Hell is other people, as is daily confirmed to us, but it’s also the title of the episode of Father Ted in which Graham Norton makes his first appearance as Father Noel Furlong. Here, Ted and Dougal’s doomed holiday is made infinitely worse by the appearance of Norton as a garrulous priest leading a youth club outing and determined to make the best of a cramped caravan in poor weather with a rousing sing-song. Furlong popped up twice more, in an episode in which a plane-load of priests face oblivion, and in another that sees him trapped – once again with his youth group – in a maze of caves.
If many comedies home in on a character’s idiosyncrasies, magnify them to the point of absurdity and then repeat the trick over and over again, Father Ted was primus inter pares; if not, why do we all still roar “drink, feck, arse” to indicate over-excitement? With Father Furlong, the trait was obvious – impossibly bouncy talkativeness, a Tigger in holy orders – but the setting was also key; always claustrophobic, always teetering on the verge of disaster, always asking the question, what else would you do but sing?
It’s a dilemma that the inhabitants of Duneen, a small town in County Cork that plays host to Norton’s first novel, have largely been unable to answer; instead, most of them seem to have found other ways to sublimate their desperation. For PJ Collins, the local policeman, it’s in mountains of rashers and pork chops and scones; for unhappily married Brid Riordan, it’s white wine, furtively swigged from the family fridge or from those miniature bottles customarily served in Irish pubs; for beautiful Evelyn Ross, thrice marked by her mother’s death, father’s suicide and love object’s desertion, it’s keeping a perfect house for her two elder sisters.
Naturally, this stasis cannot hold in fiction as it might in life, and the discovery of human bones during redevelopment works heralds seismic repercussions for the local population. It’s only marginal figures – the town busybody, the “skinny Polish girl” who works in the local shop – whose lives proceed in a relatively unruffled fashion. PJ, whose beat requires little in the way of crack policing, is suddenly thrust into the middle of a thrilling cold case and – it stretches the imagination a bit, but is sweetly done – also finds his determination never to risk romantic failure challenged, albeit by the two chief murder suspects. Elsewhere, the staples of rural intrigue and police procedural abound: the infuriating know-it-all copper from the big city, the slowly unravelled mysteries of previous decades, the adjunct storylines that prove to be red herrings.
It would be unfair to try to draw parallels between Norton’s television persona as a chatshow and Eurovision host and his writerly characteristics; even celebrities whose fame appears to rest on a distilled essence of self, or at least the illusion of it, are allowed to diversify. And a search for surface similarity wouldn’t get you very far, either, for there is little here that is caustic, or humorously prurient, or designed to mimic outraged propriety with a knowing nod to camera. Indeed, I’m not sure anyone reading this book under plain covers would be likely to guess its author.
And yet there is an interesting tension in the book that can sometimes be found in Norton’s performance work – a sense of the melancholy underlying the bravura display, the gestures towards concealed isolation. Familiar conceits – the handsome local last seen boarding a bus out of the countryside, the faithless husband who can’t bear to yield his claim on his wife’s farm – are neatly deployed. This is hardly to claim that his amiable suspense novel-cum-romance shares much ground with William Trevor or Edna O’Brien in its exposition of the contours of Irish life; Norton is good with character but, aside from the odd description of a grey Georgian house or a semi-deserted pub, doesn’t do much to evoke the textures and minutiae of everyday life. (Tellingly, he is somewhat better at this in the novel’s occasional flashback scenes, and particularly in a well-drawn evocation of teenagers attending a disastrous local concert.) Contemporary Ireland makes an appearance via the property boom, but you won’t learn much about, for example, the Repeal the 8th campaign or Ireland’s continuing membership of EU and consequent rush on passports. More surprisingly – and perhaps in an attempt to avoid Oirishry – he steers clear of rendering Irish speech beyond a few “sures” and “lads”.
Nonetheless, Holding is a solidly written piece of popular fiction that isn’t quite as sparkly as it should be but has enough in the way of action and charm to keep the reader interested. At its close, Norton appears to leave the door open for further dispatches, although not necessarily from exactly the same location; perhaps, like Father Furlong, he is simply too restless to sit still for long.
Holding is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20). Click here to buy it for £16.40
