Last Night on Earth - Kevin Maher

Last Night on Earth has much of the material that made The Fields a delightful, entertaining and a thoughtful read. It's very much rooted in the Irish immigrant in London experience and uses the cultural juxtaposition to examine with the difficulties and the strange twists of fate that life throws at you. Yes, it deals with depression, breakdown, opens with a spectacularly sweary and sweaty mess of a birth scene that leaves Jay and Shauna with a brain-damaged child Bonnie, but you might as well get used to Maher's writing being right in your face from the start, because it doesn't let up. More importantly, even though it builds up to an epic end-of-the-world situation, it doesn't let you down in the end either.

Don't be fooled by the fresh-off-the-boat Irish humour. Jay's unconventional perspective, language and manner is revealing of a ferociously intelligent, warmly open and deeply loving outlook on the world. Even within the cynical world of London and the media business (brilliantly satirised), Jay's voice finds truth and humour in life itself. Philosophical and psychoanalytical, Last Night on Earth, for all its linguistic playfulness and gorgeously descriptive, tactile, explosive writing is however not looking for answers to big questions. It's interested in the things that define who we are and the lengths we go to attain them, or run away from them. With the emphasis on Bonnie - "this strange and innocent wounded thing" - it's specifically probing of the most painful human vulnerabilities.

It's family that contains all the love and all the pain in Jay's life. The pain is linked to the notion of silence (the silence of Bonnie, the silence of Jay's Mammy, the silence of Shauna), and it's a confrontation of that silence that seems to bring out all Jay's volubility. The silence however is just as meaningful and expressive as the onslaught of words that come from the irrepressible Jay, speaking of the kind of wisdom that can't be put into words, that can't be found in the philosophy books Jay reads. Even the "fillums" are as much a way to fill the emptiness and keep the hurt at bay as fitting life to a structure of words and images that make it seem more meaningful. Using a variety of means, taking in the trivial, the familiar, the esoteric and the mystical, Maher makes Jay the centre of a dazzling word-whirlwind of all the joys, agonies and confusion of life.

It's outrageously funny, but Last Night on Earth is also an extraordinarily beautiful book, richer, more varied and much more accomplished than The Fields (as wonderfully original a debut as that was). There's one scene alone that imagines Bonnie's life as it might be in in two and a half pages of stunning, heart-achingly beautiful prose, but every single page in the book has a moment of insightful brilliance, a strikingly witty or painfully funny observation with the ability to touch on the remarkable and otherworldly with the most delightful linguistic twists and playfulness. Mostly, it's bursting with love, the love of language, love for its characters, love for all the richness of the human experience, as painful as it might sometimes be. "So much pain in so much love."