Scala Radio Book Club: Brouhaha by Ardal O’Hanlon
The razor-sharp, violent and darkly comic second novel from actor, comedian and writer Ardal O’Hanlon
Last updated 17th Aug 2022
On Thursday 26th May 2022, Mark Forrest invited comedian, actor and author Ardal O’Hanlon into the Scala Radio Book Club to discuss his brand-new novel Brouhaha.
The second novel from the popular comedian and Father Ted star is a hard-edge black comedy of buried secrets and deadly rumours, as a suicide in an Irish border town rekindles the memory of a long-vanished girl.
Dove Connolly is dead. That's not good for anyone in Tullyanna, never mind Dove. Now his best friend Sharkey is home asking awkward questions about Dove's death, about the strange graphic novel he left behind, and, most of all, about Sandra. Sandra Mohan. Missing now for over a decade, whereabouts unknown. This, however, is a town dead-set on keeping its secrets. And Sharkey is already drawing attention from all the wrong quarters...
A mystery, a black comedy, and a satire on Ireland's tangled politics of memory, Brouhaha is set in a small town on the Irish border during the uneasy transition to peace. And peace doesn't come easy in these parts.
Over the past few days, Kevin, no flies on him, had sensed a tension in the town thanks to Dove Connolly's poor decision to blow his own head off. It wasn't just the act of self-harm itself, the pointless splattering of blood and bone and brain all over his bedroom wall, that was the issue, unsettling as that was. In so doing, poor Dove had spread panic amongst the townspeople, raising all sorts of ugly questions, reviving all sorts of rumours, and inviting all sorts of unwelcome attention upon them. In Kevin's mind, there was a method to Dove's madness. Showing a shocking assertiveness for possibly the first time in his life, and the last, says you, Dove blew the lid off the whole town.
Mark began the interview asking Ardal about the fictional town of Tullyana.
‘Tullyanna is a beautiful little town with a great sense of community neighbourliness,’ said Ardal. ‘The people there can't do enough for you. But scratch the surface of this fictional town, in the same way as you'd scratch the surface of any town, anywhere. And you will find violent undercurrents, you will find shocking poverty, and you will find bad blood between families going back generations. I think as a writer, that's what attracts me to this kind of story, this contradiction between the veneer of civilization and the violence that lurks beneath.’
Mark asked, ‘How would you describe the attitude of people who live in Tullyanna towards law enforcement?’
‘Well, I suppose most people are very law-abiding. But I think in Ireland, generally, there's a slight distrust for the law generally. I think that's given its long history of being a colony. So, you have that wariness which I think has always been there. There's a real thing about snitching in Ireland. That is an absolute taboo in Ireland to this day. The worst thing you could be called is a squealer. I think after the Peace Process in Ireland, you would have had in the interest of the peace, everyone collectively turned a blind eye to some of the outrages of the past because they felt that it would be counterproductive to pursue a lot of those cases. So there are a lot of families out there who never got justice and never got the truth. So that's just a fact of the Peace Process. It's particularly terrible for the families involved. But, in the wider interest of preserving this hard-won peace, people are prepared to turn a blind eye at the very highest levels. So, I suppose that's a theme that runs through the book as well.’
Mark asked, ‘Your first novel The Talk of the Town was released in 1998. It was really well received, but it is quite a long time ago. Why this massive time gap before we got to read your second novel?’
‘Well, I'm just not very prolific, I suppose! I had success with that first novel, and I didn't quite know how to follow it up. About seven or eight years ago, I came across this idea. I knew I wanted to write something using some of the tropes of crime fiction. I came across this character, who’s the sort of bumbling detective who spends a lot of time in his own head. I had him early on and I kind of knew who he was. So, I felt I felt I was in a good place.’
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