Ghosts and Lightning, by Trevor Byrne

This review contains strong language.

“What d’yeh do when yer ma’s gone, like?” Denny asks on page 6 of Ghosts and Lightning and in the rest of the book Denny strives to answer this question.

Ghosts and Lightning charts Denny’s re-emergence in his home town of Dublin after his mother’s death, where he is reunited with his alky sister, his two unstable brothers and the motley crew of his old pals. For a while it seems it’s not easy for Denny to do anything at all; not catching a moth, not talking to his siblings and not even keeping his car upright. Denny and his sister, Paula, become stuck in their grief and begin to stagnate. They allow their mother’s spick and span home to turn into a filthy doss house used by neighbourhood kids to get drunk, high and lucky, and they simply mosey on through their days with no clear idea of where they’re going. Because life as Denny has known it is over. One moment Denny was in a Welsh pub watching a rugby match and the next moment his mother was dead and there’s not a thing he can do to change that.

As narrators go, Denny is of the wise-drop-out-in-humdrum-surroundings ilk, (he reminded me a little of the Zach Braff character in Garden State). Despite the passing of years, Denny’s childhood friends are still very important to him: Pajo is a green-haired, skinny methodoner with a fondness for animals; Maggit is an aggressive sensitivo who’d sooner have a fist-fight than admit a mistake and make recompense, and Ned is a kindly street-seller with some out-of-date selection boxes and a posh girlfriend. But outside of these four there is a wide cast of peripheral characters, each with compelling motivations and flaws. Trevor Byrne has the admirable gift of being able to magick a solid character into existence with a few short sentences:

It was mad; for a few years no one really seen much of him – he was off with junkies and all sorts, shootin up in parks and squats in town. He doesn’t really talk about it. We knew he was on gear but there was nothin yeh could say to him; the few times I tried he just looked dead sad, dead ashamed.

With his mother gone, Denny feels compelled to consider what he wants from life, whether he can get it and what life even means. He doesn’t have an inherent optimism, or faith in a religion to support him through this terrible time, so he is left searching, trying to land on something that will make things easier.

I wish we lived in ancient fuckin times, so I could worship the sun or moon or somethin…somethin that’s actually there, actually worth-fuckin-while.

The novel is unconventional in that it feels more like a slice of a ‘real life’ than a story built on the sort of very controlled plot beloved by Robert McKee devotees. Which is not to say there is no plot – it is there, but it is restricted to the very plausible end of the scale, to the point where the reading experience almost feels akin to watching a gritty documentary.

Denny narrates the entire book in Dublin dialect peppered with profanities (and let’s be clear: Denny doesn’t just swear, he swears beautifully) but this strong Dublin lingo is surprisingly easy to follow, and enables the reader to hear Denny’s voice as clearly as if he was present in the reader’s room. Denny intersperses his colloquial narrative with anecdotes, rumours, Irish folklore and the community’s most infamous tales:

And then that fella. African fella. Cut up in a bin bag and dumped in the canal. Fuckin hell such fear he must o felt. His head was cut off and everythin and they never found it for ages. In the end this girl, an Irish girl and her ma admitted to it. They took his head in a schoolbag and brung it to the park and smashed it up with a hammer. Can yeh believe that? Jesus. That such fuckin badness can exist.

Ghosts and Lightning is a fascinating portrait of a young man dealing with a tragic death that came far too soon, and the book is funny, poetic and wince-inducing by turns. I don’t think I have ever found a novel that so perfectly depicts my own experiences of adolescence played out in an economically-deprived council estate setting. The lurching from excitement to boredom, the hopefulness and hopelessness entwined, the simultaneous excesses and shortfalls, all felt very familiar to me and this accomplished storytelling left me deeply impressed.

Still, if you’re offended by strong language, or even strong dialect, you’d best give this one a wide berth. However, if colourful characters, sharp dialogue and realistic story lines appeal, you might just find Ghosts and Lightning to be one of your favourite books of the year.

Canongate, ISBN-13: 978-1847673299, £10.99, 288 pages, paperback.

Lisa is an author, blogger and blagger who appreciates ancient trees, scruffy animals and hard liquor.

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