"The Glorious Heresies" by Lisa McInerney (John Murray, 2015)

An audio book.

Maureen, now 59, left Ireland for London when she was pregnant. Now she's back in Cork, found by her son, Jimmy Pheelan (JP) - dealer in munitions, women, drugs. She's "crazier than a dustbinned fox". She's killed an intruder. Jimmy sorts it out.

2 15 y.olds are bunking off school. Karine is cleverer and prettier than Ryan (whose Italian mum's been dead 4 years, and whose dad is a wreck. But Ryan can play the piano!). Ryan's had distant longings. It's been 3 weeks since their first kiss. They have sex in his bedroom. Later, challenged by her, he admits blushingly in public that he loves her.

Runaway Georgie, 15, has met drug dealer Robbie, 22, "hair the colour of a muted sunset". He gets her to sleep around to pay bills. Neither is photogenic.

Chapter 5's good - almost a stand-alone piece. Ryan gets into trouble in class and is sent to the head. He has promise, think the teachers. During this narrative there are interjections of backstory - how he slept with Tara, the single mother next door; how his father hits him. Ryan's sensitive and maybe clever. He leaves home - he's 15 - Ryan's boss Dan Kane finds him an apartment.

JP had paid Tony Cusack to clear up the mess. Tony recognises the victim as Robbie O'Donovan and blurts the news to Mareen. The section about Maureen's past didn't keep my interest. She goes to confession and tries to get the priest to confess for the church's sins.

Georgie goes into rehab - a religious retreat. Ryan visits and gives her drugs. She shares it with Dave, a fellow patient who she's sleeping with. Tony is also in an alcohol rehab centre. A family therapy session is convened. Ryan goes.

2 years after Robbie's disappearance, and 6 months pregnant, Georgie turns up at Tony's house when Ryan's there. She's been told by Tara that Tony knows about Robbie. JP finds out, and plans to kill anyone who knows who the victim was - except for his mother.

Ryan appears in court. He was hoping for probation. He gets 9 month's detention (covering for his boss, Dan). During his stay Karine gets an abortion. When Ryan comes out he learns that Karine was unfaithful. Just once? He's taken up crime again, this time using violence.

Georgie has a baby, has to give it away to the father. 9 months later she leaves the Christain re-hab, breaks into Maureen's (she used to work in a brothel there). JP finds her. Maureen convinces him not to kill her.

Tony kills Tara.

Maureen stays with communes for a while. She sets her house alight, then a church.

Ryan's moved in with Jo, a musician. He sleeps with girls serially. It's now 5 years since Robbie's death. JP asks Tony to kill Georgie, who's a loose end. Ryan does the deed for him.

JP is in A & E with his mother. She has what turns out to be a sprained wrist. They talk about children. Having kids makes a gangster vulnerable. JP thinks he got the mother he deserved. Tony's in A & E too. Ryan's attempted suicide after a bust-up with Karine. JP and Tony talk. Tony thinks that Ryan has suffered from trying to get his father out of trouble, and blames JP for it.

Ryan thinks he's not good enough for Karine. In a flashback we find out that he didn't kill Georgie - he told her to go far away. Maureen is walking over a bridge when she sees Ryan about to jump. She saves him.

I guess parenthood and atonement are 2 main themes -

• There are several unwanted pregancies, dealt with in various ways.
• Bad/Good parents have bad/good children. All have hearts of gold. Parents in trouble use their kids as excuses.

Several styles - lyrical, comic, tragic, etc are held together in a sometimes contrived plot. Karine's behaviour is the most surprising. There are many cute one-liners. E.g.

• he looked jointed enough to be folded away when not in use and it wasn't often anyone had any use for him
• enough to turn all the stomachs of a cow
• she only sinned from the waist down
• dressed like a chillblained scarecrow with a face that would have reversed the course of the Grand National
• whose scent Karine had identified on her boyfriend's body after he had laid stammered clues at her feet like a cat bringing corpses to its mistress

Other reviews

• Alfred Hickling (You can’t fault McInerney for lack of exuberance, though she has a tendency to treat paragraphs like pinball machines, firing off bold, extended metaphors and letting them ricochet down the page … Such profligacy seems unnecessary when McInerney is equally capable of writing with great clarity and economy … Yet the energy level flags in the final third of the book, as the characters keep repeating the same patterns of behaviour to less compelling effect.)
• lonesomereader
• Joseph O'Connor (The book is, in part, an atonement story, and it becomes morally complex and gripping in a more sophisticated way … It’s a hard book to pigeonhole because it does so many things, nearly all of them very well. There is, for example, a beautifully conveyed account of a teenage love affair, written with honesty, warmth and immense heart. It’s rare that the intensity and sexuality of teenage life are written about at all in fiction, and rarer for it to be done with such empathy.)
• Kirkus reviews
• Sarah Tinsley (In places, the plot didn’t quite manage to pull things along, and I found myself losing focus on where the characters were. This is perhaps because some of their actions were repetitive, although the repeating of errors is something important to show in them, perhaps a clearer contrast could have been made. The other area of confusion was the time lapses. At points we jump ahead a few months, or even a year or two, which isn’t made entirely clear.)
goodreads