Media coverage of major conflicts tends to focus on large issues like military strategy and political maneuvers but pays less attention to stories of citizens caught up in campaigns they can't control. In the 20th century, the Troubles in Northern Ireland claimed thousands of civilian lives before the Good Friday Agreement, signed in 1998. Séamas O'Reilly (Did Ye Hear Mammy Died?) pays homage to Derry, one of the towns most affected by the Troubles, and imagines the lives of some of its residents in Prestige Drama, a sly novel that ingeniously subverts narrative expectations.
The prestige drama of the title is Dead City, an upcoming U.S. streaming series depicting "a fictitious account of one family's experience in the aftermath of a terrible massacre" in the 1970s. The screenwriter is Derry native Diarmuid Walsh, author of a failed novel and a "disastrously unsuccessful play," whose lack of success as a writer in London brought delight to jealous Derry townsfolk. The family the show is based on is the Devenneys, whose son, 17-year-old Jamie, was killed one evening when he went out with some friends. To lure viewers, the producers hire Hollywood star Monica Logue, who plays a TV detective, "one of those improbably beautiful but respectfully dowdified homicide cops," but now wants to be seen as a serious actress and has come to Derry to play the murdered boy's mother. But an unforeseen problem complicates matters: Logue disappears.
Readers might expect this novel to be like Logue's TV show, a procedural centered upon solving a mystery. O'Reilly offers instead something richer: a melancholy portrait of a town still smarting from Troubles-era trauma. Most of the novel focuses on the townspeople affected by Jamie's death. They include Ann-Marie, Jamie's mother, "the great sad case of the town"; Jonny, one of the pals with Jamie the night he died; and Bogle, who once served time in a maximum-security prison and who agrees to talk with Diarmuid to share "some of the real stories, a splash of living colour." Highlighted by unforgettably visceral writing--cops in the 1970s beat Jamie's father so severely that "his glasses were wedged in his face, melded to his cheek, bone-deep"--O'Reilly's novel is a tribute to people who fought back against terrorist tactics, a prestige drama of far greater consequence than a TV show. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer
Shelf Talker: Prestige Drama, a novel by Séamas O'Reilly, tells the stories of Derry, Northern Ireland, residents and a Hollywood actress who comes to town to shoot a series based on a tragedy during the Troubles.