Now entering his sixty-seventh year, Chris McCool
can confidently call himself a member of the Happy Club:
he has an attractive and exceedingly accommodating
Croatian girlfriend and has been told he bears more than
a passing resemblance to Roger Moore. As he looks back
on the glory days of his youth, he recalls the swinging
sixties of rural Ireland: a decade in which the cool
cats sang along to Lulu and drove around in Ford
Cortinas, when swinging meant wearing velvet trousers
and shirts with frills, and where Dolores McCausland -
Dolly Mixtures to those who knew her best - danced on
the tops of tables and set the pulses of every man in
small-town Cullymore racing. Chris McCool had it all
back then. He had the moves, he had the car, and he had
Dolly, a woman who purred suggestive songs and tugged
gently at her skin-tight dresses, a Protestant femme
fatale who was glamorous, transgressive and who called
him her very own 'Mr Wonderful'. She was, in short, the
answer to this bastard son of a Catholic farmer's
prayers. Except that there was another Mr Wonderful in
town, a certain Marcus Otoyo - a young Nigerian with
glossy curls and a dazzling devoutness that was all but
irresistible. Although Chris, of course, was interested
in Marcus only because of their shared religious fervour
and mutual appreciation of the finer things. That was
all. Besides, Mr McCool was always a hopeless romantic -
some even described him as excessively so - but is there
anything wrong with that? Spiked with macabre humour and
disquieting revelations, The Holy City is a brilliant,
disturbing and compelling novel from one of Ireland's
most original contemporary writers.
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