Panenka

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As Panenka isn’t out until next May, I am going to keep this brief, cryptic and spoiler-free, but I couldn’t resist sharing some initial thoughts on this wonderful book. He never expected Leonard and Hungry Paul to be published and so he’s very loyal to his independent UK publishers at Bluemoose Books. It was lovely, and I enjoyed the point he was making about how cathartic it can be, but after the rawness of the first half of the book it felt slightly too perfect to be realistic, and therefore lacked some of the emotional payoff I think he was going for.

Among the events he’s doing as part of One Dublin One Book is a live interview with Leagues O’Toole at which he will also perform music for the first time since 2014. As Rónán Hession’s books reflect life, thus the problems these protagonists go through are not entirely solved but like Leonard and Hungry Paul, these characters learn to deal with them. He is not a bad man, but he is far from perfect, and his complexities and struggles ring absolutely true. Panenka is an exceptionally written story of society and how, as a people, our behaviour can have a permanent impact on the lives of others. Not only that, but I felt as though not enough time was dedicated to the relationships, particularly the one between Panenka and Esther, who appeared to mean a lot to each other but didn’t really have a lot of on-page interaction to justify this.He points to a rich legacy of civil servants who wrote, people like Egyptian Nobel prize winner Naguib Mahfouz and Flann O’Brien and Thomas Kinsella. There was a lot of pressure on my mother to keep everything together, and her whole group of friends were a great support to the family,” he says. We are given little insights into their situation, their feelings, their true selves that shine a spotlight on even the most minor characters.

The move is known for only being used by confident penalty takers who dare to risk missing the kick. I think our mentality at times is trying to fix the things in our life to allow us to move on to try and say, well, how can you move on if they’re not fixable? Together, they find resonance in each other's experiences and learn new ways to let love into their broken lives.The dialogue is often more like soliloquy, especially towards the end (“Chapter 28: Proverbs”), as the characters begin to break the fourth wall. The aim of the technique is not to chip the ball over the goalkeeper, but to take advantage of the fact that many goalkeepers will dive to either side of the goal in anticipation, rather than waiting to see in which direction the ball is going. And the writing is eminently quotable – some of my favourite similies included: “His usual fluency on subjects of all kinds was contracting into a narrow cycle of repetitive thoughts as he attempted to solve the problem of that cursed season by going over and over his strategy obsessively, as though trying to find the one blown bulb in a string of Christmas lights. In the 2019 A-League Grand Final Perth Glory player Brendon Santalab, who had scored multiple Panenka penalties previously in his career, played his last game as a professional. His father, a postal worker, died when Hession was seven leaving his mother, a hospital cleaner, with eight children to raise.