Irish people go to funerals. They circle the wagons, count the survivors. Everyone could still hug and kiss, wipe away the tears and snot, shake hands with her husband, her family, her kids. Nobody knew it then, but this would be the last good funeral of the year.
Learning in February of 2020 that an old girlfriend (it was a brief fling, they were never “in love”, and they knew enough people in common to have kept casually crossing paths over the intervening twenty-eight years) had died of cancer, author Ed O’Loughlin found himself suddenly feeling old and unmoored and casting about for the meaning of it all. When pandemic-related lockdowns then hit and O’Loughlin was relegated to an attic boxroom to do his writing (while his wife and daughters did their own writing and schoolwork downstairs), he found himself going back over his life — an unhappy childhood, family loss, years as a foreign correspondent before turning to writing literature, his current happy home — and the result is The Last Good Funeral of the Year. By turns touching and funny, always interesting and contemplative, I most appreciated learning how details from O’Loughlin’s personal life show up in his novels (him having been a journalist in Africa and the Middle East makes so much sense now that I know it), and if nothing else, this makes for a fine record of the 2020 experience in first rate prose. This might appeal most to a niche audience (although I think everyone should be reading this author), and as for me, I loved it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
He told himself this from the start: this wasn’t just about Charlotte. It was about him suddenly being faced with facts he’d been ignoring — that he was getting old, that he wasn’t what he used to be, that his imagination, always overactive, had at some point reversed its direction, switching production from dreams to regrets. Anyone could see the gears turning, the facile clockwork. It was selfish and dishonest. And worse, it was dull.
What I’ve read of O’Loughlin has always engaged me at a deep level; his writing simply speaks to me. So whether he’s writing about the “banality” of his unhappy childhood (I understand too well the “habits of secrecy and shame” that small children of quarrelling parents acquire) or describing falling “through a trapdoor into his twenties” while walking along Edmonton’s High Level Bridge in the middle of a winter's night (I spent most of my twenties in Edmonton and that’s where my own trapdoor of nostalgia would lead), it’s all familiar and relatable and well-captured. And where O’Loughlin is writing about his years as a foreign correspondent (reporting from South Africa or Somalia or the Middle East), I was fascinated by what he witnessed and intrigued that he carried over a journalist’s refusal to put himself in the story he was writing (to “distance himself from the scene of the crime”) by continuing to refer to himself in the third person throughout this memoir. The tone changes abruptly in one section that reads as a tongue-in-cheek, chapter-long stream-of-consciousness:
he said to his wife once he said if I ever start writing about being a writer or about a fictional writer who is writing a book get a five-pound steel lump hammer and strike me repeatedly on the back of the head
I both liked the way that this section seemed to capture the in-your-headness of being in a continuing lockdown, without O’Loughlin actually taking it too seriously, writing at one point:
an artist friend once told him that he thought writing was the purest art because you can’t hide behind the form and when you’re writing you always have to try to find something new and he said that for example someone had told him about a recent American novel that was only one long sentence and it had won experimental prizes and wasn’t that an interesting idea and he told his artist friend that in the past five years not one but two novels that were only one long sentence had won the big English prize for experimental fiction and that Joyce first ran that experiment a century before and his artist friend laughed
But then the tone changes back, there’s another funeral, more ghosts and cemeteries and the weighing of a life, and by the end, O’Loughlin comes to some thoughtful conclusions:
So now he had, after all, a photograph of himself with Charlotte, from their short time together, a long time ago. It hurt now to think of them all, happy there together, but here was the evidence, a last-minute twist. But what did it prove? We were. That’s all. It was good. And some of us continue. Could any true story end any other way?
Again, this might have niche appeal, but I do hope O’Loughlin sells enough copies to buy those hearing aids; at least while we’re still wearing masks and he doesn’t know he’s being cussed at without the help of subconscious lip-reading. And I hope he writes many more novels and that I get to read them.
As we all sit here in horror watching Russia invade Ukraine — forces quickly taking control of Chernobyl, displacing millions of citizens, and threatening the use of nuclear weapons to enforce Putin's will — the following passage struck me as too unfortunately ironic; I'm sure the thirteen Ukranian defenders of tiny Snake Island would have preferred a slow death from climate change than putting their soft bodies between their country and a Russian warship:
He’d grown up during the Cold War, and, like many of his generation, he sort of missed it now. The possibility — probability, it had seemed — that he and everyone he knew would be annihilated at short notice by thermonuclear weapons, whether by accident or on purpose, was terrifying, but at least it would have been tragic. The present reality, of a slow, onanistic auto-asphyxiation, in which only the 0.01 per cent will achieve sterile orgasm before the planet chokes out, seems farcical at best. Not even a bang for our bucks. And if we had pushed the button, back in the good old days, most life on the planet would probably have survived us. The Chernobyl exclusion zone, now teeming with nature, has shown us that. Now, it could already be too late.
