THE FENIAN

ON the face of it, The Fenian is a simple, old-fashioned love story. Boy meets girl, they fall for each other, the path of love doesn’t run smoothly, blah blah blah. But it is much more than that. The Fenian is about the joy and despair of growing up in a place with no history. It is about the ripple effect – how a few words can define and blight whole lives. It is about the shadow of sectarianism. It is about being given a second chance against the odds. At the heart of the tale are Lorna and Robert, lovestruck teenagers convinced it’s the real thing in a Scottish new town in the 1970s, an era of hot pants and love beads, Kojak and Monty Python, The Exorcist and Blazing Saddles. But the couple are torn apart – perhaps forever – when Lorna’s dying mother makes her promise she will never marry anyone from the other side of the religious divide. The couple go their separate ways but unexpectedly come back into each other’s lives 25 years later when their long-buried feelings for each other bubble to the surface. As they edge towards a possible reconciliation, Lorna’s recollections introduce a cast of unforgettable friends and foes. They include rock-solid Big Paddy, dirty Kirsty, cursed heart-throb Ross, born-entertainer Jo and trainee psychopath Dano. Amidst the concrete warrens, underpasses and each other’s bedrooms, they discover love and loss, loyalty and betrayal, sex and booze, triumph and tragedy. And all to a soundtrack that shifts from glam pop to prog rock to punk, with major events like the Ibrox Disaster, the three-day week and the birth of Thatcherism in the hazy background of their fledgling lives. The action swings between the 1970s and the start of the new millennium – a very different world of Blair’s Britain, terrorism, the advent of social media and new screen heroes like Phil Mitchell, Shrek and Tony Soprano. With their lifelong mutual pal Big Paddy as reluctant go-between, Lorna and Robert face up to the biggest question of their lives: What if you got the chance to put right your biggest regret?