A Curious Street by Desmond Hogan

Back in 1987, age 38, I made a beeline to Foyles Bookstore on Charing Cross Road in London. I picked up a few books - The Comfort of Strangers by Ian McEwan, Search Sweet Country by B. Kojo Laing and a third book that I misplaced on the trip back to Philadelphia.

I've been looking for that third book for more than 30 years. I forgot the exact title, although I had a vague recollection 'Street' was part of the title. I also forgot the author's name but had a sense if I saw his name (definitely a male author) I might recognize it.

What I do know is the paperback was published by Picador and the back cover said the novel held much in common with Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf - the main reason I grabbed the book in the first place.

Anyway, just last week I discovered a list of Picador titles from the 70s, 80s & 90s in Nicholas Royle's White Spine, Confessions of a Book Collector. I looked through and spotted a title and author that sounded promising. I did a Google search for the cover of the book. Bingo! I recognized the book cover featuring an Expressionist painting with a figure between red brick row houses.
 

So here it is - A Curious Street by Desmond Hogan, published by Picador in 1985, a novel of passion, a novel that pops back and forth sketching a number of men and women with intensity and literary strokes most powerful. That's it - the best way I can describe this work by Desmond Hogan: novel as a series of Expressionist paintings.

To share a more direct Irish taste, here are four excerpts:

"In a uniform, red handkerchief about his neck, a young Irishman fought and was not heard of.  No postage stamps, exotic like the flowers of Almeria, in his mother's home, no trips to that house, the smell of butter and truant mice there, the redolence of military portraits."

"In Roscommon you thought of all the misbegotten harvest of Ireland, but there was something else there, hope, fulfilment, young men home from England, laughter, perfume of cigarettes, red silk cravats, paper flowers.  Some of these lads would be squashed by walls on building sites; some would die in war.  In Roscommon they'd drunk porter and laughed.  Alan continued on his way, down Annesley Bridge Road."

"The autumn of 1966 was the most normal time of my life.  I met up with Cherine again and we became boyfriend and girlfriend.  I wore a red jacket again, not the teddyboy one of five years before, but a broader, more wholesome one, a mod's one.  My hair was neatly cut.  Two red jackets were a bridge, connecting the green of north-eastern England with the sporadic, famished green of London." 

"Sweat broke from unopened buds above him as he emerged.  Eugene had changed, less lustre in his hair, in his freckles - they'd taken part of his brain, the sound of a train, the splash of neon - the path was laid out for him, miles of suburban, mountain-side houses but he was still determined to resist that course, whatever further effort that might cost."

Irish author Desmond Hogan, born 1950