The playboy of the northwestern world

We think it's fair to say that there's been a significant churlish element to the Republic of Ireland's reaction to its recent status as a country experiencing net immigration. Some of our favourite insults (dosser, sponger, whinger) have been redeployed with speed to target our recent arrivals. So we need a feelgood story -- like an immigrant who settles down, preferably someplace where no-one else wants to live, and goes on to international acclaim in his chosen field.

And so it is with Peter Finlay, winner of this year's Booker Prize. Finlay lives in Leitrim, a county that became a long-lived microcosm of Ireland's post-Famine demography -- while the population of the 26 counties was finally growing again a mere 60 years after the Famine, Leitrim's population decline persisted for most of the 20th century. It was a place that people left. So doubtless they'll be delighted with the success of one of their blow-ins.

Finlay won the prize for his novel Vernon God Little, about a high school massacre in Texas -- a genre that is proving fertile ground for quasi-fiction these days (personally we think of Heathers as the definitive analysis of the phenomenon). But it's reasonable to suspect that there's an element of fiction of his own life-story. It's not like the Booker is contingent on exactly what he's done with his life -- once he meets the Commonwealth/Republic of Ireland citizenship requirement, he can proclaim, like Dr Evil, that "the details of my life are inconsequential."

But here's what he says: born in Australia, moved to Mexico when very young, somehow was an heir to a Mexican banking fortune, but was disinherited by Mexican banking nationalisation, then bounced around the world, doing drugs and losing friends, until he winds up in Leitrim and the creative output starts to flow under the pseudonym DBC Pierre. He does confess to be worried that the creditors will show up now that the word is out he has money. He shouldn't worry so much: we doubt these international creditors would last very long on those Irish roads.