The Coming of Age of a Character and a Country

I really do read novels that are not about dysfunctional Irish families, though you might not think so, given my last review, posted five months ago, of Lisa McInerney's The Glorious Heresies. Actually, both that novel and the one I'm reviewing today are equally about dysfunctional families and a dysfunctional country, Ireland, the country of many of my ancestors, a country of great beauty and great suffering, much of it at the hands of the Church.

The Heart's Invisible Furies, by John Boyne (author of The Boy in Striped Pajamas) is dedicated to John Irving, and there is more than a bit of Irving, and Dickens too, in this sprawling saga of Cyril Avery, who tells his story first from inside the womb of his unwed, sixteen-year-old mother in 1945 and then at seven-year increments until 2015. It's Cyril's wonderfully idiosyncratic, comic-tragic voice that carries the reader along on a mostly pleasurable journey, though many awful things do happen.

The novel begins with the horrifying expulsion of Cyril's mother from her local church, and the village as well, by a hypocritical, thunderously self-righteous priest who, we learn, has fathered two children himself. The villagers, including Catherine's own family, look on in passive, fearful obedience, an attitude encouraged by the Church in Ireland for most of Cyril's life. Catherine makes her way to Dublin, where she is taken in by a couple of young gay men, one of whose father beats him to death for his "perversion." Catherine gets a job and gives her child up for adoption by the Averys, an odd couple who seem to lack all parental instincts but are likable enough in their own peculiar ways, and Cyril grows up in affluent surroundings, though he is reminded over and over again that he isn't really an Avery, and he quickly learns to refer to Maude and Charles by their first names and to introduce them to others as his adoptive parents. He also realizes he is gay, and remains closely closeted, even from his best friend, Julian, with whom he falls deeply in love at the age of seven.

This sense of being an outsider even at home - though in emotional terms it's not much of a home - leads Cyril to construct a completely private interior life, but it also makes him a sharp observer of those around him who, as he grows older, come to include a large cast of supporting characters including some noted real Irish people, like the writer Brendan Behan, who appears in a particularly entertaining episode in a pub.

Cyril does try his luck at heterosexuality; he's not very good at it and his attempts have tragic consequences for the young women involved, one indirectly and one directly. These young women, like most of the characters, are well and sharply drawn, with humor and often great compassion. It is the humor that makes the book a joy to read, especially the first half, even though much of the plot is tragic or at least unpleasant. However, Cyril's coming of age mirrors that of his country, which finally legalized gay marriage in 2015, and Boyne's representation of Ireland and the poisonous influence of the Catholic Church, which inveighed against individual sin while it was, itself, mired in hypocrisy, cruelty, and corruption, is brilliant.

A little past halfway I found my patience with Cyril's narration growing thin, though, and I skipped to the last page, where I was gratified to find that he does achieve his long-sought-for happy ending.

I received a review copy of this book in return for a thoughtful (I hope) and honest review.

Dark, Daring, Delicious

Forget about the clean, green, bucolic valleys and hills of Ireland's countryside. The Glorious Heresies, Lisa McInerney's debut novel and winner of the 2016 Baileys Women's Prize for fiction, focuses on the gritty underbelly of post-Celtic Tiger Ireland. The inner-city Cork the characters occupy is tough, irreverent, and grim, but it has its darkly comic side as well, splendidly rendered in McInerney's exuberant, lilting, and profane prose.

Some reviewers say the novel begins with a murder, but technically, when grandmother Maureen Phelan clocks an intruder on the head with a tacky religious tchotchke, it's more a case of self-defense, or at worst manslaughter. Maureen calls in her fearsome gangster son Jimmy to dispose of the body, he involves Tony, a ne'er-do-well former schoolmate, and the repercussions of Maureen's act ultimately connect not only Maureen, Jimmy, and Tony, but also Jimmy's teenage son Ryan and sex worker Georgie, who's half-heartedly trying to escape her trade and her drug habit through religion.

The dwindling power of the Catholic Church in Ireland, along with its cruel legacy with regard to unwed mothers (as shown in the film The Magdalen Sisters) provide much of the foundation to The Glorious Heresies. The moral gap left by the fading of religion is described by one of the characters: "There's nothing there. No confessor, no penitent, no sin, no sacrament. Just actions to be burned away." For many in the book, that gap is filled by alcohol, drugs, and violence. There's not much to be had by way of redemption, but McInerney's narrative genius, tough gallows humor, and the absolute pleasure she offers in her use of language make it a novel well worth savoring. Lisa McInerney is indeed a glorious new talent.

Another American Epic We Know Little About

When I was very young, we watched Broken Arrow on television. I had never heard of the Apache Wars and had only heard the name "Geronimo" when some kid yelled it while jumping off the high dive at the public pool. But I knew that Tom Jeffords the honest Indian agent and Cochise the noble chief were friends because they were both good guys. Decades later, I'd venture to say most Americans don't know much more than that. Here in Tucson, we live in what was called Apacheria, I've hiked Cochise Stronghold in the Chiricahua Mountains, and I've generally felt at least somewhat knowledgeable about some of the region's history. But Paul Andrew Hutton's The Apache Wars: The Hunt for Geronimo, the Apache Kid, and the Captive Boy Who Started the Longest War in American History has been a real eye-opener.

It was the lengthy subtitle that caught my attention. I didn't know much about the "longest war," which lasted from 1861 to 1890, or anything about either the Apache Kid or Mickey Free, the captive boy who would grow up to become a legendary Apache scout, moving back and forth between Natives and whites, useful to both sides but not quite trusted by either.

Hutton is a highly respected historian and the book is packed with fascinating and informative anecdotes. I couldn't count how many times I said to myself, "Wow! I did not know that!" about something that I really thought I should have known, especially since I wrote my dissertation on representations of the frontier, much of it in relation to captivity narratives, those stories of settlers, mostly women, captured by Indians and living for various lengths of time among them. But Hutton is more than an academic expert whose work is grounded in phenomenal amounts of research; he is a remarkable storyteller who brings his characters to life, not as cardboard cutouts or names to be memorized for multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank test questions, but as real, complex, sometimes contradictory individuals, with real, logical reasons for their actions, which were largely motivated by understandable grief and vengeance, and/or greed.

People have been talking a lot about empathy recently, and about the value of reading good fiction because it helps us to develop empathy, and I completely agree with that assessment. History, if it's fairly presented and well told, can certainly have the same effect, and this book, which is much more than information, which is often heartbreaking and/or horrifying, clearly illustrates this point.
I received a review copy of The Apache Wars from bloggingforbooks.com in exchange for an honest review. I recommend it to anyone who's interested in American history at a deeper, messier, more real level than the superficial and self-serving nationalism so many of us were taught in school.

Sometimes Good Enough Is Good Enough

I'd describe June by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore as a vacation book: not too demanding or deep, with a good-sized cast of characters representing a fairly large cross-section of entertaining stereotypes, with a plot that's complex enough to keep the reader turning pages. I read it in a couple of days when I was feeling fairly miserable with spring allergies and it kept me entertained and occasionally surprised, and I do like surprises in novels. That said, I probably won't recommend it to the more literarily snobbish of my friends. I read it because I received a free copy from Blogging for Books in exchange for an honest review; pickings were slim at the time and this tale of hidden passions, unexpected inheritance, and scandalous movie stars seemed like the most interesting thing on offer. If it's ever made into a movie, I'll go see it. But I won't expect Shakespeare, and you shouldn't either.

The story begins in a neglected mansion, Two Oaks, where the heroine, Cassie, is hiding out from the world following the death of her grandmother June and a break-up with an artist boyfriend who could just as well have been left out of the story for all he adds to it. Two Oaks itself is represented as sentient in the early pages, which seems like it might promise some Haunting of Hill House-type thrills, but the house-as-character idea gets dropped abruptly when Cassie, who's been letting the mail pile up by the front door, finally answers the doorbell to learn she's inherited the entire multi-million-dollar estate of a recently-deceased movie star who made a movie in her hometown when Grandma June was a young woman.

Did June and Jack Montgomery have an affair all those years ago, and is Cassie really Jack's secret granddaughter? Jack's two daughters don't want to believe it, so they show up to demand a DNA sample, and wind up moving in, along with a couple of personal assistants, and taking over Two Oaks. That's not such a bad thing, since one of the assistants actually cleans the place up, and her uninvited houseguests get Cassie to stop drinking so much and start eating better. The unrealistic extended visit basically serves as a narrative device to let the possible relatives get to know each other and to allow time for extended flashbacks to the time June and Jack spent together.

It works pretty well. Cassie herself isn't very interesting, but her houseguests liven things up in the chapters set in the present, and the story of Jack and June is enlivened by June's tomboy friend Lindie, who facilitates their romantic assignations. If many of the other characters seem rather flat - the greedy, manipulative small-town developer, the neurotic, manipulative actress (there's more than one of those), for example - well, that's often the case in books like this. The plot keeps moving until the final revelation, and even after that, to a heart-warming conclusion that I liked at the same time that the more critical side of me couldn't help saying, "Oh, this is kind of sappy. But what the hell. It's nice." The author even allows the house a brief return to sentience at the end, to round things off. You know, like in those writing classes where the teacher told you to tie things up with a reference to the introduction. And it's okay. Not great, but not bad, and sometimes that's good enough.