Self-Published
302
pages
Blurb
He wants to be President, but
will his inconvenient past get in the way?
Patrick Devoy
Kavanagh lives a double life. In public he is a man at the top of his game –
celebrity lawyer, chat-show regular and patron of a number of children’s
charities. But behind the scenes he is drowning in debt, his legal practice is
haemorrhaging clients and his PA is expecting his child.
The only way he feels
he can escape his creditors is to raise his media profile and in doing so he
ruthlessly exploits his family and friends. So successful is he that he is told
in a radio interview that he should run for President. Patrick mulls this over
and decides this is a great idea. He has all the skills, he can talk for
Ireland – and it would sort out his money issues.
And so begins the
march to the Áras and the promise of something for everyone.
But will his campaign
succeed? There are many obstacles in his way, most of his own making, which
threaten to blow his own family apart as the soap opera which is the race to
become Uachtarán na hÉireann plays out.
Review
I’m not sure what to
say about this book. I don’t want to be all nasty, but I really, really didn’t
like the story. I always have a hard time seeing the good side of a story in
which the main character has no redeeming qualities whatsoever, and the fact
that he keeps on getting away from it doesn’t make things better…far from it in
fact.
Basically what we’ve
got here is the story of an unscrupulous lawyer, Patrick Devoy Kavanagh who
will literally use anything and everybody—including his current wife, his
ex-wife, his children, his pregnant mistress, the partner in his law company,
etc— in his life for his own ends. To be perfectly honesty, I’m not sure I was
more upset with him being a crook or with all those people around him
facilitating his behaviour and supporting it.
*Sighs* I can’t deny
that a large part of my dislike stems from the fact that the behaviour as
portrayed by our presidential candidate is not exactly unheard of in Ireland
(and probably quite a few other countries, but I can’t speak about those). The
brown envelope culture of bribery and under the table payments and agreements is
all too common here, as is the almost casual acceptance that politicians and
lawyers just operate that way and sure, he’s such a cheeky chappy, great
company, so we’ll just ignore all the backhanded stuff.
The book just felt
wrong. The first three quarters of the story is basically a litany of all his
bad (at best) and illegal behaviour while the last part boils down to him being
rewarded for being a selfish bastard. Maybe, if Patrick had had one or two
redeeming qualities, if he’d shown even an ounce of human decency at some
point, to someone, I might have smiled while reading the story and have
appreciated it as a darkly comical look at Irish society. Since I didn’t manage
to find a single moment where I could make myself believe that maybe Patrick
wasn’t all bad, none of it worked for me.
I also wasn’t overly
impressed with the name dropping. While side characters such as journalists all
had made up names, those were so close to names of real life and currently
active media people it felt a bit like lazy writing. And I also can’t help
feeling that the book could have done with at least one more round of
editing/proofreading.
After all of the
above, you may ask yourself why I still give the book three stars (well,
two-and-a-half stars rounded up). The reason is rather simple. While the main
character in this story didn’t have a single redeeming quality, the book itself
fares a little better in my estimation. This is a fast read, with events following each other at an almost impossible pace. And, for a book I didn’t really like, it
read ridiculously easily. Although, that’s probably just as well. I’m not sure
I would have had the patience to force my way to the end of the tale if it had
been a tough read.
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