Sean escaped from Belfast, going to Liverpool to study English Literature. Now he's back in an environment of hardship and hopelessness. He works in a dead-end job for low wages, lives rent-free in a building due to be demolished, steals from the supermarket, cheats taxi drivers and does what he must to get by. He also takes drugs and gets drunk to cope with the depressing bleakness of his life and his future.
Then, during a party, he assaults another young man and he is charged with assault.
The story charts Sean's precarious life. He wants to be a writer but his encounters with the arty-farty student crowd leave him feeling alienated. Temptation is ever present: his friends encourage him to take drugs and, given his prospects, why wouldn't he? Why shouldn't he call in sick? And the aftermath of the Troubles, when terrorists and paramilitaries shot and bombed, is still around.
It's a bleak world and Sean's future seems gloomy. I empathised with him almost immediately and then spent a lot of this book hoping he would behave himself and fearing he wouldn't. There were so many opportunities for him to fail. This made it a powerfully absorbing but sometimes gruelling read.
Selected quotes:
- "Silences hung like curtains around her." (Ch 11)
- "Only a few years before,I had watched her trail Debbie Porter by the hair across the pavement and punch her over and over again until she screamed for Mairead to stop. Now she was smiling along to the poems being read by a woman who had translated Catullus." (Ch 12)
- "She was a vegan. At least, she ordered a vegan meal, and I didn't know why anybody would do that to themselves if they weren't." (Ch 20)
- "It was one of those hugs that asks a lot of the other person." (Ch 20)
- "That leathery look had aged him, and dyeing your hair will only take you so far when you look like a handbag." (Ch 21)
December 2023; 278 pages
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