Books: Colourful characters abound in novella's romp through Cork city

Ger Fitzgibbon, former head of drama and theatre studies at UCC, and now a writer and director whose creative work is deeply embedded in his native Cork, is the author of a recently published novella, The Four-Faced Liar.

Originally written as a play for voices, it was first performed as a podcast, live from the stage of the Everyman in 2020 during the covid pandemic.

It was broadcast by RTÉ’s drama department last year and also, in 2025, it was produced by Theatre Makers at the Cork Arts Theatre.

The novella, published by Menma Books, is a humorous romp through Cork city over the course of one night and into the following morning.

The church of St Anne’s, Shandon, with its four clocks all telling a different time, narrates the story. The clocks are wise-cracking commentators, observers and critics, who focus on a motley crew of some of the city’s inhabitants.

They range from a former Lord Mayor down on his luck who has taken to the sup, a Polish woman on whom Bertie, a shy carpenter, has a big crush, a 98-year old woman who single-handedly, wages war on the government, a dapper undertaker known as Morgan-the-Box, and a brash businessman, Marky, who appears to be rolling in money but is believed by one of the clocks to be ‘up to his tits’ in debt.

This is an enjoyable read, a slim volume that will bring a broad grin to anyone interested in dissecting Cork society.

It doesn’t so much romanticise Cork as skewer its pretensions and portray people that are sometimes delusional.

But there is a fondness for the city obvious in this book, an appreciation of its richness in terms of characters and of course, the unique accents, from the “gravelly growl of the merchant classes” to the “sweet cacophony” of its various inhabitants, including immigrants who have settled in the southern capital.

“The music of those voices seems to express the very physical and social topography of the city,” writes the author in the introduction of the publication.

“Flat Cork” could be attributed to “the low-lying marsh at the centre” while the “scooping rise and fall speaks of the hills around it”.

Locations are given interesting adjectives such as “yawning” Gurrane, “smug, smug Ballintemple – almost Blackrock and trending” and “duvet” Douglas - whatever that means.

Ger is attuned to class, petty snobbery, and the public and private faces of Cork society.

Take Ballintemple-based Barbara, wife of Morgan-the-Box, whose dreams reveal her world-view. She is dreaming of herself riding “...through the clouds of night, cowboy-style and naked, on a camel, at the head of the Carrigaline hunt. She is galloping through Northside housing estates, and lassoing dole cheats, illegal immigrants, and people who don’t pick up their crisp packets.”

The former fictional Lord Mayor, Gussy Barrett, is heartbroken over the death of his wife. Hungover, he makes a bonfire to burn her clothes, incapable of donating them to a charity shop for fear of spotting someone in them, thinking it’s his wife.

The acrid smoke from Grattan Buildings spirals up the hillside and “makes a soft landing in the hanging gardens of Lovers Walk”. Gussy says to his dead wife: “You always wanted to move to Montenotte. Well, there you are now.”

If living in Montenotte is the height of a low-lying social-climbing Corkonian’s ambition, then living in a glass tower is what ‘new money’ aspires to. At least, that is the case with the very dodgy Marky Power, who lives in a penthouse apartment and is given to gazing downriver “at the old docklands as if he owned them.”

It’s all about acquisition for this guy, who is waiting for his mother (the “old lady”) to “pop her clogs” but needs her to sign over shares to him before he can feel secure. It will allow him to pay off some Bulgarians, “nasty buggers”.

Marky, who is being chased by the Revenue Commissioners, bemoans the way the world has gone.

“Things were so much easier before those bastarding computers,” he observes. From the days when it was all cash, now nothing is forgotten.

“Some little Department of Finance nerd, living in a bedsit in Ringsend, and he can track your whole focking life for you in two shakes of a pig’s micky. Have they nothing better to do?”

Marky, a thoroughly base character, thinks it would be awful if his old lady died before signing over the shares to him. Guess what happens?

But read the book to find out just how this mother meets her end and what her recently amended last will and testament dictates. It’s piled high with irony.

The novella contains a portrait of the Everyman Theatre from which cast and crew have gone home for the night. It belongs once more to the household ghosts.

“The air tinkles with the echoes of old music hall songs as they gather in the stalls, then crowd into the mirrored back room, giggling and whispering, like school kids made of tinsel...They jostle and push their way through the powder, the dust the trysts and the scandals...”

This charming novella is full of pen pictures of different types of people from the various social strata of Cork. And while there are some clichés, there is plenty of imaginative power in this work.

It skates across the city, beaming down on colourful characters, and reveals the sometimes dark truths behind the facades.