Second paragraph of third chapter:

It was my third day in the job. I was sitting with the rest of the staff around a table in the second-floor boardroom, where I was being briefed ahead of my first meeting with the Northern Advisory Council that afternoon.

Paul Howard is the creator of Ross O’Carroll Kelly, a one-joke satirical column which has run in the Sunday Tribune and Irish Times since 1998 and has turned into a series of novels as well. Here he turns his gaze to Irish reunification, imagining a secret office of the Department for Foreign Affairs which has been planning for the great day since the 1950s.

The former head of the department (who refuses to go away) is an Irish version of Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb from Slow Horses; the Northerners are all stereotypes; the Southerners are mostly stereotypes; there’s even a stereotypical Australian academic; there is a late effort to insert an emotional dimension by resurrecting the protagonist’s love life; in general it’s about as good a book as you’d expect. If you like the Ross O’Carroll Kelly stuff, you’ll like this. (I think I’ve made my own position clear.)

At the same time, maybe it’s not such a bad way of gently unpacking some of the issues around reunification for a Southern readership that may not have given it much thought.

You can get A Nation Once Again here.