Between Limerick and London

‘Any man who would see another man’s glass empty is a bastard.’ This is the first commandment of Stanley Callaghan, one of many wonderful characters created by Michael Curtin, a comic genius sadly recognized as such only by a discerning few, though his fellow Irishman Roddy Doyle described him as ‘one of Ireland’s very best writers’, and they do say that it takes one to know one.

I was first introduced to Curtin’s brilliantly realized and eccentric world almost forty years ago. My then flatmate Harry, an unusual character himself who would not have been entirely out of place in Curtin’s work, had come across his novel The Replay (1981). Usually the most loquacious of men, Harry was rendered speechless for the best part of twenty-four hours while reading it – apart from splutter­ings of manic laughter and occasional shouts of ‘You have to read this when I’m finished.’ I did so, and was up all night. I was devastated when I finished it, but then overjoyed to discover that it was Curtin’s second novel. I duly found, and devoured, his first, The Self-Made Men (1980). Then I had to wait a few years for Curtin to write another one, but thankfully he did. In fact he wrote another four. Michael Curtin died in 2016, so sadly it seems there will be no more (I say ‘seems’ because when he died he left behind the uncom­pleted manuscript of his seventh novel, so I live in hope that one day, somehow, it will be published), but the six novels we do have are up there with the very best of Irish comic writing. The Sunday Express, reviewing his fifth book, The Cove Shivering Club (1996), described him perfectly. ‘Curtin is one of Ireland’s national treasures, a superb comic writer who deserves to be better known.’ Those who do know him read him not just for the gorgeous craziness of his storytelling but also for his powers of description. Whether his characters are in Limerick or London, you are right there with them, in the pub, in the park or on the street. Curtin himself once said that in the event of a nuclear bomb falling on his beloved Limerick, it should be possible to rebuild the city from his books, in the same way that Joyce’s Dublin could be reconstructed by following Leopold Bloom’s meanderings in Ulysses. So, for the unini­tiated, allow me to be your guide on what will be a very brief tour. We will take it in historical order – a very ‘un-Curtin-like’ approach, for tinkering with the chronology is one of this writer’s favourite comic tricks. We will start, as he did, with The Self-Made Men, which begins thus: ‘Ten years earlier Billy Whelan had twelve hundred pounds on deposit with Barclays and yet managed to starve on Christmas Day.’ It is soon obvious that the book is as mad as its hero, Billy Whelan. But, once Curtin has lured you into his web, Billy seems like the sanest man you have ever met. When he asks Breda, the most beau­tiful woman in the world, to marry him after knowing her for less than ten minutes, you are by this stage so deep into his reality that not only does his proposal seem perfectly sensible, you even feel it would be foolish of her to refuse. I won’t reveal whether or not she marries him, but please don’t go thinking this is a straightforward romantic narrative. Things get seriously strange, in the most hilarious way. I’ve already mentioned the great Stanley Callaghan, hero of Curtin’s second novel, The Replay. Stanley is the captain, and charis­matic leader, of the strangest crew of pub footballers you could possibly imagine. And no, you don’t have to like or understand foot­ball to love this book, but you will grow to love Stanley Callaghan, an old-fashioned man madly in love with his wife Kate, who, because of his strict sense of honour, accepts a challenge to replay a match from fifteen years ago – a match which his eccentric bunch of misfits, has-beens and ne’er-do-wells clearly cannot win. Not least because one of them now weighs over twenty stone, another has been com­mitted to a psychiatric hospital, a third has an arm in plaster having been kicked down the stairs by his wife, and a fourth is suffering from the considerable disadvantage of being dead. And no substi­tutes are allowed. So no, of course they can’t win. Can they? I worried at times, during my seven years of waiting for his next book, whether Curtin could possibly follow The Replay. But follow it he did, magnificently, with The League against Christmas (1989). Here the plot is not so much convoluted as corkscrewed, and features a cast (or perhaps a gang) including an ex-bank manager with a fetish for linoleum, a cross-dressing accountant, a barman with a morbid fear of winning the football pools, and the impossibly glamorous owner of a glossy women’s magazine, all of whom are under surveil­lance by an increasingly paranoid police force convinced they are dealing with a fiendishly clever terrorist plot. In reality, the group’s purpose is much stranger than even the police can imagine. A quote may help to give the flavour, without giving the game away: ‘“You don’t care for Christmas, Ellis?” “Foster, if Christmas was a person I would go out on a foggy night and cut its throat and then I’d hand myself in and happily spend the rest of my life watching videos in prison . . .”’ Next came what some aficionados consider to be Curtin’s best – The Plastic Tomato Cutter (1991) – which contains not one but two of his finest comic creations. The marvellous Mr Yendall, perhaps the ultimate purveyor of the ‘Modern life is rubbish’ theory, watches with horror as social change begins to engulf his traditional world. Meanwhile Tim Harding is running an organization called Fagenders, ostensibly helping smokers to quit, while nipping out the back for a crafty fag between sessions. And, in keeping with Curtin’s love of esoteric pastimes, Harding does a spot of bell-ringing on the side, which he takes very seriously, as bell-ringers do. Not many novels feature bell-ringing – offhand, apart from The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, I can only think of Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Nine Tailors, also an excellent book, even if Sayers’s bell-ringers, though all potentially murderous, lack the terrifyingly deadpan insanity of Curtin’s. For bell-ringing, read swimming in The Cove Shivering Club (1996), Curtin’s penultimate novel. The first paragraph, voiced by the book’s protagonist, writer Junior Nash, reels you in seductively, while (as is often the case in Curtin-land) hinting at the life of the author himself:

The dust jackets of my books proclaim the usual codswallop: clerk, bus conductor, factory hand, builder’s labourer, barman, burden on the state. Yet if the midnight knock ever comes to my door and I blink awake into the truncheons and the barrels of the guns and hear the bark: What are you?, Junior Nash is likely to come back with: I’m a swimmer.

Of course Junior Nash is much more than just a swimmer, or just a writer, and Curtin breathes life into him and his fellow Shivering Club members with loving care. Curtin’s last novel, Sing! (2001), is the most bittersweet of his books, at times much more bitter than sweet. Jimmy Imbusch, better known as Toots Books, the name of the shop where he very occasion­ally gets round to selling a book, is desperate to get his wife Nellie to return to him from the convent to which she has exiled herself fol­lowing a family tragedy. But how to accomplish this? Toots and his friends decide to stage an old-fashioned variety concert to tempt Nellie back through the medium of her love of music. There is though (as you may have guessed) a small problem. All Toots’s friends – Jack Droney, who likes to recite dramatic monologues to fields of cows, Ignatius Valelly, ‘who never once dirtied his brains for a living’, Madeleine Brown, alcoholic ex-queen of the university debating soci­ety, and Walter Nix, failed police informant and detective fiction addict – are as mad as a box of frogs, and about as reliable. And Toots’s own sanity is on the fragile side. So can they pull off the con­cert? And if they can, will Nellie come home to Toots? Well, that would be telling. You will have gathered by now that I am a huge fan of Curtin’s work, but I would not pretend he is perfect. At times he gets carried away and overwrites – ‘loses the run of himself’ as they say in Ireland – and it could be argued that a firmer editorial hand might have made one or two of these fine books even better. But I am delighted this did not happen. It would have been a sad loss if his tremendous flights of fancy had been curtailed by caution, and I would far rather have too much of his exuberance than too little. I should also acknowledge that my love for Michael Curtin may well have a personal element. A Venn diagram representing some of his archetypes (people caught between Irish and English cultures, people with a tendency to drink too much, smoke too much and spend too much time in pubs with sticky carpets, people who have old-school attitudes as to how life might best be enjoyed and endured, and hold, shall we say, unpredictable attitudes to authority) would have me placed at several intersections. But I’m fine with that. Above all, I stand with Stanley Callaghan when he says, ‘Any man who would see another man’s glass empty is a bastard.’ So please, raise your glasses and join me in a toast to Michael Curtin, and to his brave, battered, baffled crew, as they struggle to make sense of this bizarre but beguiling world.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 72 © Andy Bourne 2021