Review: Declan Toohey’s Perpetual Comedown
Perpetual Comedown by Declan Toohey. New Island Books, 2023. €15.95, 247 pages.
“Maynooth is a college mainly for culchies, for mature students and layabouts, for Greater Dublin Area teens who aren’t smart enough for Trinity.”
Don’t hit send on the hate-mail just yet, and try to forgive me the clickbait. Toohey’s main character is just as pretentious and pontifical as he seems, but the sharp satire of this stunning debut gives an authentic voice to university life in Ireland, mocking though it may be: “And why didn’t I go to Trinity? A most perspicacious question.”
Bizarre, bleak, and as blackly comic as I’ve come across, Maynooth alumnus Declan Toohey’s first novel tracks the mental breakdown of an English student as he strives for just one unique academic thought. A whole new interpretation of dark academia, the novel follows Darren Walton’s entire academic journey, from an elaborate conspiracy first discovered in the (fictitious, according to my latest inspection!) basement of our very own Iontas Building as an undergrad to new dimensions accessed through Trinity College’s Ussher Library as a doctoral student.
Toohey’s own biographical details align very closely with Darren’s and, though we might assume that the main character’s obsession with Camland, an alternate Ireland with its own history and culture, is his own, this lends his writing a particular veracity that I feel will appeal to students. Maynooth students, in particular, will see their own experiences reflected in detailed descriptions of the 115 bus (and its unreliable nature), as well as Iontas’s “inhospitable seminar rooms” “whose plastic swivel rests made one feel imprisoned, and on which to take legible notes was a task fit for Job”. The underground cabal may resonate less, although I won’t be surprised to see an influx of gourds on campus when this book gains popularity.
The language of the novel is one of its great triumphs. Darren’s distinctive (and oh-so pretentious) voice is a huge part of the fun, mixing archaic “heretofore”s with colloquial “Your Man”s, resulting in delicious phrases like “a most impudent bummer”. While this (first-person narrated) prose can sometimes feel over-worked and annoying, it becomes clear quite quickly that Toohey is satirising the Trinity Wanker-ism that’s so prevalent in student life. From his denigration of the fake-tanned (“gourd-faces”) to his belief that his writing is a “masterpiece”, Darren is pompous (almost) beyond belief, and his chain-smoking and alcoholism make him a near caricature of the burned-out academic. That said, he also pokes fun at himself, and the rest of us in the process: “I was doing a lot of ruminating, I told him, on masculinity, femininity, androgyny, capitalism. How couldn’t I? I was a first-year English major”.
The novel levels criticism at the institute of academia too, not just us poor students. On several occasions, Darren notes the lack of female creatives on his professors’ shelves, and the lack of dimension these same professors offer women in their writing. That Darren’s big idea is a third narrative dimension, that “there is always more than one narrative”, can hardly be coincidence. In the face of his theory’s impotence, he critiques academia’s “social powerlessness” and inability to enact tangible change.
Another element that may appeal to university students is the novel’s depiction of sex. Despite his off-putting personality and general eccentricities, Darren is having lots of it, and with all types of people. Sex is treated casually in the novel; equally, his queerness isn’t central and doesn’t seem to cause him strife (trust me, he has much bigger issues), but materializes in small ways, such as his pondering while being “fucked … over a leatherette massage table” if bathhouse systems of cruising could ever work for “cishets”, and his description of Camland as “Ireland in drag”.
The novel is full of gorgeous descriptions (“the nicotine is manna to my fulsome lungs; they wheeze in thanks with each crisp inhalation”) and hilarious phrases (“wedged between the ass-cheeks of the past”), but it does fall down for me slightly in its wooden spoon-isms— phrases such as “I likes me tay” left me a bit cold. Try as I might to attribute them to Darren’s offbeat narration, the grammatically incorrect “tá tuirseach an domhain orm” made me feel this was an authorial overcompensation. Still, maybe we can blame that one on Camland’s alternate language.
The novel is also structurally interesting: much of it is dedicated to Darren’s writing and reading of his own history, interspersed with glimpses of the present. Add to the mix a Joycean, ten-page, unbroken monologue, a film script, and a final chapter that appears after the acknowledgements, and there’s no getting away from the novel’s experimental nature.
While Perpetual Comedown is trippy and surrealist the whole way through, and we might never figure out the truth of the story (there is always more than one narrative!), it’s the novel’s emotional core that gives it resonance. Introduced on the very first page - “a savage emptiness stalks me” - the human element, the desire to be loved and to make people proud, is what stays with you.
