Finding Penelope reviewed in Books Ireland

Caitriona MacKernan reviewing in Books Ireland February 2013
Finding Penelope. James Lawless. Indigo Dreams Publishing 230 pp £7.99 pb19 cm +1-907401-78-7

Cocaine  rule of the vulnerable is the subject of this compelling psychodrama. It is set in Costa del Sol, among
expat criminal gangs and their hangers-on such as pornography film producers, their starlets and  totally innocent local Spaniards.
When the novel’s Spanish hero Ramón’s mother resisted being robbed, she was stabbed to death. Ramón, a schoolteacher, resented that expat children and their parents had no loyalty to their adopted country.
All embarrassed and shocked, the novel’s heroine, an Irish Penelope, is an unlikely chick lit novelist a “goody two-shoes”, for whom the classical image of Penelope, with protectively crossed knees, reflecting chastity, would have been apt
Penelope and her brother Dermot, a cocaine addict and dealer, were unfortunate in their parents; her mother an alcoholic who eventually committed suicide and her father, an eminent academic doctor, prone to administering putdowns and undermining his wife and two children.
After her novel’s success, encouraged by her ego- affirming literary agent, she moved to Costa del Sol to escape the family stranglehold and the belittling of her sugar-coated fiction. Besides, the agent expected life on the Costa, where one went for a tan and got a man, to be chick lit productive.
When she lived in Dundrum, Penelope, true to her name, kept house, minded her mother and nurtured her baby brother as all three cowered before her father. As he aged and became even more cantankerous, he needed her to minister to his ailments. She had resented his betrayal of her mother to and by “fawning acolytes frequenting his room, hoping in exchange for some fleshy transaction of summa cum laude in the examination’.
Her solitary escape to the Costa was brief, as Dermot followed her, trailing bars of Toblerone filled with sachets of white powder. Would her Odysseus, Ramón, win her over from her lifelong habit of protecting Dermot? Costa protection would involve playing up to and script writing for a chrome-haired lecher, cocaine addict and pornographic film maker, who “sat on the throne of his seraglio pulling at the string of the nearest girl’s bikini bottom”. Later, a foreign “tart” blinded him in one eye, and in reprisal, another was found slumped in the lift, “her short red skirt ridden up to her black panties, with blood oozing into a pool around her”. Providing him with “adulterated shit”, or talking to the pigs – the police — could and would have lethal consequences.
Lawless reinvented the millennia-worn story line to reveal not only a Dublin expat Costa del Sol akin to the RTE Love Hate series but beautiful writing, which in Carlo Gébler’s words “will give deep literary pleasure”.