Fiction matters

2. Given that the Irish characters in Last Night on Earth call everyone a gobshite does that mean it's only me and my late dad who preferred to say gabshite?

And 3. When it comes down to it, do you actually care much what happens in a novel?

Personally, I'm not too fussed. I don't read crime novels to find out whodunnit. It would never occur to me to ask Raymond Chandler who killed the chauffeur in The Big Sleep (as William Faulkner is said to have asked while writing the film script, only to be told Chandler didn't know either.) That's not what I'm reading Chandler for to be honest.

So it's not the end of the world that I don't really care much what happens in Last Night on Earth. Partly that's down to the setting (because when it's not in culchie Ireland it's set in a yawn-inducing nineties London, meeja London in particular; all press embargoes and cocaine bumps and appearances by the Millennium Dome and millennial fears. Does anyone even care about all that blurry, Blairy stuff now?).

And partly that's down to the fact that the author seems to flibbertigibbet about an awful lot. For example? There's one horrifying, scary, life-threatening bit, but it's stuck somewhere in the middle of the novel and while it has consequences it feels strangely unanchored and all at sea (a bit like the characters' plight at that particular moment).

Who are these characters, I hear you asking? Well, there's Jay, a gobshite (as previously discussed) from Ireland, who's got this American wan, Shauna, pregnant. In short, it's a jaded, jaundiced love story. The book jumps between pregnancy and years later when the couple have split up, mostly - though not totally - because Jay amps up his gobshittery.

There's other stuff in there too. Dementia. Maternal love. Exile. Priests. Lots of drugs. A therapist who specialises in experimental sex therapies. A three-year-old girl who can't speak yet. A friend - you might drop the R if you like - called The Clappers who's built like several Guinness barrels lashed together (Has to be Guinness. Sometimes you have to to accept that clichés are cliches for a reason.) The possible end of the world. Love. Lust. Why Gaelic doesn't work as an erotic stimulant. Enough. More than enough, you'd think, to keep you going for 370 odd pages or thereabouts.

None of which is what keeps you reading though. No, that's all down to the language; the raucous, noisy, Irish word torrent that pours off the page, starting audaciously with a Joycean yawp of a birth scene from the baby's viewpoint ("Inside she pushes, so brave and so strong, a huge rushy-red push that squeezes my half crown to full crown").

The joy of Kevin Maher's debut novel The Fields - that rare thing, a laugh-out-loud book about clerical abuse, which is soon to be a major movie etc, etc - was the voice; rude and loud and smart and funny and full-on Irish. The same is true here, especially in the first hundred pages.

And it's great and it's funny - I took to reading a particular paragraph on page 15 to everyone passing; I'd quote it for you now but it's sweary and filthy and namechecks WB Yeats and you probably don't want that first thing in the morning while eating your Rice Krispies.)

And yeah, and ...

But.

But there is a but. Truth is, that energy, that amphetamine word thrill, I'm afraid, doesn't last. Or rather it can't quite fuel the whole book. It's there all the way through, yes, but the juice of it thins to a dribble. And, frankly, the demands of the plot get in the way. All that meeja London stuff. And the bit where Jay goes beyond being a mere gobshite to outright gittishness.

And there's still more. The final resolve. A possible resolution. The wrap up. The end.

So where does that leave us? Maybe with the realisation that what happens in books does matter to some degree after all. Pity. Still, hopefully the Vengaboys will be happy. "Boom, boom, boom, boom, I want you in my room ..."