‘This book should just be named Times’
My sister’s review of Naoise Dolan’s debut novel. And certainly, it is not a book for those who prefer the twists, turns, and suspense of a thriller. But it very much is the book for readers who revel in the slow burn of relationship building and character development.
Exciting Times takes place in Hong Kong around 2015, when 22 year-old Ava leaves Ireland to take a job as a TEFL teacher and find her own way in the world. This is a novel of many layers. Written in a Woolf-esque internal monologue from Ava’s perspective, we are met with an inner conflict that struggles to reconcile her disapproval of capitalism and a hyper-sensitivity to class structures, with her choice to move in with Julian, a privately educated, rich banker, and allow him to pay for everything.
We also meet Edith, a Hong Kong national who attended Oxford University and is now a wealthy lawyer. Edith, also known as May Ling to some, struggles with her identity, as much in terms of her ethnicity, as her sexuality, and a career choice which was made in order to please her parents. A decision she acknowledges ‘is stupid, because the things [they] value aren’t the things I value.’
I feel I would have understood this book a lot better if my knowledge of Irish culture and social history was deeper. A lot of the way that Ava perceives the world comes from her upbringing and a lot of the cultural nuance and observation was, therefore, lost on me as a reader.
What I did absolutely love, however, was Ava’s tendency to play with, and pick apart language. Understanding the irony of teaching her Hong Kong students ‘standard’ English when no one in Britain speaks that way and her brilliant grammatical observations about Irish English:
‘Dublin had its own take on the perfect aspect. I didn’t know what to call it, but when you were ‘after’ doing something, it meant you’d just done it but didn’t expect the hearer to know. ‘I’ve just fallen in love’: we thought it might happen and it has. ‘I’m after falling in love’: look, I didn’t think there was a heart in this piece-of-shit chest compartment either, but here we are.’
She often applies these sharply intelligent observations to her own situation:
‘Julian and his friends were ‘after’ things meaning they sought them. They were after bonuses, after clients, always eating the dust of what they wanted. ‘After’ never meant looking back on what they’d done. My sympathies were limited, given who they were, but I thought it might explain why they weren’t happy people.’
Dolan has been described as ‘the next Sally Rooney’, but aside from their shared connection to Ireland, there is little similarity between Rooney’s novels and Exciting Times. In Rooney’s writing, the connections between people are real and deep and meaningful. You get a real sense of how deeply her characters’ feel.
In Dolan’s book, however, we are presented with a very one-sided perspective of a relationship completely devoid of romance. And even when Ava does seem to find real connection, the entire relationship is relayed in terms of Ava’s feelings and involvement. In fact, she rarely seems to consider how other people might feel at all.
It is perhaps representative of each person’s experience of the world that Ava only sees people in terms of their relation to herself, but at times it comes across as painfully self-pitying. Her inability to like herself or be kind to herself isolates her and destroys anything good she might encounter. Even more frustrating yet, she seems incredibly aware of this tendency to self-hate and how it impacts on her life, but wilfully chooses to ignore it or act in any different way. This was, of course, at times a little difficult to read, but the frustration evoked in her readers only serves to further highlight Dolan’s skill as a writer.
This novel is a brilliant debut from Dolan. It says a lot without anything much happening (much to my sister’s dismay) and her witty, if a little overly-cynical, observations are razor sharp. As I read, I started folding the corner of any page that contained a sentence I wanted to revisit. At the end, the pages were completely concertinaed, like a sort of origami art piece.
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