17 Carnations, The Art of Creative Thinking and Last Night on Earth

Last Night on Earth

Kevin Maher is an Irish writer, journalist and film critic. Last Night on Earth is his second novel and is based around the story of Jay, an Irish immigrant to London in the 1990s.

Firstly, we are treated to a flash forward to the birth of Jay’s daughter, depicted from the baby’s point of view, the umbilical cord cuts off blood flow to the brain and she is born brain damaged. We are then taken back to Jay’s early days in London, mostly narrated to his mother.

Our hero seems to fall on his feet and after a short period labouring, he is chosen to be in a documentary about immigrant labour in the capital. Jay’s knowledge of movies impresses the TV crew and he is signed up to make a film review program called Screen Grab.

The text cuts forward to the future, when Jay’s Irish-American partner Shauna has left him for her Danish shrink. We are introduced to a demented Irish thuggette called “The Clappers” who catches up with Jay in London and claims to have killed the Danish shrink as a favour. These shenanigans necessitate the flight of Jay, his disabled daughter and The Clappers back to Ireland.

The story continually segues backwards to Jay and Shauna’s life together. Meanwhile Jay visits his mother, who does not recognise him, so it appears the respondent of much of this work is unable to read or understand it.

Kevin Maher is an accomplished writer and storyteller, but can’t seem to work out whether he wants to be James Joyce or Kathy Lette. The opening birth scene is straight from the tradition of Irish poetics, but whole stretches of the novel feature London media lives at their most banal and trivial, with only a light dusting of satire. There are too many crap film references, which are likely to lose those without similar tastes.

The text seems to get more disjointed and random during the second half and becomes increasingly difficult to read. Maher isn’t another Roddy Doyle, who entertains and can be instantly forgotten – he has a fine turn of phrase, but little sense of direction. Here he is describing life without love:

Tons of unopened boxes of Cadbury’s Milk Tray, all because the lady realises that love is nothing and that existential horror is everything.

And the comparison of a neighbour’s loud orgasm sounds to a Hezbollah funeral is priceless. But overall, this is too much of a messy mélange of high and lowbrow, where Habermas meets Miami Vice. There is too much blarney, too little action, and the back-and-forth edits are performed too often for no particular reason.

When it comes to the ending, alas, Kathy Lette eventually triumphs over James Joyce. This is a most frustrating book, as Kevin Maher is not without talent and maybe there is something to be found in it if you were Irish abroad in London during the 1990s. Yet compared to a modern Irish classic such as Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane, Last Night on Earth seems very lightweight and disorganised.

Author Kevin Maher
Title Last Night on Earth
Publisher Little Brown
Price £14.99 (Hardback), £13.99 (Papaerback) £7.49 (eBook)
More info Publication web site