Downturn happy

Armistead Maupin meets Nick Hornby meets Marion Keyes – that’s the best way to describe the hugely enjoyable, page-turning debut novel by Brian Finnegan, well-known media commentator and editor of Ireland’s gay magazine, Gay Community News.

Set in contemporary Dublin, The Forced Redundancy Film Club follows the lives of a group of colleagues who, on getting the heave-ho from their jobs, pledge to re-connect once a month in each other’s homes to watch classic movies together. In a brilliantly structured, multi-narrative plot, the characters grapple with various challenges during the following year, from burgeoning alcoholism, infidelity with a bunny-boiler and the search for a biological mother, to the shock of becoming a stay-at-home mum coping with a behaviour disorder in her youngest child.
Of them all, the novel’s main character – the über-slick, glamorous career-woman Catherine – has the furthest to fall.
“With the boom,” recalls Finnegan, “came the prospect that maybe Irish people, who for many years saw themselves on the back foot in terms of cosmopolitan perfection, could at last now achieve that perfection. So we all saw people like Catherine – there were loads of them. People driving huge 4x4s down the narrow roads of Ranelagh; people to whom designer labels meant a lot; people who had three holidays a year, and the ‘perfect’ life.
“I strip all that away from Catherine, so that she comes to a point where she is just like everyone else, coping with the financial crisis which takes away everything she had – her job, car, house, boyfriend.”
While The Forced Redundancy Film Club couldn’t be defined as ‘chicklit’ – ‘commercial popular fiction’ being a truer description, with plenty of interest for male readers, too – there’s a great love story and an engaging Marian Keyes-like element here. Certainly Finnegan’s female characterisation is top-of-the-range.
“Six of my oldest best friends are women,” says Finnegan. “I spend good quality time with them. We talk about everything. That’s something I’m very proud of. I remember a feminist calling me an ‘honourary woman’. I was delighted. Of course I’m a man. I think I understand women, probably more than someone who doesn’t hang around with women very much does.”
Strangely, it was his novel’s gay character that Finnegan found the most challenging to develop.
“You’d think I’d have the gay character down pat, being a gay character myself,” he chuckles. “I found it difficult to go there, because I had to go into myself. At first I avoided it, because I have issues around ‘visibility’, even though I’m possibly the outest gay person working in the Irish media. I spent a good part of my life hiding who I was. There was fear, and there still is fear. I wouldn’t walk down the street holding hands with my boyfriend. There’s no person who comes of age as a gay person in this world without internalising some of the negative messages that we’re given. So I wanted to talk a little bit about internalised homophobia, and the idea of being afraid to be identified as gay.
“I also wanted to talk about something you maybe don’t hear that much about any more. There’s an idea now of gay people that we’re all out looking for marriage, and we want to be hetero-normative, and we want to be just like everyone else. And that’s true: it’s what I write about and talk about all the time. We want equality and we deserve equality. But I wanted to write about what happens when that equality actually comes along – when your partner asks you to marry him and it becomes a reality for you, but it’s, ‘Oh my god, I can get married… Oh Jesus, I don’t want to get married!’
“Also, the idea that gay men are incredibly happy and having great sex all the time, I wanted to challenge that. Jamie’s not having great sex all the time. In his relationship, there’s virtually no sex. He’s really worried about that, and very frustrated.”
At the start of The Forced Redundancy Film Club, Catherine chooses to turn off the news channel and listen to a nostalgia music channel instead.
“That’s symbolic,” says Finnegan. “Choosing sunshine and lollipops. I’ve chosen in this recession to turn off that wall-to-wall negativity – I call it recession porn – that radio is swallowed up by. I’ve chosen not to be a recession porn addict, and to live and be happy, and face the financial changes in my life. And there have been financial changes, although I’m lucky that I still have my job.
“The characters in this novel go through a lot of difficulty. The ultimate message is that we move forward all the time, and live while we’re doing it. Things don’t stay the same, and that’s good and bad. When change is forced upon us, we deal with it. I like to have an optimistic attitude about things. This is an optimistic book.”
The novel opens with the quote, ‘Remember, no man is a failure who has friends’, from It’s A Wonderful Life, the last film that the characters watch together.
“There’s this idea in Ireland that we’ve failed,” says Finnegan. “That people who lose their jobs have failed, or that if you lose a relationship, you’ve failed, or if you’re a parent and you can’t figure out what’s wrong with your child, you’ve failed.
“A central element to the book is the notion that we haven’t failed. Because despite all the characters’ difficulties, their lives go on. And part of our lives are the times that we spend with our friends, the times that we just have a laugh and connect in to other people. Life is about much more than the top layer of things, which we’re all constantly failing at anyway. Nobody can really achieve the kind of perfection that Catherine has at the beginning of the book. And that perfection is hollow, unless there’s something else behind it – the life that we lead with the people that we love.”