Brouhaha

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The actor and comedian Ardal O’Hanlon’s first novel, 1998’s The Talk of the Town , hinted at the emergence of a distinctive literary talent, equal parts Flann O’Brien and Irvine Welsh. I got about 140 pages into it, and then jumped to the last 5 chapters to find out what happened, but all in all just felt disappointing and kind of lack the oomph or the excitement for me to really get stuck in. Sandra disappeared and no body was ever found so there is a question over whether she is alive or dead. The plotting was noticeably first rate, with droplets of information into proceedings and then tidied up efficiently later on in the story. The female characters seem aggressively overwritten, and the comedic passages are shadowed by the violence.

A town that could almost be considered to be a character itself, so integral to the plot it became during the book. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The only novel by a comedian that I remember as being something other than a cash-in was Steve Martin’s The Pleasure Of My Company, a weird, surrealism-inflected novel about a man who has finally won the “Most Average American” competition.I think it's fair to say that this is not an easy book to pigeonhole, and O'Hanlon's writing style does take a little getting used to, but once you get into the rhythm of it then a curious brilliance starts to reveal itself. His follow-up has taken nearly a quarter of a century to appear, and unfortunately the boldness of his original debut has been replaced by a jarring mixture of whimsy and brutality. Another person near obsessed with Sandra’s disappearance is Kevin Healy, the Garda who was in charge of her case at the time.

The deaths stack up in the little Irish town, with links to politics, drugs, and lots of other bad lads and crime. If you're up for something a little different that challenges your idea of what a dark comedy can achieve in terms of literary weight, then I bring you Brouhaha! Ten years previous to this, Dove’s girlfriend Sandra Mohan (only 16 at the time) had gone missing and was never seen again, and an article by a journalist Joanne McCollum pointed to him as responsible, ruining his reputation.Philip quickly discovers there are others in the town still looking into Sandra’s disappearance, including Kevin Healy a local Garda detective, who was retired on medical grounds and a journalist Joanne McCollum, who’s written wild speculatory pieces on the case.