Brouhaha

Product Information

Back in town, he finds Dove left him a graphic novel he wrote and illustrated, and while initially he is puzzled and disinterested, he begins to realise that the book, about the adventures of a hero named Brouhaha is actually Dove’s way of leaving him clues to what he discovered (as also chastising him for his own actions). Unfortunately, I did find that the storyline, although interesting and well written, was a bit too slow going for me and I did struggle with the pace of the story. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. I was therefore over the moon when I started reading and I could actually hear him talking to me in his Irish tang, nuanced language and witty descriptions of real mundane issues in life.

But Dove has left a graphic novel – derivative it seems of Pat Mills Sláine – that with all its casual misogyny might have secret clues as to the crime. The way our three unlikely crusaders join together to finally lay Sandra's ghost to rest is also satisfyingly heart-warming - despite the full-on ration of violence and gritty action that forms the majority of the storyline. Maybe together they can break through the web of lies that has built up around Sandra's disappearance and finally get to the truth? Sharkey is not really sure why he is here, but a strange message he recently received from the broken and drug-addicted Dove about Sandra gives him the feeling that the time has come to confront what really happened to her.Then there is a former garda officer, Kevin, a grandfather, the victim of a non-fatal shooting and a man obsessed with what happened to Sandra as well.

It shows what an acute eye for detail the author has and an inane ability to read the human character, developed from years of putting together great stand-up routines. Interesting characters though and felt like a book written by a "real" author, and not just a celebrity cross over. The female characters seem aggressively overwritten, and the comedic passages are shadowed by the violence. The only novel by a comedian that I remember as being something other than a cash-in was Steve Martin’s The Pleasure Of My Company, a weird, surrealism-inflected novel about a man who has finally won the “Most Average American” competition. The political intrigue, which also abounds through book is handled deftly considering the minefield it was back during the tenuous early days following the Good Friday agreement.

It won’t win the Nobel or the Booker, but it ought to have a fair run at the Bollinger Wodehouse prize.

The secondary characters are fully-padded and all have a role to play (even if I did sometimes mix them up because they had nicknames as well as their given names). There is an interesting and varied cast of characters, all with favourable and negative characteristics - so more believable. I felt the story spent too long setting the scene and I was getting bored but stuck with it and the last third of the book raced to the rather obvious conclusion.Like a traveller who enjoys the journey as much as reaching their destination, I was in no hurry to reach the end and unravel the central mystery, content to savour each word, each sentence, each paragraph and each chapter of this captivating book. This is a crime novel with twists, with the latter pertaining not just to “who did it” but to the genre itself - part humorous, part Irish history around the times of “The Troubles” and part true literary endeavour.