John Boyne - The Heart's Invisible Furies

 

Rating :5/5

 

Review:

Quite brilliant 

 

The Heart’s Invisible Furies is just brilliant. It scarcely needs another review from me, but for what its worth…

A 600-page novel about a man born out of wedlock in Ireland in 1945 and growing up gay is a description which sounds unremittingly grim and would, I admit, normally have put me off. However, a couple of strong recommendations persuaded me to try it and I’m immensely glad that I did, because it’s a wonderful read which pulled me in and kept me completely hooked. It is also full of genuine human insight, superbly drawn characters and real wit and humour alongside the inevitable sadness, rage, tragedy and bitterness.

It is a masterpiece of storytelling. We get episodes in the life of Cyril Avery at seven-year intervals, beginning with his mother’s violent humiliation at the hands of the Church and her family through to his imminent death in 2015. Cyril’s narrative voice is very engaging and there is a lovely cadence to much off the prose. The story is well outlined elsewhere, but John Boyne’s depictions of the attitudes of the times and how they may shift in some but persist in others is excellent and I found so much of it recognisable and very shrewdly portrayed, sometimes with horrifying brutality, sometimes with real poignancy and at others with laugh-out-loud wit. Much of this is due to his quite remarkable characterisation; Boyne paints his characters with extraordinary vividness but with a minimum of description, allowing them to emerge from dialogue and actions. He often achieves this is a few neat lines, much as Picasso could conjure a lifelike dog from just a few brilliant pen strokes.

I was utterly engrossed from start to finish and emerged with a sense of having learned a great deal about humanity and its lack, about the hideous hypocrisy of the Church and of many public figures, and about the nature of bigotry, of love, of forgiveness and of the possibility of redemption.

I don’t have the skill to do justice to this extraordinary book. I will just say that it is one of the best, most involving and rewarding things I have read for a very long time and that, even if you find the idea of it rather forbidding, I would urge anyone to try it. I don’t think you’ll regret it.