Come Back, Paddy Riley

by Carol Birch

Anita's mother was the mermaid in the Belle Vue Fair Freak Show. Into their lives came Paddy Riley, a young Irish lad whose motto was 'the only crime in life is not to take up a good opportunity'. The opportunity was Anita's mother - hungry for love and romance. Their secret is safe until young Anita, their go-between, spins a jealous lie that tragically catches them all. Now grown with children of her own, Anita has found a kind of peace with a sweet husband, and the past is past. Until that is, a man not unlike Paddy Riley comes to their town. It's an 'opportunity' that Anita cannot, for the life of her, seem to resist.

Genres: Fiction

408 pages, Hardcover

First published May 21, 2000

About the author

Carol Birch is the author of eleven previous novels, including Turn Again Home, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and Jamrach’s Menagerie, which was a Man Booker Prize finalist and long-listed for the Orange Prize for Fiction and the London Book Award.

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliantly written. An uncomfortable read

[Veronica · Rating 1 out of 5]

I almost gave up two thirds of the way through this book because I was getting so fed up and annoyed with Anita and Michael. Anita is both a disturbed and a disturbing character, making the book uncomfortable to read pretty much all of the time. Yes, you can sympathise with the young Anita, who is well-drawn, but after all we are not prisoners of our upbringing; the adult Anita chooses to do what she does with a remarkable lack of perception given her childhood experiences and their consequences. It seems clear that she is lacking some vital component of adulthood, with her selfish and cruel treatment of others, especially Michael, and her lack of empathy for their feelings.

The parallel with her mother's behaviour was a bit too obvious and symmetrical, I thought. And the gradual decline of the dog, his death coinciding with the end of the relationship, was heavy-handed too. On the plus side, Carol Birch does convey the raw emotion and desire to hurt others in retaliation very well, and has you wincing in some scenes, especially towards the end as the slow-motion car crash reaches its predictable conclusion. But it's not an uplifting book, and I didn't feel I learned anything from it either.

[Cathy · Rating 1 out of 5]

I found the early part of the book promising: the chaotic, underclass lifestyle had a bizarre richness to it. I kind of liked some of the almost stream-of-consciousness confusion of the childhood experience. Then Anita seems to have found happiness - which is famously dull to others.

To fall for Michael was to repeat a pattern, too obviously. One really odd thing to me was that she has the pathetic example of her mother, now verbally repeating stories in old age, to remind her that nothing beautiful came of her mother's affair. I could perhaps have credited that Anita's creativity might drive her to find beauty and attraction in Michael; but that creativity was a 'thread' not a driving force in her life.

The child's experience was richly lived, but the adult's seems banal. There was some powerful writing I thought towards the end - the aftermath of the affair. But the two parts of the book didn't add up.

I think I'd have liked a bolder book. I felt this started in a slightly risky, edgy way but dwindled. And left me feeling annoyed with Anita. I had some sympathy for all the men in the book, so stupidly let down by the women.