Tristram Amory St Lawrence, 13th Earl of Howth, latterly of Finnegans Wake, hospitalised dead-drunk in Belgium and generally believed defunct, has been resurrected and dried out and now returns to his native Ireland, where a gorgeous pint of stout tempts him. There it stands, mouth-wateringly: "My darkest depths were in that vessel, a chalice I had crossed the earth to evade I was holding my soul, distilled into liquid and aching to be reunited with my body." Tristram refrains from tasting it, though afterwards, on his way to an AA meeting, he surreptitiously "suckled the knuckle the stout had doused". It's only a matter of time, for, suckler or sucker, Tristram shares in the infantilism of his compatriots as they savour Ireland's boom. At the airport to meet the returnee is Hickey, old schoolmate, corrupt builder, with a financial proposition. And on the phone is his unseen mentor and demon, the sinister Monsieur Deauville.
Is it credible that the patrician Tristram is so matey with the foul-mouthed Hickey? Don't ask. There are no realistic characters in The Devil I Know, only savage caricatures. In this carnivalesque allegory of Ireland's property boom, Claire Kilroy presents a satiric danse macabre of brio and linguistic virtuosity. The profiteers are an array of vulpine nasties and asinine greedies who've sold both soul and reason to Old Nick. Tristram, scion of an ancient Anglo-Norman house, has unknowingly sold his birthright for a mess of potage.
As the novel opens, the year is 2016 and Tristram is testifying at a tribunal delving into the Celtic Tiger's dodgy dealings. Kilroy's novel is a fable whose moral we already know: Ireland, spending money it didn't have, lost everything it did have. It's a dark divertimento that runs on linguistic verve and energy, a madly saturnalian style for a berserk era. Her Ireland is populated by ghouls and asses, with Tristram harbouring a bit of both. As in Tristram Shandy, another cock and bull story, the hero's brain is a flimsy organ: Sterne's Tristram acknowledges, "So often has my judgment deceived me in my life, that I always suspect it." Kilroy's Tristram, appointed "Director, Castle Holdings", exists in a state of existential bafflement, goggling at the fact that his shell company "bought nothing, sold nothing, manufactured nothing, did nothing", with tremendous profits. "Me? I was only the conduit," he tells the judge.
But indeed nobody in the book understands the nature of money. Money's something provided by banks, to be handed to corrupt government ministers such as Ray Lawless. This bent politican arrives in person to collect his bribe, a "rain-coloured man" carrying off a Jiffy Bag stuffed with cash "under his arm like a hog". The grand dreams and schemes cherished by Hickey, Viking and the other wannabe-billionaires are all funded by debt.
The prostitution of the motherland to property developers begins in Tristram's cession of his maternal inheritance, Hilltop, for an apartment complex whose value increases exponentially by the day. The ventures of the so-called "Golden Circle" hyperinflate to plans for a new urban quarter for Dublin, "to annex London", "to purchase Britain", Shanghai, the world. The wine drunk by these dreamers is "rich in tannin", blackening their lips, hearts, souls. They laugh "in a medieval display of mettle", padding around the boardroom "in an exhausted delirium, the mark of the plague still staining their lips". A blackly comic afflatus swells until its essential bathos punctures it. I was reminded of Ben Jonson's Sir Epicure Mammon and the Jacobean world of The Alchemist and Volpone but Kilroy's banal modern clones lack lascivious imagination. "They are all the same. Boyler, Coyler, Doyler, sitting sharpening their knives."
What The Devil I Know fails to do is to give the reader a sense of how the grand scam affected ordinary people when, with the international banking crisis, the world economy collapsed. On the other hand, its feeling for the rape of nature, both landscape and animals, is powerful and poignant. The scene of lobsters being barbecued is one I shall flinchingly remember: the intoxicated profiteers don't bother to kill them before cooking, and the seared creatures escape, dropping to the floor, scurrying for shelter, stamped on and replaced. And still they won't die. "Christ it's still alive." The insult to nature is not the least of the squanderers' sins and a sign of their twisted minds. The savage indignation of such a scene taps into the darkness of the finest Irish satire.
Stevie Davies's Into Suez is published by Parthian.
