Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Exciting Times
by Naoise Dolan (Weidenfeld & Nicolson) Ava teaches English ( TEFL) to wealthy kids in Hong Kong. She is 22, bright, and far from her Dublin home. She moves in with Julian, her sort of boyfriend. He’s from the upper English classes, Eton and Cambridge educated, uses words like ‘shall’ and works as a banker. He is 28, socialises with his other wellheeled British expats, treats Ava like an accessory and frequently goes abroad on business. Ava, who doesn’t pay rent, sleeps in the other bedroom in Julian’s sparsely furnished luxury apartment. She is floating through her young life, with occasional calls from her mother with news from home.
Julian is on a lengthy sojourn in England when Ava meets 22-year-old Edith. A self-assured and fastidious Hong Kong local, Edith has a different designer handbag for each social occasion. The pair go to the theatre, to the cinema. They drink coffee by the harbour and watch the city lights. They fall in love.
This debut novel in three parts (Julian, Edith, Edith and Julian) is a love story with the zip and truth of a Wong Kar-wai film like Happy Together. The prose, tart and knowing, is tenaciously poised and blithely ironic, like the novel’s title. Breathless too, like that other debut Less Than Zero, with its world of bright young vicious things with the world at their feet or so they believe. Amid all, Ava uses language like a blade, to cut or wing or kill. “It was as if someone else ironed everything for her –her whole life – and her role was to make new creases” she says of an especially vacuous ex-pat.
Language is her necessary, maybe only, tool in the razored world of Hong Kong’s expat community. But just as language can tear us apart, it also brings together.
The occasional news from home is comic ding-dong. Her Mam, the messenger. “Next the Arctic will melt and we’ll be living in bunkers” says her mother. “I said I hoped there’d be intermediary stages,” replies Ava. And she learns of love (“holding Julian’s hand was like holding a museum pass” while holding Edith’s “was like holding a grenade”). Already, inevitably and lazily, touted as the next Sally Rooney, Naoise Dolan is very much her own woman and writer.