In his third short-story collection, Blindboy Boatclub – one half of Ireland’s self-styled “dole-queue dadaists”, the comedy hip-hop duo the Rubberbandits – blends the ordinary and the bizarre, the hilarious and the desperate. The tone is set in the first story, The Donkey: “There’s a donkey selling Christmas trees off the roundabout. Looking like a prick in the frost with a green elf’s hat on its head.” The beast is weeping blood from the cruel abuse it is suffering at the hands of a child, and in a nearby nursing home the head of the narrator’s father is rotting, “full of dirty knots that threw terrors at him”.
Powered by immense, perverse energy out of the Limerick idiom, the collection generates a singular music that is memorable, unsettling and humane. Moments of beauty dazzle amid the profanity, as pathos and comedy are braided together.
