Charlotte Moore

The trouble with being a lie-detector

issue 29 July 2006

Novels narrated in the first person by dysfunctional adolescent boys are no rare thing. Nor is there a yawning gap in the market for novels detailing the squalor and eccentricity and thwarted dreams of life in 20th-century Ireland. I opened Carry Me Down, therefore, with a sense of weariness in advance. But I found that M. J. Hyland doesn’t deal in cliché.

The stock ingredients are all there — the school bullies, the drunken uncles, the creepy teacher, the feckless father — but the dialogue is nimble and the observations are acute. Hyland can do humour, horror and pathos all at once, as in an early scene when the show-off father fails to drown a litter of kittens. A description of the gambling grandmother slurping undercooked eggs is one of the most revolting things I’ve read for a long time. Hyland infuses all her details with meaning: a scab on the top of her hero’s head almost becomes a character in its own right.

The hero is John Egan, 11 years old but already as tall as a man.

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