FANTASTICAL TALES DURING A TIME OF DESPAIR

SOMETIMES in life it’s just easier to pretend, to live in your own fabricated world, a place which offers respite, however brief, from the drudgery of your daily existence.

This is what Tess and Mungo, the two central characters in Philip Casey’s The Fabulists, opt to do. Both are bound by family, by responsibilities, by the poverty of an Ireland yet to emerge from the gloom of the 1980s.

Yet, upon meeting they choose not to burden the other with their worries, instead creating fantastical back-stories; inter-railing in Spain, attending Catalonian protests, gatecrashing Berlin brothels, dining with the rich and famous.

And best they might. Because Mungo, mid-thirties, unemployed, has very little to shout about. Still recuperating from a house fire which almost killed his son and left him with a leaden arm, he spends his days running in the Phoenix Park, clad in boots and jeans, slowing down whenever a ‘real runner’ approaches.

His wife Connie has barely spoken to him since the fire, which Mungo caused by leaving a lit cigarette in his son’s room. And the disability payments they’ve come to rely upon will soon be no more.

For her part, Tess is living in a squalid city-centre flat, seeing her son in the afternoons and drunkenly giving in to sex with her estranged, hated husband.

She worries about her fading beauty, her stretchmarked stomach and whether Arthur, her son, will turn out like his dad.

And then a chance encounter brings the two together. She is merely curious at first, that curiosity tempered by caution, but he is instantly smitten.

Fates conspire, the intimacy of Dublin in 1990 enabling them to accidentally arrange to bump into one another, and soon they are sharing coffee in a local café - Mungo too broke to pay for his.

Whether through shame or boredom, he is the first to create an elaborate past, using his love of all things Spain to dream up tales of a summer spent on its train system; travelling up and down its coast, mixing with Moroccans, evading the authorities, the life he wishes he had, and believes he should have had.

Tess, in turn, relies on her knowledge of Germany, and of Berlin, to create an equally romanticised history for herself, reasoning that if Mungo is going to make up stories then she might as well do the same.

Both know the other is lying. They know this from the word go. Yet it is never discussed, never disputed. They take refuge in the other’s stories, joy in travelling to these foreign lands, the beaches and seafronts of Spain, the streets and bars of Berlin.

But while The Fabulists’ protagonists are all too keen to enjoy these mythical journeys through Europe, it may take a little longer for some readers to get on board.

However, once the purpose of these tales becomes apparent, the realisation that their very telling enables Mungo and Tess to continue to meet hits home, the story settles down into a sometimes tragic, sometimes humorous, look at love in an Ireland many won’t even recognise.

More recognisable will be the feeling of holding onto something precious no matter how damaging it is. Because, at heart, The Fabulists is about being at the crossroads in life, that period when your twenties are over, when choices have to be made, and one can no longer throw caution to the wind and see where it takes them.

It is also about that final chance of love, the one big romance we all believe is out there waiting for us if we just go looking for it. And the knowledge that we may have one last opportunity for something meaningful, before we embark upon on a normal, boring, albeit secure, existence.

Although there are themes of love and romance in The Fabulists, do not make the mistake of thinking it’s a soppy, romance novel. Casey’s prose is unflinchingly authentic, there is nothing fabricated about his depiction of life in Dublin, and Wexford for that matter, during an era when this country was still stuck in the dark ages.

Indeed, The Fabulists gives voice to a generation of Irish people who are often overlooked in history. These people are the ones who stayed during the great recession of the 80s. They were poor but not as poor as those who came before. They drank but not to excess. They endured a corrupt, money-grabbing government in silence, as if it were all they deserved.

It would have been all too easy for Casey to romanticise his protagonists, to make them worthy and deserving, but Tess and Mungo are as ordinary as they come, and all the more extraordinary for it.

They cheat, they scheme, they wallow in self-pity, in jealously, envy. In short, they are real people. Whether you like them or not is entirely up to you.

Ultimately, The Fabulists is about hope, it’s about endurance, and savouring those stolen moments you know will stay with you forever. And it’s a book which, although it might not stay with you forever, will have you reflecing on your own life, your own loves, and what might have been.

The Fabulists is the first of Philip Casey’s Bann River Trilogy. Its successors, The Water Star and The Fisher Child, will be reviewed in these pages in the coming weeks.