The Heart's Invisible Furies

It's got an incredible open with 16 year old Catherine Goggin of Goleen Ireland in the year 1945. She's pregnant and brought before her church parish to be loudly denounced and violently cast out. Nonetheless, with head held high she boards a bus to Dublin and quickly finds work and a place to stay. Boyne is evocative in his language and brings Dublin to life. Part 1 ends in a riveting climax just before Catherine passes out delivering her son.

And suddenly it's 7 years later and we're introduced to a young Cyril Avery. He's the tortured son of Catherine, given up for adoption. Suddenly foregrounded it is Cyril we follow throughout his life, a gay man in Catholic Ireland where as recently as 1993 homosexuality was illegal.

Boyne catalogs a litany of perils growing up gay. Being closeted and in love with his best friend, growing up cruising back alleys with furtive rendezvous with rent boys, gay bashing, the Aids epidemic and a string of bad decisions in response. But Boyne is careful not to come off too angry or despairing and inserts, in an often jarring manner, points of levity throughout.

I'm a sucker for a cathartic ending but it is tinged with the awareness that as a reader I've been carefully manipulated to this point. You see the neatly constructed narrative framework where all the stray bits and pieces snap into place and the rough edges are buffed out. In the end I have to admit that's what I wanted.