Customer Reviews

The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad: A Mostly Irish Farce

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A splendid novel in every way: very funny, very inventive, and very insightful into Ireland's many problems. A variety of Irish "types" take part in a comically convoluted plot, with a biting commentator heckling from the footnotes. Perhaps even better than Boylan's first novel, "Killoyle," to which this is a sequel. Highly recommended.

In his sophisticated-yet-funny The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad: A Mostly Irish Farce, Roger Boylan proves that he listens well. It is not enough that he handles various and disparate dialects on nimble fingers (excuse the mixed-up metaphor, if you please); he invests each of his numerous characters with such well-formed, distinct patterns of speech (and thought) that adding "[name] said" and "[name] remarked" is really not necessary.

The literate reader--this book is not written at the 10th-grade level--is rewarded with fully realized settings and personalities; one might even develop a crush on one of these characters (mine is Penny Burke). And the features! Lord warrant us, what features! But no one can accuse Roger Boylan of burying the reader in overwrought overwriting. To this reader's taste, the story is evenly brilliant throughout, never tedious, never boring, always entertaining. There is a sweet spot at which richness resides, somewhat this side of opulence, and the author rubs that spot expertly, to the reader's delight.

The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad: A Mostly Irish Farce is engaging, surprising, and exceptionally well written. It is, in short, a great novel by a master of the craft. I'm glad I read it.

Hilarious--Boylan has scored another comic triumph. The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad keeps the reader reeling with dazzling displays of erudition, caustic commentary, and a constant barrage of laugh-out-loud episodes. But this is a farce with a heart; even at their most ridiculous, Boylan's characters are deftly drawn and fully human. If you think you'll finish this book without caring about the people within it, then the joke's on you.

More captivating than Boylan's Killoyle. The Olympiad has characters that are rich in their actions, preoccupations and obssessions. Boylan is witty and erudite, and his book is a treasure-trove of deliciously clever details and footnotes. There are some hysterically funny scenes you shouldn't miss. A book unlike any other. Buy it!

Very highly recommended reading, The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad: A Mostly Irish Farce is a rollicking roller coaster of a novel by Roger Boylan and set in the days leading up to the Pint-Pulling Olympiad in the town of Killoyle, Ireland. A cross-dressing church sexton, a drunk who loses his job as a car tester and sues for wrongful termination, unemployment seminar hosts who sell missiles to the IRA on the side, and other memorable characters populate the pages of this engaging and topsy turvy tale with surprises hiding around every corner.

I am not quite finished this book - it's taking a while because I keep putting it down to laugh. The footnotes are a great addition and an entertaining read in and of themselves. Boylan's language is as fast and intriguingly unpredictable as Mick McCree's test drive. Don't know what that means? RYou'll have to read the first several pages to find out.
If you have despaired of reading a book that is both hilarious and literary, despair no more. I also recommend that you drink a pint or two while reading.

I teach comic fiction, and this is one of the funniest novels I know. It has been years since I was so sorry to see a book end. It is, however, far more than a collection of laughs. Like the work of other Irish masters from Swift and Sterne to Beckett, Flann O'Brien, Patrick McCabe, and Martin McDonagh, Boylan's novel continually blends the comic with the dark, revealing profound connections. He provides, for example, access into the minds of terrorists, from Irish ultranationalists to Basque separatists, yielding insights you will find nowhere else. His characterizations are masterful, and, like Sterne, Joyce, and Beckett, he is also a great formal innovator. I will never again consider teaching my Irish Comic Writers course without this marvelously rich novel.