City of Bohane

Whatever's wrong with us is coming in off that river. No argument: the taint of badness in the city's air is a taint off that river. This is the Bohane river we're talking about. A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in off the Big Nothin' wastes and the city was spawned by it and was named for it: city of Bohane.

Set in a near-future (2053), vaguely post-apocalyptic fictional city on Ireland's west coast, City of Bohane is fueled by sex, drugs, and gang violence, written in language gorgeously inventive, and while it was a fun and interesting read in the moment, it amounts to little more in the end than the “wisps of steam like spectral maggots (that) rose from their damp coats in the inn's fuggyheat”. I kept waiting for the point of this book – perhaps some explanation for the lost-time years that led to this bizarre society; an explanation that would then lay bare some truth of humanity, as the great books do – but there's nothing below the surface here: this is like a very clever language experiment that delights only at the sentence-level. But oh, those sentences do delight.

“Hear this!” Ol' Boy cried. “Bohane city don't always gots to be a gang-fight story. We can give 'em a good aul' tangle o' romance an' all, y'check me?”

There's something quite surreal about City of Bohane, and perhaps there's an unwritten rule to surrealism that one shouldn't ever explain; never attempt to make the vision plausible. This is only forty years (from the time of the book's publication) into Ireland's future, but most technology has been wiped out (there are jukeboxes and record players but no television; knives but not guns; trains but no cars), the political system is anarchic (with a gang, or Fancy, ruling the bowl of the city and maintaining Calm with the rival factions in the surrounding hills and the near-savages on the beach), the religious zealots pray to “Sweet Baba Jay on the cross”, people listen and dance to calypso music as though it's a secret lingua franca, and the gangbangers dress like dandies. None of this is explained except for some vague references to the lost-years and some reel-to-reel films that show the streets of Bohane once bustling with cars – this is our own world, but somehow, lost. We're promised a good aul' tangle o' romance, so let's meet Logan, leader of the Hartnett Fancy:

He had that Back Trace look to him: a dapper buck in a natty-boy Crombie, the Crombie draped all casual-like over the shoulders of a pale grey Eyetie suit, mohair. Mouth of teeth on him like a vandalised graveyard but we all have our crosses. It was a pair of hand-stitched Portuguese boots that slapped his footfall, and the stress that fell, the emphasis, was money.

Logan has been devotedly married to Macu (for Immaculata; an Iberian beauty whose wonky eye everyone fetishises) for twenty-five years, and the man he stole her from – the Gant, who used to head the Fancy – is rumoured to have returned to the city.

The Gant's humours were in rum condition – he was about fit for a bleed of leeches. His moods were too swift on the turn. He was watchful of them. He had a sack of tawny wine on him. He untwisted its cap and took a pull on it for the spurt of life – medicinal. There was pikey blood in the Gant, of course – the name, even, was an old pikey handle – but then there's pikey blood in most of us around this city. Have a sconce at the old gaatch of us – the slope-shouldered carry, the belligerence of the stride, the smokey hazel of our eyes; officer material we are not. Of course if you were going by the reckoning of pikey bones the Gant was old bones now for certain. He was fifty years to paradise.

Not only does Logan need to deal with old jealousies, but the clans in the hills are spoiling for a fight, and as young folks are wont to do – as he himself had done a quarter century earlier – Logan's lieutenants are plotting their own takeover of the Fancy. Seemingly besieged, Logan proposes a Feud (which is a formal declaration, written in his ninety-year-old mother, Girly's, “mannish” hand and delivered to the rival leader on foot), and Eyes Cusack accepts by handing over a ceremonial receipt (in this case, a drawing of a stick-figure man with genitals growing out of his forehead). As the hilltop clans begin their war-drumming and light huge bonfires encircling the bowl of Bohane, the temper in the city becomes frenzied and anticipatory:

He always enjoyed the eve of a Feud. He knew that Eyes Cusack would not for long keep his mongrels leashed, and his mood was high and expectant. When you were running a Fancy, regular demonstrations of rage were needed to keep the town in check, and just as importantly, the Fancy boys in trim. Too much sweetness and light and they got fat, unpleasantly smiley and over-interested in the fashion mags.

This isn't actually the climax of the book, but there is much reefing committed with shkelpers, against Fancy, Cusack, and pikey alike, and factions and alliances are regrouped and redrawn; paving the way for the actual climax. This occurs at the August Fair – when the summer heat draws in an obscuring Murk from the nearby ocean – and the narrative is suddenly told in jump scenes: a fat and blind old madame sings a dirge; a feral goat is chosen and raised on a platform for sacrifice; the clickheels on a Fancy's boots trace a route over the cobblestoned wynds; Girly rises from her bed and gets dressed to go out for the first time in decades; the hoss polis face down the sand-pikeys; jump; jump; jump. The action culminates in a satisfying ending, but then...it's over and nothing has been learned. The action has all been for its own sake.

I believe in the maxim, “Good books don't make good movies”, and the best thing I can say for City of Bohane is that I think it would make an excellent movie (currently in development). It's all atmosphere and costumes and bloody, sexy action; a steampunk Mad Max; A Clockwork Orange without the message. I picked up this book because it won The International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for 2013, and I thought that would guarantee a good, literary read. It's not quite that (I don't really understand what the IMPAC jury was thinking here), but I did enjoy this book in the moment.