In Let's Twist Again, Leo Cullen takes up the story of young Lally Connaughton from roughly where it left off in that collection of stories with the unbeatable title, Clocking Ninety on the Road to Cloughjordan. About halfway through that first book, Lally's mother dies and his father remarries. Lally is eight at the time. This novel covers the 10 years that follow.
The family, which consists of not only Lally and his siblings and the children of his widowed stepmother but the two produced by the new couple, live out the country now on the stepmother's farm, Ivyhall. This property is the novel's focus, and its presence is, understandably, so overwhelming in the eyes of the youthful narrator that it isn't entirely clear whereabouts in the north of Tipperary he now finds himself.
Thurles is mentioned, and the Connaughtons originally hail from Templemore, but there's also mention of coalmines, which suggests that the move was over towards the Kilkenny side. And of course geography is beside the point. What matters is the more intimate and intricate cartography of the new home. The mapping out of the domestic, rather than the topographical, the mix of the pastoral and the subterranean is as much as Lally can handle, so much so that, in comparison, his sojourn in boarding school comes off an obvious second best as an alternative training ground, and seems valuable largely as a venue of loss and for its contribution to his evolving perceptions of Ivyhall. By no means deficient in a spirit of place, Let's Twist Again is much more concerned with the rather more elusive spirit of home.
The novel's action centres around Lally's quest for this spirit and for the security it provides - if action is the word. Of course there are events, and there's even an ultimately tragic cast to them, though most of them are what might be expected from a 1950s rural Irish childhood - a day out at the big match, puppy love, obnoxious teachers. More important than what happens, however, is Lally's reaction to it. And in the account of his coping, exploring, questioning and negotiating the new adult terrain, Leo Cullen has created the most memorable fictional child since at least Paddy Clarke. Not that there's any comparison between those two. If Lally has to have literary siblings it's Frank O'Connor's child narrators he's related to, and then only distantly, as he mercifully lacks their tendency to trail their coats. In fact, Lally is out on his own.
What makes Lally so distinctive is his sensibility. There may be little in the way of clocking 90 here, but the circumstances in which Lally finds himself are rife with the connotations such a rate of speed has for dislocation, blur and the possibility of things getting out of hand. He bears the full brunt of these and the various other forms of insecurity which are the order of the day in his new life. And it's not as if he's able to take them in stride. Much of the time he's confused and put-off by his stepmother's rigid realism. Yet he possesses an intuitive acceptance of the interplay between the tendency of things to fall apart and the capacity for a centre to be held. Lally's combination of the urge to welcome life and the inclination towards uncertainty gives Let's Twist Again not only its wide variety of amusing incident but its rich psychological and emotional undertow. What Mam has taken on must be appreciated as well, difficult though it might be for a child to do so, and she gradually emerges from the shadows of Lally's misgivings to become a most affecting character.
Complementary as these two characters turn out to be, however, the nature of things prevent them from attaining wholeness or mutuality, an outcome which, however regrettable, has the invaluable effect of preventing sentimentality. As it happens, Lally becomes the dancer, Mam the one who isn't able to dance. Mam is a Frank Sinatra fan. But Lally is the boy who sings. And I don't just mean songs, though he does that too, but in the way he keeps rising to whatever occasion comes his way in this funny, sad, multilayered and exceptionally readable novel.
George O'Brien's memoir, The Village of Longing, has recently been reissued
An extract from Let's Twist Again appears on Weekend 13