Evenings & Weekends
Despite being packed with characters and set over a single weekend, nothing about Oisín McKenna’s Evenings and Weekends feels gratuitous or dense. A beautifully paced book, it provides a salient portrayal of contemporary life for a generation of adults facing roaring heat, a housing crisis, and the elixir of London’s promise. The character’s tumultuous lives encapsulate existence at the periphery of one’s twenties, standing at a crossroads somewhere between carefree party-hopping and casual sex, to the realities of pregnancy, marriage, falling in love and forgoing creative aspirations for the sake of financial stability.
Like a weekend full of potential, London is a city steaming with promise. Having recently spent some time in East London, McKenna’s visceral descriptions felt alive for me in both a physical sense and an intangible one.
“I feel like living in London is like being on the constant verge of an orgasm but never being able to cum. Do you know what I mean? It’s not that you’re not turned on. It’s not that you aren’t having a lovely time. But something deep down inside your body won’t allow for it no matter how hard you try.”
That constant sense of life left unrealised transcends the energy of London, consuming a generation of young people so overwhelmed by what they could choose to do, they fail to choose anything at all.
A whale beached at Bermondsey Beach goes viral, acting as a comical motif for the environmental crisis and the desensitised relationship we’ve developed towards it. An incident surreal enough to make the cut in today’s unpredictable reality, the bleeding whale becomes a focal point for each character to reflect upon, acting as a red thread in this series of interwoven stories.
I haven’t read a book before that felt like such an immediate reflection of my own life and the lives of my family and peers around me. Each character embodied something I saw either within myself or someone close to me, and the exploration of our modern lives was as evocative as it was delightful.
