Cónal Creedon
Passion Play
Passion Play is a gospel for the 21st century, thematically styled and structured on the Passion of Jesus Christ.
‘They say yer life flashes in front of yer eyes before ye dies.’
It’s the early hours of Good Friday morning. Demented, depressed and disillusioned, Pluto stubs another cigarette in the dregs of his coffee mug and buries himself deep under the bed clothes. He is alone and lonely in rundown bedsit-land. The sounds of footsteps on the ceiling, late-night radio, the movement of people in the hallway outside his door and the cacophony of voices from a hellish past life echo around inside his head.
‘Sometimes the need to die is stronger than the will to live.’
Caught in the slipstream of the past, Pluto’s soul takes off in a kaleidoscopic odyssey of Marx Brothers’ proportion – where the insanity of life is reconciled with the taste of freshly-boiled pig’s head.
‘The novel’s interior is much indebted to Joyce. The way Creedon combines the child-centred perspective of Paddy Clarke Ha! Ha! Ha! with the tough teenage world of The Commitments and the domestic cruelty of The Woman who Walked into Doors is ambitious and effective. His exposition of his characters’ thought processes owes much to Flann O’Brien’s skewed sophistication and Patrick McCabe’s scabrous vision as to an earlier prototype of Seán O’Casey’s Joxer. Creedon has found a form all of his own.’
— The London Times Literary Review [TLS]
Book of the Year 1999
— BBC R4 Saturday Review, Cahal Dallat.