Come Back, Paddy Riley Book

Carol Birch's sixth novel, Come Back, Paddy Riley is a strange hybrid. It is both a sentimental and nostalgic romance, dulled by a tendency to cliché and gossipy exchanges, and a powerful and clever psychological study of adultery between vivid and convincing characters. Anita grew up in a poor area of Manchester, which overlooked Belle Vue, the local fairground where her mother played a mermaid in the freakshow. The mother had the sassiness and mobile good looks of an Irish beauty, fell for a young man called Paddy Riley and used Anita as a go-between to deliver his love letters. Anita has now cosily married into the middle class and finds herself attracted to a solemn, gorgeous boy in the supermarket who reminds her of Paddy and the tragedy that befell him. The melancholic tone evokes James Joyce's The Dead and the young lover who haunts it. The story runs smoothly and compellingly between Anita's lust for Michael, the boy's father and her teenage desire for Paddy, when "a soft, scared feeling shot through her like the Red Sea parting straight up her middle". Birch has a sharp, easy use of language, especially when she details Anita's desire. Anita may be overwhelmingly mumsy but she becomes saucy, direct and textured in her "dark" pursuit of forbidden fruit, inveigling her way into Michael's life despite seeing him as another messed-up loser. He senses her cruel ambivalence and resists admirably. As suppressed desire and guilt mount, so does the significance of Paddy Riley. When the novel reaches a tortured and sublime climax, Birch's mawkish lapses are forgiven and her control of the heroine's nasty and complex emotions is paramount. --Cherry SmythRead More