Ian Cochrane happily ridiculed the shibboleths of Northern Ireland when that was rare

Résumé détaillé

Reckless Laughter traces the late Antrim-born author’s journey to literary London. Lauded by everyone from Seamus Heaney to Patrick McCabe, he is a missing link in contemporary Irish literature

I never met Ian Cochrane. In fact, despite growing up in the same part of the world as him, and being keenly interested in writers and writing from an early age, I had never even heard of Ian Cochrane until after his death in 2004.

It was in September that year that my father happened to show me a recent clipping from The Guardian – an obituary of Cochrane by his friend and fellow Northern Irish novelist Maurice Leitch. My father explained that he and Cochrane had once been neighbours at Ard-na-Maine, a little housing estate in the village of Cullybackey, Co Antrim. Both had spent their teenage years there, the development having been completed in the mid-1950s, enabling rural folk to relocate from substandard living conditions in the rundown cottages of the surrounding countryside.

Leitch’s tribute piece, brief though it was, offered a fascinating glimpse into the life story of an author somehow emerging from the humblest of backgrounds to produce what Leitch intriguingly referred to as “a critically acclaimed stream of six unusual, darkly comic novels”.

I set about reading all I could locate of these long out-of-print books, and I was hooked from the very first line of his debut novel, A Streak of Madness: “The hens were drunk – it was Derek.” This set the tone perfectly for the fictional vision of village life Cochrane would pursue in so much of his work, homing in on the puerile mayhem triggered by small-town boredom.

And yet, as I immersed myself in his novels, it became clear that there was much more to Cochrane’s imagination than his trademark ribald humour. I was struck by how he had achieved the difficult feat of writing in his own free-flowing, vernacular voice while also tackling complex themes – strained family relationships, religious hypocrisy, mental instability, alienation within a close-knit community, and the constant striving of an adolescent to understand the world around him – elevating the storytelling to something altogether grander and more…

Cochr…

Début de l'article, extrait de The Irish Times. Pour lire la suite, ouvrez l'article chez le média.