‘The Oh My God Delusion’ by Ross O’Carroll-Kelly

Fiction – paperback; Penguin Ireland; 432 pages; 2010.

Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, the alter-ego of journalist Paul Howard, is Ireland’s best kept secret.

I first discovered him when I attended DublinSwell earlier in the year. Howard was on the bill in the second half, and during his reading from his novel Mr S. and the Secrets of Andorra’s Box, done in the posh voice of Ross, he had the crowd of 2,000 people roaring with laughter, myself included. The next day I promptly went out and bought his latest book, The Oh My God Delusion, the tenth in a series following Ross O’CK, a stuck-up lad from the south side of Dublin, who’s into women, rugby and scrounging off his parents, not necessarily in that order.

But before I even got to read the book, I discovered his weekly column in the Irish Times, and then promptly bought myself a ticket to his stage play, Between Foxrock and a Hard Place, which I saw at The Gaiety Theatre on my trip to Dublin in April. A fan had been made — and I hadn’t even read the novel yet.

Fast forward to last week, and looking for some light relief in between reading Ulysses and Edward St Aubyn’s Mother’s Milk, I extracted The Oh My God Delusion from the pile and settled down for what amounted to one giant giggling fit. Indeed, there are many sequences in this novel which will make me want to laugh out loud when I recall them at a later date (especially the one where Ross draws a moustache on his four-year-old’s face using a semi-permanent black marker, only to be accused of child abuse by agitated onlookers).

The story is essentially a preposterous one, but it couldn’t be more contemporary if it tried. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but Howard paints a pretty realistic picture of Dublin circa 2009: the property bubble has burst, the banks have gone bust, big name brands are going into receivership, people are losing jobs and no one has any money (read credit) to spend.

Even Ross, with his privileged background, is feeling the effects of the recession. Now that his job at the estate agents Hook, Lyon and Sinker no longer exists (the company went belly up, to be replaced by an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet), he helps his mate repossess people’s flatscreen TVs, jacuzzis and the like when they default on the payments.

Then, when his wife’s upmarket fashion boutique looks to be on the brink of financial ruin, he does something radical. He buys an apartment on a ghost estate as a kind of insurance against losing the family home in any bankruptcy proceedings. He is told that the remaining vacant apartments on the Rosa Parks (yes, that Rosa Parks) Estate will be acquired by UCD (University College Dublin) as student dormitories (Ross looks forward to the parties), only to discover that social services are using it to house people on welfare.

Cue many hilarious — and edgy — moments between Ross and his neighbours, Terry and Larry, who turn out to be from another class entirely: they are gun-toting, drug-pushing Dublin gangsters, and Ross’s 12-year-old son, Ro, has taken a shine to them.

There are loads of subsidiary storylines involving characters grappling with the sudden change in Ireland’s economic climate.

Ross’s mother, for instance, is holding out against pressure to accept a revised pay deal for the cookery programme she hosts on RTE — and the scenes in which she presents her show, which has been “dumbed down” to only include ingredients that the average person can afford, are very funny.

I’m in the sack, roysh, watching the latest episode of her show since it was renamed FO’CK on a Budget and it’s possibly the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. She’s showing the camera, like, an ordinary corn on the cob?

‘Now,’ she’s going, ‘when I want to eat sweetcorn — like most people — it simply has to be Fallon & Byrne, with their wonderful, wonderful vegetable range, all fresh, all organic and all locally produced. However, if you’ve ever been made redundant — or you’ve been shamed by the media into accepting an arbitrary cut in your standard of living — a cheaper alternative is now available…’

The next thing, roysh, she puts down the corn on the cob and picks up what looks very much to me like a tin of sweetcorn, except from the way she’s holding it, it might as well be white dog shit.

‘Now, this is what’s known as processed food — and, if certain people in this very building are to be believed, it’s going to be all in for the next few years. Now, if you’re anything like me, you’ll be staring at this rather odd-looking, ribbed-aluminium can, thinking, “But how do I get the food — and I use that word advisedly — out of there?” Well, don’t panic — you do it using one of these…’

I don’t actually believe it. She’s about to show the nation how to use a focking tin opener.

‘As recently as the 1980s,’ she goes, and you can tell she’s struggling to even say the words, ‘you would have found one of these items in most household kitchen drawers, although they became obsolete with the advent of farmers markets and the drive towards fresh, agrichemical-free produce with fewer food miles…’

Part of the reason why the humour in this book works so well is that Ross, his mother, and pretty much the entire cast of characters in it, have no real sense of what it is like to truly suffer. There’s a real disconnect in their reality with the reality of so many others who are really struggling to make ends meet. Ross, for instance, thinks his world is coming to an end when he is told to hand over a much-beloved prize possession — a rugby medal he won when he was 18 — while all around him his contemporaries are downsizing their homes, buying their groceries on credit or getting married on a very tight budget.

And while I suspect some of the humour — the “in” jokes, the rhyming slang, the play on accents — might not translate across the Irish Sea (or the Atlantic), most everyone will understand the satire on the class divide, between the haves and the have nots, between the snobs and, to use a Ross term, the skangers.

The book is a comedy, but, as the saying goes, there’s many a true word spoken in jest.

Finally, my edition comes with some terrific black and white illustrations by Alan Clarke, which are just as funny as the text they accompany. I really love the picture above, showing Ross being “romantically attacked” by a Rottweiler while his gangland neighbours piss themselves laughing.

Oh how I’m looking forward to reading the rest in the series!