Sudden Times (Hardcover)

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Amazon.co.uk Review
Ollie Ewing has forgotten the thing that tells him who he is. The hero of Dermott Healey's Sudden Times has returned to Sligo to recover from "a few experiences" in London by laying low and listening to "complaints and sermons, jibes and asides" in his own head. Men are after him. A crowd of them. Or maybe not. He's in hiding, mostly from his own shame. His brother Redmond and his best friend Marty are dead. It seems as though Marty died in a labouring accident but as snippets of Ollie's scatty recollections cohere, it becomes apparent that Marty was murdered, left in the back of a lorry, in a pile of charred bones. Redmond too, was flown home from Luton in a coffin and it isn't until much later in the novel that the details of his manslaughter are revealed. The deaths haunt Ollie and people in the town can see the danger in his eyes. His attempts to reintegrate socially and mentally are slack, confused, painful and absurdly funny. He shifts from job to job, finally getting routine and acceptance as a trolley check-out in Doyle's supermarket. "You have to break out before you can learn the laws of the tribe. And you have to break inside before you can learn your true nature." Ollie is often uncertain of time or place and dislocation overtakes him without warning, throwing the narrative back to London, forward to France, while Ollie is too frightened to move far at all.

Healy's prose has ripping dialogue, an amiable grace and moments of great, uncomplicated tenderness for Ollie and his estranged father, who's holed up in a single room in Coventry, a burnt-out labourer, too poor, proud and done-in to travel home. In one of the most hilarious scenes in the book, Ollie and his father and "a posse of retired, low-slung Sligo and Mayo men" roam the Midlands looking for a fiddler from Gurteen and a "bit of crack". "It was the sort of thing my father would do, go searching for a man he couldn't find." Ollie is a man Ollie cannot find, and Healy excels at a compassionate portrait of the loss of self, with a fierce, resilient humour and a touching, vulnerable love for his characters. He works the paradoxes of pathos and tenacity beautifully. The climax of what happened to Ollie is irresistibly sinister and packed with sustained menace and Healy mines the particular tragedy that can befall the working class Irish in England with astute bleakness. --Cherry Smyth

Review
Ollie is back home in Sligo, collecting trolleys in a supermarket and sharing a ramshackle house with a group of art students. His state of mind is fragile, and he has to keep a conscious grip on reality. He has yet to come to terms with the strange events that occurred in London in the world of gangers and day-labouring, which led to the death first of his best friend, and then of his brother. Gradually the reader realizes that Ollie is a most unreliable source of information, and that his version of events is not necessarily the only one. Much of the fast-moving story is revealed through dialogue, and the culminating courtroom scene is both a technical tour de force and an emotional roller-coaster. Like much of the best Irish fiction, Healy's latest novel is comic and tragic in equal measures, and should convert many new readers to the pleasures of his fresh and deceptively simple style. (Kirkus UK)

One man's descent into the hell of madness, pursued by men who may have killed his best friend, as told by the acclaimed novelist and poet (The Bend for Home, 1998, etc.).Ollie Ewing, an Irish carpenter, is living in meager surroundings in Sligo, trying to recover from a shattering experience as an immigrant worker in London. At the outset of the story, told in the first person by Ewing, he's working in a supermarket, "a great shop to think in," and living in a rundown house inhabited by a group of struggling artists. He's been living inside his own head for so long, victimized by his London crises, the nature of which are only gradually revealed, that he is "sick of [his] own consciousness." Slowly, painstakingly, he begins to reconnect with the world, starting with his housemates, then his mother and, finally, his reproachful father, whom he visits in Coventry. Only after that reconciliation does Ollieand Healyreel back the months to recount the devastating events that sent him on a downward spiral. One of hundreds of itinerant Irish laborers in London, Ollie stumbles into a protection and hiring racket (vaguely reminiscent of the corrupt doings in On the Waterfront). He angers the wrong people and finds himself torn between paranoiac fantasy and genuine danger. Eventually, both his friend Marty and his brother Redmond fall victim to real violence from his real enemies, leaving Ollie to grapple alone with his demons and a brutally insensitive English justice system. Healy tells his story with a dark, jittery humor, filled with jagged rhythms, punctuated by the bizarre reveries of Ollie's wandering mind. It all ends not with Ollie's rebirth but with the traumas that precede it: the result is an odd, troubling read.American readers will want a glossary of Anglo-Irish slang, but anyone who reads this will catch the brooding strangeness of this eerie, difficult book. (Kirkus Reviews)

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