Fiction:After 30 years in London, film director Tomas Dalton is coming home to Dublin. At least, it used to be home. In an effort to reconnect with his working-class, inner-city roots, he moves into a house around the corner from the street where he grew up, on run-down Bass Road (situated, mystifyingly to anyone familiar with this part of Dublin, off Clontarf Road, although it seems more like a grotesque caricature of the North Strand or Ballybough).
He fills his house with his lovingly displayed collection of historical and personal memorabilia, from Harry Boland's letters to his mother's old cards. But his romantic dreams are dashed on his very first day by a group of tracksuited local boys, who embark on a disturbingly sophisticated campaign of terror and intimidation.
Tomas is meant to be working on an important new film, starring faded Hollywood star Karin Goldman, with whom he strikes up an unlikely rapport; he's also trying to put his life back together after the collapse of his marriage. Gradually, however, he becomes more and more obsessed with defending his house and its contents, as what begins with a couple of nasty pranks soon becomes more personal, more violent and more disturbing. Moncrieff is a fluid, confident writer who expertly creates a sense of genuine menace, and this very readable book is genuinely unnerving at times.
BUT IT'S LET DOWN somewhat by the unconvincing characters. Never enormously likeable despite his sympathetic predicament, Tomas, as he descends into paranoia, becomes merely irritating. When confronted by the obnoxious father of one of the boys after finally, and understandably, standing up to the youthful tormentors, he defends himself in such a nastily prissy way ("Are you slow, man? Are you retarded in some way?") that I wanted to slap him myself.
As for the working-class characters, they're almost universally depicted as pathetic, grotesque and/or practically feral. This may, of course, be intended to reflect Tomas's increasing paranoia, but in a world where sneering, dehumanising words like "scumbag", "knacker" and "chav" have become shorthand for "poor person", it still leaves a nasty taste in the mouth. And the revelation of what initially inspired the boys' hate campaign is surprisingly trite. Yet the story's oppressive, threatening atmosphere lingers in the reader's mind long after the final page. A powerful but uneven book.
Anna Carey is an assistant editor at The Gloss magazine
The History of Things By Sean Moncrieff New Island, 222pp. €14.95