James Patterson reviews the blackly comedic debut novel from the Irish Times columnist and author of acclaimed memoir Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?
There’s not enough cynicism anymore. Too much of what we’re offered in a world gone mad amounts to little more than formulaic dreck that pleases algorithms and plays to the attention-poor gallery with just enough exposition to make us raise our heads from the endless cycle of Reels and TikToks which has poisoned our collective unconscious.
How many of us remember the last time we picked up a book and read without interruption? When was the last time we watched a movie at home without our phones to hand or laptops on our knee? We’ve been sold oblivion in the form of an infinite scroll, and have fallen into the trap of monetising our trauma for the sake of clippable quotes.
Against this backdrop, a debut novel like Séamas O’Reilly’s Prestige Drama reads like just the right dose of healthy scepticism. Without generalising too much about how novels within the same national body end up sharing characteristics, this is the sort of dark comedy that could only have been written in Ireland.
Ostensibly about the filming of a Troubles-related television series in O’Reilly’s native Derry, Prestige Drama skewers our modern pretensions about raking over the past. It picks apart the notion that 'telling our truths’ can be anything more than a money-grab, especially when those in charge of production are ‘Yanks’ and ‘Brits’ with no emotional skin in the game.
Its opening line – "I remember Jamie Devenney’s head half blown open" – feels like a deliberate nod to Flann O’Brien’s surrealist masterpiece The Third Policeman, and no doubt the polyphonic narration will invite contemporary comparisons with the likes of Donal Ryan and Wendy Erskine.
This is the sort of dark comedy that could only have been written in Ireland.
"Taking people’s pain and using it to sell dish soap and car insurance," says the mother of the murdered Jamie Devenney at one point. "They treat their own violence like the hiccups. Something mad and terrible that was happening for some mysterious reason."
"I think some part of him wishes he died," says another character about his father’s experience of the Troubles. "Feels bad that he never got so much as a scratch. Some disfigurement he could take to the pub as… proof of time served in the bad old, good old days."
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Listen: Seamas O'Reilly talks to Ray D'Arcy
But Prestige Drama is also aware of its own meta-referentiality. By writing a novel about the problems inherent in narrativizing the past, O’Reilly has had to create a story that inevitably does the same. As a consequence, he has fun with the absurd whodunnit that holds the plot together, in which lead actress Monica Logue has unaccountably gone missing and the townsfolk speculate about showrunner Diarmuid’s possible involvement.
This is, without a doubt, one of the most penetrating, uncomfortable, original and funny satires to have been written about the legacy of the Troubles since the publication of Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street almost thirty years ago. It kept me away from my phone for longer than I’m used to and in the attention economy that rules all our lives, what greater plaudit is there than to say it held my interest?
Prestige Drama is published by Fleet
