The Heart's Invisible Fury by John Boyne

A novel can be transformative, for it has the ability to condense our experience and reflect what we knew back in a way that we recognize as true while enlarging our understanding and engaging our heart.

The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne tells the life story of Cyril Avery, spanning seventy years between 1945 and 2015. It is the story of a young man growing up, a good but passive man who is not allowed to be a real son, an honest friend, who makes mistakes and survives horrible losses. In the end he discovers his true identity and is able to rectify relationships.

The story has its terrifying and violent moments. The dark humor brought out-loud laughter. And it has sorrows that brought tears to my eyes.

It is a compassionate book. It is a work which unsparingly attacks hypocrisy and double standards in society and the church. The worst people can do, the violence and hate crimes and prejudice is all revealed. As is forgiveness, understanding, and the vision of a state of being that will recompense our earthly losses.

I was totally unprepared for this book when I chose it as my Blogging for Books read. It was one of those happy accidents of a book finding its right reader.

The novel opens in Ireland at a time when the church controls social mores and with a harsh hand ferrets out illicit sexual activity, unwed teens and homosexuals especially.

Cyril Avery, 'not a real Avery' his adoptive father reminds him, was born to an unwed mother who was rejected by her family and parish. His birth came in a moment of terror. His self-absorbed adotpive parents gave him a home but no affection, yet he loved and accepted them. His childhood and university friend Julian was beautiful, brash, and self assured. Julian, like his father and like Cyril's father, was sexually promiscuous from an early age. He became the secret object of Cyril's affection, which Cyril does not reveal until the morning he was to marry Julian's sister.

"What was I even doing here? Years of regret and shame began to overwhelm me. A lifetime of lying, of feeling that I was being forced to lie, had led me to a moment where I was not only preparing to destroy my own life but also that of a girl who had done nothing whatsoever to deserve it."

I recalled a minister friend from long ago, smart and fun and capable, and his wife who like me was an English major at university. At annual conference we would met up and talk. Years passed and the wife was expecting their first child. The husband told her that he was in love with someone else and that he was gay. Our denomination would not appoint a homosexual, and to this day will not appoint a homosexual unless they are celibate. So, he had married a woman he loved deeply, and pretended to love her sexually as well. It was devastating, the wife faced with raising a child as a single mother, the husband waiting to hear if his career would be taken away. What that taught me was not to hate my friend but the evil that forced him to deny who he was, unable to live honestly and wholly.

"I can't excuse my actions," Cyril tells Julian's sister years later, "but I didn't have the courage or maturity to be honest with myself, let alone anyone else."

And I recalled another friend, a young man grappling with his sexuality during the early days of AIDS, whose self loathing and fear of family rejection kept him not only closeted but even dating. In these days, a woman told me she hated picking up a phone that had been used by another gay friend,  an otherwise intelligent woman.  Boyne's book addresses this too, as Cyril volunteers to visit AIDS victims and experiences the hatred and blame put on gays for the disease.

Near the end of his life, Cyril meets his birth mother and learns his story. "Maybe there were no villains in my mother's story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing."

His mother looks at her home village's graveyard and says, "All these people. And all of that trouble. And look, they're dead now. So what did it all matter in the end?" She wonders, "Why did they abandon me? Why do we abandon each other? Why did I abandon you?"

Why do we allow ourselves to be led into hate and violence? How can we look at a son or daughter, a friend or schoolmate, and allow some idea to alienate us, so we do not see the person we know but a vision of something frightening?

In the flawed, humane, and tempest-tossed Cyril perhaps we will recognize we are all fallen creatures tyring to just get through life, hoping for a moment's affection and love.

I received a free book through Blogging for Books in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Heart's Invisible Furies
John Boyne
Hogarth Books
$28 hard cover
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6078-6

The Good People by Hannah Kent

They were familiar with death, these valley people who shared blood and tradition and an understanding of a world moored in the old ways.

Living in brutal subsistence poverty, the folk shared dwellings with their livestock, whose butter and milk paid the rent, and walked barefoot in frigid mud to save their shoes.

They knew the Good People, the fairy folk, who must be appeased, staved off, and feared. They knew people who had been swept, taken by the Good People. The Good People, called thus so as not to offend them.

Set in 1826, in a small Irish village removed from the encroaching modern world, the people are steeped in their shared belief in herbal cures and potions, blessings and magical rituals.

Nora's daughter had married and gave birth to a son, a fair, normal child. Then her daughter became ill and was swept by The Good People; afterward, the grandchild became ill. A paralytic, shriveled, insensible child is left in Nora's care. When Nora's husband suddenly dies, the child becomes a burden, screaming and incontinent, unable to show love, but with insatiable need.

The doctor and priest tell Nora she must care for the cretin but offer no aid or consolation. She hires an impoverished girl, Mary, to care for the child. And asks for the help of aged Nance, a woman schooled in the ways of The Good People, an herbal healer.

Nora and Nance agree that the child is a changeling, and try charms to make the Good People reclaim their own and return Nora's true grandchild. Only Mary feels compassion for the child.

Under pressure from the priest to give up her heathen practice, Nance believes she needs to prove her skill and value; she needs a win. Nora is desperate for respite and, turning the child into an 'it', agrees to more desperate means, threatening harm to the boy in hope of forcing the Good People to take him back.

A dark and relentless book of a people crushed by poverty, clinging to inherited ways of trying to control their world, The Good People was inspired by a true story. The historical setting is vivid and engrossing. The land and the society are beautifully drawn. Kent gives Nance a true love of nature's beauty, even as she live in lonely filth and pain. We enter her mind, learn her backstory, and understand her world.

Nora's grief over her husband's death and the loss of her daughter feeds into her rejection of the child. The Christian priest admonishes Nora to "blind yourself no longer to the sin of pagan delusion." And yet she still hopes to find her grandson returned, unable to separate superstition from science. We cannot approve of Nora's wish, but we understand what brought her to the crisis.

This is not a fast reading, plot driven book, but a character study of a time and a people. There is propulsion to know how the end plays out.

I found myself reflecting on how our world paradigm limits our understanding. Conflicts worldwide are rooted in tribal or religious values coming into conflict with each other or with modern 21st c worldviews.

If a parent does not believe in vaccinations because of religion--or fake news-- and their child dies of a preventable disease, should they be culpable for the child's death? Was Jim Henson's death of a preventable disease a suicide because he refused treatment based on his religion?

This past week the news reported a local doctor performed genital surgery on seven-year-old girls. We consider it mutilation. In spite of education reforms and making it illegal, the ritual persists. It is a cultural norm in African societies, including Muslim, Christian, and Ethiopian Jews. Some say the girls accept it as a part of being a woman. Today I read in the newspaper women's accounts of the horror and pain they endured.

What we believe is not rational. It never has been based on science or logic. Does it exonerate us for the harm we inflict out of our best intentions?

Hannah Kent offers us The Good People, the imagining of a historical event. May it open our eyes.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Good People
Hannah Kent
Little, Brown & Co.
Publication Date: Sept 19, 2017
$27.00 hardcover
ISBN:9780316243964

Grace by Paul Lynch: The Story of a Girl Surviving The Great Hunger

2 million people died in The Irish Potato Famine when blight destroyed three years of potato crops between 1845 to 1851.

In his novel Grace, Paul Lynch recreates Ireland during the famine. The writing is gorgeous, the protagonist, Grace, memorable, the descriptions of what she experiences while on the road crushing.

Think of a journey story set in a Dystopian world, such as The Road by Cormac McCarthy. Consider that the story is history, that the starvation, despair, disease, and the ever-present threat of death are historical.

Realize that government and the wealthy could have alleviated the suffering. It is a disturbing realization of how those of means and comfort justify their selfish self-interest. Then consider the great need in the world today, in America, in your own hometown, and know that nothing has really changed. We still turn a blind eye and hold to 'truths' about self-reliance and just deserts.

Grace's mother provides a cottage for her children through an arrangement with Boggs, who visits her as payment for his largess. But as Grace nears puberty, Boggs notices the girl. One night Grace is roused and her mother shears off Grace's hair and orders her to dress in men's clothing. The next day her mother insists she eats a rare meal of meat and orders her out of the house to find work as a man, hopefully to return with full pockets.

Confused and unwilling, Grace hangs around and is joined by her younger brother Colly. Colly instructs Grace on manliness, how to smoke a pipe to damp the hunger, and his chatter fills the void. They seek out empty huts or animal sheds for shelter, shivering in the cold. After an accident takes Colly, his voice and comments are still heard by Grace, become a part of her, and she answers back in whispers.

Grace journeys from town to town, picking up work where she can. She mimics men's behavior while noticing the swelling of her breasts. She passes through villages where the starving hawk their shreds of clothing and emaciated children stand listless. She finds herself with rough company, thieves, men who have detected her sex and follow her, and finally Bart, who becomes her protector.

"This is no way to live."

Bart and Grace travel across the country, to people and places from his past, hoping to find work, to learn there is nothing left of the Ireland he had known.

"Don't you see what is going on around you? The have-it-alls and well-to-doers who don't give a fuck what happens to the ordinary people," Bart tells Grace. "The people are living off hope. Hope is the lie they want you to believe in. It is hope that carries you along. Keeps you in your place. Keeps you down. Let me tell you something. I do not hope. I do not hope for anything in the least because to hope is to depend on others. And so I will make my own luck. I believe there are not rules anymore. We are truly on our own in all this." And at the last, "The gods have abandoned us, that's how I figure it. It is time to be your own god."

Grace is nearly dead when she is rescued by a disturbed religious cult leader, then must find the strength to escape her rescuer. She returns to find her family home deserted. The book ends with Grace, age nineteen, the famine over, pregnant and living with a man she trusts, with hope for the future.

Lynch has accomplished something remarkable in this historical novel, for he not only has created a memorable protagonist and a story of growing up, not only a vivid picture of Ireland during The Great Hunger, but he has given readers a book that raises our awareness of suffering and how, in the past and in the present, every one of means who turns away is responsible.

I found this one of the most memorable novels I have read this year.

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Grace
by Paul Lynch
Little, Brown & Company
Publication July 11, 2017
$26 hard cover
ISBN: 9780316316309

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue

The Wonder by Emma Donoghue immersed me into another world, an almost claustophobic closed society, reduced to one room, one patient, and little outside interaction.

An English nurse trained under Florence Nightengale during the Crimean War, Lib is hired for an unusual two week position in a poor Irish village. The village still bears the scars of the potato famine, windowless and deserted cottages ovegrown with vegetation, hungry women and children huddled in the rain.

Lib's scientific training is to be utilized in objective observation of eleven-year-old Anna who stopped eating on her last birthday four months previous. A committee has hired Lib and a nun to watch Anna every minute, in shifts, to verify that the child truly has not been eating.

The villagers are ardent Roman Catholics who along with their prayers and rosary continue to adher to local folklore, setting out saucers of milk for the wee folk. Anna's physician hopes he is watching a new level of human evolution that portends the end of starvation and war. Others believe they are watching a miracle. Very few recognize the signs of starvation.

Lib doubts what she is seeing, knows the girl must be participating in a hoax. An unbeliever, Lib distains the pious Catholicism of Anna and her community. As Lib watches Anna decline in bodily health she comes to see the girl's deep intelligence and learns that the child is willing to die if it means she can save her deceased brother from purgatory.

Good nurses follow rules, but the best know when to break them Lib decides, and with the help of
Byrne, a newsman lured by a story, she decides to break all the rules she has been taught, becoming personally involved with Anna and altering her fate. To do nothing is the deadliest sin, Byrne had told her.

This is the first time I have read Donoghue. It is a masterfully crafted novel. The novel has subtle details that place it in time. The Crimea War and Great Potato Famine are recently past. Lib reads Charles Dicken's magazine All the Year Round and George Eliot's Adam Bede. Byrne's history as a journalist reminds that while Ireland starved Parliment stood silent. Lib is allowed to slowly grow in her understanding of what she is observing, struggling with issues of faith and the nature of her professional role. Perhaps the ending is too neat, but it is gratifying wishfullfillment. We come to admire Lib and Anna captures our hearts.

The story was inspired by the stories of Fasting Girls over the centuries.

I received a free ebook from the publisher in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.



The Wonder
Emma Donoghue
Little, Brown, and Company
Publication Date: Sept 20, 2016
$27 hard cover
ISBN:9780316393874