The Reading Of The Green - To Die, Laughing

In writing Passion Play, Cónal Creedon has done what several ink monkeys of my acquaintance have been idly threatening to do for years: written a great Irish novel. What it's surprising is that he got around to it at all, really, given that his particular modus operandi is eerily similar to that of your average bar-stool bard.

"Realistically, I think sitting down and writing for eight hours a day five or six days a week is a bit too driven," he muses. "I've got a feeling you're a lot better off thinking and talking about something and then writing in occasional bursts."

Despite this rather sensible form of procrastination, Creedon is given to the occasional burst, and in Passion Play he has delivered a chaotic, character-driven rollercoaster ride that refuses to become bogged down in the mire of tedious aren't-drugs-great trendiness so beloved of contemporary young British and Irish writers.

The central character of the novel is Pluto, a disturbed 33-year-old Leesider with a colourful past and no apparent future. Despite his mother's suicide when he was a toddler, he enjoyed a pleasant enough existence with his father and sister but was reared by the Street, MacSweeney Street and the lads who lived on it. The lads? An array of colourful young bucks glorying in monikers such as Fatfuka, Tragic Ted, Georgie and Pinko.

Years later, Pluto lies alone in his squalid bedsit, deserted by the inhabitants of a past which surrounds him. In despair, he takes his own life and renews acquaintances with the children, cronies, clan and carnal conquests he met in life.

"The whole book is based on the Passion of Jesus, y'know," explains Creedon. "That's why it's called Passion Play. It's Good Friday and there's this guy who's been deserted by all his friends. He's looking around the Garden of Gethsemane and wondering what he's going to do. He believes that sometimes the need to die is stronger than the will to live . . . which is just a cop-out really, when you think of it. Then when he dies he has to go in search of heaven and we witness the chaos which ensues when his soul leaves his body . . . that's what the end section of the book is. It's like someone revisiting their life, assessing what they did and then standing up to themselves."

Creedon himself describes the backdrop to Passion Play as "black, black as a bluebottle's eyeball but with a weave of characters that is as colourful as a baboon's arse. A study of life and death that deals with components such as time, God, Heaven, Hell and the human factor." Despite its undeniably bleak content, it manages to bowl along at a frenetic pace, retaining the good humour for which its author, writer-in-residence at the Everyman Palace Theatre, Cork, is renowned.

"The reality is that I honestly set out to write a very sad story," he reveals. "I mean, it is sad—the main character is a guy who kills himself. He thinks where he lives is hell and when he dies, his soul goes and finds heaven and it transpires that heaven is the same place as hell. It's a very dark book. It opens with his mother killing herself, then we meet his father who has a speech impediment and builds his own coffin and dies. Everyone dies: Fatfuka dies, Georgie dies, Tragic Ted dies . . . that's the nature of life, we all do die. In the book it seems particularly grim because it seems as if they're all dying day after day after day, but that's not the case. But when you go down that road, because it's so pathetically sad, it's bound to be funny. It's like that urge we all have at funerals to laugh. It's sad and it's pathetic, but pathetic is funny."

Despite the fact that his first novel is basking in critical acclaim, Creedon adopts a decidedly bashful demeanour when asked about his future writing plans.

"I've a sort of fear now that people will expect me to start writing books and that's not what I'd be into really," he muses. "I wouldn't want to have 10 titles at the end of my name. I might do another one in the next five to 10 years . . . we'll see. I'll just keep tipping away and when something comes together, it'll come together."

Here's hoping it's sooner rather than later.

Passion Play is published by Poolbeg.