The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue: Paging Netflix

Cover image for The Rachel Incident by Caroline O'DonoghueThe premise of Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident reminded me of Belinda McKeon’s Tender which I loved but was stunned to find I’d reviewed back in 2015. The novels turned out to have little in common besides being written by Irish women about the relationship between a young straight woman and her gay male friend. In O’Donoghue’s novel the eponymous Rachel remembers the year she lived with James in a dilapidated house in Cork.

Until I started working at the bookshop I had considered myself quite well read.

Shocked by news that her erstwhile professor, Dr Byrne, is in a coma, Rachel is catapulted back to 2010, her final year at university, when she was working in a bookshop to pay her fees. After a rocky start, she and newbie bookseller James Devlin become inseparable, setting up house together in a grungy house on Shandon Street. Each is very different from the other. She’s the child of middle-class parents hit hard by the financial crash; he’s been brought up in poverty by his mother. She has vague plans to do something in books; he has his eye on screenwriting with little or no education to fall back on. James is gay but not out, even to Rachel, despite the intimacy between them. When he spots her crush on her professor, James helps engineer the launch of his new book, much to Dr Byrne’s surprise. After the launch party, things take a rather different and surprising turn from the one Rachel had hoped, putting her friendship with James under strain. By the end of their year together, both will be heading in very different directions: Rachel to London where she will eventually edit a newspaper for Irish ex-pats, and James to New York where he will become a celebrated scriptwriter.

We had a very complicated relationship with Will & Grace. People brought it up with us a lot, wherein James would remind them that he wasn’t gay.

O’Donoghue tells this touching, witty coming-of-age story from Rachel’s perspective, looking back on a very different Ireland from the one she visits in 2022, when women travelled to England for their abortions at great cost and same sex relationships were still largely under wraps. She’s an engaging narrator, funny and self-deprecating. O’Donoghue vividly evokes the hothouse atmosphere of intense friendship when two young people click and fall into a kind of platonic love. Sometimes those friendships burn brightly then fade but Rachel and James find a way through the extreme messiness of their year in Shandon Street, texting and visiting, keeping up with the intimate details of each other’s lives. There’s a hint in O’Donoghue’s opening paragraph and her acknowledgements that it’s a novel that may bear a passing resemblance to events in her own life. Given that, its ending is particularly pleasing. A thoroughly enjoyable piece of fiction that would make an excellent movie.

Virago Press: London ‎ 9780349013558 320 pages Hardback (Read via NetGalley)

16 thoughts on “The Rachel Incident by Caroline O’Donoghue: Paging Netflix”

  1. This looks a good read, and perhaps satisfyingly free from too much depressing drama, which the newspapers are currently full of. Ordered from the library!

    1. Indeed, it is. My current read is a very good, very dark political novel set in a near future authoritarian state. Checking my review of this one before posting it cheered me up!

  2. I’ve got this one on my reading table. It’s up next, after an excellent but very dark novel I’m about to finish. I’m looking forward to the relief of lighter fare. This sounds enjoyable!

    1. It’s a very smartly turned out piece of entertainment, an enjoyable antidote to darkness. Coincidentally, I’m reading the darkest novel I’ve read in some time. It, too, is excellent but I’ll definitely be seeking out something lighter next.

    1. Tender was so lovely, wasn’t it. This one doesn’t have the same yearning melancholy to it, more smartly entertaining but perceptive if you see what I mean.

Leave a comment ...

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.