It is a game we all play. How might our lives have turned out if we had made different choices? What if we had acted on impulse? Trusted our emotions instead of running scared? Would things have worked out if we had stayed with that first lover instead of settling for the partner we did?
There can be no answers for there are too many variables, but in those moments of existential questioning it is hard to resist the fantasy of a parallel life. This is the territory of Eugene O’Brien’s Heaven, set on the weekend of a spirited wedding in Edenderry in the Irish midlands when, unbeknown to each other, a fiftysomething couple find themselves reckoning with a romanticised past and an uninspiring present.
