HEART, BE AT PEACE
DONAL RYAN
Viking Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available now
Rating: 3.75* of five
The Publisher Says: From one of the most acclaimed Irish writers today, a new novel about smalltown Ireland that explores a community on the mend and the power of love and trauma to both bring people together and divide them
“I said it before. Madness comes circling around. Ten-year cycles, as true as the sun will rise…”
In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storm of economic collapse and now look to the the jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the scars of its history, new stories have begun to unfold.
But a new, insidious menace creeps through back-alley shadows and into the lives of this community. Old grudges fester and new ones arise. Young people are lured by the promise of fast money while the generation above them tries to hold back the tide of an enemy beyond their control. And the peace of this small town is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way.
A stunning, lyrical novel told in twenty-one voices, Heart, be at Peace reveals a community that together looks to weather the storm of betrayals, secrets, and grudges that can divide families, towns, and entire generations.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.
My Review: I got a copy of Steerforth Press's hardover of Author Ryan's debut, The Spinning Heart, years ago. I was not a fan. It felt to me like a lightened up, shallowed out, misery porn oratorio. This novel-in-stories (though Viking would not like that description, stories being anathema on the US market) is the thematic and setting follow-on to the first book. It isn't really a sequel because it makes perfect sense, nuance and all, to someone who has never read the first book.
It is, I'm unsurprised to say, written in the same style as the first book, and that is not greatly to my taste. It's not incompetent, or poor, or clumsy. It just...is. For barely over two hundred pages, it's fine, unexciting but fine. Any longer, though, and I'd be mental for need of some kind of verve, some hint of passion for or prejudice against. Like this: “That was always the way in Ireland, he said. You’d be hung for robbing an apple and made king if you robbed a castle.” Or this: “That’s what young ones do once the madness starts coursing through them. It’s a dangerous place in a person’s life, that shadowy path between childhood and adulthood, and it’s pocked and hexed with all sorts of traps and trials.” Or this: “Pokey had a friend from Malta or one of those quare places who was living down near the lake, just back from the foreshore, in one of those big low houses that was built on a foundation of bribes and bullshit back in the eighties.”
No one's ever said, thought, or written that before, have they.
So I found the execution wanting, and was not excited by the extremely short chapters that change viewpoints and function as slighly underdeveloped stories. If you're telling stories making them wgolly their own thing is best...but these are interdependent fragments of a narrative, I think, so neither fish nor fowl. If this was a deliberate choice, an intentional development of storytelling, it did not hit the mark for me. Too much slid past the PoV switches for me to feel fully satisfied.
Others will disagree, and will thoroughly relish all my cavils as features. I'm not warning anyone away from a poor product; your own tastes be your guide, and Kindle up a sample to see what you think of the writing.
For me, this is my last foray into this bit of Irish literature.
