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As the Beast from the East and Storm Emma gripped Ireland in their icy embrace, Danny Denton’s debut novel The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow was appropriate company. ‘Appropriate’ is not, ordinarily, within this book’s remit: it is, by all accounts, a genre-bursting, elemental whirl of fiction. The weather metaphors dominating the novel’s critical reception are not only suggested by its setting – an Ireland in which it never stops raining – but are testament to the scale of Denton’s dystopian vision, and ambitious alternation of narrative modes. The minstrel-esque tone of the first pages – “Roll up! Roll up, for a breakneck blast of the sunken future – a myth-rich song of Ireland past and present” – resurfaces in the words of various narrators, particularly the propulsive force of ‘Mister Violence’.
This is the Kid in Yellow’s story. It follows his expulsion from the King’s havoc-wreaking gang of ‘Earlie Boys’, charting his movements through the drowning city of Dublin. Lying low in the Croke Park Flats and making memory trips down the Financial District with his love T, pressure builds towards the Kid’s taking of the baba from the King. Denton’s world is rigorously re-mapped and imagined in coruscating detail. The novel throws you in at the deep end; names precede knowledge, and language is warped by power, so that ‘early’ is spelled ‘earlie’ and ‘fukk’ elongated. Futuristic prose is laced with contemporary text-speak – ‘Mad ting. Lay off the herbal x’, the Kid re-reads in a conversation with T on his ‘device’. More fascinating still is the interpolation of half-remembered poetry (the Kid is something of a repository for ballads), making this a post-modern reflection on Ireland’s bardic past, an idiosyncratic weaving of myth, history and environmental catastrophe.
The Earlie King doesn’t shy away from the brutality of its vision, but, in arranging ‘bits’ of first person accounts and playscripts, it dances around scenes – assured, sometimes detached, nonetheless tender. Subtitled “a wayward myth: fragments shored against ruins”, it is an astonishing experience to read its design into focus.
