‘Inishowen’ by Joseph O’Connor

Fiction – Kindle edition; Vintage; 482 pages; 2011.

I couldn’t have picked a more appropriately seasonal book to entertain me over the Christmas break than Inishowen, an early career novel by Irish writer Joseph O’Connor.

Set between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve 1994, this hugely immersive story is about a dysfunctional American family from Manhattan and a recently divorced Irish policeman working in Dublin whose worlds collide unexpectedly.

It deals with some dark issues — including terminal cancer, parental bereavement and infidelity — but presents them in a fast-paced, page-turning package with oodles of compassion and a healthy dose of laugh-out-loud comic moments. (The one-liners are brilliant — and once you spot them, you keep finding them, on almost every page.)

Trio of characters

The story, told entirely in the third-person, focuses on three main characters: Ellen Donnelly, a 46-year-old American woman trying to track down her Irish birth mother; Ellen’s unfaithful husband, the cosmetic surgeon Dr Milton Amery; and Garda Inspector Martin Aitken who has never quite gotten over the hit-and-run death of his son six years earlier.

This trio of disparate characters are drawn together when Ellen walks out on her family and flies to Dublin. On Christmas Eve she collapses in the street, where she is “rescued” by Inspector Aitken, who takes an interest in her case.

The pair eventually go on a road trip to Inishowen, where Ellen believes her birth mother resides, and it’s during this journey, which is filled with drama and high jinks, that their friendship morphs into something sexual.

Meanwhile, Dr Amery is at his wit’s end in Manhattan, wondering whether his wife is ever going to come home. She’s often walked out on the family before but always returns in a night or two. This time the stakes are much higher because Ellen has pancreatic cancer and has less than a year left to live but is yet to tell her two teenage children.

Despite this, Amery uses his wife’s ongoing absence to continue sleeping with the much younger woman he’s been involved with for the past two years.

All these multiple narrative threads come together in the end, but this novel is less about the destination and more about the journey each character makes to get to Inishowen, a peninsula in the north of County Donegal. It is best described as an enjoyable romp, which includes moments of tension, high drama, fun and frivolity.

Reliance on stereotypes

But O’Connor does roll out some old tropes. There’s the melancholic troubled cop who self-medicates to get by, the teenage mother who had to give up her child for adoption under duress, and the serial philanderer who thinks only of his own sexual urges despite claiming to love his wife. Yet each of his characters is well-drawn, with interesting backstories and distinctive personalities.

O’Connor also conveys the Irish political situation of the time — several years before the Good Friday Agreement — with delicacy and aplomb.

Unfortunately, the last few chapters of the book slide into farce, when Ellen’s former boyfriend, Dick Spiggott, enters the fray. His over-the-top (loud, American) antics aren’t in keeping with the overall tone of the book.

But on the whole, this is a fun read full of witty dialogue, some great set pieces, and terrifically believable, if somewhat damaged, characters.

Inishowen was first published in 2000. I’ve previously read O’Connor’s Star of the Sea (2003), Ghost Light (2010), The Thrill of it All (2014), Shadowplay (2019) and My Father’s House (2023) and have a couple more of his earlier novels in my TBR.