The Glorious Heresies - Lisa McInerney

As you can probably tell from the title, Lisa McInerney's The Glorious Heresies irreverently sets about demolishing a lot of the institutions and ideals that underpin a somewhat romanticised view that persists about Ireland. All the usual targets are there and are laid into with a great big hurley stick - the hypocrisy of the Catholic Church, the treatment of women and the failings of crooked politicians, but the author doesn't spare the Irish themselves or any idealised notions about the family.

Actually, as irreverent and brutal as it appears - and it does get very dark into alcoholism, abuse, drug dealing and prostitution - The Glorious Heresies is a little more subtle and colourful than it seems. It doesn't set out to rip into everyone as much as force you to evaluate people in a more realistic light and really consider the harm that has been done by those institutions that would rather wash their sins under the carpet and pretend they don't exist. Lisa McInerney allows you no such comfortable illusions.

So, no, the characters you meet in the novel aren't particularly pleasant, but they reflect another growing cross section of the community that is representative of a lot of the problems being faced in Ireland, and specifically here, Cork. All of the characters are connected around one incident, the accidental killing of an intruder in a house where Maureen's son Jimmy Phelan has put her up. The house has a history, so does Jimmy, and so does the dead man who unfortunately came to be there. The disposal of the body by Tony Cusack (who recognises the victim) opens up a whole other can of worms.

If that sounds rather grim or even like a crime thriller, it's only to draw out the deeper character that Lisa McInerney explores with a sense of dark humour, finding poetic resonance and poetic justice within it all. It's not high-flown writing either (although it's a little bit showy at the start), but completely in the tone of the subject and the flawed characters, with the romantic notions they foster and the harsher reality that they actually have to deal with in the imperfect family and social conditions that are the legacy of Ireland's mistakes in the past.

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