Book Review From Doyle to McCourt, a wild ride

By Dylan Foley

YEATS IS DEAD! A MYSTERY, edited by Joseph O’Connor. With Roddy Doyle, Frank McCourt and Conor McPherson. Alfred A. Knopf. 253 pp. $23.

"Yeats is Dead!" is a novel of the bloody search for an unpublished manuscript by James Joyce. Before the smoke clears, the bodies are stacked high and a gleeful satire of Irish society is splashed all over the walls. Some of Ireland’s best writers have created a raucous tale with delicious twists and turns, leading to an absurd conclusion.

Developed as a fund-raiser for the Irish section of Amnesty International and edited by the novelist Joseph O’Connor, 15 Irish writers — playwrights, novelists, journalists and even a stand-up comic — take turns writing the 15 chapters. The book is a glorious romp through Dublin, where the ghost of Joyce hovers not far above.

Roddy Doyle starts the novel with a blast, immersing the reader in the crime syndicate of Mrs. Bloom, an elderly mob boss who dispenses her murderous orders from a stolen papal throne. Bloom will stop at nothing to get Joyce’s last manuscript. The chapters are like a runaway train, with the reader along for a wild ride. Besides the murderous Garda Sgt. Roberts, the cast include the humorless inspector Andrew Andrews, who beats confessions out of the innocent; Micky McManus, a Dublin rasta who wishes with all his soul that he were black, and Dymphna, a fake nun, gun moll and kiss-o-gram girl. All Dymphna wants is middle-class brick house in Stoneybatter to call her own.

The action in "Yeats is Dead!" is pumped up by the corrupt cops looking for the manuscript, battling it out with the dead man’s son (a toilet deodorant salesman), the fake nun and a rogue Joycean scholar. With the baton passed from writer to writer, the ante keeps getting upped. Gene Kerrigan, Ireland’s most famous investigative journalist, writes a police interrogation scene that will make the reader’s hair stand on end. The playwright Marion Keyes adds a police wife hell bent on revenge that stirs up the pot. O’Connor then steps in himself and ramps up the satire. A government minister turns up dead in someone’s bed of very gross natural causes. Chaos and mirth descends on the characters.

Part of the humor in the book is that the reader can see the curveballs that Ireland’s most famous writers are throwing at each other. Characters are developed, then killed by the next writer, all in a mock noir style. Along the way, Joyce’s priceless manuscript gets thrown in the Dublin dump, partially eaten by rats and stolen twice.

The reader meets the earnest Garda Greer, who only has eyes for the talented inspector Grainne O’Kelly. In the hands of one writer, he is a competent cop, but in the hands of another he is a bumbling fool who is constantly promoted upstairs.

Memoirist Frank McCourt is given the nearly impossible job of carrying the novel to something similar to a conclusion. He does a bang up job, all the while knocking Limerickmen, Joycean scholars and men with peculiar sexual tastes. For the characters of "Yeats is Dead!" crime does pay, but in different amounts to different people.