The Pleasant Light of Day

If the title of Philip Ó Ceallaigh's first book didn't make you grab it off the shelf, the reviews should have. Notes from a Turkish Whorehouse was variously described as ‘a truly superb book’ (Dermot Bolger) and ‘the most impressive debut by an Irish writer for some time’ (Irish Independent). Anne Enright enthused, ‘Philip Ó Ceallaigh gives us not just a new voice, but a whole new literary space’.

This space is brutal, rough and, in some places, just plain nasty, but as readers we sometimes need to be shaken from our somnolence and Ó Ceallaigh has proved that he is the man to do it. Try this extract from ‘In the Neighbourhood’, a montage of miserable lives eked out in an unnamed crumbling east European city: ‘Bless us, Father. For there is not enough space between us, we have gripes, an itchy ring, hard winters, short tempers, rough toilet paper, bad language, fuzzy tongues, monthly bills, damp walls, hairy ears, burst pipes and the water is inexorably rising.’

It’s not the most hopeful of images, neither is it the only one: there's also random violence, grim sex and failed relationships. Yet some of the book is extremely funny, and the last story, ‘The Retreat from Moscow’, ends on a surprisingly tender moment.

Ó Ceallaigh’s second collection, The Pleasant Light of Day, is a somewhat gentler affair. ‘Uprooted’ is a sort of Irish version of ‘In the Neighbourhood’, weaving together the disparate lives of people drawn to one small coastal town, but the tone is elegiac rather than despairingly bitter. Even a story about lawlessness and Chechen rebels in Georgia ends ‘After a few months I met a girl. We wanted to be happy together and we succeeded for a while.’

In fact, I would go as a far as to say that a downright playful tone has infiltrated some of Ó Ceallaigh’s stories. This is most obviously true of his hilarious parody of Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist (he even calls the story ‘The Alchemist’ and his protagonist Pablo Conejo) – it’s all about Destiny and the Power of Love – but it is also evident in the tale of a man who persuades a woman to have sex with him after demonstrating his levitation skills.

This is not to say that Ó Ceallaigh has lost his darker side entirely (thank goodness). There are further catastrophic relationship failures and a very weird story about US government-controlled operatives who live ordinary suburban lives while on the lookout for terrorists in the community. This more overtly political element to his writing is also apparent in the aforementioned story about the Chechens and in a moving tale about war crimes against the Jews.

Perhaps the most complex story in the collection is ‘Tombstone Blues’, a meditation on the teachings of St Antony (‘for if we too live as though dying daily, we shall not sin’). The narrator travels into the Sahara to spend a week at a monastery, where he hopes to find peace in order to write ‘a work that would make the teachings of Antony, and the philosophy of asceticism generally, intelligible to the modern world’).

On his last day, two things happen: he discovers a bottle of Bushmills whiskey in his room and ends up spending a night drinking and having protracted sex with an American woman who has come to stay at the monastery and who, it turns out, has a brain tumour. Meditation is shockingly juxtaposed with carnality and mortality to prove the frailty of St Antony’s dictum in the modern world.