The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow

The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow is a literary stylistic dystopian noir set in a Dublin where it is always raining and the city is a sodden, half-derelict place with a mysterious arsonist and a crime boss called the Earlie King. A boy—the Kid in Yellow—is in trouble and it all relates to a baby and the Earlie King. Others try to fathom what is going on, but soon it is too late and the Kid has taken the babba away, an action that doesn’t look like it will end well.

The novel is a distinctive one that defies simple categorisation: dystopia, gangster noir, a drama about a baby, a stylistic experiment that jumps between lyrical prose and play script. The plot itself is quite simple, but told in a complex way that creates mythology in an atmosphere of unrelenting rain. In some ways, it is another Irish gangster story; in others, it is a new dystopian set amongst religious tradition, distrust, and a lot of water. The Kid’s desperation to care for the baby is heartwarming and their survival becomes the reason to keep turning the page.

Denton has written a fresh novel that blends genre and writing style in a bold way. There is something about the short, sharp scenes, mix of forms, and stylistic and violent future that makes the book in some ways feel similar to good graphic novels, though it is text-based. This is a novel for fans of gangsters and dystopias, a modern noir with a bit of heart.

All I can say is WOW! An incredibly exciting, adventurous, uncategorizable novel. Beautifully written, surprising and compelling. I will be recommending this to everyone. An outstanding debut and unlike anything else I have read.

It's amazing when a novel can create such a strong sensory experience and all-encompassing atmosphere within its prose that you feel like you're imaginatively entrenched in this fictional world. There have been few books I've read in recent years that have done this as powerfully as Danny Denton's new novel “The Earlie King & The Kid in Yellow”. He describes a post-apocalyptic Ireland that experiences constant rain so that whole sections of the country begin sinking into the sea, the agricultural industry is destroyed and 92.46 per cent precipitation counts as the “thinnest and firmest in yonks. A bare tremble.” People can only witness the sun in videos, UV booths or sun rooms. One character keeps a slug as a pet. The seas are so polluted fish are poisonous and there are mutant green dolphins. There's an overwhelming sense of dampness and darkness and rot. Many pages of the novel are covered in sketches of rain and occasionally we're given sections from a play script which appears on the page like a water-soaked document. People in Dublin live in fear of a gang lord known as The Earlie King while the police look the other way. Believers flock to the West to worship a miracle statue of the Virgin that has foretold the end of the persistent downpour. Denton powerfully evokes this feeling of a drowning Ireland in order to dramatize a country in a state of crisis. In doing so he produces an immersive story as well as a striking commentary on institutional corruption and the information age.

In a way, it feels like this book has all the elements of a young adult novel. It's a kind-of post-apocalyptic fiction with an adolescent boy hero at its centre who seeks to undermine the oppressive powers that be. One of The Earlie King's underlings, a boy who is around 13 years old and wears a yellow rain jacket, plots to steal the King's granddaughter for reasons which only become apparent over the course of the narrative. But, like Sandra Newman's epic “The Country of Ice Cream Star”, this novel invents its own language rhythms and idioms in a highly sophisticated way. It's formed partly from current Irish dialect and partly from an invented slang to fit with a lingo appropriate to this dilapidated world. So rain jackets that must be worn constantly outside are known as “skins” and a form of television commonly watched is known as the TeleVisio. There are even invented alcoholic beverages and drugs which are frequently referred to. Meanwhile, The Kid in Yellow (whose true name we only discover towards the end) is a kind of repository of literature as he can recite from memory lines from Shakespeare, Goethe, Yates, Michael Hartnett and other poets. Although he doesn’t entirely understand the meaning of their lines, this language lives on through him as do numerous local fables. Storytelling is important throughout the novel, not least of all because (like Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale”) the entire tale of “The Earlie King & The Kid in Yellow” is being told at some future point through the perspective of a local detective, “the last Irishman” who partially witnessed this catastrophic drama unfold.

Although we don’t see what the world has become in this future point where the primary tale has transformed into myth, it can be presumed that this new nation has moved beyond this gang-run society trapped in a glut of information. One of the themes Denton is preoccupied with is a current general belief that the information age will allow our society to progress to a state of peace and tranquillity. It’s as if we’ve been lulled into believing that the bounty of knowledge we can find through internet searches will allow us to achieve enlightenment. One character named Jeri has a theory that in seeking to know everything we discover that “knowledge didn’t produce an answer as to why we couldn’t find peace. Why we were here.” People find that they are just as confused, fragmented, discontent and alone as ever. Hence the constant rain is a kind of symbol for how clouded our vision remains despite this easy-access to knowledge: “There was so much in the world that was mysterious, all of it held just beyond the rain, or piped just beneath the city’s surfaces.” It becomes apparent that “This country is slowly disappearing. The whole world is falling to pieces. Time is accelerating and cracking apart, and after almost three thousand years of praying none of the organised religions has been able to stop that. None of the sciences either.” So the Kid in Yellow - as well as a vigilante arsonist, a local alcoholic mystic, a chronicler of the gang’s violence and a spectre known as Mister Violence – take steps to trigger a large-scale transformation to move society to a new stage.

Danny Denton is an invigorating and inventive debut author whose voice is a welcome addition to the chorus of new Irish writers making powerful statements about the current state of Ireland. It feels like a new wave in Irish fiction has been felt in full force since the property bubble burst and a financial crisis ensued after 2007. Writers such as Lisa McInerney, Lucy Caldwell, Gavin McCrea, Danielle McLaughlin, Colin Barrett, Gavin Corbett, Kevin Barry and Mike McCormack have creatively addressed different sides of the fallout of this economic downturn in their fiction which ranges from short stories to historical novels to more experimental prose. Now Denton has created a vision of the country which is struggling to find a way forward and seeks to find establish social systems which can represent and support all of its people – not just “the city’s rich or the city’s corrupt”. The original structure of his book frames this drama in such a fascinating way. But, most of all, “The Earlie King & The Kid in Yellow” is also a moving story of a tragic love affair and disillusioned youth.

"All stories are meaningless," Sweeney said. "Only you yourself put meaning on them."

In a dystopian Ireland bursting with allegories, parallels, and misty touchpoint shadows to the whole wide range of Irish history and culture from ancient to the twenty-first century, in a hazy, mazy, dark-grim fairy tale, The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow is a strong contender for my favourite book of 2018 – no matter what else comes along this year. Denton's writing is gemstone special, weaving words and making pure poetry of prose, but retaining a dry, wry humour about the mess and trouble of life.

Ireland's light has dimmed, the sun hidden behind an overwhelming deluge of rain that never stops, which floods the whole land and seeps into homes and soaks wet-through the people, who have taken to wearing plastic 'skins' to combat the ever-damp, ever-dripping, ever-falling rain, and taken to drink and drugs to numb the pain of abject bone-deep poverty and desperation, the economy, the industry and the people having fallen apart more than two generations ago, leaving nothing but the black market to get people through their torrential days – and from this sodden circumstance has emerged a dank community, crawling with gangs calling themselves the Earlie Boys, that are beholden to the strange, death-bringing figure of the Earlie King.

These shady, shifty street gangs rule Ireland now, and people disappear with terrifying regularity for the most innocuous crimes and mistakes, their relatives informed by the reporter O'Casey, who keeps a secret coded ledger of the what he hears about the ultraviolent and frighteningly matter-of-fact deeds of the Earlie Boys.

Official law enforcement officers are helpless to stop the gangs; the technology, the surveillance, is pervasive, and cameras are everywhere, but cameras are useless in the face of the Earlie Boys and young 'runners' – who have nothing to lose, and many slippery ways of evading identification.

And among the dank and the endless wet, and the half-light and the terrifying gangster-filled and fuelled life of the country, the Kid in Yellow fell in love with the wrong girl, and she with him, and this young pair had a baby. This is their story.

The Earlie King and the Kid in Yellow is a strange book – a dark and seedy legend of a despairing future, written in earthy and lyrical prose. Denton casts a spell and his dystopian vision, as charmless as this dank and violent Ireland is, is shot through with a deeply moving story and vivid, haunting characters. There have been many great strange, dark novels out of Ireland – as from any country though perhaps Ireland is entitled to the crown, having birthed O'Brien's Third Policeman, Beckett's Watt, McCabe's Dead School, and Joyce's, well, everything that Joyce ever wrote – and this is an emerald in that crown, glinting not quite wholesomely but sharply, darkly wonderful.

I received a review copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley