The Rooster #22
The Mess We're In....
The Rooster is my fortnightly newsletter which includes regular recommendations for my paid subscribers. Behind the paywall this week.. new Before Midnight! my new favourite TV show, an article that floored me, London festival drama and more…
I received an email from my publishers this week informing me that my second novel The Mess We’re In is part of a special 99p Kindle deal for the month of June. I’m unsure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. It feels like the online equivalent of a bargain bin? My publishers assure me that it is a good thing so I am choosing to believe them. Either way it made me realise that I haven’t spoken about the book on here yet and I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk a little bit about it for those who haven’t read it and might want to.
I wrote The Mess We’re In in my early forties. Book writing is a slippery thing, and I learnt from writing my first book Mother Mother that it’s important for me to keep the form of the book amorphous as it’s being created, to allow it to change shape or rhythm and to allow room for new ideas and strands to arrive in the writing. The only thing I knew for certain was that I wanted to write a story that was set in one place in one linear line of time and I wanted it to be based on things I have seen and situations I have lived through.
The story begins in early June 2001. Labour have just won another general election in a landslide victory. The Nokia 3310 is the phone of choice, downloaded ringtones and Snake playing a must. The Brit pop explosion is long gone, leaving in its vacuum space for garage music to spread out of London and into the charts, and from America, a new spate of garage rock bands to excite music critics, in The Strokes and The White Stripes. Westlife are relentlessly dominating the charts. The Daft Punk Discovery album and Missy Elliot’s Get Ur Freak On have just been released and Basement Jaxx’s Rooty comes at the end of June just in time for Summer. Big TV moments galvanised the nation, Brian Dowling (icon!) captured the hearts of the UK and Ireland on winning Big Brother 2, and that Autumn, Pop Idol launched, starting a new era for pop stars, where they could be plucked from obscurity to sing in front of millions every week. This was a pre-Netflix, pre-streaming world, 14 million people watched Will Young become the first ever winner of Pop Idol. There is a sense of optimism culturally, Y2K fear-mongering dissipated, a new century up and running, until 9/11 happens and nothing feels the same again…..
We meet Orla at the tail end of an all nighter in her friend's student flat. She has big dreams to make beats and produce whole songs from scratch. She also has a herculean capacity for hedonism and a fragile sense of self worth. She moves into a tumbledown house in Kilburn, with her best friend Neema and a rock band called Shiva who are signed to Redstar Records, a thriving indie record label based in Camden. A year of euphoric highs and soul crushing lows lies ahead.
The Mess We’re In covers themes that are hugely familiar to me; leaving Ireland, being Irish abroad, the search for belonging, the music industry, the conflict between music makers and the industry around them, and the healing power of songs.
I took inspiration from a formative time in my own life, when I moved to England from Belfast at the age of twenty one and lived in Farnborough for a year before moving in with my brothers band in London.
The more I wrote the more I kept coming back to Irish-ness. And especially the sense of Irish-ness that exists when you don’t live in Ireland. I am a proud member of the Irish diaspora and this book acts as a sort of love letter to the older Irish who came to London before my generation. Orla acquires a job working in an Irish bar called Fahy’s on the Kilburn High Road. The Fahy’s scenes were a way for me to explore the intergenerational differences within Irish diaspora - the cultural context of people who left in the 1950s and 1960s compared to the start of a new century. How it’s possible to feel Irish but foreign to other Irish people. Orla never really had to think about being Irish before she left Dublin. she just was. Where she left Dublin wanting to put Ireland behind her, the irony is that she has to work with these desperately lonely people who long for Ireland and everything it gave them.
The book is also an exploration of female friendship. An Irish girl and a British Asian girl, both othered in their own ways, coming to the big city to stake their claim. Both coming from culturally stifling backgrounds, and yearning for a sense of freedom and independence, but Neema’s stakes are so much higher and the book explores white privilege in the context of ignorance, how someone like Orla just doesn’t have to think about how Neema has to work so hard to be accepted in systematically racist world. Neema is pulled backwards in every direction where Orla can walk into a ready made community of Irish people abroad and not have to suffer racism because of the colour of her skin.
Despite some chapters being set in Dublin, London prevails in terms of place in this book. There is a sense of parallel between Orla finding her way in the city and becoming more comfortable in her own skin. I didn’t want to end it neatly, but I did want there to be intimations of hope for Orla and lots of juicy question marks in the readers head about where Orla could end up and how her life could turn out.
The book has been out two years now. It still feels alive to me. I don’t cringe when I read it which feels like a big development for me as a writer! I suppose I’m glad I wrote it. It changed my relationship to Ireland and being Irish abroad. So much so that I wrote a whole other essay about that change, entitled My Journey To England which you can read here on Substack.
Here are the Observor and Irish Times reviews of The Mess We’re In if you want to read further.
I recorded the audio book myself - you can listen to it here , and there’s even a Spotify playlist to go along with the reading experience if you so wish.
And don’t forget if you’re a Kindle reader you can get it for 99p for the month of June.
Jesus I need a lie down after all that selling.
I wish you every enjoyment if you do read it and please let me know how you go.
Behind the paywall .. new Before Midnight! my new favourite TV show, an article that floored me, London festival drama and more…