A doctoral student’s unravelling as he pursues academic fame is the central storyline of Declan Toohey’s inventive, experimental, and off-the-wall debut novel, Perpetual Comedown.
In Trinity’s Ussher library, while “looking for confirmation that I’m sane”, Darren Walton discovers something that might prove the existence of “an alternate Ireland called Camland”, where instead of ire, there is calm; everyone is free to do as they please; nothing is unusual; and all things inspire wonder. The existence of Camland, along with his theory of “the three-dimensional narrative”, will be Darren’s ticket to academic stardom, he believes.
Darren’s heightened first-person register leads us through a less-than-trustworthy account of “underground cabal[s]” at Maynooth University, a missing professor with whom he once had sex, a mother whose moods swing between “Beautiful, Bored, [and] Busy”, a separate dimension presided over by a bearded figure he calls “Your Man”, a sojourn in Nova Scotia, and much more. We dig through curious signifiers: gourds, cutlery, cans, Rick Astley songs, trying to pick apart what’s going on beneath the story Darren is telling us, and himself.
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It is the wont of the fledgling writer to blow open convention and in Perpetual Comedown we get the sense of a young writer at play. Big ideas (around storytelling and reality), elevated turns of phrase (“I must address the mammoth in the vestibule”), and contemporary Irish references (GAA-heads, Frank Ryan’s pub, Bus Eireann routes) abound. The book’s ambitious style is straight out of Flann O’Brien’s playbook. While Darren mulls over the idea of “a novel with infinite outcomes”, the outcomes in this novel often come from leftfield. Each scene and sentence lead somewhere surprising, as though the author has picked at random from his infinity of options. What’s the maddest thing that could happen next, we wonder, and then something madder happens.
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This is not entirely displeasing, though it’s often perplexing. The book brings us up close to the narrator’s unstable state, and steers us emotionally, even when we are baffled as to what’s happening at surface level.
But it is the story beneath the surface that is the book’s strong point.
“I desperately crave fame, I want every titbit of attention I can get, all because I need my mother, Anne-Marie Walton, to love me,” he tells us, adding, with a twist: “Oh, Mam. Why?”
Though at times overly loose, chaotic, unconstrained, when it peels back the layers, the book has unexpected meaning and poignancy.
