The Heart’s Invisible Furies
In a small parish in West Cork in 1945, Catherine Goggin, aged just 16, is pregnant and unmarried and with the intolerance and bigotry of Irish society in those days, that is not a good place to be. Her moral turpitude is brutally exposed by the priest in her local church, and she is violently expelled from the village. She goes to Dublin to find work and have the baby, who is the first-person narrator. When he is born, the baby is promptly handed over to nuns, who then sell him to a childless couple—Charles & Maude Avery— a rather louche and wealthy pair, with a relaxed marriage, and Cyril, as he is called, has a lonely and emotionally chilly childhood. As Cyril grows into maturity in the 1950s and early ‘60s, it soon becomes apparent that he has a big problem integrating into the regimented Irish society of the times in that he is gay. The trials and tribulations that he experiences in an intolerant Irish society are narrated in a weird combination of zany humour allied with the serious and nasty sides of such chauvinism.
This is a lengthy novel with a wide scope that covers the life and times of Cyril as a gay man in a repressed society. There’s much pathos and humour as well as episodes of violence, hatred and intolerance, and it is highly sexually explicit; it is a ribald and entertaining blend that makes for a highly readable account. However, I was perplexed by the numerous historical errors and oddities in the text, as well as some “continuity” issues, but the reader cannot be fully sure if these are mistakes made by the less-than omniscient narrator, Cyril, or whether they are just errors from the author. I rather think it is the latter.
