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Kevin Power

Bad Day in Blackrock Paperback – 8 July 2010

by Kevin Power (Author)

37 ratings

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**Inspiration for the 2012 award-winning film What Richard Did – from the author of White City, available for pre-order now**

'An excellent novel... It comes from the gut, it's raw, it's passionate' John Boyne, author of The Boy in Striped Pyjamas

On a late August night a young man is kicked to death outside a Dublin nightclub and celebration turns to devastation. The reverberations of that event, its genesis and aftermath, are the subject of this extraordinary story, stripping away the veneer of a generation of Celtic cubs, whose social and sexual mores are chronicled and dissected in this tract for our times.

The victim, Conor Harris, his killers - three of them are charged with manslaughter - and the trial judge share common childhoods and schooling in the privileged echelons of south Dublin suburbia. The intertwining of these lives leaves their afflicted families in moral free fall as public exposure merges with private anguish and imploded futures.

Praise for Kevin Power:

'Kevin Power is an author of magnificent control, stirring the deepest compassion with restless anger in this piercing contemporary novel' Frank McGuinness

'This novel marks the debut of a deeply moral and probing writer - and a potentially great one' Sunday Post (Ireland)

'White City is a dark, hilarious and emotionally profound study of the toxic effects of greed and entitlement. Also, a story brilliantly and movingly told. Couldn’t stop reading it. Will read it again' Ed O'Loughlin, author of Not Untrue and Not Unkind and This Eden

'This is part thriller but mostly a look at what it means to grow up... full of ridiculously beautiful, polished, & often scathing sentences. This novel is pleasing on so many levels, both intellectually & emotionally... You'll laugh, you'll cry... Read it, read it, read it' Claire Hennessy, author, editor & publisher at Banshee Press

Print length

240 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Simon & Schuster UK
Publication date

8 July 2010
Dimensions

19.8 x 0.07 x 13 cm
ISBN-10

1847399398
ISBN-13

978-1847399397
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Product details

Publisher : Simon & Schuster UK (8 July 2010)
Language : English
Paperback : 240 pages
ISBN-10 : 1847399398
ISBN-13 : 978-1847399397
Dimensions : 19.8 x 0.07 x 13 cm

Best Sellers Rank: 327,295 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- 865 in Lawyers & Criminals Humour
- 18,076 in Humorous Fiction (Books)
- 31,080 in Literary Fiction (Books)

Customer reviews:
37 ratings

Product description

About the Author

Kevin Power is the author of Bad Day in Blackrock (2008), which was filmed in 2012 as What Richard Did, directed by Lenny Abrahamson. Kevin is the winner of the 2009 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly and many other places. Kevin lives in Dublin and teaches creative writing in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin.

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5 star		31%
4 star		38%
3 star		21%
2 star		10%
1 star 0% (0%)		0%

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Lady Petra Wimsey

Compelling and brutal

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 December 2012

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I found portions of this book very hard to read - some of the descriptions of the central incident are so graphic as to be thoroughly unsettling. I liked the writing very much - Kevin Power gets inside the characters' heads very effectively and produces a taut account of a rarified group of young people with everything going for them, who threw it away in a drunken brawl. The close similarities of the plot to a real-life case in Ireland make it the more difficult to read, but this is a powerful novel and well worth the price.

Helpful

Ivor Faulkner

Bad Day in Blackrock

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 1 July 2013

Verified Purchase

It was a good day in Harold's Cross(where I live) when I read it. Liked it because of it's mean style with not a word our of place. It reminded me of Capote's "In Cold Blood", viz., killing(s) based on fact and in a 'journalistic' style. Although the reader knows the outcome and the narrator knows it also the narrative still manages to create an investigative/detective atmosphere. The author needs to find another subject soon before he's forgotten by a fickle reading public always looking for something more...

One person found this helpful

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Neil Hand

Good story but quite drawn-out

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 2 February 2015

Verified Purchase

Good story but quite drawn-out. Might have worked better as a lengthy short-story. Author was clearly striving to establish some stylistic devices such as repeating certain sentences throughout the book for dramatic effect, but this got annoying quite early on. Also, the non-linear timeline on which the story is told doesn't really work IMO. We know exactly what's going to happen from the start of the book; we know how the main drama in the story will unfold, and spend the rest of the book learning about the tedious background. That being said, the story is interesting and it's written well, even if the style isn't my cup of tea.

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jojo

Interesting story, mediocre writing

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 17 March 2013

Verified Purchase

i bought this book after watching the film based on it "What Richard did". The story is good, and is clearly based on a true incident that happened in 2000. For me, the writing isn't exceptional, more mediocre. it tells the story, describes the characters and their emotions, but doesn't really stand out as great writing. So it's a good read, the story really makes you think how easily your life can change and how money does appear to buy you some protection in this world.

One person found this helpful

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Colin

Would not recommend

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 March 2020

Verified Purchase

To be avoided. Poorly written, unnecessarily vulgar language, little sensitivity shown to subject matter (based on a real life murder in Ireland in early 00’s

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Timothy J. Warnford

Excelent service

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 5 May 2021

Verified Purchase

Fine book that I read in two sittings

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jan fleming

Took me back...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 3 June 2013

Verified Purchase

I loved this book and took me back to my boarding school days, easy reading and well written. Enjoyable storyline

Helpful

A strong debut with more than a hint of poor taste

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 18 January 2015

I had not heard of the real-life killing upon which this 2008 debut novel is based. A young man from a privileged background, Conor Harris, is kicked to death in a fight with a group of his peers outside a Dublin nightclub. The events leading up to this killing and its consequences are told by a narrator, whose identity is revealed only at the end of the book, from the perspectives of those involved, their friends and families.

The narrator emphasises that not all the truth of what happened have emerged in the police investigation and laces his text with ‘maybes’, ‘mights’ and ‘perhapses’ which I found initially frustrating. The author’s style, using short repetitive sentences is rather disruptive. Thus we have ‘the much repeated Bang. Bang. Bang’ describing the three kicks that kill are assumed to have killed Connor. Describing the parents of the three boys accused of the killing, Power writes ‘They knew people at the Irish Times and the Evening Herald. They knew people at Deloitte & Touche and they knew people at Microsoft. They knew people at Intel and Lucent Technologies and Independent News and Media. They knew people at Trinity and UCD.’

Whilst the killing is at the centre of the story, the author is equally concerned to explore privilege and the ways that this can subvert the rule of law and the equitable machinery of society. The boys at the centre of the story, who attend the exclusive Blackrock College, feel protected by the contacts of their South Dublin families. Power is very good at describing the lifestyles of this clique in the period of the killing, 2004, when the Irish economy was booming.

These are young people behaving badly because their schools, their parents and society have told them implicitly or explicitly that they can. However, they are not children. The pent-up violence the boys release, accentuated by a night’s hard drinking, is linked to their rugby successes, when they ‘took the first running kick as though aiming for the conversion in a senior cup final’. Their sporting successes created opportunities to move seamlessly from college to university and attracted female students from the same social background, with €249 Ugg boots and designer sunglasses, as well as teenage groupies, fuelled by booze, who see these young men as gods.

The dialogue between the characters is very convincing, their topics of conversation - sport, education and careers, fashions and the cost of ‘essential’ items - always reveal the bubble within their lives are lived. The ambivalent roles of the establishment, colleges and church, are deftly drawn and Power describes the wider social comment on the case obliquely through newspaper headlines and TV coverage. The police investigation is earnest and thorough, and the realisation of the three suspects once they are arrested that life will never be the same again gains impact through understatement. One of them thinks ‘When he turned sixty-five he would still be the boy who killed Conor Harris. When he shuffled into the nursing home, he would still be the boy who killed Conor Harris. When he died himself – he increasingly felt – he would just be catching up.’

The novel’s title refers to a newspaper headline and related back to Spencer Tracey’s great film ‘Bad Day at Blackrock’ from 1955. What initially struck me as a rather unstructured collection of anecdotes and attempted reconstructions gradually crystallised through the undoubted skill of the author, although questions remain as to the reliability of the narrator. Half way through I would have scored this 3* but overall it deserves higher whilst leaving a distinctly unpleasant feeling in my mind.

Power was at university with school friends of those accused of involvement in the killing that took place in 2000. Given the time taken for the police investigation, the trial, appeals and time served in prison, the book’s publication must have caused great upset to the family of the dead boy at exactly the time that they were trying to move on. Such apparent insensitivity to the situation of the bereaved should not be part of a book review. However, I found it difficult to separate the two. At least the narrator admits ‘My motives in telling [the story] have been purely selfish, and have had nothing much to do with propriety or with the need for good manners.’

One person found this helpful

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Bad Day in Blackrock Paperback – 8 July 2010

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