The premise of Séamas O’Reilly’s brilliant debut novel is that a Hollywood actor has flown into Derry to star in a new TV series about the Troubles called Dead City, then mysteriously disappeared. But its real interest lies in what happens when a place becomes defined by a particular historical moment, to the extent that stories told about it lapse into formula. As one character says of the TV series: “A young lad coming of age in a time of violence, will he get caught up in everything or find another way through blah blah blah.”
O’Reilly is determined to show us that the people of Derry are not so easily stereotyped. He uses Dead City as a starting point to circle through different characters connected to the series, from a stressed scriptwriter to a local historian who wonders, “How do you talk about the past as a person still living it, in a place that barely survived it?” As we move through the novel, we discover the links between them, creating a patchwork portrait of the city, similar to the way Tommy Orange’s novel There, There used a chorus of voices to explore the lives of Native Americans.
Each character talks to us directly. “The whole place has gone mad with Hollywood arriving,” says Dympna: people hope it will boost the economy “like Thrones did for Belfast”. Dympna’s daughter wants to audition and is quizzing her about the 1970s, “like some fella from the UN on a fact-finding mission”, while Dympna remembers the things she’s hidden from her children. “I wondered there and then if awareness is all it’s cracked up to be if you can’t tell the whole story.”
Who tells the story and why they tell it is a central concern, though O’Reilly’s lightness of touch means it never seems overdone. He has a keen eye for absurdities, for the way tragedy becomes marketable: the artist who daubed murals on Bogside walls now doing lecture tours with a “wee moustache and crucifix earring like a plastic Provo”; the ex-IRA hitman offering his services as a “consultant”. Those once bound by a code of silence are happy to demonstrate how to make a bottle bomb. “Say Nothing my arse,” says one character.
Economic necessity means people take work that perpetuates the cliches. Local painters are hired to recreate an old mural for the film set. “I can do the gunman, you can start with the dove,” says one. “If I do another dove as long as I live, God help me.” Aspiring actor Turlough says: “This crock of shite is the only chance I have of getting out of here.”
The locals note it’s mainly Americans and Brits working on the series: Americans who sentimentalise their Irish links – one of the theories about the missing star is that she’s “gone native like a load of Yanks do” – and Brits who “treat their own violence like the hiccups, something mad and terrible that was happening for some mysterious reason”. But there’s also Eileen, who is hopeful her home will be used as a filming location so she can pay for a new extension, watching the production crew examine her ornaments like “artefacts they pulled from a bog”.
This recreation and commodification of the past is a kind of haunting. The novel is run through with the different ways in which the dead are inescapable. Ann-Marie’s son was shot by a British soldier, his image now endlessly reproduced on book covers and “bloody tea-towels”. With her cold rage and her clear articulation of the unfixable contradictions of grief – “My heart is small and hard, wind-bleached like seaside beach seats” – Ann-Marie is one of the novel’s most powerful voices. Reflecting on the lads who came home safely after her son was killed, she says: “It wasn’t their fault and I’ll never forgive them.”
O’Reilly’s first book, Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?, was a heartbreakingly funny memoir about his mother’s death, and he clearly has a rare gift for moving nimbly between oppositions. The humour of Prestige Drama is skilfully weaponised: it allows O’Reilly to go after subjects that we often tiptoe around. And his language is gloriously vivid: a hungover man wakes up “slowly, like a column of dog food muscling its way out of a tin”.
Some may feel the missing actor thread should have had more prominence, but Prestige Drama is more interested in the ordinary people behind the televised version of events. James Plunkett, author of the 1969 novel Strumpet City, another polyphonic book about an Irish city, explained his novel’s success by saying he “didn’t lift my eye away from people at any stage, didn’t lift my eye away from the parish … for the whole of life is in that parish, where else can it be”.