Carry Me Down [Kindle Edition]

"This is writing of the highest order." This is how JM Coetzee describes Carry Me Down. So, it is with high expectations that I started reading M.J. Hyland's latest offering - and at the end of the book I emerged astonished, puzzled, bewildered, and deeply disturbed.

Few pages into the book, and you wonder if this is another coming-of-age offering similar to David Mitchell's latest offering; the somewhat simple, yet brilliantly devious prose reminded me of Ali Smith's brilliant novel, the Accidental. However, continue reading, and you realise that this is no ordinary tale. It is meant to haunt the reader long after he or she finishes reading it.

Narrated by the almost 12-year old boy, John Egan, Carry Me Down offers little but the complicated lad's view of the story. He, his beautiful mother and his jobless father all live with John's paternal grandmother at her place in Gorey, Ireland. Much of the second half of the book takes place in Dublin, where the family moves after a nasty spat between John's father and his grandmother.

However, the theme of the story lies in what the boy claims is his extraordinary ability to "detect lies." The lazy reader who likes to have an informed opinion by just reading the jacket of the book might assume that the boy indeed does have a gift. But, Hyland offers little in the way, despite the "apparent" (and I stress the word apparent) experimental successes John demonstrates - particularly, when it comes to revealing his father's extramarital affair, although I'm not convinced, if indeed that is the case.

In any event, while Hyland delicately entagles John's complicated personality, several more disturbing events ensue, and the reader can be forgiven for sympathising with the disturbed, unusually tall adolescent with homosexual feelings (although this, thankfully, was paid only the attention that was due, without providing channels for the tabloids to exploit the angle). Although I would be surprised if a reader emerged sympathising with John at the end.

This is an intensely emotional psychological drama, which when given the benefit of imaginative interpretations, can be as real as your eyes reading this review, or as unreal as a graphic dream in which you dream of reading this review. Either way, you'd have a remarkable book by a remarkably talented writer.

The Booker 2006 seemed to include a couple of books on each of several themes. James Robertson's The Testament of Gideon Mack and Andrew O Hagan's Be Near Me both dealt with ministers who are ultimately disgraced and ostracised by their communities. Similarly, both David Mitchell's Black Swan Green and M.J.Hyland's Carry Me Down are tales of the troubled growing up of boys.

This is pretty much all they have in common, though. While Mitchell's book seemed conventional when compared to his earlier work, its chronological narrative structure allowed the reader to fall head-first into the protagonist's life. Hyand's novel is altogether more unsettling and fractured. It follows a period of time in the life of eleven year-old John Egan, an awkwardly tall and introverted only child who starts the book off living with his parents in his paternal grandmother's house in Gorey, Co. Wexford. Ostensibly, events involve his schooldays and his family's move to Dublin, but the main subject of the story is not only external events but also the internal workings of John's mind and his sometimes fraught relationship with each of his parents and with his grandmother. John is an obsessive child with a penchant for repeatedly reading successive copies of the Guinness Book of Records. He is determined to make himself famous by exploiting what he sees as his gift for detecting lies. The irony is that his original intention of purifying his family life by exposing lies ends up leading to strife.

Hyland evokes well the introversion of an only child and the sometimes suffocating atmosphere in his home. The lightning quick mood changes that can lead to stressed parents snapping or lashing out verbally, and that plunge children into bewilderment and make them feel rejected, are deftly described. There is a vivid and disturbing account of a bully in John's school in Gorey and the tale of what happens to his only friendship is moving. Yet for all his vulnerability, John is no saint - although he wishes his classmates would show a little more tolerance and his parents would only speak the truth, he himself is repulsed by his grandmother's disgusting eating habits and is not averse to fibbing when it suits him.

Carry Me Down is a strange book. Much of it feels disjointed - numerous separate domestic incidents that don't coalesce to form a cohesive story. Many of these incidents themselves are trivial in the extreme. Yet perhaps this is the intention - the overriding sensation on reading this book is one of unease. The vile life led by empoverished Dubliners living in towerblocks in the early seventies leaks out of every page, every small domestic occurrence. And more tumultous events occur too, almost with the inevitability of a train speeding inexorably along a track. The whole is a sometimes disspiriting but always fascinating semi-voyeuristic peek into the life of an ordinary disadvantaged family and an insight into the circumstances that can trigger catastrophe. The reader is left wondering at the end whether John Egan achieves happiness or not, and the fact that we care is testament to the reality of the portrayal of this lonely boy.

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At first, John Egan seems a normal enough twelve year-old, but as the novel develops, we are enabled to explore a rare kind of psycholgical abnormality, although it is not until near the end that this becomes really apparent. The narrative device of using the present simple tense is used by the author to take us inside the boy's mind as he observes the world around him, and although there is plenty of action, this is what the the novel is really concerned with.

John becomes obsessed with the truth or falsehood of what others are telling him, and comes to believe that he has a unique gift for detecting lies. This obsession has tragic consequences for his parents' marriage, and leads to an enthralling climax.

I enjoyed the atmosphere of Dublin and the Irish countyside created by Hyland and much of the characterization is convincing, but some of the realism is not for the over-sensitive.