The title of this book is about misdirection as much as it is about anything else. It’s rife with things that do not actually happen. Pages are spent telling stories about things that might happen, or that we think may have happened – but in reality, so little does occur, until we are left wondering what else WILL happen.
The novel centers on the Barnes family. Dickie Barnes and his wife Imelda live with their two children, but their well-to-do lifestyle is quickly about to suffer because Dickie cannot keep the family luxury car business afloat amid the changing economic circumstances of the 2000s in Ireland. Teenage daughter Cass is developing an alcohol addiction while trying to finish out her final years of high school, and PJ is a 12 year old who finds himself afloat in a sea of bullies and lax parenting. No one in this family is exactly as they seem – each of the foursome have their own covert thoughts, a consciousness they will stream at us through chapters variously narrated by each.
Murray is insistent that you cannot dismiss the past, and so we delve into not only the present day but also the circumstances that led to this dismal point in their family history. Dickie and Imelda have a more complicated history together – theirs is not a simple love story, which explains much of what drives them apart in their present. Cass and PJ receive only intermittent attention from their parents, loving though they might be, and so the stakes are raised in their social relationships.
And it bears repeating – nothing is really as it seems. Willingly or unwillingly, the truth is constantly in flux.
This novel is LONG – at over 600 pages, it was intimidating to get started. I wouldn’t say that it flew by, nor would I say this is my favorite intergenerational novel this year – I think it was always pushing back, perhaps almost satirizing the genre even as it reveled in its tropes, and for me it is genuinely one of my favorite ways to explore a story, so I don’t mind when an author takes that a tad more seriously. Despite that, I do think it felt much shorter than 600 pages. It was intricately plotted, such that by the time the various strands of the story wound their way to the end I needed to KEEP READING THAT FINAL CHAPTER.
Other notes about form – this is another novel that eschews quotation marks and I just do not understand why we are doing this. I really appreciate quotation marks, I have no idea what purpose is served by eliminating them. The one thing in this novel that almost made me put it aside was that one of the four characters whose perspective we take has her chapters written WITHOUT ANY PUNCUTATION AT ALL. It was, in my opinion, a lazy way of indicating something about this woman’s character.
Overall, despite missteps, this was worth the time it took to read. So what if it made me want to throw it against the wall as I read the last few sentences? Things aren’t always what they seem.