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There, Ollie worked as a day laborer on building sites, joining a shadowy underworld of foreign workers, crooked bosses, violence, and drugs. This in spite of his best efforts to stay out of trouble:
I don't like hearing talk of governments. Politics makes me dizzy. They're cat. If you're paranoid about government then the psyche is unsettled. You're not well. Next thing is you're standing in Saint Columba's in your pyjamas talking to some bollacks about the phallus and chewing something to bring you down.But this is an Irish novel, of course, its rough, lyric vernacular haunted by the ghosts of Beckett and Joyce, and Ollie's great tragedy is that politics find him whether he likes it or not. The strains of the traditional song "Cunla" torment him along with the voices of his dead, and the "reels and jigs" that echo through his head have names like "Rifles from High Buildings," "Protection Rackets," "Come Back Me Auld Mate," and "Is the Place Being Watched?" If the book has a fault, it's that its first half simply slips away; we're drawn into Ollie's London story, and the trip we took to get there seems in retrospect like an extended narrative tease. But in trying to make the two halves fit together, you might well pay this mad and beautifully terrifying novel the highest praise of all: that is, to read the last page, and immediately turn to the beginning and start again. --Mary Park
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