Sad Bastard by Hugo Hamilton Secker & Warburg 193pp, £9.99 in UK
Emerald Underground by Michael Collins Phoenix House 234pp, £15.99/£9.99 in UK
Whether by angry young men or otherwise, a society's comfort should be continually disturbed by having its official mores challenged, its underbelly probed. When it is programmatic or indiscriminate, however, or when it is just a display of street cred, iconoclasm can itself become complacency.
With Sad Bastard, Hugo Hamilton continues the very self-conscious examination of crime and a host of other Irish social ills he began in Headbanger (1996). Sequel does not depend for resonance on prequel here, since Hamilton has basically written the same flawed novel twice. Garda Pat Coyne, the misanthropic "Dublin Dirty Harry" who earlier headbanged his city's criminal underworld, is currently on leave, but still "playing the role of civil conscience". The new plot is rudimentary, loosely revolving round the activities of a smuggler of Romanian refugees, and is incidental to a didactic intent.
Coyne is more a template than a character, designed to repeat complaints against, well, pretty much everything in Irish culture.
Surrounded by phrases such as "the old Ireland", "the new Ireland", "contemporary Ireland", he is a contrived anachronism, a "walking paradox" who reviles the singing of The Fields of Athenry while simultaneously indulging his nostalgia: "Every change in his country, every sign of progress was an assault on his persona."
The main area of attack is consumerism and this leads to some new ethnic stereotyping: "What evolutionary platform had the Irish arrived at now, Coyne thought. Their identity was what they purchased." Hamilton's indignation is arguably justified, but it is uncontrolled and frequently approaches the nonsensically cynical ("the Irish would basically eat anything as long as it was dead and came with french fries") and the cliched ("Maybe Ireland was not a real place at all but a country that existed only in the imagination"). Hamilton's own fictionalised milieu is certainly unreal: brief references to Connemara, hurling, Irish dancing, the Irish language, appear only as essentialising ciphers, and his "new" country is often just a matter of plopping in sound bites from pop culture ("In the background, George Michael was screaming Freedom!").
Before Headbanger, Hamilton wrote three less forcedly topical novels set outside of Ireland. If he wants to return to form while maintaining his current state-of-the-nation project he should calm down a little and aim to make his view of Ireland more panoramic and his irreverence more stylistically cohesive.
Compared to the world of Michael Collins, the fetid details of Hamilton's low-lifers appear fairly harmless, and even Bukowski - an ostensible influence on Emerald Under- ground - reads like a Ladybird book. Collins specialises is squalor and viciousness and his narrator here, eighteen-year-old Liam, spends a saison en enfer as an illegal immigrant in America. Temporarily languishing in a seedy New York motel, he undergoes a metaphorical metamorphosis via a rash: "My new skin had a hard roughness, more scar than skin, the armour of prehistoric survival."
After a period selling his "clean piss" to methadone-seeking addicts, and a stint in an abattoir, he sets off, in an on-the-road excerpt, for Pennsylvania with Angel, a sixteen-year-old prostitute, and her pimp Sandy. They settle in a trailer park and the best part of the story ensues with Liam's training sequences as he dreams of gaining an athletics scholarship.
Though the climactic scene, where he wins a five-mile race, is somewhat mawkish, there is a general gutsiness throughout to Collins's dealings with such inflictions as pornography, ghettoisation, drug addiction. While this partly autobiographical novel is the best attempt yet in Irish fiction to deal with the sub-species of Irish illegals in the Eighties, Emerald Underground is considerably damaged by the aggressive hipness of the sordidness, by the imprecations being heightened to such a degree that they become histrionic, unreal, and quickly inure the reader. When the word "shite" is so frequently used as it is here, some of it might be better left under the carpet.