tl;dr

Ireland has never been this wet.  A fantastic near future noir fairytale.  Genre readers take note.

opening remarks

I’ve been looking forward to The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow by Danny Denton since it was announced sometime last year.  The cover is a bit of an eye-popper.

knee-jerk observations

Yes, I think this will be my cup of tea:

The novel is set in near future Ireland, Dublin in particular, where the rain never stops and the economy is in ruin.  The story centres around the titular Kid in Yellow who was a runner for crime-boss The Earlie King (also titular) until the Kid ran away with the King’s child.  While this event is described in the opening chapter, Denton initially takes us back some months before this moment.

The following excerpt, from the Kid’s perspective, as he goes to meet a girl named T, gives a taste of the prose but also Denton’s waterlogged and crumbling Ireland.

A potted history of how future Ireland became the drugs capital of the world, run by crime-bosses rather than Governments:

It transpires that the Kid in Yellow fell in love with The Earlie King’s daughter.  They texted, met in secret and at some point, through the magic of the birds and the bees, T became pregnant.  Sadly she died during childbirth.  The Kid, however, promised T he would look after their daughter.  It’s a promise he means to keep even if he has to steal the newborn from under The Earlie King’s prodigious beard.

Denton’s dystopia has a colloquial language, a mix of the old-fashioned – “mayhap” – the portmanteau – “TeleVisio”, “newsheet” – and a clutch of invented words that, on reflection, might just be Gaelic.  The language sets the tone, soggy, corrupted and dangerous.

Structurally, the novel verges on the experimental.  For the most part, we see this drenched world through the eyes of the Kid and the reporter who attempts to track the Kid down (later, we will get the perspective of a police officer dragged into this affair, possibly the only clean cop in all or Ireland).  Every so often there are excerpts from a play set in a local pub around the time of the main events of the novel.  And if that isn’t playful enough, in amongst this there are interludes which feature what seems to be an anthropomorphic representation of violence, his name, predictably, Mister Violence.  Here he is opining about his favourite subject:

There’s a number of references to an intercom that broadcasts 24/7 across the city.  When the rains first began, the intercom was designed to provide the populace with news and information.  Now it’s a constant reminder of a broken world:

Mutant sheep!

The Kid in Yellow travels to Dingle – hometown of mutant sheep – to visit a small statue of the Virgin Mary.  Apparently, in a sudden shaft of sunlight, the Statue spoke to two young girls and declared that the rain would stop.  Like so many other Marian apparitions reported throughout history, thousands have made the pilgrimage to hear the Virgin Mary’s message. When the Kid visits the Statue, his daughter in tow, he believes he can see the Virgin Mary breathe.  Rather than be awed he gives the Statue both barrels:

One thing I find profoundly moving is how the novel gradually becomes a story about a father’s bond with his baby daughter.

The Gist Of It

The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow is likely to be compared to The Drowned World.  Similarly, the novel’s manufactured language will remind critics of A Clockwork Orange or Riddley Walker.  Although I haven’t read Ballard, Burgess or Hoban, they were the books that immediately came to mind because of how they’ve become stand-ins for novels about apocalyptic drowned places (Ballard) and dystopias that have developed a new language – whether invented or a mix or neologisms and portmanteaus (Burgess and Hoban).  Comparisons to these ur-texts shouldn’t undermine the fact that The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow always felt like its own thing.  A noir fairytale with a mythic quality that pits the powerful against the powerless, that’s as much a tragic love-story as it is a touching tale about a teenage father and his new-born daughter.  It’s a story that doesn’t require a dystopian, decline of world setting but would feel less substantial without it.

Denton’s Ireland, with its constant rain and its eroding infrastructure and its frazzled technology, is brilliantly evoked.  His characters – not just the Kid but the reporter and the police officer, the latter of whom plays a more significant role as the novel progresses – are flawed products of their broken city, and yet, in their way, willing to struggle against the King and his Earlie boys.  And then there’s the language and structure of the novel – which includes snippets of a play featuring a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern double act, another literary homage – which establishes Denton’s unique voice, one that might borrow from here and there, but still feels fresh and distinctive.

Although released by a literary publisher this is a novel that deserves genre recognition.