Bleating hell

>> Blah, Blah Blacksheep is pretty blah

by JULIET WATERS

What is it about power-hungry sadists who are drawn to Celine Dion? First in Irvine Welsh's Filth there was the psychotic Edinburgh cop who adored her. And now in Maggie Gibson's Blah, Blah Blacksheep, a nasty Dublin blackmailer stakes out his victim while wiping away a tear to "The Heart Will Go on." Is there something about the soul-selling hyper sentimentality of Dion that is irresistible to a man whose life is an intense struggle to disguise vulnerability? Or is Gibson just being derivative?

Both, perhaps. Gibson's book seems always on the edge of being an interesting, original suspense-comedy, a girl's take on the thriller-buddy genre. But more often than not she tempts me to shorten the title to Blah, Blah. Gibson's hard-working, hard-drinking, sexist Dublin gals, who somehow get mixed up with a bunch of Eastern European thugs, might be more bearable if they came off as endearingly damaged. Sadly, they just come off as jerks.

To be fair, Gibson has set herself an impossible task to begin with. Male buddy formula hinges on the well-worn premise that men have a hard time becoming vulnerable or intimate unless they're drunk, or thrown into a crisis where they are typically fleeing criminals or the law. Women, we like to believe, are masters of instant intimacy. They can become best friends over a shade of lipstick. So in a similar crisis buddy situation, Thelma and Louise for instance, merely being intimate and vulnerable isn't enough. To challenge our expectations they have to kiss and die.

The buddies in Blah, Blah are Dublin reporter Drew Looney, and corporate party organizer Georgina "George" Fitz-Simmons. Their lives run parallel through much of the book until circumstances draw them closer together.

Drew, a somewhat frumpy, Guinness-guzzling, neurotic mess is a reporter having a hard time with her misogynist boss at the Dublin Daily Record. On a routine deportation story about a Romanian refugee, she stumbles on a possible illegal slave-trade scoop. Meanwhile, statuesque blonde George, a recovering coke addict, is being blackmailed by a Polish drug dealer named Broylin Grillo. On top of the money she owes him after he set her up to take the fall for a stolen shipment of drugs, he has compromising pictures of her deceased father which he is threatening to show her fragile mother.

Grillo is the link between Drew and George, since he's also involved in forcing refugees into indentured servitude. But before the two women discover they have a mutual enemy, a number of coincidences throw them together. First, Drew nearly runs George down in an airport. Then it turns out George is catering Drew's brother's engagement party.

Despite getting drunk together at the party, and trading too many very lame men jokes ("How many men does it take to screw in a light bulb? One. Men will screw anything.") Drew and Georgina don't really hook up until much later in the novel. A requisite how-to-dump-the-dead-body plot point gives them a common problem, but they never get much space to develop their characters. One doesn't get the sense that Gibson would know what to do if they did anyway.

Too much space is taken up by a subplot involving a has-been Australian glam rocker, who's been set up by our Dion-loving bully on a bogus statutory rape charge involving the bully's daughter. There's a lot going on in this book and "quirky" is the effect Gibson is obviously aiming for. Frantic is what she achieves. And morbid, since much gratuitous violence is needed to keep the plot pumping. But the real victim in this charmless thriller is the city of Dublin, which comes off as a dull, busy, decadent rip-off of every other dull, busy, decadent city of the '90s.

Blah, Blah Blacksheep by Maggie Gibson, Orion, pb, 278pp, $24.95