A Wake for the Living

The Wake by Colm Herron

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Brasil is the largest Catholic country in the world. Like other Catholic countries, we celebrate our dead by throwing a wake for them, where family and loved ones gather - usually around an open casket - to spend the night in contemplation of this life and what lies beyond. Wakes for us - as for the Irish Catholic, our cousins across the pond - are a chance for neighbours to socialise, gossip and pick over the life of the recently deceased. In my town, there are people who won't miss a wake for the world, even if the deceased is somebody they didn't know.

In the case of Maud Abilene Harrigan, not much loved but recently deceased in Derry, Northern Ireland, there's a severe lack of anyone interested in holding her wake. When Jeremiah Coffey's mother decides to wake her in order to show up the neighbours, the stage is set for a list of characters to cross his path during a long night, including the ex-girlfriend, Aisling, who left him for another woman.

Colm Herron brilliantly sets the Coffey home like a stage, where the town's drunks, priests and do-gooders rub shoulders and share gossip. There's something in this of Mike Leigh's theatrical humour. The dialogue is sharp and witty. When Jeremiah has an incident with his clothes and locks himself in the bathroom, I was reminded of Leigh's "Abigail's Party", with its painfully awkward characters who create a comedy of manners and satire on the society that houses them.

Herron's black humour leaves no stone unturned. One second Jeremiah is blasting the church, the next he's turned his bitterness on lesbians. Does Maud stand for Northern Ireland? The dead "body of politics" on the kitchen table that the Irish stand over, squabbling and arguing about? Is Maud, the neighbour nobody wanted to have, a symbol for Catholics and Protestants? The second half of the book is about Jeremiah trying to get back his ex-girlfriend, entering her world of queer rights and street protests. The threat of violence looms over each hill, with Catholics marching perilously close to Protestants. Maud's wake is perhaps a foreshadow of the conflict in this divided society, but as readers all we can hope is that Jeremiah finds some love with Aisling and manages to carve some sort of happiness.