The Thrill of It All

Joseph O'Connor

I've just finished reading Joseph O'Connor's The Thrill Of It All.  I first came across O'Connor's books when I read Cowboys and Indians about twenty years ago.  I had just moved to London from the more glamorous Hull, via Birmingham, and although I had neither Eddie’s (the hero’s) swagger nor the Mohican, I loved the tale of a punk finding his way, skint in the city.  Fast forward 22 years and I was mooching around in Waterstones opposite Exeter Cathedral and came across his new book.  I had loved The Star of The Sea (a brilliant tale set aboard a famine ship, making the journey from Ireland to New York in 1847) so I grabbed the book and I devoured it in two days.  It is a wonderful heartbreaking book about music, friendship and family.  

The story follows the formation of a band called The Ships in the Night (see what he did there) and the relationship between two close friends from different sides of the planet geographically and in all other ways (Irish Robbie and Vietnamese Fran) and a brother and sister rhythm section to die for.  The typical mode for the tale (see The Commitments, Once) is for heroic failure to be celebrated amidst fart gags and much acoustic troubadour-ing.  Here the scale is writ much larger: from Luton to Dublin to New York, from backstreet bars 'open mike' to headlining the Glastonbury Festival.  From sleeping in crap vans to flying on private planes.  Success and failure is found not heroically and humbly, but hugely and devastatingly.  The characters are drawn like old friends you will have loved, lost and clung onto over the years and the two-thirds-in kick in the teeth for Robbie and the reader is a masterstroke.  Since finishing the book I keep hearing The Ships on the radio, and on Spotify, and in old records I have not heard for years.  Someone will surely make a film or a musical of the book and however well or badly it is made, with characters drawn like this, it will be massive. 

Post-script/..17th January: I found myself in a pub last night eulogising about the book to a group of old University friends, including an Irish friend (from Hong Kong) who used to play in a raggle-taggle band.  There is a new Dublin band called Cloud Castle Lake who have a falsetto singer and an extraordinary sound (think Radiohead meets the Tijuana Brass).  For me, they have Fran on vocals.  A taster, below.  Happy New Year.