The Outside Boy
Young Christy Hurley is a traveller, a Pavee gypsy, who migrates with his father and extended family around Ireland in the late 1950s. The guilt he carries for killing (he is told) his mother when he was born burdens not only him, but prohibits the whole family from settling down even long enough for Christy and his cousin to get any sort of education or to prepare for their first communion, stretching an even wider gulf between them and the settled folk. When Christy’s grandfather dies, the boy takes on yet more guilt when he talks his cousin into setting the old man’s soul free by burning it in his caravan. On the blowing smoke, an article cut from an old newspaper comes to Christy’s hand. He sees it as a message from the dead and realizes the woman in the picture holding a baby next to a strange man must be his mother. When Christy’s father makes one more attempt to settle briefly in order to put the boys in school, Christy, a self-taught reader whose favorite book is The Hobbit, finally has the tools to begin to unravel the mystery of the woman in the photo.
Some of the greatness of Angela’s Ashes dampens these pages, maybe as much as is possible for an author for whom this is fiction, not memoir. Beautifully crafted scenes and characters keep the pages turning. If I had a complaint, it would be that I would have liked more to have been done with the travellers’ skill as animal healers after that first great punch of the grandfather calling on Christy’s help in the difficult births of twin colts. Maybe in the sequel?
