The writer of this beautiful, uplifting and touching first novel has been a senior civil servant for many years, and has captured the imagination of readers in Ireland where the novel is set, as well as abroad.
Leonard and Hungry Paul by Rónán Hession tells of two friends in their thirties, who seem a bit odd and nerdy, but are good-natured and happy with themselves and their world. Their greatest passion is board games, and they enjoy reading science journals, encyclopaedias and birdwatching.
Hungry Paul lives with his mother and father, and the family are content together. Leonard also lives at home, with his widowed mother. Mindfulness is all the rage these days, and we are invited into the two friends’ world where they live in the present, take care of their parents, are kind, and delight in the small joys of life. They remind us that life is precious, even when people are uncelebrated.
The public response to this book, published in March 2019, has been phenomenal; it became a word-of-mouth bestseller in Ireland and Britain and was the subject of a publishers’ bidding war in America. It was also chosen by Dublin, Unesco City of Literature, as 2019’s One Dublin One Book where everyone in the city reads a designated book during April.
The book is a positive story, celebrating small acts of kindness which can mean so much, and seems particularly apt in these troubled times where we have come to appreciate friends and family more.
A busy father, Hession wrote Leonard and Hungry Paul in 2017 in the late evenings when his children were in bed. That’s still when he writes, when he has the house to himself. It was his first experience of writing prose and there aren’t any writers in his family. Being chosen for One Dublin One Book has made him realise how rooted he is in the city.
Leonard and Hungry Paul is a celebration of people who live quiet lives, people who “don’t push themselves to the front” and are often either simplified or, worse, rendered grotesque in literature. This is why there are very few physical descriptions, no surnames, no place names. The author didn’t want shortcuts, and believes that if you want to take quiet people and put them in the foreground, you need to prune away the things that normally obscure them.
“Leonard and Hungry Paul in particular, is heavily influenced by coming out of a decade of reading children’s books for my kids,” he says. “What children’s books do a bit better than other fiction is they try to go beyond just saying ‘the world is a bad place’… They try and say, ‘Is there a way to be in the world, given the world is the way it is? How do I engage with the world without it overwhelming me?’… That’s something I think of in my own life and it comes out in the book.”
It’s an unexpected treasure of a book which I thoroughly recommend.
By Letitia Fitzpatrick