Kilbrack: A Novel

O'Neill, Jamie

ISBN 10: 074325595X ISBN 13: 9780743255950

Publisher: Scribner, 2004

Synopsis

O'Leary Montagu was born at age twenty-five - a difficult age, as he himself admits. For the past eleven years, which is as far back as he can remember, O'Leary has been sustained by two people: his girlfriend, Mary, traumatized by O'Leary's neuroses, and Nancy Valentine, author of Ill Fares the Land. Her memoir of an idyllic childhood in Kilbrack ends as she returns to the village after inexplicable banishment and finds it abandoned.
Now Mary has left him, and O'Leary finds himself homeless and laboring under an ill-starred fate. With his treasured copy of Ill Fares the Land, he arrives in the dilapidated village of Kilbrack and finds it hasn't been abandoned at all: thin old Downey, the pharmacist, is still dispensing medicines and advice; Nellie Maguire is still languishing in her pub; and stout Mrs. Cuthbert, still frenzied, arranges for O'Leary to marry her daughter, who has vowed to become a nun.
What has happened to Kilbrack? O'Leary's coming will change everything, but in a manner no one - in his right mind - could foretell.

About this title

About the Author:

Jamie O'Neill was brought up and educated in Dun Laoghaire, Co Dublin. His bestselling AT SWIM, TWO BOYS, was published by Scribner in September 2001.

From Publishers Weekly:

Written a decade before Irish author O'Neill's breakthrough novel At Swim, Two Boys, this richly comic tale is at once a satire of Irish popular novels and exemplar of the genre. The book boasts a highly unusual hero, O'Leary Montagu, so named by the nurse who 11 years earlier found him, at age 25, facially scarred and wholly amnesiac after being struck by an automobile. Wracked by a host of strange compulsions, O'Leary is obsessed with an unpublished memoir he discovers, Ill Fares the Land by one Nancy Valentine, about her decaying hometown of Kilbrack and its endearingly odd inhabitants. After countless rereadings of the memoir (its title is rendered on O'Leary's copy as Ill Farts the Land, one of many such embarrassing "misprints"), O'Leary finally decides he must visit Kilbrack and the author to write her biography. What he discovers in the supposedly abandoned Kilbrack isn't at all what he expects. The outrageous cast, nearly all of whom seem to be characters in the memoir, are hilarious, and O'Leary himself is a memorable addition to the roll of heroes of Irish literature, with his endearing tics and habits. Constantly making brief mental "diary memos," he also clutches in his pocket his version of a security blanket (a mysterious "lemon jiffy") and waits five full minutes before entering a public toilet to be certain no one is inside. Only the crude homophobia of O'Leary's father jars in this idyll of satiric nostalgia.
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About this edition

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 074325595X
• ISBN 13: 9780743255950
• Binding: Library Binding
• Number of pages: 305