The World of Tomorrow

Brendan Mathews, “The World of Tomorrow,” Little, Brown & Co., 2017, 560 pp

As I wandered through the new-book section of the library, I came upon The World of Tomorrow, a first novel by author Brendan Mathews which had some very attractive themes for me: The IRA, the 1939 World Fair, lots of Irishmen. 

The book starts out fulfilling my expectations: with Francis Dempsey, an Irishman faking his way across the Atlantic in 1939 first class as a Scottish lord. Francis has recently escaped from a Dublin prison after he was allowed, under guard, to attend the funeral for his mysterious schoolteacher father. There, he and his younger brother, Michael (enduring his own incarceration of sorts in a Catholic seminary), are abruptly sprung by a mob of their dad’s old I.R.A. pals, whom they never knew existed.

A wild ride ensues across the Irish countryside, to a safe house that turns out to be not so safe. Francis accidentally detonates the explosives inside, leaving him with a small fortune in stolen funds.  However, the explosion has deafened Michael and caused a memory loss and several inconvenient bodies.  So they set out for the States under what Francis calls “the First-Class Plan,” traveling in as extravagant a manner as possible. He appropriates the title of a highland lord from “Macbeth” and explains that he is taking the muddled Michael — now “Malcolm” — to see if a specialist in New York can do anything about his brother’s awful fox-hunting accident.

Francis’ ostensible goal is finding their older brother Martin, now a jazzman living with his family in the Bronx. They are able to reach him, all right, but for various reasons Francis continues with the First-Class Plan, setting himself and Michael up in a vast suite in the Plaza Hotel. He continues his ship-board relation with the heiress he met aboard ship.  He is particularly attracted to the way she can play a violin. 

Then Tommy Cronin, from the I.R.A., is sent by a mobster chieftain named Gavigan. Francis blabs about his heiress connection — including his promise to her family that he will introduce them to his “cousin,” the queen of England when they visit “The World of Tomorrow,” the world’s fair recently opened in Queens. Gavigan decides this is an excellent opportunity to have Francis shoot the king dead. He threatens to execute every Dempsey extant if Francis refuses, and has Cronin put him through a crash course on regicide.

Francis grimly sets about this task while his brothers remain conveniently oblivious. Martin, hired to provide the music for his sister-in-law’s wedding on the same day as the royal visit, is hoping to turn the gig into a new start for his lagging career. Michael, still fuzzy, wanders about Manhattan under the aegis of the Jewish-Czech photographer Lilly Bloch and the shade of William Butler Yeats (yes, you read that correctly).

My Notes:

Pg. 117:…she was starting to see that life was like being handed the ingredients one at a time for a meal you were supposed to make, never knowing what was next.  You might start with a chicken, a few carrots, a sack of potatoes, and think, Now we’re getting somewhere—but the next three items would be a bicycle tire, a top hat, and a bag of penny candy, and you had to figure out how to use it all. There was no chance to slip any of it into the trash, or set the hat on our head, or pretend you never saw the tire.