WORDS: Alicia Byrne Keane

The Thing About December, written prior to Ryan’s Man Booker Longlisted novel, The Spinning Heart, is an unusually striking debut. Ryan chronicles a year in the life of Johnsey Cunliffe, the 24-year-old son of rural Irish landowners at the greed-driven height of the Celtic Tiger. Johnsey is a sheltered young man, largely reliant on his family and terrorised by childhood enemies. However, his role in the community is soon to change. Having lost his father to cancer, his mother’s sudden death leaves Johnsey in sole possession of his family’s farmland. Amidst the development frenzy of Ireland’s boom years, a scramble begins for Johnsey’s land, and the protagonist finds himself at the heart of a warring community.

Events in this book are far from uplifting yet Ryan’s writing style is eccentrically colloquial and, at times, plain hilarious. The author captures the rhythm of Tipperary speech down to its most colourful idioms; his storytelling style brings an honest, humorous perspective to delicate issues of grief and loneliness. Imaginary dialogue with the dead, misheard words, and bizarre daydreams all feature in Ryan’s prose, and even the most harrowing scenes are told with a frank humour. As a protagonist, Johnsey is a compassionately rendered take on the “unreliable narrator”. Despite often having an imperfect understanding of events, his earnest outlook allows him to make unusually apt observations: “People could be quare hard work . . . If this was the alternative to loneliness, he’d sooner be lonesome forever.”

Much like Mark Haddon’s narrator in The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night Time, Johnsey’s disconnection from the social interactions around him leaves us to rely largely on implication. We become fascinated with what goes unsaid. We must infer the motives of Johnsey’s companions, and it is indeed often difficult to tell friends from foes. Our confusion mirrors that of the protagonist, capturing the atmosphere of an individualistic society in which trust is a shaky concept.For this reason, many of Ryan’s characters are difficult to gauge. It is at first unclear whether Mumbly Dave is a witty charmer, or a misfit desperate for friendship. Siobhán appears, by turns, affectionate and condescending, and the motives behind her apparent fondness for Johnsey are left unexplained. Ryan presents these characters without judgment, maintaining ambiguity throughout.

Cultural context is given by way of subtle allusion, without ever seeming pointed. Johnsey suffers under the burden of ancestral legacy. Descended from civil war heroes, he asks himself: “Why couldn’t he have been born with a full quota of manliness?” The materialistic preoccupations of modern Ireland are implied in a poignant childhood flashback, showing the efforts of Johnsey’s mother to buy him a designer jumper in the hope of making him less susceptible to bullying. Ryan eschews clunky sermons on the state of contemporary Ireland, in order to document the nation’s effect on an individual level.

This novel captures the damaging influence of a society no longer sure of its ideals — without looking like it means to. To label The Thing About December as a social commentary is to saddle it with weighty political pretensions. In reality, Ryan’s premise is simpler: reflecting the Celtic Tiger Ireland through the eyes of the innocent everyman. While it avoids gloomy condemnations, The Thing About December offers considerable food for thought on the years that precipitated Ireland’s collapse.