Kilbrack — Jamie O'Neill

*Starred Review* Written more than a decade before the widely acclaimed epic At Swim, Two Boys [BKL F 1 02], this exuberant comic fable is both highly amusing and surprisingly moving. O'Leary Montague, a facially scarred amnesiac as the result of a car accident, travels to the Irish village of Kilbrack because it is the setting of his favorite novel, Ill Fares the Land, by Nancy Valentine. The small-town residents prove to be deeply eccentric, with habits ranging from button hoarding to cocaine addiction, so O'Leary, a veritable bundle of nervous tics and obsessions, fits right in. His desire to write a biography of the revered Nancy Valentine leads him to a hapless meeting with reclusive Valentine Brack, a still raffish if aging member of the landed gentry who harbors a terrible secret. O'Neill sends up the rural Irish to a fare-thee-well, devoting paragraph after paragraph to the hidebound villagers' convoluted conversations, so cryptic in tone that they inevitably lead to absurdly comic misunderstandings. While never slackening the antic pace, O'Neill deepens his narrative by making of the shambling, timorous O'Leary a change agent of revolutionary import. Soon enough, his story comes to signify the poignant search for one's history and home. O'Neill can cross genres at will--an epic tragedy here, a black comedy there; his large talent knows no bounds.