Irish Fiction: In the absence of a publishing history, it's not unusual for first time novelists to declare wacky former jobs - part-time fish-gutter, roller-coaster operative - in their biographical notes.
The back of Emer McCourt's first novel, Elvis, Jesus and Me, is no exception, except her past lives are rather more impressive; as an actress she performed in Hush A Bye Baby and Ken Loach's Riff Raff, before turning film producer with the award-winning Human Traffic.
Now living in London, 39-year-old McCourt makes a fictional return to her homeland of Northern Ireland with this novel, setting it in a council estate near the Border in 1973. Narrated by 11-year-old Seany, the real star of the show is Ger, his sister, 10 months older and a fan of Elvis, Neil Armstrong and Jesus, in that order.
Shortly after her 12th birthday, in desperation at being left off the football team, Ger declares herself to be a boy, popping a Cookstown Dependably Delicious sausage down her trousers as proof.
A summer of incidents and scrapes follows. Seany and Ger lock an altar-boy in a garden shed so Ger can serve Mass; stage their own version of It's a Knockout in the back garden; and fend off the lusty O'Rawe sisters. The sound of the Troubles ebbs and flows through the narrative in convincing fashion; this might be a childhood lived in the shadow of violence, but to an 11-year-old boy, Fizzy Lizzy chews and soccer are of more immediate concern.
Although McCourt gives us several heavy-handed hints that a dark family secret is about to emerge, it's a fairly long time coming. When it finally does shimmy to the surface, it knocks Seany's family sideways, sending his mother to bed and his father on a drunken bender. While the secret itself is not exactly new territory, it does provide a welcome bolt of tension, moving the pace of Seany's narrative up a few notches.
In choosing a child narrator, McCourt has joined a long line of Irish writers, from Frank O'Connor to Roddy Doyle. Like them, she mines the seam of humour between a child's understanding of the world and an adult's, playing on the precocious child's aping of an adult turn of phrase: "Mum and Dad liked to argue about that sort of thing. Listening to them would have murdered a saint."
Yet as a character, Seany is just not odd enough to carry this novel, and all too often his insights on life veer dangerously close to whimsy, of the "aren't kids funny?" variety. In Elvis, Jesus and Me, McCourt may have captured the conversational tone of a child's speech, but she has neglected to give him a good story to tell.
Louise East is a writer and critic. She contributed to Travelling Light, a collection of travel writing to be published by Tivoli shortly