Merciful Hour by Bernard Share

Merciful Hour Reviews

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  MJ Nicholls

  Having taken me over six years to learn (by chance, in an issue of the RCF on Alan Burns) of this novel’s existence (no reprint, Dalkey?), it is with pleasure I can announce that the follow-up to the slab of comic barm that was Inish is almost as successful. The publisher’s attempt to summarise the “plot” of this anti-plot, anti-structure, anti-conventional novel of madness on the cover flap is almost as amusing as the multi-character antics taking place: various narrators and characters, narrating “on tape” and on the pages of the novel itself, cut across one another in a sort of endless meta-limbo, couched inside a cockamamie tale of a tourist castle scheme(?) and some folks arriving from The Delegation(?): a “plot” sprinkled with copious Irish history references that might explain some of the more esoteric aspects of the novel. Otherwise, let the lunacy, wordplay, excellent dialogue, and overall weirdness entertain, and the impressive if inconsequential levels of narration, chronology, and history leave you in a state of impressed bafflement.