Media coverage of major conflicts tends to focus on large issues like military strategy and political maneuvers but pays less attention to stories of citizens caught up in campaigns they can't control. In the 20th century, the Troubles in Northern Ireland claimed thousands of civilian lives before the Good Friday Agreement. Séamas O'Reilly pays homage to Derry, one of the towns most affected by the Troubles, and imagines the lives of some of its residents in Prestige Drama, a sly novel that ingeniously subverts narrative expectations.
The prestige drama of the title is Dead City, an upcoming U.S. streaming series depicting "a fictitious account of one family's experience in the aftermath of a terrible massacre" in the 1970s. The screenwriter is Derry native Diarmuid Walsh, author of a failed novel and a "disastrously unsuccessful play." The family the show is based on is the Devenneys, whose son, 17-year-old Jamie, was killed one evening when he went out with some friends. To lure viewers, the producers hire Hollywood star Monica Logue, who plays a TV detective and has come to Derry to play the murdered boy's mother. But an unforeseen problem complicates matters: Logue disappears.
Readers might expect this novel to be like Logue's TV show, a procedural centered upon solving a mystery. O'Reilly offers instead something richer: a melancholy portrait of a town still smarting from Troubles-era trauma. Most of the novel focuses on the townspeople affected by Jamie's death. Highlighted by unforgettably visceral writing, O'Reilly's novel is a tribute to people who fought back against terrorist tactics, a prestige drama of far greater consequence than a TV show. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer