Irish intolerance

The title of John Boyne's 2017 novel The Heart's Invisible Furies stops you in your tracks. Does this really sound like something I want to read? What could it possibly be about? It sounds too serious, too angry, too challenging. The fact that it's 580 pages long is intimidating in itself.

I still can't decide if it's a good title or not, but I can now say it is a terrific novel, much easier to read than you might think but not so easy to grapple with.

This is the story of man's life, from birth to death. That man is Cyril Avery, who is not a real Avery, as his adoptive parents tell him repeatedly during his youth. Maude Avery, his adoptive mother, spends most of her time closed up in a room smoking cigarettes and writing novels she hopes nobody will ever read. (They do, and after her early death from cancer she becomes one of Ireland's greatest writers.) Charles Avery, his adoptive father, is a wealthy man but also a cheat, both on his wife and on his taxes.

As for his real mother and father, we read about them too. Catherine Goggin gets pregnant as a teenage girl, then is disowned by her parents and banned from the church and the town by an intolerant and hypocritical Irish priest. As this is Cyril's first-person account of his life, we know Catherine will reappear again somewhere in his story, and in fact she does several times. Their lives intersect at various points before they discover they are actually mother and son.

Irish intolerance shapes Cyril's own life, as he is a homosexual and Ireland despises homosexuals even more than it does unwed mothers, And so he must keep his heart's furies as invisible as possible, at least until he moves to Amsterdam later in his life. Before that, however, Cyril actually gets married and has a son, though not in that order. He deserts his wife immediately after the wedding ceremony, disappearing for years, leaving his bride in a country where divorce, too, is not tolerated.

If so much of the novel is about separation and distancing, Boyne eventually brings everyone together — mother and son, husband and wife, father and son, prodigal and homeland. Yes, the story is as serious as the title suggests, yet parts of it are as funny as anything P.G. Wodehouse ever wrote.