Catherine O'Flynn

A lost little girl with her detective notebook and toy monkey appears on the CCTV screens of the Green Oaks shopping centre, evoking memories of Kate Meaney, missing for twenty years. Kurt, a security guard with a sleep disorder, and Lisa, a disenchanted deputy manager at Your Music, follow glimpses of the girl through the centre's endless corridors - a welcome change from dealing with awkward customers, colleagues and the Green Oaks mystery shopper. But as this after-hours friendship grows show more in intensity, it brings new loss and new longing to light.

Starting in 1984, we meet Kate Meaney, a 10-year old orphan and self-stylized junior Nancy Drew with dreams of owning her own detective agency. Kate lives with her maternal grandmother. Her grandmother expects young Kate to be no more trouble than a flatmate so Kate is pretty much left to her own devices and tends to pass through life unobserved by the people around her. Her friend: 22-year old Adrian who works in his father’s newspaper shop in Kate’s neighborhood. Kate spends her time, when she is not in school, conducting surveillance in the new local shopping mall, Green Oaks. When Kate disappears one day, Adrian is the last person to have seen her and becomes the main suspect. The hounding of the press drives Adrian into hiding from everyone, even his own family.

Fast forward 20 years. Green Oaks is now a much larger shopping complex and the story shifts to Kurt and Lisa, Adrian’s younger sister. As Kurt and Lisa find themselves drawn into the mystery around the girl that appears on the CCTV security screens in the mall’s security room, we delve into their unsatisfying lives, their pasts and slowly unfold the secrets they know. I really like how O’Flynn has given Green Oaks a looming, sinister presence on society and takes the reader into the behind the scenes intricate world of a large shopping mall. The effect of Green Oaks on the characters, the plot and the overall story of Kate Meaney’s disappearance made this part mystery, part ghost story a compelling read for me. While the story tends to stray from its original course, there is a purpose to the straying. What really worked for me is how the story unfolds – slowly, layer by layer – to the surprising conclusion.

For the most part, the story is told through the voices of Kate, Lisa and Kurt. It is more a telling of two stories that merge at the end and is something to keep in mind as you read it. An added element that did not make sense to me until I had finished the book was the inclusion of anonymous first person commentator vignettes (depicted in italics) that would crop up from time to time in the story. While the book starts off with energy and purpose with Kate’s character back in 1984 – no, this is not another Flavia de Luce! - the overall sense of the story is one of loss, loneliness and longing. This is more of a slice of life story – with all its warts – than the mystery that is at its roots. The characters are well drawn, as are the circumstances of their lives and their environment.

For a debut novel, this winner of the Costa First Novel Award is an excellent read and I can honestly say that I will never look at a shopping mall in the same way again. show less

In 1984, Kate Meaney fancies herself a junior detective; she's observant and has the patience for surveillance, but she sees little that's suspicious. She misses her father, and her grandmother is beginning to talk about boarding school, but, Kate confides to Adrian, the shopkeeper's son, she doesn't want to go. He offers to go with her, but after she sits the exam, she's never seen again, and Adrian becomes a suspect, though Kate's body doesn't turn up.

In the early 2000s, Adrian's sister show more Lisa is working a dead-end job in a record store in the same mall where Kate used to do surveillance; she misses her brother, who left town and only sends a mix tape on her birthday. Kurt is a security officer at the mall, and after he sees a little girl on the monitors, he and Lisa strike up a friendship of sorts. Both are stuck in their patterns, and much less dynamic characters than Kate (and Kate's friend Theresa). Thanks in part to Kate's stuffed monkey, and clues from Kurt's co-worker - who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the mall - they do eventually solve the mystery of Kate's disappearance, and Theresa is there to bring him to justice; however, it's too late for Adrian, who dies by suicide.

Quotes

"I think adults....they think they know what's best for their children's, but they don't really. In fact, they often have very bad ideas, and the children have much better ones, but it doesn't matter...[the adult gets] to choose." (Kate to Adrian, 49-50)

But it seemed to be a trade-off; with the pain went the details and memories. People had said "Time heals," but he realized time didn't heal, time just eroded and confused, and he didn't think that was the same thing at all. (Kurt, 92)

She idealized time away from work to such an extent that it could never live up to her expectations. (Lisa, 114)

Lisa felt as if Dan knew a better version of her - someone with interests and ideas and plans. All that was best about Lisa, or had once been best, was saved in Dan's memory and had yet to be overwritten by the newer, paler reality. The same was also true in reverse. They both had high hopes for each other, if not for themselves. (137)

He wondered if what he'd failed to do had actually made any difference at all. (Kurt, 172)

"Nothing makes spending twelve hours of every day doing something you hate worthwhile." (Dan to Lisa, 176) show less

Still feeling the impact of his wife’s death, retired bus driver Dermot Lynch makes the rash decision to leave his home in Birmingham, England and drop in on his son, Eamonn, in Spain. Lomaverde, the village Eamonn and his suddenly absent girlfriend, Laura, chose as their home is a ramshackle ghost town of half-finished skeletons, inhabited only by a patchwork of odd immigrants. While Dermot wakes each morning hoping to spark the father-son relationship he and Eamonn never had, his son is show more more concerned with winning back Laura and tying up the fraying ends of his own life.

Though Dermot and Eamonn make up the center of O’Flynn’s story, Mr. Lynch’s Holiday is layered with themes far beyond the disconnected father and son. In subtle flashbacks and side plots, the novel weaves in questions about immigration that each of the characters approach differently depending on their backgrounds. O’Flynn highlights some of the inconsistencies in the ways outsiders are approached throughout the world, without preaching or losing track of the novel’s core.

Catherine O’Flynn has crafted a novel rich with connections and nostalgia, written with a breadth of life experience and filled with endearing characters. For those seeking an entertaining but fulfilling read, Mr. Lynch’s Holiday is a trip well worth taking.
See more at: http://www.rivercityreading.com show less

Dermot, the retired and recently widowed bus driver from Birmingham, takes two weeks holiday to visit the son he's never been close to, Eamon, at his home by the sea in Spain. Eamon doesn't realize his father's even coming to visit because his despondency since his wife suddenly left him has him ignoring all the realities of life -- including the mail.

The complex where Eamon and Laura purchased their dream escape from home was never completed, is seriously under occupied, poorly built and show more has been abandoned by its now bankrupt builder. Fortunately Dermot is a bit of a handyman and more sociable than his son and it is through Dermot that we meet the handful of other ex-pats who are also stuck in their units that no one will ever want to buy and that will likely never be finished.

I really enjoyed this story of a man and his adult son connecting for the first time in their lives. Dermot is a great character; his son less so but all too familiar. I loved the ending to the story. But (here it comes) having read O'flynn's previous two novels, What Was Lost and The News Where You Are, I must confess that this one just didn't pack the same punch as the first two. Still enjoyable, just not quite up to what I've come to expect from this author. show less