"The thrill of it all" by Joseph O'Connor

An audio book.

It's in the form of an autobiography - so long in writing that Robbie, the author, changed during the duration of its creation. There are extracts from interviews etc. The various PoVs don't always agree. He has a daughter, Molly, who was writing blogs in 2012. His sister died at 7.The narrator was born in Dublin, raised in Luton. At poly he met Fran, a bi (gay?) Vietnamese raised in Sheffield. Together they busked. They created "Ships in the night".

At college Trez, a very pretty Irish girl, befriends him – a prize-winning celloist and violinist. His parents are impressed by her. When she’s around, his father Jimmy offers cups with saucers (the saucers are ashtrays else when) and puts on both bars of the fire. They need a drummer – “The seas without its tides would be a puddle”. Her brother Shaun is a drummer. The 3 boys move to London in 1983 while Trez finishes her degree.

300 demo tapes got them nothing. They did college gigs, touring in a car with a horse-box. When they ran out of colleges, they did pubs. In 1984 they did a John Peel recording. Then they were invited to Top of the Pops (lives were organised around the Thursday event). The legend was that they pulled out because they insisted on playing live, but actually Tres turned up too late. The UK became difficult for them. Tres started a Masters in New York. The rest of the band went over and squatted, busking. They were discovered and went on a college tour. They suddenly hit the big time. Neil Young criticised his guitar playing. They visited Patti Smith at her house.

The band fell apart. He ended up as an EFL teacher living in a London houseboat with a daughter doing a degree at Princeton. Tres ended up a Professor. After decades, Tres wants him to do a gig. Rich, litigious Fran wants him to pull out, offering him £10,000 (Fran later writes him an apology, saying that Rob saved him from suicide).

Rob wants to bottle out of the gig at the last moment. He thinks he’s doing to gig for Tres, but she’s doing it for him. He’s always found it difficult to accept love. Bob Geldoff introduces him by name. His daughter plays guitar to help him. The gig’s on the same night as the London Olympic opening. Fran is performing there. He has Rob’s name on his T-shirt.

Fran ends up with a house in South Vietnam, inviting Rob there.

Jimmy's words are fun. So are the lists of pop group names and private jargon -

• "Puking like a fruit machine"
• The drug supplier asked "one-way or return?"
• "The Irish are good at making exceptions."
• Bring their new songs to the studio “like kids showing a starfish they’d found”
• Stayed in little B+Bs, “landladies’ bras on washing lines”
• ”he looked like the bearded man in The Joy of Sex”
• The squat had no door. Instead, there was a US flag with a cigarette burn at the centre of each star
• ”out-doing each other in camp to assert their masculinity”
• ”music without silence is like sex without tongues”
• The disappointment the audience feels when the band says “here’s some of our new material”
• Not a memory, a “snowglobe he didn’t want to shake”
• ”sky as blue as in the opening sequence of ‘The Simpsons’”
• ”trying to get my thoughts to alight on the same tree”
• ”fat parps of trombone”
• A big, luxury car – “a car you go to in your holidays”

Other reviews

• Neil Spencer (As usual with bands, the early years of struggle are the most arresting. ... O'Connor has clearly learned much from the career of his famous sister, Sinéad ... The novel's third act – the aftermath of success and, in Robbie's case, decline and fall – confirms that this is less a tale of pop dissolution than of family. Most bands function as dysfunctional families after all. While the major part of the book casts Robbie as chronicler to the charismatic, druggy Fran – Nick Carraway to the singer's Gatsby – the finale turns the spotlight on his own quest for the rock'n'roll grail. Though for Robbie that comes in the shape of a 1955 Fender Stratocaster, the real grail remains, as ever, love and redemption.
• Toby Litt (the role of scene-stealer goes to Robbie's other big love, Trez, the gorgeous, classically trained string-player who drags Robbie and Fran out of 1980s Luton to London, Manhattan and a 90‑city world tour. The first three-quarters of the novel chart a rise and fall that manages to be fresh and unpredictable while hitting all the necessary highs. But it is the final part – the fade-out – that breaks your heart. ... The Thrill of It All turns out to be the story of an atrociously self-knowing man who didn't know himself at all – because he hadn't a clue what he meant to other people. )

"Where have you been?" by Joseph O'Connor (Vintage, 2013)

In "Two Little Clouds" 2 schoolmates meet years later in a pub. The twist is unexpected and worthwhile - the main character's been told a fib. "Orchard Street, Dawn" is set in New York, 1869. An immigrant Irish family's baby dies. We see how the community provide support, learning about the parents' past and future. In "Boyhood's Fire" we're in London, 1988. It's the day of the England-Ireland football match, but the main character has to go to an Wedding reception (Irish wife and flown-in relatives; English husband). Old arguments return. The Ireland team's managed by Jack Charlton, an Englishman. Tempers fray - the main character's in a state because of something his sister told him, but a trick's been played on him. "Death of a civil servant" charts the fall of a now childless husband whose wife leaves him without warning and who's preparing his suicide. "October-Coloured Weather" features a married woman with maybe 10 months to live. Alone in Dublin she goes to a hotel room with a chatty widower she meets, spending a probably sexless night with him. He's kind, so is the waiter, and kindness matters now. "Figure in a Photograph" is the weakest of the stories so far - a husband who wanted children now has them. In "The Wexford Girl" a son recounts his friendship with his father, his mother's sudden departure and death, then his father's death. He died laughing, having joked himself out of awkward situations. It might be my favourite story in the book.

The concluding novella "Where have you been" shuffles some by now familiar ideas - the main character, Cian (Irish), had a breakdown after his divorce (he'd wanted children, but had none). He spends time with his ailing father. He meets an English women, Catherine, who often visits Eire for her work (it emerges that she was a self-harmer and still visits a therapist). There's long, drawn out dialogue. The whole thing saunters along. The final section jumps a few years. Cian delivers a requiem for his father. We get the inevitable history lesson and discover that through Catherine he met an Irish divorce with whom he has a family.

There are several fathers trying to have a closer relationship to a son, or v.v.. Dublin is booming, the Irish are returning. The dialogue's good (so Irish that it sounds stage-Irish at times - "I will not indeed. I've no voice on me these days. Don't be mocking the afflicted" p.71), with Irish history feeding the flames. There's humour, with passages like "His glasses are of a kind promoted by opticians as suitable for parents of toddlers. Designed by geniuses in a wind tunnel, advertised by astronauts, they are guaranteed unbendable. The Swiper in the Diaper whips them from Sean Hyland's face, does something fast and deft with her clever little hands and tosses them triumphantly on the footpath. They look like an ampersand. Sean Hyland's daughter has a future in origami. Or vandalising car aerials" (p.171). Overall I was underwhelmed.

There's a typo on p.91 - "people only it in for the buck".

Other reviews

• Chris Power (Guardian) ("The Wexford Girl", the one really excellent story here)
• Catherine Taylor (Telegraph) (Nostalgia is effective when not laced with sentimentality; “The Wexford Girl” is a fine, stripped-down example of loneliness. However the collection ends with an overblown “novella” deploying O’Connor’s familiar prototype of male depressive and failed affair, and a preaching, ponderous coda. It is this sonorous earnestness which dogs the writing. )
• Lucy Scholes (Independent) (Individually these stories are quietly unassuming gems; together, a powerful ode to modern Ireland)
• Brian Maye (Irish Times) (There are stories here about broken marriages and the tender love of sons for fathers (familiar themes in O’Connor’s writings). That love is most movingly and impressively expressed in The Wexford Girl (probably the finest story in the collection) but dissipated somewhat in the final, overlong part of the novella that gives the book its title. O’Connor has a wonderful ear for dialogue )
• Philip Womack (New Humanist) (This collection is beautiful; full of pure, simple truths that linger long in the mind. All around O’Connor’s characters, things change – but humanity, in its loves and losses, stays the same)
• Kim Evans (The story which most memorably stands out is Orchard Street, Dawn ... This is a perceptive and moving collection of stories, although most of them are better described as flashes of emotion and moments in time rather than a strong narrative, with the exception of the novella at the end.)