Book Review: ‘Prestige Drama,’ by Seamas O’Reilly

PRESTIGE DRAMA, by Séamas O’Reilly

In recent years, a vibrant stream of writing has emerged from Northern Ireland concerning not just the Troubles, but also the lives of those who have come of age in its wake. Novels such as Louise Kennedy’s “Trespasses” (2022) and Michael Magee’s “Close to Home” (2023) have been greeted with much critical acclaim and commercial success. “Trespasses” has already been adapted for TV, and a mini-series based on “Close to Home” began filming this year.

Now comes the novel “Prestige Drama,” a boisterous and affectionate, if sometimes thin and too-easy, sendup of this flourishing era of post-Troubles Northern Irish writing. The book, by the journalist, memoirist and Derry native Séamas O’Reilly, begins with a disappearance. An American actress named Monica Logue, who arrived in Derry to research her role in the upcoming TV show “Dead City,” has gone missing.

This mystery has understandably discombobulated the show’s creator, Diarmuid Walsh, though he is less concerned for the welfare of his leading lady than for the fate of “Dead City,” a series set during the Troubles and “inspired” by the decades-old killing of a Catholic teenager by British soldiers. A Derry-born drinker and failed novelist, Walsh sees “Dead City” as his final shot at success and belated revenge against those local residents who, over the years, have mocked his literary pretensions.

Despite Monica’s disappearance, the production continues unabated; each chapter is a first-person monologue from a person connected in some way to “Dead City.” We meet the murdered boy’s aged, still-grieving mother; his childhood friend; a former I.R.A. Provo eager to pitch his services as a production consultant; and an ambitious Gen Z actor too young to remember 9/11, never mind the Troubles.

What unites the characters is an acute awareness of the past’s vulnerability to revisionist simplification, of the temptation for even well-intentioned storytellers (and Walsh is certainly not that) to take all the jagged complexities and contradictions of history and sand them down until they fit into the templates and tropes of a given medium — in this case the glossy aesthetics of “prestige” TV.

As one character puts it: “Every film I ever seen about any place or any war was probably filled with stuff the people from there would hate, things they couldn’t stand, and is this what we’re making for ourselves?”

Though there are scenes that touch on the darkest matter of the Troubles, the prevailing mode is comic, breezy. “Prestige Drama” is designed to make you laugh, a book of voices that’s at its best when showcasing the Derry residents’ lovingly scornful turns of phrase: “One look at that fella and you’d know he couldn’t crumple a paper bag with both hands.”

The book’s form can occasionally leave “Prestige Drama” feeling rudderless. O’Reilly relegates the missing-actress story line to the back burner, and this lack of an active plot, coupled with the one-and-done monologue format — besides Walsh, who appears regularly — means the chapters take on a certain structural sameness: a potted personal history interwoven with reflections on the larger legacy of the Troubles, as well as any qualms (or lack thereof) concerning “Dead City.”

Still, the novel has charm and punch enough to carry it through, and a steely determination not to take the seriousness of it all too seriously: men with guns, dead children and missing women. It’s only the nightmare of history. It’s only TV.

PRESTIGE DRAMA | By Séamas O’Reilly | Cardinal | 173 pp. | $28