An audio book. The father ("The chief") of the narrator Hart and his older brother, Cormick, is a potato farmer who gets sucked up in the Irish boom and bust (investing in Spanish property, etc), ending up with big debts. We meet the sons in their mid-teens. Their mother is Nora.
Cormick has an Engineering job after getting a first at Galway. The narrator's more more interested in literature - Beckett etc - and girls. At 25 he's still on the farm. Maybe he'll become "a tourguide for the potato museum".
The Chief gets terminal cancer and is thinking of committing suicide, but he wants someone to check the Bible on the subject first. When the narrator goes to the priest intending to ask about suicide, he first confesses to hating his brother. The priest responds by admitting to feeding his own brother magnets (flat ones that looked like wafers), thus perforating his intestines and killing him. I've heard that anecdote before.
They go for a final family trip to the beach. Dolly, Cormack's girfriend (but also Hart's), comes too. Cormack is involved with shady deals.
Nora stops 2 cocks that habitually fight by killing one of them.
After the assisted suicide (morphine overdose) Hart is accused of murder - the strangulation marks on his father's neck was Hart just making sure. All the family are on trial.
Hart is scared of dogs, and poisons the ones along his street so he could have a relaxing walk of freedom.
During the trial (during which all the suspects live at their homes), we learn that Nora left a nunnery and became house-keeper for a priest before she married. Hart suspects that his brother is trying to incriminate him. His mother interrupts the trial, and there's a plea-bargaining offer that depends on Hart pleading guilty for a lesser offence, the others likely to go free.
The language is entertaining, e.g. -
- "We were Russian dolls she was gathering up and fitting together like so many stock characters. Eventually she'd get to the chief who'd be the biggest figurine to keep us safe inside even if his woodworm would pass on by proximity. How easy us muck savages were to grasp, how basic our motives. It was an old sentimental story that went down like trifle, the struggle for self-hood, exorcising the individual from the mask, the inexpert, misunderstood, miserable, myth-drunk countryman, versed in obsolete statistics"
- "she was a stealthy wave I wanted to dive into, no matter if it thrashed and trampled me breathless"
Other reviews
- Catherine Taylor
- Goodreads
- Sarah Hughes (It is left to the reader to pick their way through his increasingly unreliable narration, for there is another story running parallel to his. The end is as shocking as it is inevitable. Hughes draws on inspirations from the story of Cain and Abel to John Millington Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, delivering a gut punch that both holds a mirror to Ireland’s recent past and warns of the dangers of being too in thrall to ancient history)
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