A WRITER must be either exceptionally ambitious or exceptionally astute to preface their latest novel with an epigraph from James Joyce’s labyrinthine, polyphonic last novel Finnegans Wake.
A WRITER must be either exceptionally ambitious or exceptionally astute to preface their latest novel with an epigraph from James Joyce’s labyrinthine, polyphonic last novel Finnegans Wake.
Luckily, Claire Kilroy proves herself astute with The Devil I Know, and, even though I admired All Summer, Tenderwire and All Names Have Been Changed, her previous three novels, the gear change in ambition is palpable. Her previous novels toyed with thriller motifs like a pearl necklace round the fingers of a bored beauty; their real substance was trauma, and that trauma was personal to the point of dissociated privacy.
The Devil I Know is a public novel, even a political novel, about how Ireland went from hyperventilating affluence to agog beggary. But to make the economic crisis into a frightening and funny story does not involve, as it did with John Lanchester’s Capital, looking to the specifics of economics; rather, Kilroy invokes the old gothics. If The Devil I Know weren’t such a neat little title, I’d suggest The Private Memoirs And Confessions Of A Justified Banker.
The novel is narrated by Tristram Amory St Lawrence, the 13th Earl of Howth, in the present moment of an enquiry in 2016, with an occasional prompt from his lawyer Fergus. Readers of the epigraph will catch the smart references (“to Howth Castle and Environs. / Sir Tristram, violer d’amores”). Kilroy’s Tristram, we learn swiftly, is a recovering alcoholic as well as an aristocrat, shuttled between countries in his role as a translator.
He is good at his job, “a perfect conduit” where one language turns into another. He is an empty vessel, clinging to his Alcoholics Anonymous dream of empty vessels. He is very much unlike Joyce’s accumulation of all languages into one dream-story.
A crisis on one of the planes he shuttles between means that he must stop off back in Ireland. Having left under a shadow, he returns under a cloud of smoke, lost baggage and the tiniest bottle of whiskey in Christendom. At his lowest point, before he even imagined the flight, he died several times on the operating table. He was almost miraculously revived, and, thanks to his AA sponsor, a M Deauville, he returns to the place where everyone thought he was dead. There he finds his aged father, his old retainer (a man who gifts and spits riddles throughout the book) and his primary school-friend, Hickey, now a builder capitalising on the boom. As they build their ziggurats of cards, and Tristram finds small happiness in the midst of his moral laxity, we realise not is all well.
Not all is well in Tristram, but not all is well in Ireland either. It’s a place of brown envelopes and shoddy workmanship, where the oligarchs can boast: “Go home to your wives and apologise on my behalf. Tell that while they slept you earned tens of millions each overnight,” accompanied by the “shrill, unguarded laughter of disbelief”. Tristram has been reassured earlier, since M Deauville, as well as an AA sponsor, turns out to be the best financial strategist since man invented money. Also, Tristram can never reach him on the phone: the one thing a sponsor does.
I am sure various readers will pin their cards to the satanic elements in this book early on. (Let’s face it, by page ten, Tristram is sent towards rooms 622 – 666). Kilroy offers sufficient targets for the devil among our greed, but you won’t guess at the end which he really is. And he is everywhere and nowhere. Tristram realises that debts will always be called in by the eponymous character. As the horror descends, Hickey says he won’t pay for something and Tristram realises: “We would all pay for it, many times over and for the rest of our lives.”
Along the way, Kilroy provides some of the most stunningly sly and wry writing being offered at the moment. One moment she is lyrical: the wake of a boat is lace on the ocean. The next she is brilliantly satirical: when you read the description of Hickey’s barbecue, with the rubber bands melting on the lobsters’ claws as they crawl off the grill, I would defy you not to put a knuckle in your mouth in pain and shame.
And the reference to the Wake pays off. It was a quote on the old, pre-euro currency of Ireland as well. And the quote there continued to “commodious vicus of recirculation”, part commode, part commodity, part vice, part Caesar’s “vici: I have conquered”, part Vico’s eternal return, and all circulating medium; which is language, money and sewerage. In Joyce’s quote, Tristram “rearrived from North Amorica”, the place of desire; Kilroy transposes this to the flow of credit crunch finance. When the reader realises how craftily Kilroy has riffed on Joyce, you have to wonder which Scots writers could do the same.
In a sense, this novel is Kilroy’s final exorcism of John Banville: a demon haunted narrator, glib, compelling and eloquent is neutered. She also gets rid of Anne Enright; domestic tragedies are no longer kept indoors. In such an act of defiance and defection, she has won the right to their laurels.
Edinburgh International Book Festival, 22 August, 10.15pm. www.edbookfest.co.uk