Mayo author returns with fourth novel
MAYO author Martin Keaveney has returned with fresh fiction in his fourth novel - and seventh book overall - with The Lodger, coming out soon, just in time for Christmas.
This time, Keaveney moves back to the 1990s, with a narrator known as ‘Mac’ and several other pseudonyms, and a cast of cartoon-like characters.
The Lodger tells the story of Mac, who lives with his landlord The Monk in the sparse home of Chez Vous, Coyne Road, in a small west of Ireland town, just before the arrival of the internet.
Mac, who spends most of time working in Yang’s Chinese Restaurant, drinking in The Clover pub and attempting to extract cans of cider from the local niteclub, is intrigued by Patrick McNamara and his various money-making schemes. And he and his enigmatic flatmate are soon on a one-way road towards ever more serious and dangerous crime escapades.
The story also features Marlon ‘The Monk’, who owns the house and charges for teabags, Bonnie, his nymphomaniac girlfriend, whose howls of ecstasy are the house and novel’s soundtrack, while there's also two outrageously lazy students ‘from the south’ who attend at least one lecture per term, along with a couple of suspiciously clean welders who rent the back garden chalet.
Most important to the book, though, is the mysterious Patrick McNamara, whose shady background, activities and growing influence on the household becomes more and more compelling.
While The Lodger may not be as even-handed as Keaveney’s other novels, it nevertheless blasts the reader through a wild and dazzling ride through a west of Ireland town in that faraway time before the internet. In this world, people regularly went to pubs, nightclubs and chip shops, in that order, used classifieds and payphones to find work, lodgings and get lifts home, and watched afternoon TV game shows on actual televisions.
For a window to a time (not that) long gone, it is probably Keaveney’s best achievement.
The Lodger can be pre-ordered here, and will also be available in all good bookshops. Browse Martin Keaveney's previously published works here.
The Lodger is published by Penniless Press, Warrington, UK.