Breaking the spell
Anguish and comedy abound in a story of three Irish mates in search of salvation.
Ilike this first novel. I like it partly because it’s so inerrant in its presentation of male love: that derisive hoot and thump on the arm that all XY chromosome holders know means “die for you, bro – but don’t tell anybody”.
Two boyos from 1990s Dublin want to
save their mate. Physically, Tom is okay, if you discount the eyepatch. He’s back home after a spell away, an evil spell as war correspondent in besieged Sarajevo. Internally, the guy’s a wreck, “obsessed with the notion of bearing witness”.
Baz and Karl are set on helping him through. They try it in the most devoted and chaotic of ways, via a road trip through California to the experimental clinic called Restless Souls, run by a Vietnam vet who sounds like the King of Quacks. Trouble is, while they’re settling Tom’s memories, their own start bubbling. They bubble mostly from the fact that these three mates used to be four.
That’s the guts of Dan Sheehan’s very satisfying story. It could be such a cliché, but it stays real and raw. Plot and lads
career along. Jokes spray like shrapnel. Good taste is subverted at least once a page. Terrific.
They experience naked yoga and campfires, the World’s Largest Donut and whiteknuckle driving above the Pacific. They discourse on the etiquette of urination in public cemeteries. There’s anguish as well as comedy. Their picaresque progress is punctuated by Tom’s memories of Sarajevo: women crying into their hands, pages floating from a burning library, hotel windows bullet-proofed with mattresses, and doctor and lover Helena.
The clinic turns out to be a place of zebras, robots and jewelled cow skulls. After they reach it, Tom really falls apart.
Dan Sheehan: plot and lads career along, jokes spray like shrapnel and good taste is subverted.
Traumas have to surface; terrors have to be channelled. It’s the most inert part of the narrative and should have been trimmed or redistributed.
I like Restless Souls also because it’s open-hearted. It takes on big emotions, deep hurts. I like its helter-skelter eagerness, its yahoo dialogue, the authentic, affectionate cadences of men verbally smacking one another around the head. Okay, its prose postures, and its humour has too many regurgitated biscuits and bottles of Jamesons. But it’s a young guy’s first novel, remember.
The trio do come through. They even hug, though “that’s not really how we are”. And they’d die for one another, bro.