A hairy tale from the media jungle

Fiction: According to Stephen Price, the titular Monkey Man of his debut novel is not based on any one individual.

That Price was producer of Today FM's The Last Word radio show through most of its Eamon Dunphy years is neither here nor there. The fact that the publisher, New Island, has chosen to emblazon the words "he isn't just a good host. He's a great one" across the back cover should be ignored.

Price's Monkey Man, Kevin Carver, is a gnarled old punk rocker turned polemical columnist who has reinvented himself as the presenter of Irish TV's most successful chat show. He has a propensity for calling hapless lefties "fuckers" live on air, while fawning over the horserace- loving minister for finance. Possessed of a rat-like cunning and instinct for survival, he is never happier than when ensconced in a seedy late-night dive, surrounded by admirers, with a few lines of coke up his nose and a bottle of champagne in his hand.

Doesn't sound like Pat Kenny to me.

Around this Calibanesque figure whirls the vanity fair of the Dublin media world: gormless sycophants, useless careerists, dumber-than-dumb PR dollies, and, in the background, the real power-brokers and money men, all drily observed by Price's narrator, a young TV producer who has accompanied Carver up the greasy pole of success but now fears his star is about to turn nasty on him.

Like several other recent attempts to portray boom-time Ireland, Monkey Man has echoes of the early 1980s novels of Jay McInerney and Bret Easton Ellis, wherein groovy young Americans ultimately realised that their lives of chemically fuelled excess and conspicuous consumption were somehow unfulfilling in comparison with the love of a good woman. Monkey Man's narrator, Lee Lovecraft, ticks all the required boxes of the sub-genre.

Smart-aleck prose style? Check. Silver sports car? Check. Designer pad? Check. Meaningless casual sex? Check.

It's the weakest element in what is otherwise a terrifically funny, no-holds-barred swipe at the Dublin media's petty pretensions and craven obeisance to the powerful.

Not surprisingly, Price has a real feel for the unspoken dynamics of power within media organisations, but he's also - as his work on The Last Word's Navan Man sketches showed - a natural satirist, not afraid to be as savage as his subject requires.

Best of all is the Monkey Man himself, a monstrous, amoral, egomaniacal bully who bestrides the novel with a sort of terrible, horrible glamour. In Kevin Carver, Price has created one of the most memorably loathsome characters in recent Irish fiction.

Hugh Linehan is editor of The Ticket

Monkey Man By Stephen Price. New Island, 273pp. NPG