Road to Notown - Softcover

Foley, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0856405760 ISBN 13: 9780856405761

Publisher: Blackstaff Press, 1996

A satirical novel about the pretensions, hypocrisies and paranoia of the literary world and its hangers-on - novelists, poets, academics, passionate women and barking-mad eccentrics - and, for good measure, Northern Irish cultural conditioning, marital breakdown and the maelstrom that passes for family life. Filtered through the bemused, wisecracking observations of the young narrator, the plot gallops through a twenty-year journey from the North to Dublin to London, encountering on the way Kyle Magee 'the Zorba of the North' - novelist, painter, jazzman, drinker, lover of women and celebrant of life - and the lovers, relatives, disciples and poseurs that swirl in the vortex of his restless energy.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Michael Foley was born in Derry in 1947. He was joint editor of The Honest Ulsterman from 1970 to 1971 and contributed a regular satirical column, ‘The Wrassler’, to Fortnight magazine throughout the early 1970s. His first collection of poetry, True Life Love Stories, was published by Blackstaff Press in 1976, followed by The Go Situation in 1982 and Insomnia in the Afternoon in 1994. He has also published a collection of translations of French poetry and four novels. The Guardian described his book The Age of Absurdity: Why Modern Life Makes it Hard to be Happy as 'a work of admirable scope ... energetic, witty and erudite' Formerly a lecturer in Information Technology at the University of Westminster, Michael is now retired and lives in London. Follow Michael on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/MrMichaelFoley

From Kirkus Reviews:

East meets West--or, more precisely, North meets South--and all hell breaks loose in new arrival Foley's raucous, vicious, and utterly brilliant satire of culture, religion, and literary ambitions in modern Ireland. Whatever else may be observed of the Isle of Saints and Scholars, it's certainly a small world. All the more so if you're young, bright, and living in Belfast, like Kyle Magee, the Protestant ``Zorba of the North,'' who carries his opinions on life and art into every room he enters. Supremely self-confident and ruinously charming, he sounds clever enough to know what he's talking about but is too offhand in his pronouncements to let anyone know for sure. Naturally, he attracts a following, and our narrator becomes Magee's chief acolyte in short order. He sees in Magee a way out of the Ulster provincialism that, for Catholic and Protestant alike, keeps life nasty, brutish, and if not short at least dull. So he and Magee set out to convert the natives to the saving grace of Art, broadcasting a radio program called ``Born- again Ulster,'' setting up theater troupes, and writing novels of modern Irish life. Along the way, they fall into the hands of the Herron sisters, upwardly mobile scions of a matriarchal clan of Catholic shopkeepers, and each man takes his pick: Magee marrying Liz Herron, and the narrator settling for her older sister Reba. The friendship is stretched by Magee's egomania and the narrator's jealousy, however, and even as brothers-in-law the two find less and less to hold them together once they've emigrated to Dublin and London. The time it takes the narrator to realize what manner of man Magee truly is works out to be nearly the whole of the story, but he does manage in time. A superb exposition of the dynamics of private lives played out endlessly in public--and written with an easy wit and casual sophistication that have all but vanished from the contemporary scene. -- Copyright �1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.