Sudden Times
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- 9,99 €
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- 9,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Ollie Ewing has forgotten the thing that tells him who he is. The hero of Dermott Healey's Sudden Times has returned to Sligo to recover from "a few experiences" in London by laying low and listening to "complaints and sermons, jibes and asides" in his own head. Men are after him. A crowd of them. Or maybe not. He's in hiding, mostly from his own shame. His brother Redmond and his best friend Marty are dead. It seems as though Marty died in a labouring accident but as snippets of Ollie's scatty recollections cohere, it becomes apparent that Marty was murdered, left in the back of a lorry, in a pile of charred bones. Redmond too, was flown home from Luton in a coffin and it isn't until much later in the novel that the details of his manslaughter are revealed. The deaths haunt Ollie and people in the town can see the danger in his eyes. His attempts to reintegrate socially and mentally are slack, confused, painful and absurdly funny. He shifts from job to job, finally getting routine and acceptance as a trolley check-out in Doyle's supermarket. "You have to break out before you can learn the laws of the tribe. And you have to break inside before you can learn your true nature." Ollie is often uncertain of time or place and dislocation overtakes him without warning, throwing the narrative back to London, forward to France, while Ollie is too frightened to move far at all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Already recognized as one of Ireland's best contemporary writers, Healy (Goat Song; The Bend for Home) makes good his reputation with this explosive, if somewhat truncated, third novel. In vivid, disjunctive prose, the sentences short and tumbling, Healy, who also writes plays and poetry, thrusts the reader into the life of Ollie Ewing, a young Irish man struggling to stay this side of madness after an unspecified, horrific experience in London. Once a carpenter, Ollie is making a new life for himself in Sligo, Ireland: working as a stock boy in a supermarket, settling into an apartment with a group of artists and occasionally going to visit his mother in a rural town farther north. But these seemingly easy transitions are made agonizing by Ollie' s recurrent nightmares and fragmented memories. Ollie's younger brother, Redmond, and his pal, Marty, whose grisly fates are slowly revealed, appear most often in the flood of violent images, amid glimpses of immigrant worker life in London and a seamy underworld ruled by the menacing Silver John. Healy flips back and forth from past to present and into dreams like a cardsharp shuffling a deck, revealing just enough about Ollie's trauma to make the reader avidly turn pages in search of new clues. The only problem is that he shows his hand too soon. In the second half of the novel, Healy abruptly shifts to a more straightforward account of Ollie's London past and the events that have estranged him from his father. Although this section is competently written, with good sharp dialogue, its tension and emotional resonance flag in comparison to the furious early chapters. Nonetheless, Healy's novel remains an exceptionally gripping exploration of a young man's struggle with his conscience and the mistakes of his past.
