This novel features a gang of four – Mulligan, Foley, Murphy and Neary – possible characters in a Beckett novel or “ ... names like Dublin bars” as the book says. The narrator, Patrick, joins them in London to help them “to fly a cartoon version of our flag”. They are in limbo, capturing much emigrant experience, but theirs is a transitional student/adult limbo.
The real world is mediated through a countercultural – The Fall, John Cooper Clarke, The Prongs, even Kerouac – japing distance: “We could never accept the identity of migrant but were self-declared misfits and aliens even at home among friends. Parody expats ... ”
They share a flat, which is captured brilliantly in all its truly tatty 1980s-ness. It’s a cross between Withnail and I and The Young Ones – a decaying transient stage – whether individual lives (in the latter) or the last days of a decaying Empire (in the former).
They call themselves the “Mocking Boys”. They knowingly spin smart-alec sentences – a simulacrum of intellectual ideas – not cowboy builders but cultural cowboys. One works on the building sites but the others sign on the dole under multiple aliases – assuming Irish identities of friends from their past school days – a nod to historical recompense.
Manchán Magan: India and Ireland share many features that show remarkable commonality. What’s going on here?
John Boyne: ‘I’ve reviewed books by friends and occasionally by antagonists but there’s only one I regret’
Fiction in translation: Darkenbloom a profoundly disturbing Austrian satire
Kinahan Assassins: The scale, depth and depravity of organised crime in 21st-century Ireland laid bare
The novel locates itself at the crossroads of three generations of Irish emigrants – the Mocking Boys and Girls; their contemporary Irish careerists, who are in Britain to claim good modern jobs; and the older generation – those that built, and continue to build, Britain. These latter “dinosaurs of decency” are personified in the older character of Peader, whom they encounter in the pub. His sincerity punctures the artifice of the Mocking Boys.
The boys live in inverted commas but a great joy of this novel is the way real life invades their quipping stance and blows apart their apartness pose. Real life via the emigrant experience, via the need to prepare for an adult life, via love travails: they were “linked by our avoidance of the inevitable”.
The dynamic of the group is expertly explored and divergent lives fully, though economically, evoked. The style has a lick of Iain Sinclair about it. There is verve and élan and a smart joy in language and a well-turned phrase. It is a clever and insightful book with passages of brilliant writing and a surprising honesty and emotional heft.
The Now Now Express novel is available directly from Bandcamp, Spindizzy and at Books Upstairs
