Himself by Jess Kidd review a dark and rollicking debut

Diabolical deeds, ferociously kept secrets, black humour and magical realism abound in Jess Kidd’s richly textured, thronging debut. At its dark heart is the tale of a long-ago murder in a remote coastal village in the west of Ireland, and the young man who, nearly 30 years later, seeks to avenge it.

We are in Mulderrig, County Mayo, in the sweltering late spring of 1976. “A benign little speck of a place ... pretending to be harmless”, it is ripe for disturbance. This takes the form of Mahony, born in 1950 to its most rebellious teenager, Orla Sweeney. Both had vanished 26 years earlier; now Mahony, a petty criminal brought up in a Dublin orphanage, and armed with a letter and photograph that have recently come into his possession, has returned to reclaim his past.

Mahony causes a tremendous stir in the village, with his brooding good looks, unshaven appearance, easy charm and – less palatably to its residents – relentless pursuit of the truth of what happened to his mother. The official story is that Orla, the local good-time girl, who grew up in a filthy hovel at the edge of the forest, left Mulderrig one afternoon in May 1950, and abandoned her child to the “care” of nuns. Yet as the novel opens with Orla’s brutal murder in the forest all those years ago, as witnessed by her infant son, it is evident that most of the village is, if not in cahoots with her killer, at the very least unwilling to uncover the past.

Mahony’s appearance in Mulderrig is not simply an inconvenient incursion for Father Quinn, the village’s crooked priest, who had almost certainly been complicit in the sudden demise of his humane predecessor Father Jim, one of Orla’s few protectors. Nor is it just a thrill for the parish’s attention-starved female inhabitants (and the focus of genuine passion for timid Shauna Burke, in whose father’s house Mahony lodges). It is also the catalyst for the dead, whom only he can see, to rise and swell the population of the village – most poignantly the ghost of six-year-old Ida, who lost her yo-yo in the forest, saw something she wasn’t supposed to see, and was dispatched with a shovel to the back of the head by Orla’s murderer. Teasing, pirouetting Ida is Mahony’s phantom guide; most notable among the living characters is the marvellous creation of Merle Cauley, a balding, foul-mouthed former actor, who claims to have been the muse of JM Synge. With her late fiance, Johnnie, keeping a wistful, ghostly watch over her, Mrs Cauley, together with sidekick Bridget (Emily Brontë crossed with Annie Oakley), becomes Mahony’s champion and his abetter in the quest for justice for Orla.

The legions of murmuring, plaintive deceased are what most command our attention in the novel: appearing first to a desperately lonely seven-year-old Mahony amid the dreary violence of the orphanage, they are “drawn to the confused and the unwritten, the damaged and the fractured, to those with big cracks in their tales, which the dead just yearn to fill”. They have their habits and their affectations: Father Jim is usually to be found on the commode in Mrs Cauley’s bedroom, while Johnnie, elegantly holding a cigarette, always exits stage left. But the one wraith Mahony yearns to see, that of his mother, never manifests itself. These melancholy departed foreshadow the tumult and catastrophe that result when Mahony comes back to Mulderrig.

Kidd has produced a formidable entertainment, if frantically overcrammed with incident, characters, and most confusingly, genres. Himself is both noirish crime thriller and rollicking comedy, the latter aspect providing light relief from the breathtaking violence of the many murders Kidd itemises. (The gruesome fate of a cat and a dog will not be described here.) Orla’s killing is described in lyrical, almost mythical terms: “The man held her. He watched with quiet devotion as each breath became a difficult triumph, flecking his chest with scarlet spume.”

Then there is the book’s supernatural aspect: the eerie, poised alertness of animals, plants and trees, particularly in the forest scenes. This pastoral setting comes complete with a hermit (who may or may not be innocuous) dwelling in the woods, where a palpable malevolent presence broods throughout. As well as the chorus of the dead, we have a “holy spring” that erupts through Father Quinn’s study floor, and a concomitant plague of frogs; a storm of soot enveloping the village; life-changing floods. These cataclysms are perhaps too plentiful and too fantastical for one novel. Kidd has imagination to die for and a real command of plot and character; if she can trim the excess and ration the energy, her next book should be very fine indeed.

Himself is published by Canongate. To order a copy for £10.65 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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