Bibliofemme Bookclub An Irish Bookclub

This is the story of a Cork northsider, a Norrie, who spends his teenage years whacked out everything from class A drugs to prescription pain killers. The son of a single, alcoholic mother, he doesn’t know who his father is. His best friend and partner-in-crime Max is dead, but not from the inevitable overdose. Desperate to lose his virginity, he gets the local drug lord’s youngest, and favourite, sister pregnant: bad move. Her brother, Pat (The Baker) Baker, breaks the boy’s legs as a warning; once out of hospital our drug-addled hero hightails it out of the city, through the suburbs, towards rural Ireland, anonymity and escape.

Wall’s fourth adult novel (he published a children’s trilogy under the name Bill Wall) is a beautifully written and very poetic book. It presents a first person account of years wasted on being wasted, and it traces the unnamed central character’s attempts to rebuild his life, to form a proper family with Jazz and Kaylie, always with one eye on the door.

It can be read in one sitting, but it’s a tale that unravels slowly, as though following an invisible map drawn in the narrator’s sozzled mind.

The very ordinariness of the racketeering, the gangsterism, the kidnapping and killing, drug dealing and taking is chilling. This is a world of stolen wallets, joyriders, raided medicine cabinets, random acts of vandalism, 16-year-old prostitutes and violent pimps. This is the country alright, it’s a side of modern Ireland that most people don’t like to think to exists.

These dark realities are softened by a constant return to humour – once the narrator asks, “Is there a foreign language school for gangsters, or do they all watch The Godfather first?” – but like the narrator’s past, which continues to haunt him, there’s no real escape.

What Wall does best, and perhaps unusually, is depict several very different environments with unerring credibility (albeit from one character’s point of view): The Lawn on Cork’s northside, the council estate home of the Norries; the nearby suburbs with their real, manicured, lawns; the country, where everything runs on agricultural diesel and old men live alone on near-empty farms; and the seaside town with its chipshop and fishermen, and yacht owners too busy to collect their shiny new toys themselves. It’s all very well drawn and it draws you slowly in.

Some of Wall’s sentences are simply superb: as the narrator recalls an escape through the suburbs with Max he says, “By the time we stopped, it was like we changed languages. Every garden had this weeping tree with kids in Benetton playing on the grass.”

This is not a happy-ever-after tale but I did feel it tied up a bit too neatly at the end. The gangster-chase plot felt a little heavy handed, as though forcibly imposed on the emotive and descriptive writing to give it a more acceptable shape.

Despite that, This is the Country is a thoroughly good read. It’s atmospheric. It’s slow. It’s convincing. It’s painful. It feels authentic. It tells the twenty-first century Irish drug-world story from another side: this guy’s not really one of them, he was just born in the wrong place.