 296), but, once public opinion turned, Sorcha, as ever, turned with it, as it now attracts cultural capital. On social media, young people were praised for ‘actually doing something about climate crisis’, with farmers being seen as a ‘pack of whinging, tax-avoiding bastards who got what was coming to them anyway’, and The Irish Times op-ed said: Mount Anville girls have a reputation for being spoiled princesses who care only about their hair and their make-up and what cor their daddies are buying them for their Sweet Sixteenth – but now there’s a new, selfless generation, whose activism has turned the spotlight on adults, including formers, who have failed in their duty of care to the planet. (Howard 2020, 297) At a time when opinions are very much in flux, it is important for people to be on the right side, and Sorcha is the embodiment of this desire to be constantly on the side of progressive and popular causes. The upshot of all of this is that Honor is invited by Mary Robinson to address the United Nations General Assembly on the issue of climate change, which she does, much to her mother’s excitement, and where she brings the plan we saw at the end of Schmidt Happens to fruition and makes her true feelings about climate change, and especially her mother, very clear in a very public manner: ‘CLIMATE CHANGE IS A FOCKING HOAX!’ (Howard 2020, 341), and she adds that she could pretend to care, like the last girl (presumably Greta Thunberg). Honor, in a piece of Juvenalian satire that takes a savage poke at attitudes towards the environment, says that her position is one of ‘principled inaction’ because if things are as bad as people say, there is ‘no point in any of us getting upset about it’; she goes on to add that the world is massively overpopulated and that the United Nations is responding to this crisis by ‘inviting children in here to tell you what you already know. And why? Because it makes you feel good about yourselves’ (Howard 2020, 342).

A Family Man  199 Needless to say, this causes major horror at the United Nations, but Honor is not finished and goes on to excoriate her mother’s treatment of her, bringing international and public humiliation on Sorcha, whom she calls a ‘moral grandstander’ and someone whose every action is calculated to ‘satisfying her emotional need to be thought a good person’ (Howard 2020, 342). She then goes on to tell the whole assembly about how Sorcha sent her to Australia because she thought that Honor was poisoning Hillary without ever giving her a chance to plead her innocence, and she reads out Article 11 from the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ‘a copy of which hangs on the wall of our focking Kitchen’, which says that: ‘Everyone chorged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence’. And yet she condemned her own daughter without even offering her a hearing. So guess what she did then, ladies and gentlemen? She packed me off to Australia – the way they used to treat convicts in, like, the olden days? (Howard 2020, 343) She goes on to explain how she set up all of the committees and protests just to see how far she could go, and as she says later in the book, ‘everyone is pretending to care …. It makes people feel good and virtuous and fills the hole where religion used to be’ (Howard 2020, 365). It is satire at its most savage, as attitudes and parenting qualities are critiqued, as are a number of opinions that are popular but not fully thought out and skewering these is something at which Howard excels. As if Sorcha had not enough on her plate, she is also involved with New Republic as a minister. Charles and Hennessey are feeling proud of their achievement, speaking Latin as is their wont: ‘“Datum perficiemus munus,” he goes (we shall accomplish the mission assigned); “Acta est fabula, plaudite!” (the story is done) the old man fires back. “Exclamation mork! Exclamation mork! Exclamation mork!”’ (Howard 2020, 1). They are about to go to Áras an Uachtaráin to receive the seal of office when it transpires that there is an enquiry into aspects of the election ‘due to allegations of widespread electoral fraud’ (Howard 2020, 6). As we have seen, Fyodor and his friends have rigged the election, and the enquiry would seem to be the end for Charles’s ambitions. However, he is completely unrepentant and remains very confident; indeed, he airs his very frank opinions about all the previous Taoisigh who preceded him as he is driven to Áras an Uachtaráin: W.T. Cosgrave: A pious bore! Éamon de Valera: A raving madman!

200  A Family Man John A. Costello: A weak fool! Seán Lemass: A blithering halfwit! Jack Lynch: A coward and a traitor!’ Charles Haughey: I liked him! You know, I think I even loved him! I wish he were alive to see this day! Garret FitzGerald: A well-meaning buffoon! Albert Reynolds: A gombeen and a back-stabber! John Bruton: A man utterly devoid of personality and charm! I remember sitting beside him at a dinner in the RDS one night and falling asleep with my face in my soup! Bertie Ahern: Ah, Bertie! Dear, dear Bertie! Brian Cowen: Moving swiftly along! Enda Kenny: An idiot geography teacher! Leo Varadkar: An airhead – minding the class in the absence of a grown-up! (Howard 2020, 2–3) In a clear nod to the actions of Donald Trump, Charles organises a Rally for Democracy, where he fires up his supporters by telling them that the powers that be are ‘STEALING THE ELECTION!’ (Howard 2020, 30), and his fans respond in kind: ‘We want CO’CK! We want CO’CK!’ (Howard 2020, 31). Tear gas is fired and there is great anger at the Gardaí because of it, as Charles shouts that this is what it is like to live in a fascist state. Of course, it is not the Gardaí who use tear gas, but people employed by Fyodor who are trying to foment panic, which will allow Charles to play the victim. The whole process is a serious attack on democracy, and it has elements of the early years of Hitler to it, as street violence gave rise to instability, as well as having echoes of the violent reaction to Donald Trump’s speech in Washington on 6 January 2021 as a mob of his supporters attacked the United States Capitol Building. It may seem strange to have the person fomenting this pictured spouting Latin tags, but two other politicians whose democratic credentials are, to say the least, questionable, are also portrayed as almost lovable buffoons at times, namely Donald Trump and Boris Johnson. Both are often called by their first names in a way that breeds a sense of familiarity, and the dangerous undertones to their policies are often seen as not serious – and yet both got elected and managed to do tremendous damage. Howard here is transposing that to an Irish situation in a very interesting manner – at times it is hard to separate fiction from reality. As part of their plans, Charles and Hennessey try to get Ronan on board, with Hennessey offering him an apprenticeship in his firm as well as offering to finance his studies in Blackhall Place while also putting Ronan on a salary. Ronan wants to work in New York for a large human rights law firm, but, at the christening of the sextuplets, Leo manages to

A Family Man  201 get hold of Kennett’s gun and fires some shots, and Ross hears ‘the sound of glass smashing’ and then he hears ‘a second shot, which hits the baptism font, and everyone’s shock suddenly turns to panic’ (Howard 2020, 357). Ronan takes the gun and disposes of it but is seen: ‘some wooden’s arthur tedding them that I got rid of the bleaten thing’ (Howard 2020, 382), and his passport is taken so he cannot go to New York. Ross suspects foul play on the part of Hennessey and his father, but he cannot prove it. It is another example of Charles going beyond the pale in terms of behaviour, and Howard is almost teasing the reader, as Charles moves along the scale of genuine evil, and yet he still retains a sense of affection in the reader, a parallel to people still worshipping Trump and Johnson, no matter what laws they break or harm they do. In this sense, he is very definitely holding up a mirror to society and to our current fascination with this kind of leader. A further satirical swipe is taken at the efforts of the government to ‘fix’ the homeless crisis, by using JP’s Vampire Bed, along with a new invention called the ‘Homedrobe’, which has been invented by Éadbhard Ó Cuinneagáin’s company called ‘Manila Capital’. This is a property investment company ‘obviously, solutions-focused – and we work to identify, then fill infrastructural deficits in Ireland, post-crash’ (Howard 2020, 135), the jargon is pitch-perfect here. Basically, this is a living space, about the size of a hot press, into which a Vampire Bed is placed. JP, speaks in terms that immediately dehumanise homeless people, calling them the ‘hord-ofhousing’, and seeing them as needing not homes but places to be stored ‘in a more spatially efficient way’ so that ‘we can ensure that they take up a lot less space than they currently do’. The 10,000 homeless people, or ‘units’ as they are called, could be put in Vampire Beds, each ‘taking up no more than two-point-five square metres of floor space’, which would allow them to ‘accommodate all 10,000 units in a space no lorger than an average-sized aircraft hangar’ (Howard 2020, 134), and the vocalic signifier of social class in ‘lorger’ underlines just how much of a class issue this is – very few middle-class people are part of the homeless group or are ‘hard-of-housing’. Perhaps the most satirical aspect of all of this is that JP and Christian had been first invited to showcase the Vampire Bed ‘at the Deportment of Housing, Planning and Local Government’s Big Homelessness Think-In at the K Club before Christmas’ (Howard 2020, 68), the K Club being one of Ireland’s most exclusive hotels, resorts and golf courses. Could there be a more inappropriate place to discuss homelessness than in one of the plushest hotels in the country? The book ends as an ouroboros, as we take the same journey to Áras an Uachtaráin with which it began. This time there is no impediment and Michael D. Higgins inaugurates his election as Taoiseach: ‘Cathal Ó Cearbhaill-O’Ceallaigh. Congratulations on your election as Taoiseach’.

202  A Family Man While he is getting his seal of office, Fionnuala is going around the room measuring the windows for curtains. Micheal D.’s wife, Sabina, jokingly reminds Fionnuala that ‘you do know, don’t you, that the job doesn’t come with this house?’, but the reply from Fionnuala is very forthright: ‘she gives the poor woman the serious death stare and goes, “You have exactly one week to move out”’ (Howard 2020, 390). At the beginning of Normal Sheeple, we find that Michael D. has not yet moved out, but he is now ‘literally in the attic’ (Howard 2021a, 33) while still looking for new accommodation, while Charles, Fionnuala and the sextuplets are all now living in Áras an Uachtaráin. Michael D. meets Ross a number of times, and he offers his opinions from speeches he has made at various different events, warning about the dangers of forgoing intellectual development at the expense of just preparing ‘young people for the world of paid work’ (Howard 2021a, 127). Normal Sheeple is a book full of changes as a lot of the characters move on to new occupations and new experiences and create new relationships. With Sorcha as minister for climate action, Ross is working with the children a lot and joins the Merrion Tree Bistro Chat group of mothers who are passing messages to each other. As Sorcha tells him ‘from now on, Ross, you’re going to be Bill Clinton to my Hillary’, which leaves him wondering ‘if that means I’m allowed to have sex with other women. But in the end I decide not to ask’ (Howard 2022, 13). Fionn’s cancer is cured, and he is relieved and looking to the future with Hillary. Charles as Taoiseach has begun his long-term plan of working with the Russians, who helped him to get elected. His aim is to get Ireland to leave the European Union and establish a stronger set of connections with Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Charles sets out his brave new world in very clear tones: We have taken back our country – and we now have a once-in-alifetime opportunity to reimagine Ireland and redefine its relationship with the rest of the world! We are no longer Éamon de Valera’s nation of toothless, fat-ankled girls and big-boned, idiot boys, dancing a set in the village square after Sunday Mass! We are an intelligent, vital, hard-working people! (Howard 2021a, 1) Vladimir Putin speaks well of him in his visit to Ireland, and Ross, once again, has sex with Raisa and ends up, in a situation redolent of a French farce, hiding behind a couch while Charles, Putin, Hennessey and Fyodor have a long vodka-sodden conversation that lasts all night. Charles steals the Book of Kells as a gift for Putin, but the latter wants something else: ‘President Putin has asked me to say that this afternoon he visited the

A Family Man  203 wonderful passage grave at Newgrange. He would consider this to be a suitable gift from Ireland as a sign of our friendship’ (Howard 2021a, 180). This is a farcical series of events, but Ireland does have a history of selling off resources to private companies and individuals, much to the detriment of the overall social finances, and Howard, in this reductio ad absurdum, uses Newgrange as a synecdoche of this trend. The connections between Charles and other demagogic figures are becoming clear, and he is asked the question on RTE: ‘What do you say to people who accuse you of singing from the same populist hymn sheet as Donald Trump and Boris Johnson?’, and Charles, like the two leaders mentioned, blusters angrily instead of reacting to the actual question ‘I say, how bloody well dare you? How bloody well DARE you suggest that this is all just some wheeze to me?’ (Howard 2021a, 332). Charles is pushing as hard as he can for a referendum on Irexit. Of course, this is paralleling the whole Brexit debacle in the United Kingdom, and Charles, by definition, is being placed in the roles of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson: ‘Portugal! Ireland! Italy! Greece! Spain! The countries who were forced to wear the hair-shirt of austerity! They called us PIIGS, ladies and gentlemen! PIIGS!’ (Howard 2021a, 348). By whipping up emotion, Charles is avoiding any real economic debate and, instead, is appealing to a sense of anger and a sense of bitterness – it would seem to be complete overkill and totally unbelievable except that in the real world, across those ellipses, we have all seen what Brexit has done to the UK economy and to the relationship between Northern Ireland, mainland Britain and the Republic of Ireland. In this case, politics is actually being more satirical than Howard’s fiction. The darker aims of Charles’s future vision of Ireland can be seen in his new town in Donegal, which is explained fully by Fyodor to Ross: This, my friend, is Malingrad’. ‘There is lot of oil and gas off west of Ireland. To extract, we need workers. And workers must sleep’. ‘Presumably standing up?’ It will be model for your father’s vision of post-agricultural Ireland’. ‘What are you even talking about?’ ‘All of your population will live in cities just like this one. They will drill for oil or for gas, or they will chop down trees, or they will work for big, multinational corporations that pay no taxes, and they will sleep standing up in space-efficient Homedrobes’. (Howard 2021a, 395–396) It is a dystopian future, and one wherein the whole of Ireland would be some sort of giant mine and toxic dump for Russian waste, with people

204  A Family Man living in ant-like colonies with no real quality of life. Of course, this would be Donegal and the midlands – the Foxrocks of the world would sail serenely on. Ronan explains that they plan to ‘turden the whole of the Midlands into a wasteland’, where Russian waste can be buried after Fyodor ‘cuts down evoddy tree in the bleaten counthroddy’. Charles sees agriculture as part of Ireland’s peasant past, and he wants to create a ‘postagriculcherdoddle society’ (Howard 2021a, 398). While all this is going on, at such a serious level, there is a domestic drama also unfolding, and it is one that had been developing across the later books as Ross and Fionnuala gradually make their peace with each other. It begins with Ross visiting Fionnuala and the sextuplets in Áras an Uachtaráin, and Ross explains to her how to hold a baby to stop it crying, something about which Fionnuala knows nothing: ‘you hold a baby in your left orm so its ear is next to your hort’ (Howard 2021a, 17), and when Fionnuala does this, the baby stops crying. This is the beginning of a number of such visits by Ross as he sits with his mother, his brothers and sisters and their German nanny, Astrid, who creates an atmosphere of calm and tranquillity. She even manages to have this effect on the triplets who also come to visit, and Fionnuala expresses her fondness for Ross as well, saying how nice it is ‘us spending time together like this. You and I. Your children and my children’ (Howard 2021a, 91). They begin to bond, which, having read the earlier books, would seem to have been going to happen, and details of Ross’s past come up that are quite affecting. She tells Ross how he loved jigsaws when he was young: I’m there, ‘Did I?’ because I’m beginning to really love these mornings, listening to stories about my childhood while hanging out with my brother and sisters, and – yeah, no – even her as well. (Howard 2021a, 166) In terms of memory, Fionnuala brings out a photo album with a red cover, which she keeps in her Birkin bag, which is full of pictures of Ross as a baby, and she finds a photo of Ross at about six months old, and she then asks him to ‘look at your little face and then look at Louisa May’, noting that they have ‘the same frown’, and they are genuinely sharing moments together. In one of these, Fionnuala shows a clear sense of self-knowledge: ‘just because I was a bad mother, Ross, doesn’t mean I didn’t love you – on some level’ (Howard 2021a, 166). This is a significant step shift in what has been a comic love-hate relationship with massive Freudian undertones. By putting them in this phase, Howard is allowing them to develop individually and to ensure that their relationship is not a stock flat relationship that is repetitive and never moves out of its loop, and, to ensure this, he adds an element of pathos in that Fionnuala is gradually succumbing to dementia.

A Family Man  205 ‘I’ve been forgetting things, Ross’, she tells him in a moment of revelation, ‘It’s my mind, Ross. Most days I’m fine. But some days, I just can’t remember people’s names or things that happened’ (Howard 2021a, 354). Ross has suspected as much, but, in typical fashion, he has compartmentalised this and seen it as not his problem, but now, in the developing mother-son relationship, and with Charles preoccupied with politics and in strong denial about Fionnuala’s condition, Ross becomes the person upon whom she can lean. She says, for the first time in the series, ‘I love you, Ross’, and while he admits that she has said this before, he feels this is the first time that he felt that she ‘definitely meant it’, and, in a touching moment, he responds, ‘and there’s fock-all I can say back to her in that moment except, “Yeah, no, I love you too, Mom”’ (Howard 2021a, 355). Despite her dementia, Fionnuala still retains quite a bit of self-knowledge, describing with great accuracy that while she is not dying, she does know that ‘bits of me will slowly disappear’, a comment that Ross describes as ‘heavy shit’ (Howard 2021a, 391). The fact that he is verbally unable to process all of this makes his newfound loyalty to her all the more affecting; he is not a wise guide to the horrors of dementia, but he is there and he will stay with her, and she knows this, asking him at one stage about whether, if she is no longer capable, he will ‘look after the children’ (something, we remember that Fionn also asked him when he found out that he had cancer), and his reply is: ‘You don’t even need to ask me that’ (Howard 2021a, 391). Despite all of his issues, other characters see good in him, which again is a narrative device that Howard deploys to keep him in a positive light in the eyes of the reader. Nevertheless, to make sure that we also remember the idiocy and harm of which he is capable, he visits the principal of Castlerock, or as it is now known ‘St Ignatius of Loyola Secondary School for Boys – Established 2018’, and engages in a huge row with the new principal Tom McGahy, with whom he has a long history of animosity, about all of the changes in the school, reminding him of his time with Tina (Ronan’s mother), who said that his penis was like ‘a fun-size packet of Rolos’ (Howard 2021a, 309) and that he cried every time after sex. McGahey is furious and screams at Ross to get out of the room, and it is only later that we find out that McGahey had died of a heart attack in his office shortly after. Ross tells no one about the conversation. He attends the funeral and seems to have got away with it, but Howard’s use of the literary device of Chekhov’s gun means that he is found out. In a Chekhov play, if a gun is introduced in Scene 1, then someone will use it in a later part of the play. In this book, Silas, a recording device like Alexa or Google Home that repeats what people say or sends messages to phone contacts, has been mentioned five times and now, as Ross has a detailed conversation with Fionn, the new principal of Castlerock College, where he tells Fionn about his conversation

206  A Family Man with McGahey that may have precipitated the heart attack; and where he confesses to having had ‘a brief fling … with Honor’s Irish teacher when we were in the Gaeltacht’; and about how JP had stolen Delma’s ‘Hermès scorf … back in the day and spent the entire summer in Irish college ‘; and finally confesses how he and Delma had ‘a thing. Not that long ago either’ (Howard 2021a, 386–387). Of course, Silas records this and sends the conversation to every one of Ross’s phone contacts. Needless to say, this causes an uproar in his own life and in the lives of his immediate circle, especially for Sorcha. In this book, Sorcha, as a government minister, has found her message in the area of climate action. She hires Simone ‘pronounced Sea-mon’, as a new Special Adviser’ (Howard 2021a, 69). Her plan is to reduce agricultural emissions, and she will be introducing a bill before the Dáil that will ‘ban the forming, breeding and sale … of all sheep and cows in Ireland’ (Howard 2021a, 85). Of course, farmers and rural Ireland in general are horrified, and their response is to flood the Vico Road, where Sorcha and Ross live, with cows as a demonstration. They do the same, with sheep, to a school concert in Mount Anville. Her EU colleagues are horrified, and they do not support her. This drives Sorcha, who has been a Europhile and a huge fan of the Erasmus programme since we first met her, to espouse Charles’s ideas for Irexit ‘if the European Union refuses to act to safegord the future of the planet, then maybe we are better off out of it’ (Howard 2021a, 239). Erika challenges her about this, but Sorcha holds firm, as bringing down greenhouse gas emissions is now her core issue as a politician. She is at a traumatic life stage, as one of her core values has changed and her relationship with Honor is still a disaster after the United Nations speech, so when she hears, on the Silas recording, that Ross has been unfaithful with both the Irish teacher and Delma, it is very much the last straw for her: ‘“OUR MARRIAGE,” she goes, “IS OVER, ROSS!” and she slams the phone down on me’ (Howard 2021a, 392). All of her current relationships seem almost toxic at this stage, and the sense that she is too involved in causes and not sufficiently involved with people is strong here. Speaking of Honor, we discover that she is being ostracised by the other girls at school, and that she has no one who likes her at all. Skyping with Erika, she tells her that Ross is actually her best friend, and Erika, while commenting that ‘he’s in love with himself and totally deluded about a lot of things, including rugby’, makes the grudging admission that ‘he’s a good father, Honor’ (Howard 2021a, 192). After this, Honor decides to go to the Dingle Gaeltacht in County Kerry as something of a rite of passage. She stays in a house with a number of other students, changes her personality to be less negative and makes friends with a girl called Clíodhna from Louth. Here she meets Reese, a rugby-playing boy from St Michael’s College on Ailesbury Road in Dublin 4, and they start going out together,

A Family Man  207 with Ross instantly becoming the archetypal over-protective father, not unlike Edmund Lalor; as he puts it ‘one player recognises another’, as he sees that ‘my daughter has fallen for a teenage version of me’ (Howard 2021a, 227). There is a touch of an allusion to Friends here, in the Ross and Russ episode, where Rachel is attracted to a man called ‘Russ’ who is very like Ross Gellar. Here, we see something similar in the phonemic connections of ‘Ross’ and ‘Reese’, and Sorcha makes the point that her ultimate nightmare was that her daughter ‘would one day bring home a teenage version of Ross’ (Howard 2021a, 384). Seeming to desire popularity and friends, Honor has a personality change, which is signalled by a name change, as she now goes by Onóir Ní Cheallaigh, though she has already had a name and gender change in a previous book, as we have seen, and has wanted to go by her second name, Suu Kyi. However, both her popularity and her relationship are shortlived, as Reese cheats on her with Clíodhna and is caught and blackmailed by Ross into not breaking up with Honor while still in Irish College; however, he ghosts her when they return to Dublin, telling her ‘it’s, like, Irish college. I thought you understood that’ (Howard 2021a, 316). On hearing that Reese had been with Clíodhna, she becomes distraught and gets drunk and violently ill at home and also at a party, where she is brought to hospital by Reese. She is initially angry at Ross for not telling her the full story, but Erika explains that he is just being protective: ‘that’s all I was doing, Honor. I didn’t want to see you hurt’ (Howard 2021a, 368). Returning to her more usual personality, in the aftermath, she sets up ‘an account on Facebook called Clíodhna the Slut from Louth’ (Howard 2021a, 368), and she will proceed to bully her. Ross’s son Ronan is deeply enmired in Charles’s and Hennessey’s politics and business dealings and they would like him to take over their affairs in the fullness of time. He has been literally going through the rubbish of other politicians looking for incriminating documents: ‘That’s Frances Fitzgedoddled’s. That’s Micheál Meertidden’s. That’s Meerdy Lou McDonoddled’s’ (Howard 2021a, 51), and one does not need to be Sigmund Freud to see the metaphor here of Irish politics as a form of each party trying to dig up dirt on each other. The issue of the gun from the christening that we saw in the last book is still alive, which means that Ronan is unable to leave the country and is now working for Hennessey, and he is even starting to dress like him in a black-and-white pin-striped suit: ‘you look like a young Hennessy Coghlan-O’Hara!’ (Howard 2021a, 97). At his birthday party, Ronan thanks Ross for being a good father, and he makes the following prescient point: ‘Rosser’, he goes, ‘for a madden with no moddle compass of he’s owen, you did yisser best to keep me on the sthraight and naddow.

208  A Family Man And I waddant to ted you in front of all these people that I lub you veddy much, Rosser’. (Howard 2021a, 377) The point that Ross has no moral compass is well-taken, as is the point that he still tries to do his best, which makes Ross an ethically complicated character and someone who has lots of contradictory emotions and actions, and also someone who can do great harm and great good in very quick succession. So on one level, Ross can be a very good parent while on another, his response to being called a ‘focking wanker’ by Leo is not to chastise his son for using bad language but to reply ‘maybe you’re the focking wanker, Leo. Have you ever considered that?’ (Howard 2021a, 369). Does this make him a bad parent? Is he any worse than Sorcha who has done so much reading of trendy parenting books, as we have seen? On hearing that the charges against Ronan have been dropped, Erika and Ross bring him to the airport to fly him to New York and get him out of Hennessey’s clutches. On the way there, Ronan reveals a lot of Charles’s plans, including the fact that the destruction of Ireland’s cow and sheep herd is actually Charles’s own idea, and that Simone is ‘working for my old man’. As Ronan explains, ‘she’s a pladdant, Rosser. Her nayum’s not eeben Sea-mon. It’s bleaten Alice or sometin’ (Howard 2021a, 398). He goes on to reveal Charles’s plans for Malingrad, and to disclose how Charles sees people’s lives after Ireland leaves the EU: ‘woorking sixteen hours a day on starvation wages and sleeping standing up in bleaten wardrobes’ (Howard 2021a, 399). And it is in Ant Farm at Cherrywood that this mode of living is trialled, where it is described as ‘a truly revolutionary residential development’, according to the brochure, ‘that reconceptualises what we consider living space’ (Howard 2021a, 54), which is made up of Homedrobes. As already noted, these are about the size of a hot press, and they can accommodate one Vampire Bed as well as a pocket where you can fit, ‘your wallet and your cor keys, and also a shelf with a wireless phone-chorging station on it’ (Howard 2021a, 55). The very idea of putting people into such tiny claustrophobic spaces, and, of course, no prizes for noticing the satirical intention of the name of the development, is a further step in the dehumanisation of the homeless ‘problem’ and a way of ‘reconfiguring’ the very notion of a home to store these surplus ‘units’ more efficiently, a damning indictment on the attitude of those in power to the people without any power and Howard, with the Vampire Bed, makes the blood-sucking economic actions of the powerful in Ireland overt and unpleasant in this dystopian image. Howard’s satirical perspective takes a turn for the literary in this book, especially when we look at the title, Normal Sheeple, which is, as already

A Family Man  209 noted, a homophonic mirror of Sally Rooney’s very popular book, Normal People, the story of two people, Marianne Sheridan and Connell Waldron, whose will-they, won’t-they story of love and friendship develops from school in Carricklea in Sligo, through their time at Trinity College Dublin, and it finishes just at the end of their time there. In the Gaeltacht, Ross meets Honor’s Irish teacher to whom he is instantly attracted describing her as ‘my age, I’m guessing – with long black hair’, looking a little like Marisa Tomei and wearing a ‘black cordigan, black trousers, men’s shoes’ (Howard 2021a, 204). Gradually they discover that Marianne is Honor’s Irish teacher, and they clearly feel a mutual attraction. Ross and Marianne speak in a parody of the dialogue between Connell and Marianne in Normal People, in terms both of the book and of the very popular television series which was broadcast during the COVID-19 lockdowns, which meant it had a huge following. Marianne was played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, with Paul Mescal playing the part of Connell, and the monosyllabic, almost impressionistic dialogue, often muttered, was a stylistic feature of the show, and Howard has parodied it really effectively, to show the introverted but very real chemistry between the two characters. ‘Right’. ‘Sorry’. ‘It’s cool’. ‘Okay’. ‘Are you sure you’re alright?’ ‘I’m grand’. ‘It’s just you seem –’ ‘What?’ ‘– I don’t know. I want to say –’ ‘What?’ ‘– flustered?’ (Howard 2021a, 205) In the TV series, Connell has a curly fringe, and Ross, still in Dingle, cannot get his normal pomade, so his famous quiff has been replaced by a fringe (Howard 2021a, 211–212), thereby mirroring Connell’s hairstyle. After a series of intense and monosyllabic encounters, and suggestively eating some ice cream, they end up kissing ‘her going at me with her tongue like she’s licking the melted ice cream off the inside wrapper of her Wibbly Wobbly Wonder’ (Howard 2021a, 244). She has separated from her husband, Donnacha, who had sex with another woman, but in the end, decides to take him back, and their final act is to have very passionate sex, with Marianne screaming out the name of the woman, ‘Gráinne fucking Thorpe’, as she bends Ross ‘like a balloon animal, trying to find

210  A Family Man the position that works for her best’ (Howard 2021a, 284). In their final farewell, they say very little, as ‘let’s be honest, we only ever spoke in short sentences anyway’ (Howard 2021a, 287). In the book, Connell is a soccer player, but in the TV series he plays Gaelic Football, and Ross also parallels this as he reinvents himself as a football player with ‘An Ghaeltacht veterans football team’ (Howard 2021a, 214), where they start to call him Rossa de Paor, and he agrees to take part in the grudge match between An Ghaeltacht and Sneem veterans. Like Honor, the change of name provides him with something of a blank slate, and he gradually takes to the Gaelic football rules and becomes friendly with most of the team, all of whom are older and very rural as well as being set against the campaign of Charles and Sorcha. In another gesture towards the TV version of Normal People, Connell’s GAA shorts became famous, especially when Paul Mescal was seen in public wearing them, and, sure enough, this is mentioned in the final match of the series, with Ronan noting that ‘them showurts you’re wearton doatunt leave much to the imagidation, do thee, Rosser’, and Ross agreeing that they are ‘definitely tighter than rugby shorts’ (Howard 2021a, 272–273): his transformation to Connell is complete. Before the final game, one of the team members outs his real identity as Sorcha’s husband and Charles’s son, but the captain of the team, Muiris, makes the telling point that ‘“The sins of the father,” Muiris goes, “are not the sins of the son. The same as the sins of the wife are not the sins of the husband. Will you play for us against Sneem?”’ (Howard 2021a, 272). Such forgiveness is a core in enacting forms of change in characters, and this is no exception. As often happens in the series, once Ross is involved in a team and playing sport, his better self emerges, and now, despite a lifelong detestation of GAA, he admits to feeling ‘actual pride in that jersey, even though it’s made of micro polyester and the letters GAA are spelled out over the right tit’ (Howard 2021a, 273). One of his core beliefs is that sport, especially male rugby, has intrinsic value, but, as he matures, he starts to see other sports as intrinsically valuable in themselves as well. In this case, he realises that, though he is the son of a man who wants: to lay waste to rural Ireland and married to a woman who wants to slaughter your animals. Yet you were prepared to put that aside in the name of sport. And I want you to know that I will not let you down today. (Howard 2021a, 274) Of course, they win, and, of course, Ross, or Rossa, scores the winning goal. The happy-ever-after aspect of this is counterpointed by what seems to be the end of his marriage, in the personal sense, and in a political sense

A Family Man  211 by the fact that his father has probably been responsible for the burning down of the Dáil as a way of ensuring success in the Irexit referendum by blaming the EU for causing the fire. There are echoes of the Reichstag fire here, on Monday, 27 February 1933 in Berlin, as people are being whipped up emotionally. Ronan has told Ross of a doomsday button, as has Michael D. Higgins, and, on seeing the flames, he knows that his father is the one responsible. In the final book of this study, but not of the series, we bring Ross and the others up to the present. One of the challenges of writing about Howard is knowing that there will be a new book out each year, which will gradually deepen and develop so many areas of the narrative, the satirical perspective and the characterisation which will complicate the comedic vision with darker themes. So, Once Upon a Time … in Donnybrook, a book that seems to be offering a version of life as some kind of fairytale, nevertheless, it begins quite darkly in the ashes of the burned-down shards of what is left of the Dáil. While Ross and Erika have found out that Charles is to blame for this, Charles is playing the victim, offering ‘a prayer of thanks that nobody was killed or even hurt last night!’ (Howard 2022, 4) before rushing to point blame in a manner redolent of Hitler and the Reichstag fire; while the latter blamed the Communists, Charles blames the EU: ‘I want to make a promise to you – we will hunt down those responsible for this outrage ... all the way to Brussels!’ (Howard 2022, 6). Just as Howard keeps the often amoral Ross in our affections, so he balances the evil and malign acts of Charles with gestures of love and kindness, as he romantically proposes to Fionnuala ‘will you re-marry me?’ (Howard 2022, 217), and despite the fact that he seems to be in denial, he is all too aware of Fionnuala’s dementia and of its consequences. ‘The woman that you and I love is disappearing, Ross, bit by bit! I know that!’, and he goes on to say that by marrying her, he hopes to ‘make whatever time she has left as happy as I can’ (Howard 2022, 386). He also voices his own truth in terms of his political credo: ‘Believe it or not, Ross, I’m doing what I’m doing because I want to leave not just money for my children – but a better, stronger and truly independent Ireland!’ (Howard 2022, 386). So a man who can burn down the Dáil, run the country without assembling parliament in an alternative venue and also be a real threat to democracy can also be a kind and loving husband who is happy to put the care of his wife first: the complexity of narrative creation demands a complexity of ethical response on behalf of the reader, and this is a strength of the series. The malign aspect of Charles is seen in his inauguration of Malingrad, his city in Donegal, and the Homedrobes and Vampire Beds that will comprise it: ‘Malingrad’, the old man goes, ‘will be a synergy of Irish resources and Russian money and know-how! Not only will it serve as a home to the

212  A Family Man tens of thousands of migrant workers extracting the valuable energy sources from the seabed that will secure our country’s economic future for centuries to come, it will provide the model for how we will all live in the future! (Howard 2022, 240) …. ‘Their Vampire Bed – inverted commas – has helped bring about a reconceptualisation of what constitutes a liveable space! When you’ve retired to your cosy Homedrobe after work, you’ll be able to – inverted commas – plug yourself in and find out vital data about how many steps you’ve taken that day, the number of calories you’ve consumed, whether you’re sufficiently hydrated and the exact day you’re likely to die!’ (Howard 2022, 241) It is a dystopian future, and Charles is driving it through with very few actually seeing the damage he is doing to the future of the country – the parallels with contemporary Irish and many aspects of world politics are all too clear. The negotiation between this fictive homeless crisis and the real one is stark, and, at least in the fictive world, there are attempts being made to ‘fix’ it – however dystopian these may be; in the real world, the numbers just seem to keep growing. Of course, it also connects with our increasingly small personal world where we stare more at phones and smart watches and monitor ourselves electronically than we talk to others. The Homedrobe allows for this. In terms of his own relationship, his marriage to Fionnuala proceeds, with Honor as bridesmaid and Ross as bridesman, in a wedding themed on ‘The Great Gatsby’ (Howard 2022, 233). Howard maintains the pathos, as in a wedding dress fitting, Fionnuala wets herself and has to be comforted by Ross. The ongoing change in their relationship is interesting, and one wonders how it will pay out in future books. It is thought-provoking as his primary relationship with Sorcha is gradually sundering. He is still living in Honalee but now in one of the towers Edmund had built to feed into Sorcha’s princess-complex. Sea-mon confesses that she has been working for Charles all along, but Sorcha is in deep denial: ‘The EU didn’t burn down the Dáil, Sorcha. Hennessy did it – and he did it on the Taoiseach’s instructions’ (Howard 2022, 47). By the end of the book, he and Ross split for what may be the final time, as she admits to feeling nothing for him and says ‘I think this tower was just my way of keeping you close until I was sure. I’m sorry if that sounds selfish’ (Howard 2022, 349). The dynamic with Honor has also been a factor in their relationship as she switches moods and modes throughout the book. She and Ross are still close, with Ross coming near to strangling Edmund after he makes disparaging comments about her. Honor tells him that, had he killed Edmund, she ‘“would have helped you dig a hole in the gorden to bury him”. See,

A Family Man  213 that’s how sweet she can sometimes be’ (Howard 2022, 44–45): once again, his views on parenthood are very, very different! She has a new boyfriend, Adam, whose parents are swingers and involve Ross in a threesome. The boy, reminding Ross of Ed Sheeran, writes a special song for Honor: One flash of her smile makes me Want to be the best man I can be …. She’s so fucking hot! Fuck! Ing! Hot! Bitch! (Howard 2022, 128) However, Reese, who dumped her after the Gaeltacht, returns and tells her he still has feelings for her. Honor’s response reminds Ross of how he kept dumping and returning to Sorcha – ‘she sounds so like her old dear as a teenager that I want to nearly cry’ (Howard 2022, 363). However, once again, they have misjudged Honor’s motives, as she knocks Reese on the head on the day he is supposed to play for St Michaels in the Leinster Senior Cup finals, bundles him into the back of her mother’s car and drives to the Sally Gap in Wicklow to get her revenge for the way he treated her in the Gaeltacht and also for telling his friends ‘we, like, did stuff that we never actually did’ (Howard 2022, 380). At the end of the book, she decides she wants to live with Ross, who will be moving in with Erika and her mother on Ailesbury Road now that he is finished with Sorcha. The fairytale aspects of the book are the success of the Irish Women’s Rugby team, under Ross as coach. Given his many disparaging comments about women’s rugby, it is another example of the Ross of the present deconstructing his past personae. He meets the captain of the team, Sive Keenan, and she sees right though his misogynistic attitudes, asking him why he always says: ‘Head Coach of the Ireland team, albeit women’ (Howard 2022, 57), and the response is: ‘Er, because they are women?’ (Howard 2022, 100). She is very much into rugby, saying that women need training with ‘The ball. The ball. The ball. The ball’, which was ‘one of Father Fehily’s sayings – word for literally word’ (Howard 2022, 134), and, despite their differences and probably influenced by the hauntological echo of Fehily’s words, he asks her to be assistant coach. Ross makes the women bring rugby balls everywhere: ‘to bed with you at night …. into the shower with you in the morning …. on your lap when you’re driving’ (Howard 2022, 200). They bring in a soccer player who is a very accurate place-kicker and Sive has an encyclopaedic knowledge of the other teams. They win all their matches and even get Charles’s support ‘COME ON IRELAND, BRACKETS, WOMEN!’ (Howard 2022, 263), but Ross realises that it is Sive and not he who is the real leader of the team:

214  A Family Man This isn’t like it was when I coached Andorra, or Pres Bray, or – yeah, no, they all count – the Facebook tag rugby team. It’s not like the time when my heroics helped keep Seapoint Rugby Club in Division 2B of the All Ireland League. The fact is that I’m a total and utter irrelevance within this set-up – and that’s a hord thing for a man like me to have to admit. (Howard 2022, 337) However, in another example of his polyparadigmatic development, he does admit it and goes on to resign as manager, nominating Sive as his replacement. The team wins the Six Nations Championship. What is interesting here is that Ross, at the end of these four books, is able to list genuine achievements in his recent past, and he seems to be no longer living on the fantasy camel-hump of the Leinster Senior Cup victory back when he was in Castlerock. What the future will hold for him, and for his family and for the Ireland that Howard creates on the other side of those ellipses, is something we can only wait to see. At the end of this study, we see how, in negotiating and oscillating between real and fictive Irelands, the meanings are inter-dit, between the lines and the words. We see the faults and flaws of both the characters and their society, but we also come to like them and feel for them and empathise in this satirical, but comedic world. Crucially, and in spite of its ability to create meaning, the carnival is a place of sharing and joy and a form of equality – everyone pays the same for each activity. Learning through laughter has an important cultural role: Laughter has the remarkable power of making an object come up close, of drawing it into a zone of crude contact where one can finger it familiarly on all sides, turn it upside down, inside out, peer at it from above and below, break open its external shell, look into its center, doubt it, take it apart, dismember it, lay it bare and expose it, examine it freely and experiment with it. (Bakhtin 1981, 23) This is what Howard does, as well as offering us characters who we can laugh with and laugh at as they go through different elements of life. The next novel, Camino Royal, again features the hauntological influence of Father Fehily, as he urges the ‘goys’ to walk the Camino from beyond the grave. It is beyond the scope of the present study, but if Howard remains as prolific as he is, it may well be the first book studied in a sequel to this one. The study of satire and humour, of ways to make us laugh at the pomp and self-regard of power and to hold that power to an intellectual and somatic judgement through the sharpness of language and perception, has been a

A Family Man  215 significant trope in Irish and European literature. I think that the work of Paul Howard is a significant addition to that whole genre, and it tells us a lot about the real of contemporary manner through its satirical inter-dit and allows us to understand more fully, and critique, the real world in which we live. To finish by citing Bakhtin: Familiarisation of the world through laughter and popular speech is an extremely important and indispensable step in making possible free, scientifically knowable and artistically realistic creativity in European civilization. (Bakhtin 1981, 23)

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Works Cited  219 Derrida, Jacques (2002) ‘Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority”’, translated by Mary Quaintance, in Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar, London: Routledge, 230–98. Dufresne, Todd (2006) Killing Freud: Twentieth-Century Culture and the Death of Psychoanalysis, London: Continuum. Eliot, T. S. (2006) The Annotated Waste Land with Eliot’s Contemporary Prose, edited by Lawrence S. Rainey, New Haven: Yale University Press. Elliott, Robert C. (1960) The Power of Satire: Magic, Ritual, Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Forster, E. M. (1956) Aspects of the Novel, The Clark Lectures 1927, New York: Harcourt, Brace. Freud, Sigmund (1918) Totem and Taboo: Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics, translated by Abraham Arden Brill, New York: Moffat, Yard and Company. Freud, Sigmund (1920) The Interpretation of Dreams, translated and edited by James Strachey, London: Allen and Unwin. Freud, Sigmund (1922) Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious, translated by Abraham Arden Brill, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and co. Freud, Sigmund (1939) Moses and Monotheism, translated by Katherine Jones, London: The Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Freud, Sigmund (1960) Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, edited by James Strachey and Anna Freud, Vol. 8, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, London: Hogarth Press. Freyne, Patrick (2012) ‘It’s Good to Know We Can Rely on Ross’, Irish Times, Saturday 13 October. Freyne, Patrick (2014) ‘Paul Howard Interview with Patrick Freyne’, Irish Times, Monday, 8 September. Friedman, Amy L. (2019) Postcolonial Satire: Indian Fiction and the Reimagining of Menippean Satire, Pennsylvania: Lexington Books. Gillespie, Michael Patrick (2008) ‘The Odyssey of Adam and Paul: A Twenty-FirstCentury Irish Film’, New Hibernia Review / Iris Éireannach Nua 12 (1 (Earrach / Spring)):41–53. Gleeson, Colin (2017) ‘Seán FitzPatrick Case One of State’s Most Cack-Handed Trials’, Irish Times, 27 May 2017. Gorman, Clare (2015) The Undecidable: Jacques Derrida and Paul Howard, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Greenberg, Jonathan Daniel (2011) Modernism, Satire, and the Novel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hand, Derek (2011) A History of the Irish Novel, Newcastle: Cambridge University Press. Harte, Liam (2014) Reading the Contemporary Irish Novel, 1987–2007, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Heaney, Seamus, and Barrie Cooke (1984) Sweeney Astray: A Version from the Irish, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (1975) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, translated by T. M. Knox, Vol. 2., Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heidegger, Martin (1949) Existence and Being, Introduction by Werner Brock, Chicago: H. Regnery Co.

220  Works Cited Heidegger, Martin (1996) Being and Time, translated by Joan Stambaugh, Albany: State University of New York Press. Highet, Gilbert (1972) The Anatomy of Satire, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hitler, Adolf (2021) The Speeches of Adolf Hitler 1921–1941, Privately Published. Hobson, Marian (2001) ‘Derrida and Representation; Mimesis, Presentation and Representation’, in Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, edited by Tom Cohen, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 132–51. Holohan, Conn and Tony Tracy (eds) (2014) Masculinity and Irish Popular Culture: Tiger’s Tales, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Honohan, Patrick (2010) ‘The Irish Banking Crisis: Regulatory and Financial Stability Policy 2003–2008’, A Report to the Minister for Finance by the Governor of the Central Bank, Dublin: Government Publication. Howard, Paul (1995) Steve Collins Celtic Warrior, Dublin: O’Brien Press. Howard, Paul (1996) The Joy, Dublin: O’Brien Press. Howard, Paul (2000) The Mis-Education Years, reprint 2016, Dublin: O’Brien Press. Howard, Paul (2001) The Teenage Dirtbag Years, originally published by the Sunday Tribune, Dublin: O’Brien Press. Howard, Paul (2003) The Orange Mocha-chip Frappuccino Years, Dublin: O’Brien Press. Howard, Paul (2004) PS, I Scored the Bridesmaids, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2005) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2006) Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2007a) Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’s Guide to South Dublin: How to Get by on, Like, 10,000 [euros] a Day, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2007b) This Champagne Mojito is the Last Thing I Own, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2008) Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2009a) Rhino What You Did Last Summer, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2009b) We Need to Talk About Ross, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2010) The Oh My God Delusion, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2011) NAMA Mia!, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2012a) Anglo: The Musical, Dublin: Ireland. Howard, Paul (2012b) The Shelbourne Ultimatum, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2013) Downturn Abbey, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2014) Keeping up with the Kalashnikovs, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2015) Seedless in Seattle, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2016) Game of Throw-Ins, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2017) Operation Trumpsformation, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2018) Dancing with the Tsars, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2019) Schmidt Happens, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2020) Braywatch, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Howard, Paul (2021a) Normal Sheeple, Dublin: Penguin Ireland.

Works Cited  221 Howard, Paul (2021b) RO’CK of Ages: From Boom Days to Zoom Days, Dublin: Penguin. Howard, Paul (2021c) ‘Ten Things I’ve Learned Writing Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’, Irish Times, Saturday 3 April 2021. Howard, Paul (2021d) ‘We’re Not a Priority for the Vaccine, Even Though We’re Rich?’, Irish Times, 20 March 2021. Howard, Paul (2022) Once Upon a Time in ... Donnybrook, Dublin: Penguin Ireland. Irigaray, Luce (1985) This Sex Which Is Not One, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Irish Examiner (2004) ‘Principal Made Manslaughter Accused Write Version of Incident’, Irish Examiner, Friday 30 January 2004. Kelleher, Margaret (2015) ‘Digital Platform for Contemporary Irish Writing’, http://www​.con​temp​orar​yiri​shwriting​.ie/ [accessed 23/04/2023]. Kelly, Adam (2017) ‘The Re-education of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly’, Éire-Ireland 52 (1 and 2, Spring/Summer):49–77. Kelly, Fergus (1988) A Guide to Irish Law, Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. Kernan, Alvin B. (1965) The Plot of Satire, New Haven: Yale. Kerrigan, Gene (2010) ‘Harney Didn’t Create Chaos on Her Own’, Sunday Independent, 14 March 2010. Kharpertian, Theodore D. (1990) A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon, Madison, WI: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Kimmage, Paul (2015) ‘12 days of Kimmage: Paul Talks to Ross O’Carroll-Kelly creator Paul Howard’, Irish Independent, 25 December 2015. Kinsella, Thomas and Louis Le Brocquy (1969) The Táin, translated by Thomas Kinsella with Brush Drawings by Louis Le Brocquy,Dublin: Dolmen Press. Kirk, Eugene P. (1980) Menippean Satire: An Annotated Catalogue of Texts and Criticism, New York: Garland. Knight, Charles A. (2004) The Literature of Satire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krause, David (1982) The Profane Book of Irish Comedy, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1988) Seminar 2 The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, translated by Sylvana Tomaselli, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1998) Seminar 20 On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge – Encore 1972-1973, edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Bruce Fink, New York: Norton. Lacan, Jacques (1990) Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, translated by Rosalind Krauss, Denis Hollier, and Annette Michelson, New York: Norton. Lacan, Jacques (1991) Seminar 1 Freud’s Papers on Technique 1953–1954, translated by John Forrester, New York: Norton. Lacan, Jacques (2006) Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink in collaboration with Héloïse Fink and Russell Grigg, New York: Norton.

222  Works Cited Lanters, José (2000) Unauthorized Versions: Irish Menippean Satire, 1919–1952, Washington: Catholic University of American Press. Lynall, Gregory (2012) Swift and Science: The Satire, Politics, And Theology of Natural Knowledge, 1690–1730, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Lyotard, Jean-François (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Macherey, Pierre (2008) ‘Marx Dematerialised, or the Spirit of Derrida’, in Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, edited by Michael Sprinker, London: Verso, 17–25. MacKillop, James (1986) Fionn mac Cumhaill: Celtic Myth in English Literature, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. Maher, Eamon and Eugene O’Brien (eds) (2015) From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of the Celtic Tiger and Its Aftermath, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marx, Karl (1990) Capital: A Critique of Political Economy 1, translated by Ben Fowkes, 3 vols. Vol. 1, London: Penguin Books. McLaughlin, Roisin (2008) Early Irish Satire, Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. McNeill, William (1999) The Glance of the Eye: Heidegger, Aristotle, and the Ends of Theory, Albany: State University of New York Press. Meagher, John (2015) ‘Paul Howard: Why I’m “Sooo” Not Done with Ross’, Irish Independent, 13 September 2015. Mercier, Vivian (1962) The Irish Comic Tradition, Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mikowski, Sylvie (2014) Ireland and Popular Culture, Oxford: Peter Lang. Moretti, Franco (1987) The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, London: Verso. Mulvey, Laura (2009) Visual and Other Pleasures, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Nightingale, Andrea Wilson (2004) Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh, Ailís (2007) Satirical Narrative in Early Irish Literature, unpublished dissertation, School of Celtic Studies, NUI Maynooth. Nyberg, Peter (2011) ‘Misjudging Risk: Causes of the Systemic Banking Crisis in Ireland’, Report of the Commission of Investigation into the Banking Sector in Ireland, Dublin: Government Publication. O’Brien, Eugene (2009) ‘A ‘Third’ Reading: James Joyce and Paul Howard and the Monstrous Aporia’, in Passages: Movements and Moments in Text and Theory, edited by Maria Beville, Maeve Tynan, and Marita Ryan, Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 131–48. O’Brien, Eugene (2014) ‘‘Tendency-Wit’: The Cultural Unconscious of the Celtic Tiger in the Writings of Paul Howard’, in From Prosperity to Austerity: A Socio-Cultural Critique of the Celtic Tiger, edited by Eamon Maher and Eugene O’Brien, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 62–75. O’Brien, Tim (2008) ‘Bank Chief Calls for ‘Brave’ Budget’, Irish Times, 6 October 2008. O’Carroll-Kelly, Ross (2014) Ahem. I Have Just This Minute Finished Working on My Next Book. It’s Called ‘Raiders of the Lost Dork’ and You Can Buy it in September. edited by @RossOCK: Twitter.

Works Cited  223 O’Connor, Brendan (2003) ‘Defendants at Liberty to Offer Two Fingers to the Justice System’, Irish Independent 30 November 2003. O’Sullivan, Joan (2019) ‘Advanced Dublin English in Irish Radio Advertising’, World Englishes 32 (3):358–76. Osborne, Peter (2005) How to Read Marx, London: Granta Books. Power, Kevin (2008a) Bad Day in Blackrock, Dublin: Lilliput Press. Power, Kevin (2008b) ‘Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, Irish Independent, 6 November 2008. Quintero, Ruben (2011) A Companion to Satire: Ancient and Modern, Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Regling, Klaus and Max Watson (2010) A Preliminary Report on The Sources of Ireland’s Banking Crisis, Dublin: Government Publication. Renfrew, Alistair (2015) Mikhail Bakhtin: Routledge Critical Thinkers, London: Routledge. Rooney, Sally (2018) Normal People, London: Faber. Ruddock, Alan (2010) ‘Don’t Bank on This Lot to Come Clean on Their Own’, Sunday Independent, 18 April 2010. Simpson, Paul (2003) On the Discourse of Satire: Towards a Stylistic Model of Satirical Humour, Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Swartz, David (1997) Culture & Power: The Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Swift, Jonathan, Carole Fabricant, and Robert Mahony (eds) (2010) Swift’s Irish Writings: Selected Prose and Poetry, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Taylor, Cliff (2017) ‘FitzPatrick Omnishambles a Defining Moment for State’, Irish Times, Saturday 27 May. Terrazas-Calero, Ana María and Carolina P. Amador Moreno (2017) ‘Encapsulating Irish English in Literature’, World Englishes 36 (2 June):254–68. Dalzell, Tom and Terry Victor (eds) (2013) The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, London: Routledge. Ward, Koral (2008) Augenblick: The Concept of the ‘Decisive Moment’ in 19thand 20th-Century Western Philosophy, London: Ashgate. Webb, Jen, Tony Schirato, and Geoff Danaher (eds) (2002) Understanding Bourdieu, London: Sage Publications. Roche William, K., Philip J. O’Connell, and Andrea Prothero (eds) (2016) Austerity and Recovery in Ireland, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolf, Naomi (1991) The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, London: Vintage Books. Zappen, James Philip (2004) The Rebirth of Dialogue: Bakhtin, Socrates, and the Rhetorical Tradition, Albany: State University of New York Press.

Index

1916 Rising 161 Abrahamson, Lenny 62 Adam (Honor’s boyfriend) 15, 213 aesthetic 20, 34, 39, 41, 43, 55, 85 aesthetic ideology 55 Africa 24, 89, 93, 156–157, 169 Agamben, Giorgio 53, 81–83 Ahern, Bertie 50, 72, 200 Alan Clarke 40, 76, 153 Allied Irish Bank 21–22 Althusser, Louis 56–57 Amador-Moreno, Carolina 15, 17 Amburn-James, Valerie (Criminal Assets character) 77, 89–90 America, United States of 7, 9, 41, 47, 51, 94–95, 129, 174, 200 Amie (friend of Sorcha) 97 anagnorisis 20, 103, 171, 173 analysis 2–3, 14, 18, 37, 43, 82, 86, 99–100, 106, 175 Andorra 6, 9, 26, 90, 93, 99, 106, 214 Anglo-Irish Bank 22, 27, 56, 120 Ant Farm at Cherrywood 208 Aoife (girlfriend of Fionn) 64–68, 96–97, 108 Apple 53 Áras an Uachtaráin 12, 199, 201–204 Argentina 10, 103, 110, 129–130, 136–137, 162 Aristotle 18–20 Atkins, G. Douglas 36 austerity 13, 45, 75, 109, 111, 114–117, 122, 123, 127, 130, 134–135, 175, 203 Austerity and Recovery in Ireland 16 

Australia 134, 191, 199 author 4, 6, 14, 30, 35, 36, 62, 91, 107, 143, 168 Bakhtin, Mikhail 2, 13–14, 39, 55, 59, 88, 91, 104–107, 112, 137, 139, 160, 168–169, 214–215; carnival 24, 39, 75, 105, 107, 180, 214; polyphonic 30, 88–89, 91, 105, 112, 178, 186; polyphony 88, 104–105, 168 ballroom-dancing 182 Bank of Ireland 21–22 bards 2, 34 Barnes, Eabha (Ross’s date) 42, 189–190 Barton, Ruth 21 Baudrillard, Jean 175 Baxter, Judith 168 beauty 32, 39, 53, 64–69, 80–81, 86, 110, 134, 156, 158, 192, 196 Bed, Vampire 12, 192, 201, 208, 211–212 Beesley, Arthur 4 Benjamin, Walter 24, 83, 157 Benson, E. F. 39 Bernadette (woman on jury) 147–148 Bettega, Fabrizio (Erika’s boyfriend) 129 Bevis, Matthew 33 Bildungsroman 12–13, 95 Blackrock College 48, 61, 111, 194 Blodwyn (Nudger’s Welsh partner) 129–130 BMW Z4 77, 81 Boland, Tom 38, 161 boom, economic 6, 23, 104–105 Bourdieu, Pierre 2, 13–14, 20, 39, 41–43, 50, 122, 139–140; capital

Index  225 118, 123, 189; capital, cultural 41–43, 60, 82, 140, 198; capital, social 50, 63; capital, symbolic 41–42, 52, 57, 82, 91, 139; metanoia 20–23, 42, 56, 112 bourgeois 42, 44, 59 Bray 4, 11–12, 84, 127, 188–189, 194–195, 214 Breatnach, Liam 34 Breege (nurse) 171 Brigita (surrogate) 189 Broderek (uses they/them pronouns) 176–177 Bublé, Michael 113 Buckets of Blood (friend of Ronan) 173 Buenos Aires 131, 162 burning down of the Dáil 12, 26, 109, 133, 157, 211 Cahill, Susan 15 cancer 194–195, 202, 205 capitalism 6, 50–53, 75, 78–79, 81, 123–124 caricature 8, 39, 54–55, 85, 87, 93, 98, 102, 106 Castlerock College 7, 46, 48, 59, 60, 62–63, 76, 83, 103, 111, 118–119, 182, 188, 205, 214 Catholicism 44, 52, 56, 82, 91–92, 178 Celtic Tiger 1, 6, 9, 13, 15–16, 23, 28, 38, 43–47, 56, 58, 71–77, 81–83, 88, 91–92, 104–105, 109–134, 142–147, 175 character 1, 3, 5, 7–8, 10–13, 16–17, 26, 30–32, 36–37, 44, 46–48, 50–51, 54–55, 69, 71–72, 75–78, 82, 84–85, 87, 92–108, 128, 132, 137, 142–152, 155–158, 160, 163, 164, 169–171, 176, 180–182, 186, 188, 195, 208 Chassay, Eddie (surgeon friend of Hennessey) 165 Chloë (friend of Sorcha) 66, 97 Christmas 33, 73, 138, 140, 152–153, 159, 171, 201 Ciaran, Brother (Presentation College Bray) 182, 194–195 Claire (from Bray) 16, 84, 127, 142, 164, 176, 188, 194 Clarke, Alan 40, 76, 153

Clarke, Austin 2, 37 class 2–8, 17, 25, 34, 42–52, 54–57, 59, 72, 74, 79, 84–87, 89, 94–95, 99, 101, 103, 105–106, 112–113, 120, 122, 127, 130, 138–140, 149, 152, 160, 169, 176, 182, 184, 200–201 Clíodhna (friend of Honor in Gaeltacht) 206–207 coat, camel-hair 47 cocktail, Minted 82–83, 90 Coghlan-O’Hara, Hennessy 6–7, 26, 59, 83, 114, 197, 207, 212 college 7, 11, 42, 46, 48, 54, 56, 62–63, 71, 103, 111, 194, 205–207 columns, newspaper 3, 7, 38, 46 comedy 3, 9, 16–17, 20, 25–26, 31, 37, 40, 47, 50, 62, 67–68, 70, 74, 84–85, 88–90, 94, 96, 102, 108, 112, 123, 128, 130–136, 138, 143, 145, 148, 155–156, 158–159, 162, 165, 171–172, 191, 196–197, 204, 211, 214 commodification 52–53, 67, 69, 73, 77–83, 92, 95, 115, 124, 189 Conroy, Barry (JP’s father) 8, 33, 38, 101 Conroy, JP 7–8, 46, 73, 75, 91, 93, 101, 111, 118, 126, 134, 142, 149, 151, 158, 162, 168, 192, 201, 206 conscience 33, 75, 158 consumption 41–45, 67, 75, 77–78, 81–83, 90, 124, 140 contemporary Ireland 2, 16, 101, 127, 169 Cork 11, 167, 174–175, 181, 185–186 COVID vaccine 3–4 Cowen, Brian 21, 200 Criminal Assets Bureau 25–26, 89, 107–108 Cronin, Mike 15, 119 culture 1–5, 7–8, 11, 13–16, 20, 25, 34–35, 39–44, 47–48, 50–53, 60, 62, 66–68, 71, 81–82, 91, 93, 108, 115–116, 121–122, 128, 138–140, 168–169, 189, 192–193, 198, 214 culture, high 1–3, 14, 16, 18, 39–40, 43, 49, 100 culture, popular 2, 14, 16, 39–40, 43, 71, 138, 189 Dalzell, Tom 17 Danaher, Geoff 41–42, 140

226 Index de Barra, Andrea (Fionn’s mother) 18 de Barra, Eleanor (Fionn’s sister) 125–126, 129, 131 de Barra, Ewan (Fionn’s father) 149 de Barra, Fionn 7, 9–11, 24, 45, 63–64, 86–87, 96–99, 114–115, 123, 125–126, 129–131, 134–137, 143, 149–151, 156–159, 168, 174, 182–185, 188–191, 194–195, 202, 205 de Barra, Hillary (Fionn’s son) 189–191, 194, 199, 202 deconstruction 48, 83, 102, 112, 113 Delma (friend of Fionnuala) 7, 196, 206 de Man, Paul 55 dementia 12, 204–205, 211 democracy 175, 186, 200, 211 Derrida, Jacques 2, 13–15, 19, 39–40, 43, 61, 82, 100, 102; ergon 39–40, 43–44, 91; hauntology 82, 102, 158, 172, 213–214; navette 14, 20, 101; parergon 39–40, 43–44, 91, 191; parergonal 40 dialectical 7, 13, 46, 84, 132, 155 dialogicality 88, 168 dialogue 12, 29–31, 37, 88, 91, 105, 127, 168, 209 Dingle 171, 206, 209 Distorted Body Image Syndrome 32, 67 Donegal 203–204, 211 Donoghue, Chris 181 dream 5, 80, 84, 87, 100, 123 Drewery, Derek (bullied Honor) 153 Dublin 4–7, 24, 69, 71, 73, 75, 79, 81, 84–89, 95, 120, 137, 161, 184, 206 Dufresne, Todd 79 Dumpling, Ezra (Shoshanna’s baby) 151 Dussourd, Bernard (Andorran ruby boss) 99 Dussourd, Conchita (psychoanalyst) 99–101, 104 dystopian 203, 208, 212 Easter Rising (1916 Rising) 161 economy 6, 9–10, 21, 23–25, 36, 41, 43–44, 73, 75, 93, 103–105, 116–117, 120, 132, 136, 144, 174, 192, 203, 208, 212 Eliot, Thomas Stearns 1, 2

élite 27, 54–60, 73, 115–122, 126, 131, 151, 186 Elliott, Robert C. 29, 31 ellipsis 3–4, 7, 13–14, 18, 20, 50, 59, 79, 117, 203, 214 Emer (friend of Sorcha) 31, 64–66 enculturation 50, 66 environment 76, 95, 138, 152, 168, 198 eponymous 9, 30, 44, 126, 174, 182 estate agency 38, 73, 75 European Central Bank 13, 114 European Commission 13, 114 eye-dialect 3, 86–88, 113, 129, 139, 150, 156, 169, 172, 193–194 Fabricant, Carole 36 Facebook 193, 207, 214 Fantasia 132–133 fashion 51, 52, 66, 84, 96, 114, 131, 163, 190, 205 father-figure 101 fatness 32, 64, 67, 68, 133, 142, 202 Fearne (friend of Ross) 74 Fehily, Father Denis 49, 53–60, 96–102, 108, 111, 118–120, 148, 156–159, 172, 182, 193–195, 213, 214; Vianne (old girlfriend of Denis Fehily) 54, 97, 98 fetishism 52, 64, 73–83, 90–92 Fianna Fáil 23, 105, 175–176, 185–186 fili 34, 35 financial crisis 82, 105, 113, 117 Fine Gael 23, 105, 118, 176 Fitzpatrick, Seán 16, 27, 51, 75, 79, 119–120 Flynn, Jack (Siofra’s son) 159, 164, 170, 200 Flynn, Siofra (child psychologist) 159–164 football, Gaelic 86, 210 footlong sandwich franchise 134, 158 Forde, Christian 7, 56–57, 62, 77, 87, 129, 134–135, 142–143, 149, 153, 157–159, 168, 171–172, 201 Forster, E. M. 10; flat character 10, 12, 76, 147, 168; round character 10, 93 Foxrock 7, 50, 51, 77, 101, 106, 196 Freud, Sigmund 2, 13–14, 46, 74–75, 79, 89, 100, 102, 106, 113–119, 122–124, 143–144, 183, 189, 204,

Index  227 207; Oedipus complex 100, 107; tendency-wit 115, 117, 119, 121–122 Freyne, Patrick 1, 2, 46 Friedman, Amy L. 33–34 Gaelic Athletic Association 128, 181, 210 Gaeltacht, the 188, 206, 209, 213 Gardaí 9, 49, 115, 197, 200 Garret (partner of Claire from Bray) 127, 164, 176, 200 gaze, male 66–69 gender 11, 13, 66–67, 167, 177–180, 207 genre 13, 17, 21, 28–29, 33, 35, 37, 40, 49, 55, 77, 91, 95, 102, 105, 197, 215 ghost 9, 30, 102, 110, 112 giddiness 72–73, 81 Gillespie, Michael Patrick 44 Gleeson, Colin 27 Google 150, 190, 193, 205 Gorman, Clare 15, 73 goys, the 87–88, 126, 159, 214 Graham, Sasha 192 Graubard, Terry (former Castlerock player) 39, 103, 111–113 Greenberg, Jonathan Daniel 31 half-sister 7, 9, 93, 100, 114 Hamlet 102 Hamon, Philippe 96 Hand, Derek 15 Harte, Liam 15 Harvey (gay American friend of Ross) 9, 94, 176 Haughey, Charles J. 23, 105, 165, 185, 200 Heaney, Seamus 40, 43 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 74 Heidegger, Martin 19–20; Augenblick 19–23, 27, 107 Higgins, Michael D. 12, 201–202, 211 Highet, Gilbert 29, 30, 33, 50 Hitler, Adolf 52, 54, 58–59, 98, 174–175, 200, 211 Hobson, Marian 40 Holohan, Conn 15 homedrobe, the 201, 212 Honalee (Sorcha’s family home) 125, 133–135, 138, 154–155, 159–160, 212

Honohan, Patrick 22 Hook, Lyon and Sinker (estate agents) 8, 33, 38, 73, 75, 192 Howard, Paul: Anglo: The Musical 16; Braywatch 11, 14, 182, 188–189, 194; The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nightdress 8, 13, 71–72; Dancing with the Tsars 11, 14, 167, 177, 182; Downturn Abbey 10, 14, 42, 136–138, 149; Game of Throw-ins 10, 14, 166–167, 182; The Joy 18; The Mis-Education Years 7, 46–47, 118–119; Mr S and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box 9, 13, 26, 46, 93, 169; NAMA Mia! 9, 13, 110–115; Normal Sheeple 12, 14, 88, 188–189, 202, 208; The Oh My God Delusion 9, 13, 20, 110, 113– 114; Operation Trumpsformation 11, 14, 21, 167, 173–174; PS, I Scored the Bridesmaids 8, 71; Rhino What You Did Last Summer 9, 13, 93–94, 104, 110, 124, 176; Schmidt Happens 11, 14, 75, 188–189, 198; Seedless in Seattle 10, 14, 136, 138, 159, 167–168; The Shelbourne Ultimatum 1, 9, 13, 110, 115, 123, 137; The Teenage Dirtbag Years 7, 13, 46–47; ThesauRoss 2, 17; We Need to Talk about Ross 144 Huguette (Ronan’s UCD girlfriend) 192 human resources 76 humour 2, 6–7, 13, 17, 20–22, 25, 28, 33–35, 37–39, 48, 55–56, 60, 66, 74, 78–79, 87–88, 103, 106, 113– 115, 120–122, 128, 160, 163–165, 177–179, 214 Ibrahim (Ugandan kidnapper) 157–158 ideology 6, 54–59, 62, 65, 72, 79, 82, 96, 118–119, 161–162, 184, 193 idiolect 17, 78, 86, 88, 120 Immaculata (Sorcha’s sponsored African girl) 93 Inquiry 22 International Monetary Fund 13, 114 investigation 22 Ireland 1–29, 35–39, 41, 44, 45, 47, 51–52, 56, 73, 75, 78–79, 89, 91–92, 97–99, 101, 103, 105, 108, 111–113, 116–117, 121–125, 128–130, 134,

228 Index 136–137, 149, 162, 165, 173–176, 186, 188–189, 195, 201–211, 213–215; Ireland, fictive 13–14, 50, 117, 175, 214; Ireland, real 14 Irexit 12, 174, 203, 206, 211 Irigaray, Luce 65–67, 69 Irish Times, The 1, 3, 27, 38, 63, 107, 198 Irish Women’s Rugby team 213 irony 4, 5, 7, 14, 35–37, 51, 63, 84, 90, 101–105, 139, 145, 177–178, 184, 188, 192, 194 irony, narrative 133, 147, 158 jail 25–26, 63, 102–103, 107–108, 117 Jamaica 86 Jenny (Fionn’s girlfriend) 149–151, 154, 156, 158–159 Jesuits, The 158 Johnson, Boris 155, 193, 200, 203 Joint Committee investigation 22 Jones, Byrom (Seapoint rugby coach) 172, 182 Joseph, Erika 7, 9–10, 12, 65, 68, 79, 84, 93–97, 100, 114–115, 123, 125–126, 129–132, 137, 152, 162, 169, 186, 191, 206–208, 211, 213 Joyce, James: Ulysses 42 judgement 55, 61, 85, 108, 155–156, 160, 187, 191, 214 Julius (kidnapper) 24, 156 Kelleher, Margaret 16 Kelly, Donie (Ross’s 1916 ancestor) 161 Kelly, Edward John (Ross’s 1798 ancestor) 161 Kernan, Alvin B. 35 Kerrigan, Gene 120 Kerry 12, 188, 206 Kharpertian, Theodore D. 33 Killiney 4, 138–141 Kimmage, Paul 46–47 Kinsella, Thomas 41 Kirk, Eugene P. 33 Knight, Charles A. 30–31, 33 Krause, David 37 Laakso-Sigurjónsson, Magnus (Oisinn’s partner) 176–177, 193 Lacan, Jacques 2–3, 13–14, 24–25, 57, 75, 116, 118–119, 132; inter-dit 3,

7, 23–24, 62, 127, 175, 214–215; the real 4, 7, 13–14, 16, 20–27, 44, 47, 50, 105, 111–114, 116–122, 127–129, 136, 175–176, 181, 192, 203, 212–215 Lalor, Edmund (Sorcha’s father) 125, 154–156, 159, 163–165, 169, 177, 180, 184, 190–191, 207, 212 language 3, 8, 16–19, 21, 25, 28–29, 33–34, 37–39, 42, 44, 48, 56–57, 102, 112, 116, 120, 139, 149, 157, 160, 163, 170–171, 178, 181, 184, 208, 214 Lanters, José 29, 37 laughter 3, 14, 24, 28–29, 31–32, 38, 51, 55, 62–63, 66, 69–70, 74, 94, 106, 112, 119, 145, 149, 155, 160–163, 170, 179, 214–215 Lauren (Christian's wife) 94, 134, 142, 153 Leavis, F. R. 16 Le Brocquy, Louis 41 legend 1, 88 Leinster 4–5, 7, 9, 10, 12, 46, 48, 54–55, 63, 98, 103, 111, 119, 129–130, 135, 142, 165, 172, 188, 194–195, 213–214 Leinster Schools Senior Cup 1, 3, 7, 9, 12–13, 22, 46, 54, 98, 110–111, 115, 119, 122–123, 137, 172, 188, 194–195, 213–215 leitmotif 4, 37 Lenihan, Brian 21 Leonard, Mrs (ballroom dancing teacher) 182 Lidia (surrogate) 189 Lidl 88 linguistic 3, 8, 15–19, 21, 25, 29, 34, 37–39, 42, 44, 48, 56–57, 102, 112, 116, 120, 139, 149, 157, 160, 163, 170–171, 178, 181, 184, 208, 214 LinkedIn 193 literature 1–3, 14–16, 20, 29, 33–35, 37, 39–40, 43, 65, 84, 121–122, 149, 169, 175, 205, 208, 215 Little Cambridge 192 Loredana (surrogate) 189, 196 Los Angeles 9, 73, 93 Love/Hate 11, 167, 168, 173; Nidge (main character in Love/Hate) 168 Lucas, George 87, 129

Index  229 Lynall, Gregory 36 Lyotard, Jean-François 175 M50 87, 132, 192 Macherey, Pierre 102 magic 78, 82–83 Maher, Eamon 22, 73 Malingrad 203, 208, 211 Mandela, Nelson 170, 173 Manichean 177 Marianne (Ross’s Gaeltacht girlfriend/Honor’s Irish teacher) 12, 188, 206, 209 Markievicz, Countess 185 Marriage Equality referendum 177 Martin, Micheal 175 Marty (thief from northside) 1, 86–88 Marx, Karl 2, 13, 52–53, 78–82, 102 Massey, Muirgheal (Sorcha’s political rival) 174, 185 Masters, Anto (Tina’s brother) 83, 106, 107 Masters, Rhianna-Brogan 138–139, 145, 152, 192 Masters, Ronan 5, 7–8, 10–11, 55, 71, 78–79, 83–85, 92, 96–97, 99, 106, 111–112, 125, 127–130, 133–138, 140, 143, 145–146, 160–161, 167–168, 170, 173, 192–193, 200–201, 204–205, 207–208, 210–211 Masters, Tina (Ronan’s mother) 78–79, 83–85, 88, 106–107, 133, 135, 146, 205 materialism 23, 25, 34, 39–40, 44, 53, 73, 77–82, 90–92, 103, 105, 124, 194 McEvoy, Felim (former Castlerock player) 103–104 McGahey, Tom (principal of Castlerock College) 101, 205–206 McNeill, William 19 McPhee, Phinneas (UCD lecturer) 193 Meagher, John 17–18 Mercier, Vivian 35, 37 Merrion Shopping Centre 26 metaphysical 18, 82 middle-class 8, 42, 47, 50, 56–57, 79, 83, 85–88, 95, 120, 125, 138, 140, 152, 171, 179, 181, 183, 185, 201 MILF 136, 170, 189 Milice française 54, 97 Modernism 1, 2, 39

modernity 13, 25, 105, 127, 142, 169 Moldova 189 Mongey, Cillian (Sorcha’s partner) 9, 95, 97, 104, 110 Monte Carlo 142 Montessori School 192 Moretti, Franco 13, 95–96, 107 Mount Anville 11, 163, 168, 174, 179–180, 182, 198, 206 Mountjoy prison 108 Mrs Wells (Sorcha’s grandmother) 89, 177 Muiris (GAA player in Gaeltacht) 210 Mulvey, Laura 68, 69 Murphy, Brian 61, 62, 111 myth 1, 9 narcissism 8, 13, 47–48, 69, 100, 146, 164, 168, 171 narrative 4, 13–14, 30, 40, 44, 46, 49, 53, 62, 67, 71, 84, 88–90, 96, 100, 103, 106–107, 110, 112–114, 124–125, 128, 131, 133–139, 143, 147, 149, 151, 158, 167–168, 170, 173–175, 178, 181, 187, 205, 211 narrator 4–5, 63, 89, 106, 107 narrator, fallible 14, 158 narrator, fallible first-person 124, 189 narrator, first-person 4, 30 National Asset Management Agency (NAMA) 9, 13, 24, 110, 112–117, 123 Nazi 54–55, 58–59, 98–99, 101–102 negotiation 3, 13–14, 23, 43, 50, 76, 101, 127, 156, 175–176, 212 New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, The 17 New Republic, (Charles’ political party) 6, 11, 115, 132, 174–176, 199 newspaper 3, 7, 16, 122, 124 New Zealand 5, 150, 172, 193 Ní Chathasaigh, Croía (Sorcha’s feminist advisor) 184–185, 193 Niemöller, Martin 180 Nightingale, Andrea Wilson 18 Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh, Ailís 34 northside 50–51, 69, 74, 123 novel 6, 8–9, 30–31, 40, 49, 88, 91, 104–105, 133, 137, 141, 156, 159, 188, 214 Nudger (friend of Ronan) 130, 133–134

230 Index Nugent, Ryle (rugby-reporter friend of Ross) 69 Nyberg, Peter 22 O’Brien, Flann 2, 29, 37 O’Carroll, Aida (Fionnuala’s mother) 132–134 O’Carroll-Kelly, Brian (Ross’s son) 7, 10, 21, 61–62, 111, 167, 171, 181, 186, 191, 200 O’Carroll-Kelly, Cassiopeia (Fionnuala’s daughter) 197 O’Carroll-Kelly, Charles 4–14, 21–28, 31, 37, 38, 50–59, 75, 77–78, 80–81, 85, 92–93, 99, 101–109, 114, 116, 118–129, 132, 136–137, 144–147, 155–156, 160–168, 170, 173–175, 181, 183–188, 193, 195–208, 210–213; Dick Features 92, 107; Full stop. New para 102, 107; Irexit 12, 206, 211; New Republic 6, 11, 115, 132, 174–176, 199; Shred Focking Everything 6, 9, 20–21, 28, 113 O’Carroll-Kelly, Diana (Fionnuala’s daughter) 142, 197 O’Carroll-Kelly, Emily (Fionnuala’s daughter) 197 O’Carroll-Kelly, Fionnuala 6–12, 52, 57, 77, 85, 89–95, 106, 113–115, 119–121, 127, 130, 132–137, 142–145, 152–158, 160, 167–168, 174, 178, 186–189, 196–197, 202, 204–205, 211–212; Criminal Assets 9, 25, 89–90, 107–108, 153; Fifty Greys in Shades 9–10, 136; Karma Suits Ya 9; Legal Affairs 9; Mesbur, Zara (character in film of Sundried Tomatoes) 127, 130, 132; Mom, They Said They’d Never Heard of Sundried Tomatoes 6, 9, 127, 130, 140; States of Ecstasy 9 O’Carroll-Kelly, Honor 3, 4, 6–12, 71, 92–95, 115, 124–128, 130, 132– 136, 140–143, 148–149, 152–164, 167–171, 179–183, 188, 190–199, 206, 207, 209–213; Caleb (Honor’s boyfriend) 169–170, 174; Eddie (Honor’s transgender name) 11, 98, 139, 165, 167, 179, 180, 190; Flidais (Caleb’s mother) 169–170; Reese (Honor’s boyfriend) 189, 206–207, 213

O’Carroll-Kelly, Hugo (Fionnuala’s son) 157, 197 O’Carroll-Kelly, Johnny (Ross’s son) 7, 10, 142, 165, 167, 171, 191 O’Carroll-Kelly, Leo (Ross’s son) 7, 10, 156, 167, 171, 180, 200, 208 O’Carroll-Kelly, Louisa May (Fionnuala’s daughter) 197, 204 O’Carroll-Kelly Ross; Rossi (Seapoint nickname) 171; de Paor, Rossa (nickname in the Gaeltacht) 210; O’Carroll-Kelly, Ross (nickname) 146, 185; roysh (phatic term used by Ross) 17, 45, 51, 58, 62–65, 67, 74, 84, 92, 98, 99, 107, 120 O’Carroll-Kelly, Sorcha 4, 7–12, 31, 38, 42, 64, 71–72, 75–87, 89, 92–97, 104, 110, 115, 123, 125, 127–171, 173–177, 179–184, 186–192, 196–199, 202, 206–208, 210, 212–213 O’Driscoll, Brian 10 O’Fathaigh, Riobard (school principal) 141 O’Gara, Ronan 5 O’Sullivan, Eddie 98 ollam 34 Osborne, Peter 80 parents 5–6, 10, 46–50, 57, 72, 78, 83–84, 97, 100–101, 114, 120–128, 130, 133, 139, 141–145, 149, 152, 156, 159–164, 180–183, 191, 197, 208, 213 Paris 54, 79, 81, 99, 129, 165 parody 16–17, 30, 35–37, 74, 90, 113, 168–169, 209 patriarchy 48, 50, 56, 65–67, 91 Pearse Street Sanitary Services 103 Penguin 106 perfumed holy water 91 Petty, Sir William 36 Pfanning, Fred (hostage consultant) 156–157 philosophy 14, 18, 19, 40, 59, 74, 88, 91 Plato 18, 20 polyparadigmatic character 96, 107, 194 populism 60, 89, 162, 174–175, 181, 203 Power, Kevin 3, 62, 65, 169

Index  231 Power, Lovell (character in Criminal Assets) 89 power, symbolic 14 Pratchett, Terry 39 Pratshke, Patriona (social worker) 138–140 Presentation College Bray 188, 194 priesthood 91, 162 privilege 2–6, 38, 50, 53, 56–57, 60, 126, 185 profanity 2 property developer 6, 108 prosperity 73, 109, 115, 130 Protestantism 56 psychoanalysis 3, 14, 46, 100 Putin, Vladimir 12, 202 Quintero, Ruben 29 Rastafarian 86 Rathfriland, Hedda 114, 124, 126 Rathfriland, Regina 9, 26, 113–114, 123–124, 126 Rathfriland, Toddy 113–114 recession 6, 9–10, 13, 16, 27, 44, 71–72, 109–110, 113, 115, 117, 120, 121, 123–129, 132, 134, 136–139, 143, 174 Regling, Klaus 21–22, 118 relationship 7, 9–12, 34, 39, 41, 43, 45, 46, 51, 55, 61, 69, 78–81, 89–92, 94, 96, 99, 100, 102, 107, 108, 113, 114, 126–128, 130, 132, 133, 135, 136, 142–145, 147, 150, 154, 158, 163, 169, 173, 181–183, 189–191, 194, 197, 202–207, 212 religion 8, 52, 56–57, 78, 81, 83, 88, 91–92, 101, 149, 184, 190, 199 Renfrew, Alistair 105 repetition-compulsion 10, 75, 82, 116, 118–119, 150, 189 Report 22, 118 responsibility 8, 22, 25, 28, 34, 58, 111, 118–120, 122, 133, 137, 211 Revenue Commissioners 108 rhetoric 58, 61, 78, 94, 123, 132, 174, 180 Robert Mahony 36 Robinson, Mary 198 Rob the Builder (Comic song about NAMA) 24 Rolly (Ugandan kidnapper) 24, 157

Rooney, Sally 12, 65, 188, 209; Normal People 12, 88, 188, 209, 210 Rosa Parks Apartments 110, 111, 132 Rowuz of Finglas West, The (Dordeen’s sister) 192 Roxana (surrogate) 189 Ruddock, Alan 117 rugby 4–12, 18, 38, 46–48, 50, 54–60, 63, 68, 76, 93, 99, 103, 108, 119, 129, 143, 146, 151, 162–167, 170–178, 180–182, 188, 193–194, 206, 210, 213–214 Russia 11, 59, 167, 168, 186, 196, 202 Ryan, Marita 16, 61 sæva indignatio, Swift Jonathan 31 Samuels, Ari (Fionnuala’s elderly husband) 167, 174, 178, 187 San Sancilio (plastic surgeon) 94 satire 2–7, 13–14, 18, 20–38, 42–44, 48–50, 54–56, 59, 62, 66–69, 73–74, 78–80, 84, 87–88, 91–94, 102, 104–105, 112, 121–123, 125–129, 137, 140–145, 149, 151–152, 162–163, 168–170, 175–177, 179–182, 186–187, 192–194, 198–203, 208, 211, 214–215; Archilochus 29; Horatian 2–5, 13, 28–34, 37, 51, 62–63, 67, 76, 87, 94, 106, 149, 160–164, 170, 181, 187, 193; Juvenalian 2–5, 13, 28–37, 49–50, 56, 62, 87, 94, 175, 192–193, 198; Menippean 2–5, 13, 28–34, 37, 49, 59, 62, 67, 87, 88, 91, 105, 129, 137, 142, 152, 163, 170, 193; Varro 30 scatological 180, 184 Schirato, Tony 41–42, 140 Schmidt, Joe 11, 14, 75, 188–189, 193–194, 198 school 1–6, 10–13, 18, 38, 46–50, 62– 63, 69, 76, 83, 88, 111, 119, 130, 134–136, 141–143, 152–154, 161, 164, 174, 179, 188, 194, 197–198, 205–206, 209 school, private 56, 111; Holy Child Killiney 69, 192; Loreto Dalkey 69; St Joseph of Cluny 69 Seanad 184 Seapoint 10, 166, 170–173, 214 senior cup team 11, 17, 22, 25–27, 30, 47, 48, 50–51, 54–57, 62, 63,

232 Index 69, 74–75, 86, 90, 94, 98–100, 103, 106, 115, 117, 122, 124, 126, 132, 134, 138, 148, 164, 167, 184–185, 188, 189, 191, 206, 207, 213–214 Sexton, Johnny 10, 165 sexuality 11–12, 16, 31, 65, 68–69, 83, 89–91, 99–100, 113–114, 116, 124–126, 129, 131–133, 142–143, 147–148, 150–151, 157–158, 160, 168, 170, 173–174, 176, 179, 183, 189, 192, 196, 202, 205, 209 Shakespeare, William 85 Shelbourne hotel 9, 110 Shengelia, Fyodor (Russian mafia ally of Charles) 193, 195–196, 199, 200, 202–204 Shengelia, Raisa (Fyodor’s wife) 196, 202 Shengelia, Sergei (Fyodor’s son) 195–196 Shomera 182 Shoshanna (JP’s girlfriend) 142, 151, 154, 158 Shred Focking Everything 6, 9, 20, 21, 28, 113 Silas (Alexa-like recording device) 205–206 Simone (Sorcha’s special advisor) 206, 208, 212 Simpson, Paul 102 Sinatra, Frank 9 Sinn Féin 24, 176 slang, rhyming 17, 78, 115 social class 18, 42–47, 50, 57, 61, 63, 66–67, 78–80, 84, 112, 115, 120, 130, 138, 151, 201 society 2, 14, 23, 34–36, 41–44, 50–52, 56, 60–62, 66–68, 78, 83, 91, 94–95, 103, 114, 116–119, 140, 168, 175, 179, 201, 204, 214 Sorcha’s granny, Mrs Wells 89, 177 South County Dublin 21 South Dublin 2–3, 5, 11, 18, 31, 38, 46–48, 64, 69, 72, 76, 78, 89, 110, 121–122, 137, 149, 152 Star Wars 62, 129 Stembridge, Gerry 45; About Adam 45 stereotype 36, 66, 89 Strictly Mount Anville glitter ball 11, 168, 182 style 2–4, 12, 17, 33–35, 39, 46, 63, 67, 84–91, 107–108, 125–127,

154–155, 159, 174, 184, 186, 188, 209 Sunday Tribune, The 3, 7 surrogate 12, 189 Sutton, Mr (Castlerock rugby coach) 48 Swartz, David 41 swearing 42, 171, 176, 186, 191–192 Swift, Jonathan 2, 29, 31, 35–37; A Modest Proposal 35–36 Szidonia (surrogate) 189, 196 Tattan, Derek (Ronan’s rival tour operator) 173 Taylor, Cliff 27 teenager 10, 26, 31, 47, 136, 143, 207, 213 Terrazas-Calero, Ana María 15 theoretical grasp, Aristotle 19 theoria 18 thinness 65–66, 130 Thunberg, Greta 197–198 toilets 179–180 Tracy, Tony 15 tradition 2–3, 13, 16, 29–30, 34, 37, 44, 66, 83, 176, 187 transgender 11, 139, 167, 179–180 Trinity College Dublin 86, 209 triplets, the 7, 10–11, 136, 149, 152–156, 159, 171, 176–177, 182–184, 191, 204 Trump, Donald 6, 11, 51, 59, 155, 167, 174–175, 193, 196, 200–201, 203 truth 2–3, 7, 14, 19–23, 26–27, 77, 81, 91, 104, 123, 148, 159, 211 Tuhill, Terry and Larry (Dublin criminals) 111–112, 124 Tuite, Dordeen (Shadden’s mother) 129, 139 Tuite, Kennet (Shadden’s father) 128–129, 139, 145–146, 192 Tuite, Kennet and Dordeen (Shadden’s parents) 128, 139 Tuites, the 129, 133, 138–140, 143 U2 45, 72; Bono 72–73 Uganda 10, 131, 136, 143, 149, 156, 159 unconscious 5, 7, 14, 19, 25, 44, 68, 86, 100, 121, 130, 140, 149, 160–161

Index  233 United Kingdom 41, 203 United Nations General Assembly 198 universe, comedic 89, 96 University College Dublin (UCD) 7, 46, 63, 84–85, 111, 147, 184, 192 upper-class 3, 50, 138 value, use- 78, 82 vasectomy 10, 137, 163–165 Vico Road 73, 125, 137, 160, 206 Vienna 54, 98 Wallace, Oisinn 5, 7, 9–10, 24, 32, 63, 86, 91–92, 111, 125, 134–136, 142, 149, 154, 158, 168, 176–178, 193 Ward, Koral 19, 162 Warwick, Trevion (Ross’s US agent) 9, 94–95 Watson, Max 21, 118 Webb, Jen 41–42, 140

wedding 8, 71–72, 79–80, 83–84, 125, 129–132, 143, 148, 212 Weltanschauung 50 Whelan, Marty 1 Wilde, Oscar 2, 29 Williams, Gus (owner of Pearse Street Sanitary Services) 103 Wodehouse, P. G. 39, 156; Bertie Wooster 39, 147 woke 75, 95, 104, 180, 184, 187, 192 Wolf, Naomi 66 working-class 8, 50, 57, 74, 83–89, 133, 138, 140, 173, 184 world, comedic 47, 84, 130, 135, 145, 148, 155–158, 172, 191, 214 Yanet Garcia 168, 183 Zappen, James Philip 91 Zeitgeist 8, 53, 127