Patrick Freyne

@patrickfreyne.bsky.social

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Irish Times writer & author of OK, Let's Do Your Stupid Idea & now, out in June, Experts in a Dying Field. You can preorder here: https://linktr.ee/expertsinadyingfield

Succession: Scrooge McDuck’s children Huey, Dewey and Louie. Photograph: Sky/HBO
Bruce Wayne’s Ted Talk Wayne [coughs]. “How does a billionaire process trauma and, at the same time, contribute to the city he loves?” [From the audience: “Pay your fair share of taxes!”] Wayne [annoyed). “The answer isn’t obvious.” [From the audience: “It is!”] Wayne [glaring at the audience and steepling his fingers in a show of power]. “After the brutal murder of my parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne, by the hoodlum Joe Chill, I knew I needed to do something.” [From the audience: “Get therapy!”]
Dorian Lynskey Nerve theatre critic The very funny Irish journalist Patrick Freyne’s debut novel, Experts in a Dying Field (Sandycove), is a fast-moving, unpredictable delight. Ostensibly about the survivors of an obscure 90s indie band, it’s full of twists and stylistic games: a chapter might take the form of an album review or an interview. Its combo of punk and postmodernism recalls Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad but has a charm of its own. I’m planning to pack The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (Riverrun), translated by Ross Benjamin. Shortlisted for the International Booker prize, Kehlmann’s novel audaciously reimagines the film director GW Pabst’s Faustian pact with the Nazis. I’m already a sucker for fiction based on historical figures, especially when Europeans do it. Throw in fascism, cinema and the price of complicity and I’m sold.
I’ve been binge-reading Tessa Hadley. Her most recent novella, The Party, is a beautifully old-fashioned coming-of-age novel about class and youthful aspiration. I also read Prestige Drama, the debut novel by Séamas O’Reilly. It’s a brilliantly angry, funny and cacophonous book about a fancy TV show being made about the Troubles in O’Reilly’s home county of Derry. Both of these books are very short. I also enjoyed rereading Ulysses by James Joyce for a Bloomsday event. The trick is to 1) remember it’s very funny, and 2) don’t check the page count. I suspect it might be up to 300 pages long. Experts in a Dying Field by Patrick Freyne is published by Penguin Sandycove. To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Ibelieve the children are our future. And what I mean is that I believe the children in Million Dollar Nannies (Disney+) are our future because their multimillionaire parents can afford apocalypse bunkers. Your less-wealthy children? Most will be cinders in the coming conflagration. The rest will be battling it out as savage marauders on the Fury Road. (The columnist looks ruefully at his thuggish nephews, who’ve had an early start with such behaviour.) In the meantime, before rogue AI and climate change and Peter Thiel destroy civilisation, the best way to survive is to be employed as a servant to an oligarch. Then perhaps they will take you with them to their compound in New Zealand, where, please God, you’ll be able to murder them in your sleep and hoard all of their precious water, canned goods and crypto tokens.
Experts in a Dying Field cover featuring a golden fox
"I enjoyed hitting myself with it" New blurb just dropped for Experts in a Dying Field (in shops from June 11th)
Due to the filth I wrote about sexy shows on the telly in last week’s column, the governors of the trust that oversees The Irish Times held a special meeting. They decided I was being far too sexy. They are now permitting me to write about the excellent Jilly Cooper adaptation Rivals (Disney+) only if I focus on the intricacies of local-television franchising in the 1980s and not “shenanigans”*, “tomfoolery”* or “high jinks”* (*riding, *riding and more *riding). With this in mind they have suggested that I dispense with the “intimate” parts of Rivals in the first few paragraphs, just to get them out of the way. So here goes. When a mummy, a daddy, a daddy’s business partner, a cigar-chomping business aristocrat, a morning-show presenter, a priapic MP, a sexy American ladyboss, a romance novelist, a simple young ingenue (much like myself) who is vulnerable to seduction (guilty as charged!), a polo team, several topless farmers and the actor Danny Dyer all love each other very much, they make luuurve.
Patrick Freyne's novel Experts in a Dying Field featuring a spiralling golden fox as the cover image
Anna Carey's brilliant book Love Scene in a kind of pyramid display in the window of Dubray Books
Or, even more importantly, how many slap-up meals and embroidered suits and tropical hideaways and vintage guitars would that buy for poor old Patrick, who works so hard and gets so little in return?
As a man of letters, dedicated to the life of the mind, I don’t know how I would manage without the help of my trusty groundskeeper, Freyne. Though getting on in years (78-ish – not sure if he has a birth cert) Freyne is an absolute treasure and friends are often asking me if they could borrow him. “Not a chance,” I say. “Get your own Freyne!” It’s not like days of yore when the relationship between upstairs and downstairs was a cold and distant one. We have a friendly and informal relationship, Freyne and I. I often take him refreshments when he is, for example, powerhosing my drive or insulating my shed and I am taking a break from writing deep thoughts in my study. And when I do so, we chat about the affairs of the day and I survey my estate (a terraced former council house in north Dublin).
Under Irish law, if Dermot Bannon demands entry to your house, you have to let him. He has special constitutional powers, like the president or Bosco. It’s there in black and white: “The Irish nation hereby affirms its inalienable, indefeasible and sovereign right to choose its own form of government, to determine its relations with other nations, and to develop its life, political, economic and cultural, in accordance with its own genius and traditions. Also, Dermot Bannon can come into your house whenever he wants.”
Ah, MrBeast and the way he might look at you, the big Easter Island head on him looming out at us from a social-media landing page. See him there, emoting like a fleshy emoji, his voice rising and falling as if in Auto-Tune, in a plastic mimicry of man. MrBeast basically answers the question: what if the YouTube algorithm had a head? Regard that head. Regard his huge, slightly embarrassed rictus grin below a set of apple cheeks and a pair of glassy, expressionless eyes, all framed by the vague beige blur of his large, generic face. Your children know that face better than your own. He is their parasocial digital daddy, and they watch with nihilistic glee while, like a modern-day Sun King, he randomly launches money at the desperate victims of US economic policy.