Francis M.N. Cleary is confused, but that's nothing new. By way of example, just last week, dressed in pyjamas, he walked out of the nursing home, babbling something about losing a door. Three weeks ago, for most of a day, he said he was sure he was in France, and possibly a Frenchman. He threw an onion at the communal television. Many of the staff at the nursing home can't stand him. Sometimes he's just too much work.I picked this up back in 2011, encouraged by the front cover's description of the author as Ireland's answer to Irvine Welsh. I should not have bothered. It's a miserable book about an English chap who hires a Belfast thug to accompany him to inspect his empire of camgirls in Romania; it all goes horribly wrong. The characters are all grotesques, and there is none of the gruesomely compassionate exploration of the darkness of human character that Irvine Welsh has (at least I think he does; it's years since I read him). You can skip this. If you don't want to, you can get it here.
This was the non-genre fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my shelves, and also the shortest unread book that I acquired in 2011. Next on those piles are One of the 28th, by G.A. Henty, and Cycling in Victorian Ireland, by Brian Griffin.
