Puckoon

"Puckoon" is a comic novel by Spike Milligan, first published in 1963.

The novel concerns the troubles brought to the fictional Irish village of Puckoon by the Partition of Ireland: the new border, due to a lapse by the Boundary Commission, passes right through the village, resulting in such absurdities as the church and graveyard being in different countries (the resulting disruption to funerals, exacerbated by the border guards' insistence that all members of the funeral party "including the corpse" must have valid passports, is a major motivator for the latter part of the plot). Nearly all of the local pub is in the Republic of Ireland, but one small inglenook is in Ulster, where beer is sold at a cheaper price; consequently, all the customers keep trying to crowd into that one tiny corner of the pub.

The protagonist of the novel is the feckless Dan Milligan, a man so lazy that the author is obliged to take direct action to prevent him spending the entire novel lounging about at home; thus alerted to his status as a fictional character, Milligan spends much of the subsequent story engaged in arguments with his creator about the trouble he's been put to. At one point in the novel, Milligan stops and looks at the bottom of the page of the book to see which page he is on.

Adaptations

An abridged audio book version, read by the author, was released on LP and cassette.

A film adaptation, written and directed by Terence Ryan, was released in 2002. It starred Sean Hughes as the renamed Dan Madigan and (after Spike Milligan's poor health prevented him from taking part) Richard Attenborough as the narrator. Jane Milligan, daughter of Spike, appears in a small role.

Quotes

*"Money couldn't buy friends but you got a better class of enemy."

Influences and inspirations

In the village of Puckoon, the clock on the church steeple is stopped, always giving the same time, but (at all hours of the day) the villagers persist in reading this as the correct time. Science-fiction author F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre has stated that this idea was partly the inspiration for his "Interzone" story "Sundowner Sheila", which takes place on a planet where the sun is always directly overhead; the story's narrator (mentally defective) continually assumes that the present moment is noon.

External links

* [http://www.guerilla-films.com/puckoon/ Official web site for the film]
*imdb title|id=0276428|title=Puckoon