From out of the City
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- $16.99
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
This intriguing novel brings us to a future in which electricity is scarce and Dublin has gone to seed. Hawk-eyed octogenarian Monk is keeping assorted desperate characters under strict surveillance -- among them Schroeder, recently sacked from Trinity College, now stalking a reporter in the days leading up to the visit of the U. S. President. When the unthinkable happens and the President is assassinated, Monk sets about discovering what's happened to those in his care and, along the way, to the late President -- but this is not, he insists, the story of an assassination. Nor is it a thriller. It's the truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kelly's inventive, overwritten tale of double-dealing and moral vacancy unfurls amidst a backdrop of Machieavellian politics in a broken Dublin, 10 years after the Jerusalem War. The President of the United States, a drug-fueled libertine in love with his cockapoo, Elvis, has been shot dead at a dinner in his honor. On a dilapidated street in the town of D n Laoghaire, we meet a trifecta of pitiable characters whose lives are indirectly upheaved by the aftershock of the assassination. There's our pleonastic, senescent narrator, an isolated voyeur with a surveillance headquarters in his attic, his main target, Schroeder, a former wunderkind turned drunk academic obsessed with the busty TV news reporter Paula Viola; and Walton, a porn-addicted hermit strapped to a wheelchair. This oddball ensemble unfortunately lacks sufficiently developed motivations, which in turn plot the course of this uneven story. The narrator's jarring interventions do the novel a further disservice: "I appreciate that there are elements of the thriller now creeping into the narrative " he explains, "and indeed there will be more heightened scenes soon." Kelly proves himself as an imaginative storyteller with a keen eye for the absurdly depraved, but the overall result of the novel is scattershot.
