With
Nick Laird's novel 'Utterly Monkey', the
post-Agreement depiction of Northern Ireland has
arrived in print—and it has received the 'Rooney
Prize for Irish Literature', the back cover informs
me prominently. (London: Fourth Estate, 2005; New
York: Harper Perennial, 2006) Its appearance as
a paperback, the addition of a feature I've never
seen before in which there's not only background
and interviews and two of his similarly prize-winning
poems...but the contents of his desk, his most played
i-Tunes, and "Poems Attached by Blue-Tac to
the Door of My Study" the latter three as of
July 4, 2005.
Laird's
novel follows the dyspeptic detective send-ups of
Colin Bateman, the considered meditations of Glenn
Patterson—both Northern writers also continuing
their explorations of their province as the Troubles
subside, and like Robert MacLiam Wilson, he loves
shenanigans enmeshing his likable protagonists who
seem to take quite a bit from their creators.
What
distinguishes Laird? First of all, he's over a decade
younger than this trio. Born in 1975, by the time
he came of age in Cookstown, the worst of the violence
had begun to for the most part ease. Like MacLiam
Wilson, he went to Cambridge. Unlike his predecessor,
he did not drop out—shades of Ripley Bogle—but
went on to a year at Harvard and six years practicing
law in London. He chucked it all and took up writing.
Now, I have to admit, since he's married to Zadie
Smith, I'm not sure when this relationship started
and how it influenced his decision. Certainly, however
the situation, Laird has, like his wife, taken on
today's London and, in his case, mixed it with a
glance back at his native corner, still struggling
to shake off the paras—now using drug moneys
to fund their continued grievances and, in this
novel, to carry off—on the Twelfth of July
2004—another spectacular.
Laird's
sketches of his native turf enrich what otherwise
succeeds far more on characterisation than plot.
While the caper entertained me, and its initial
twists kept me up at nights eager to continue while
not wanting the book to end too soon, as I kept
reading, I began to grow disappointed. Still, I
recommend it regardless of its too-pat ending and
denouement. The people he conjures up, with a couple
of notably static ones, mix satire's bite with reality's
tang. They do seem only slightly larger than life.
While Danny, the main character, seems perhaps too
glaringly a stand-in for his harried solicitor-maker,
and likewise his stunning black partner, Ellen,
may be all too closely drawn from his wife, these
comparisons are perhaps inevitable for a first novel.
(As a professor once lectured to us, 'all first
novels, or first books for that matter, are deep
down autobiographical.') But, with Ian, dispatched
from 'the Organisation' to force the Crown to pay
attention to its spurned suitor now languishing
across the Irish Sea, Laird's command falters. There's
one scene when Ian wanders about the zoo in Regent's
Park that adds nothing but time-killing to the story
as it nears its climax. Geordie, the unwitting mate
of Danny who has to leave 'Ballyglass' suddenly
when he stumbles upon the ill-got stash of 'the
Organisation', and his girlfriend Janice do add
texture to Laird's depiction of the recent past
and the post-1998 Northern younger generation that
still finds all too little to gainfully do in a
fast-changing economic invasion. Laird's insights,
filtered through mainly Danny—who mirrors Laird's
own trajectory for the most part, Geordie, and,
to a lesser extent, Janice and Ian, establish the
post-Agreement terrain in asides scattered through
the novel. Never enough to pontificate, but sufficiently
scattered to make 'Utterly Monkey' more than another
generic trade paperback mass-market purchase to
while away the hours in an airport or on a bus.
He
introduces 'Ballyglass' as a market town where,
'It was an instance of the parallel universe
becoming visible, as if two separate towns existed
and somehow inhabited the very same space.'
But, now, the Protestant greengrocer who put carrots
in his window while his adjacent Catholic competitor
displayed broccoli and cabbages both risk redundancy.
Businesses close after the Army barracks is dismantled,
the sangars vanish, as 'It was becoming apparent
to the place that it was only the troubles that
had kept the community structure'.
Echoing
Connolly's warning about only the flags changing
but not the masters, Laird's omniscient narrator
observes how with 'the invasion of the national
chains, Ballyglass was starting to look as if it
could be in Yorkshire or Surrey. It had turned out
that the threat of losing your identity hadn't been
from the foreign governments of Dublin or London
after all, but instead from the money-makers, the
profit margins, the businessmen.' (189-90)
Laird,
with each of his main characters also remarks upon
the inescapable images that marked their formative
years. For Geordie, he recalls the Lambeg drum:
'He remembered how the lodge's banners had advertised
their faithfulness, as if faithfulness was all that
mattered. But how could one stay devoted to someone
who wants to leave you?' (54)
Militant
Ian resents how the Crown 'only ever treated
the Ulster Unionists as conditionally British. Useful
enough when there was a war to be fought or an Olympics
to compete in but otherwise fit only for caricature
and ridicule—the bigot braying on the telly,
marching sternly past the camera in his archaic
bowler hat and ludicrous sash, awkward, brash, unfashionably
religious.' (320-1)
The
loss of any belief transcending one's own committments
— whether to domination or decency becomes
Danny's psychomachia — infuses this book in
a barely registered hue that delicately shows how
popular fiction depicts, as much as the long shelf
of tomes on modern secularism, existentialism, capitalism,
the pulse of its era.
This
book at times reminded me of Dickens, Thackeray,
or even George Eliot in its determination, beneath
all of the scurrying and swearing, to honestly capture
Britain today— as its embattled Northern outpost
with its abandoned settlers, or in London as 'a
whirlpool's eye, a huge centripetal machine dragging
bodies towards it from across the world.' (324)
But Danny realises that the capital's promise only
enriches capital: 'London had seemed to promise
to put him at the centre of his life, but the city
kept turning, and the song of one small existence
became quickly subsumed in the hum or its engine.
He was fuel.' (325) Janice and Geordie gawk
when they leave 'Ballyglass' for London: she has
never seen a black person up close until she meets
Ellen. Danny wanders Cheapside—the emptiness
of nighttime weekend London in the deserted corporate
blocks of the City emerges tellingly. 'Dan looked
at the bus's windows--there wasn't one white face.
These were the dark ghosts of the City of London,
those invited to the party but only if they arrived
at the back door, ate nothing, and left before it
began.' (276) The tale of the lad up from the
province(s) that has sparked so many novels again
reaches its fulfillment. But, unlike the gains of
Pip or Dick Whittington, it's not—for much
of the novel—Danny's happy storyline.
The
Province itself, as Danny notes in an aside, continues
its own isolation as far as the City's concerned.
A fellow lawyer: '"You've been over in Belfast,
I hear." He said it like Belfast was just south
of Baghdad.' (285) When Ellen and Danny go back
to investigate 'Ulster Water,' as their law firm's
client seeks a hostile takeover to buy and gut the
firm of its assets, human and material, they too
find it a bit exotic. Staying at the Europa, they
cross to the 'most famous pub in the North', the
Crown. (221) Laird lovingly details its decor, and
even if you've seen it countless—if half-recalled—times,
he makes its interior fresh through the eyes of
a returned colonial back to the hinterlands. 'Danny
thought of the hold of an emigrant ship, dark and
hot and filled to the rafters with shouty Irish,
excepting one quiet black girl who was standing
beside him, her skin more polished and dark than
the smoke-dark wood of the walls.' (222) Laird's
ability to arrest an image does not overpower, but
thickens, the scenes he portrays.
Drawing
upon his poetic avocation, which judging from the
two samples appended to this edition takes not only
his acknowledged influence of Heaney but in my estimation
Auden and Larkin—both in his verse and prose
rhythms, Laird sprinkles his story with arresting
metaphors. For instance, London's black cabs are
compared in their vaulting roofs and interior silence
to cathedrals—inside the taxi, Danny stares
out at 'a London so quiet it was as if the mute
button was pressed' (164); the law firm's like
a vast ruminant, its entrance as its maw, corridors
its intestines, and its lawyers like teeth, 'yellowy-pale,
varying in sharpness, and renewable.' (29) A
xerox machine whirs: 'From under its lid Danny
could see the strip of light zip up and down the
glass panel, the dawn horizon strapped into a box.'
(107) Two pages later, Danny looks out his office
window at those windows opposite: 'They were
like stacks of televisions all tuned to the same
channel. A programme about a mythical monster: half-human,
half-desk.' (109)
On
the other hand, Danny, as well as the other emigrants
from the North, find to their chagrin: 'Forget
about six degrees of separation. Everyone in Ulster
was just a person away, sitting on their other side,
waiting to lean forward and say hello.' (175)
Caught up in a white lie while interviewing two
Ulster Water employees, Danny realises in the nick
of time what others in the novel do not, to their
sorrow and for plot complications: unlike London,
in Northern Ireland, the world is indeed small.
Even
as calm replaces anxiety in the North, however,
in our own decade, as Danny recognises, what for
decades has made his homeland famous or infamous
has now spread ineradicably from provincial to worldwide
outbreaks. Watching BBC World, Danny ponders: 'A
global terrorism expert was being interviewed. There
was terror everywhere now. Danny felt an unkind
thought rise in him like bile: now everyone else
would know what it felt like—to live with the
backdrop of bombings and guns, with murderers sharing
your doctors and schools, your restaurants and surnames.'
(249-50)
While
'Utterly Monkey,' in my reading, does not
entirely pay off in a satisfying conclusion, it
may make for a great film. Certainly the climactic
pursuit over the Thames, across the Millennium Bridge
into the Tate Modern, seems written with screenplay
in mind. And, as a novel pitched to an audience
perhaps as wide as, say, Zadie Smith's, Laird's
debut promises not only entertainment but, as the
citations I have shared with you attest, the seriousness
beneath the satire that marks talent more than it
does sass.
