Michiko Kakutaniコミュの（42）UTTERLY MONKEY

January 6, 2006

'Utterly Monkey'
A Debut Novel Serves Up an Irish Stew in London
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI

UTTERLY MONKEY
By Nick Laird
344 pages. Harper Perennial. $13.95.



Question: what do you get if you combine the TV series "The Office" and the Guy Ritchie movie "Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels" with a Nick Hornby novel and the Kingsley Amis classic, "Lucky Jim"?
Answer: you get the Irish writer Nick Laird's first novel, "Utterly Monkey."
Part caper movie, part coming-of-age story, part urban satire, "Monkey" introduces a writer with a wonderfully original and limber voice - a writer who seems able to jump genres as easily as he shifts narrative gears.
Though Mr. Laird began his literary career as a poet - his critically acclaimed collection "To a Fault" picked up several prestigious prizes in Britain last year - his prose has none of the self-consciousness or preciousness sometimes displayed by poets-turned-novelists. Instead, Mr. Laird - who is married to the novelist Zadie Smith - uses his radar-sharp eye for detail and ear for how regular people talk to give us an ebullient cast of characters, rendered with an idiosyncratic mixture of sympathy and wry humor. He also gives us a visceral sense of the two worlds these people inhabit: the dreary small town in Northern Ireland, still haunted by the Troubles, where Mr. Laird's hero, Danny Williams, grew up; and London, the cacophonous big city that Danny moves to in hopes of reinventing his life.
When we first meet Danny, he is working as a lawyer at a fancy, upscale firm - a job not dissimilar to the one that Mr. Laird once held, before he quit to write full time. Indeed, Mr. Laird uses his inside knowledge of this world to create a hilarious sendup of office life, from the masters-of-the-universe boasts of the partners to the sheepish, self-promoting strategies of the drones; from the high-stress, testosterone-fueled meetings to the lonely late-nights spent doing research and writing briefs.
Danny, who has a hard time concealing his feelings, hates his job. He hates the monotonous hamster-wheel routine. He hates his pompous, patronizing boss. He hates the poisonous office politics. Most of all, he hates being a lawyer who has to work on closing deals he hates - like one that would result in the acquisition and downsizing of a company and put thousands of people in Northern Ireland out of work.
Danny spaces out during meetings, signs e-mail messages with a fake name and fantasizes about vandalizing his boss's desktop toys.
On the other hand, Danny reasons, his job is a lucrative one that's enabled him to get a nice apartment in London - the sort of job his parents always expected him to get in "another institution in a long line of places where you got told what to do, and did it." He has a good friend at work - Albert, a die-hard hypochondriac who likes being a lawyer because "it allowed him to dress like Cary Grant" - and he has a crush on a beautiful young woman named Ellen who is an office trainee.
As things happen in this sort of novel (or movie), something abruptly comes along to disrupt Danny's depressing but placid routine: an old friend from home, Geordie, literally turns up on Danny's doorstop and announces that he needs a place to stay. Geordie reminds Danny of a traumatic incident from their childhood that Danny has spent years trying to forget, and in the next five days, he will effectively turn Danny's life upside down.
Geordie, who had stayed behind in Ballyglass after Danny left for university, is on the run from a violent thug named Budgie. Budgie's sister Janice is Geordie's girlfriend, and she has given Geordie £50,000 that she's stolen from Budgie.
In an effort to escape Budgie's wrath, Geordie takes a boat to England, where he makes friends with another thug, named Ian, who, unbeknownst to him, happens to work with Budgie. Ian will trail Geordie to Danny's place, and in looking to reclaim Budgie's money will drag both Geordie and Danny into a bombing plot against the Bank of England.
None of this is remotely plausible, of course, but Mr. Laird pulls it off with a wink and a nod and lots of high-spirited body English. He takes a slew of overused conventions - a car chase through the crowded streets of London, a hidden stash of cash, a madman shambling, Lucky Jim-ish personality and his almost unerring ability to say or do the wrong thing.
Along the way, Mr. Laird also gives us a memorable and kinetic portrait of London as a city of dreamers and immigrants, people on the run or on the way up - a city that's "a huge centripetal machine dragging bodies towards it from across the world" and subsuming the "song of one small existence" in the giant and deafening "hum of its engine."

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/books/06book.html?ex=1143954000&en=7e62287a0ad164fa&ei=5070