(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Thanks to the many loud and shouty tentacles of the digital age, it’s usually the case that when something happens to someone, we know about it.
Or, at the very least, we have the potential to know about it.
Hence, we hear celebrities celebrating their good deeds or influencers spuriking the virtues of a product or experience and even ordinary people marking the fact that something big and wonderful has happened in their lives or they have done of something of real note.
But happens to the quiet people of the world, people who, says Rónán Hession, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul in an interview with The Irish Times, “‘don’t push themselves to the front’ and are often either simplified or, worse, rendered grotesque in literature'”.
Further he notes 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.'”
The beauty of Leonard and Hungry Paul is that titular quiet people of the book are given a clean and clear voice, and even more importantly, given the time to live their lives out in fornt of us without any adornment and with the simple quiet rhythms of their life to keep us company.
It turns out that this quiet observance of peoples’ lives can yield rich and emotional impactful results, with both characters given the narrative time and air to simple be and to then work their way into our hearts.
Had Leonard been a different type of person he might have gone to the pub to meet some friends for an evening of darts, dominoes, cards or other prison games, but nothing made him feel lonelier these days than the thought of spending time in the company of extroverts. It is at times like this that we find out who our true friends are, or in Leonard’s case, we call upon our only friend. And so, to avoid or fill that stale chapter of the evening, Leonard had made it a habit to take refuge in the company of Hungry Paul.
There is a beautiful cadence to Leonard and Hungry Paul which may come from the fact that Hession is also a popular musician in Ireland and has an existing gift for the patterns and sounds of life, but I also suspect it’s because he has had the time to witness life lived in the quiet moments and writes of what he knows.
To be honest, most of life doesn’t take place in a social media, self promotional glare – you could be forgiven for thinking that of course with the unceasing torrent of opinions and articles and short videos coming our way on a minute-by-minute basis.
But the truth is that for most people, if not all of them – yes, even influencers and other self promoters have an excess of moments lived away from the glare of digital megaphoning – the everyday is experienced in moments that no one notices but the person at the heart of the moment and its true impact is often also not readily apparent.
This becomes apparent in the life of Leonard, who is best friends with Hungry Paul, when he meets a bright and sparkling woman at work with whom he has a real connection; for him it is lifechanging and while the path to true love is not exactly smooth, much of it happens out of the glare or care of other people, underlining the fact that for many of us, and especially for the quiet people of the world, this is how it always is.
(courtesy West Cork Music (c) Ger Holland Photography)
Tender, charming, witty and thoughtfully insightful, Leonard and Hungry Paul celebrates the people who fly under the radar and who because of their camouflaged status in as stridently “LOOK AT ME!” world, are dismissed as not achieving as much as everyone else or falling through the cracks to the point where they are accused of failing at life.
That happens to Hungry Paul who at 30 still lives with his parents and who doesn’t work much at all, save for a few days at the post office a month and occasional volunteering stints with his lovely mother (both his mother and father are delightfully grounded people who don’t begrudge Hungry Paul’s presence in the family home but who are ready for the next stage of their life, though their not sure what that is exactly).
He is seen by his high achieving sister Grace, with whom he is close, as a failure of sorts, as impinging on his mum and dad and failing to go and do the stuff that adults are routinely supposed to do.
But as it turns out, Hungry Paul is making his way through life and some quite wonderful, if typically quirky things do happen to him by the end of the novel, and Leonard and Hungry Paul makes the necessary point that simply because he’s not marching to the beat of the world’s drum doesn’t mean his life doesn’t have value or that it’s not progressing as it should.
Hungry Paul had been in to see Mrs Hawtorn earlier that week. She had been asleep for several days and was not getting better. He had stayed with her for over an hour, holding her hand and enjoying the silence for both of them.
He and Leonard, who is gainfully employed as a children’s encyclopedia writer but is struggling to work out a way forward in the weeks following his mum’s death, are content to play board games of a night – the way Leonard is folded quite naturally into Hungry Paul’s family is a delight and a reminder of the power of selfless, uncomplicated community – and to quietly amble through life in ways that confound more type A people like Grace.
They are sweet and thoughtful and the kinds of people for whom ruthless self promotion is not even remotely a thing but as you spend time with these two quite delightful people, who seem to have life more figured (though not wholly; they’re not perfect, just very sweet) than most of the louder of the world, you see the power and purpose in simply quietly getting on with things.
You could be mistaken in the current tumult of noise coming from all kinds of angles and places, not least a certain newly-installed leader of the once leading light of the “free world”, that might is right and loudness equals worth and value.
But the truth of the matter is that that’s simply not the case, and people like Leonard and Hungry Paul prove it ways that move the heart, still the soul and remind us that while many of us move around with sound and fury thinking that signifies progress and life value, it’s the quiet people of the world who simply get things done, live their lives and who are the ones, as the back cover of the novel wonders, who might be “onto something”.