The Boy is a powerful novel of wasted talent, loss, greed and revenge – but also of discovered genius and life-affirming friendship.
By turns terrifying, taut, humane and tender it tells the origin story of Ireland’s organised-crime epidemic with a skill and grace which belies a debut novel, and is the calling-card of a ringing new voice in Irish fiction.
When the Guards knock on the door The Boy already knows his mother is dead. His father flees to the pub, leaving him to wait alone. Soon his brother Fallon, half-protector and half-outlaw, draws him into a world where grief and crime are rarely separated. At the same time, a wealthy landowner harbours grotesque secrets in the countryside – a hidden “family” of abducted boys, a nightmare lurking beneath respectability.
As The Boy moves through these fractured worlds – his father’s guilt, his uncle’s paramilitary past, his brother’s violent death – he becomes both witness and inheritor of a brutal legacy.
Think of a space where the layered complexity of Tana French meets the whipsmart dialogue and brutal beauty of Colin Barrett and the sharp tenderness and humour of Graeme Armstrong’s The Young Team – and you’re somewhere near where this novel will take you.
The Boy is a dark, lyrical crime debut. It is unflinching, propulsive, and unforgettable.
Mark Gyves is an Irish crime fiction writer. He has lived and worked in the UK and Ireland and now resides in his hometown on the outskirts of Cork.
My thoughts: I actually thought this was a black comedy, as The Boy becomes mired in death and crime in order to buy video games, pizza and trainers. He takes over his brother’s drug business with his strange friend, gets caught up with some complete nutcases and goes all out for revenge.
The world he finds himself in is full of gangsters and drug dealers, people who don’t want to know what’s going on, but also kind neighbours and loving grandmothers. His dad’s a deadbeat, but was once a genius, until he used that brilliance to improve ways of blowing people up and turned to drink, The Boy makes sure his bar tab has been paid.
It’s a weird, dark place, the underbelly of Cork and full of very odd people with nasty habits like killing people or keeping them in dungeons under their ancestral home. The Boy is smart but perhaps a bit too young and naive for the life he finds himself in.
An interesting and quite enjoyable read.
*I was kindly gifted a copy of this book in exchange for taking part in this blog tour, but all opinions remain my own.
