The Glorious Heresies

The author's bio from the overleaf:

Lisa McInerney is from Galway and is the author of the award-winning blog 'Arse End of Ireland'. The Irish Times has called her 'the most talented writer at work in Ireland today'. Her mother remains unimpressed.

One assumes that McInerney's mother was finally impressed when her daughter won the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for The Glorious Heresies, her first novel. And she ought to be: this book is profane and profound, a gritty and twisted tale of the underbelly of Cork city, Ireland. The characters are real and human, the plot is engaging and artfully revealed, and with just the right amount of deadpan Irish quippery, even the most tragic of scenes is imbibed with black comedy. I loved this book, and as it's the last of the 2016 Bailey's Prize shortlist that I was able to find and read, I'd agree with the jury that it's the best of a fine lot of books: what an exciting new voice for fiction McInerney is. 

Ah for feck’s sake altogether. Another religious mother. You’d have to ask yourself what’s wrong with this country at all that it can’t stop birthing virtuous ould bags.

The Glorious Heresies starts with a murder: a defenseless old woman is surprised in her home by a burglar, and after she brains him with a gaudy religious artefact – her Holy Stone – she calls in her son to clean up the mess. The son, Jimmy, is particularly well-suited to the task: not only is he the kingpin of Cork's criminal element (and therefore has the connections to make this little mistake go away), but since the house he has set up his estranged Mammy in used to be one of his brothels, Jimmy has his own reasons for not involving the Gardaí. 

Small houses. Small sanctuaries. Small lives. The city runs on the macro, but what's that, except the breathing, beating, swallowing, sweating agonies and ecstasies of a hundred thousand little lives.

The genius of The Glorious Heresies is the way that McInerney repeatedly takes three steps forward and then one step back: a dead man on the kitchen floor needs to be cleaned up, but he's just a wasted away junkie; no great loss to the world. But wait: we later learn that he had parents and a girlfriend (and a selfless motive for breaking into that house), and suddenly he's a real person, and no matter how much time passes, this girlfriend – a street whore with “a face like a slapped arse and an arse like a bag of Doritos” – won't stop asking questions, revealing the web of connections that ties everyone together. Or, we meet an alcoholic widower who beats his oldest son bloody on a regular basis, and just when you write him off as a nasty and useless piece of work, we learn the pain and love behind his actions. Or, something happens at the neighbour's place one night that sets a young man off on a self-destructive path, and the actual events aren't revealed until the end of the book. This device never felt like a cheat either: it was like McInerney was inviting the reader to make a snap judgement about the characters based on the way they initially looked or acted – as we all would if we saw one of them lurching towards us from the shadows late at night – but with just the barest of additional background information, we're forced to acknowledge that these characters are as human and as deserving of dignity as any of us. I can't overstate just how well this was done.

I'm carrying around my anger like a sack of wailing kittens; I'm not able to drown it. Like this thing we have is so deep and brittle because of my mistakes and my mistakes are so massive and glowing so bright I'm scared to set them down.

At its heart, The Glorious Heresies is a love story, and we follow Ryan and Karine from their first sexual encounter at fifteen until the end of the book, when Karine has just turned twenty-one. While every moment of their relationship has the honest, self-important heft of adolescent love, this couple is also used to demonstrate the class differences in modern Ireland. Ryan (as the bloodied son of the alcoholic wastrel) seems destined to take his place among the criminal element: despite being musically gifted and brilliant at maths, no one seriously expects him to finish school; it's not like there are any straight jobs left after the death of the Celtic Tiger anyway. On the other hand, coming from a middle-class family, Karine can slum around with gangsters and dealers and still finish university; have her parents rent a ballroom to celebrate their daughter's milestone birthday. (And I know I'm supposed to sympathise with Ryan that his girlfriend's parents never accepted him because of class issues, but as the mother of daughters, I wouldn't be pleased either if one of them came home with a thuggish dropout; no matter how bright or devoted; and that's no doubt another level on which McInerney is purposefully challenging my prejudices.)

Here are the clergy, gathered outside the maternity ward like an unkindness of ravens, grasping every perch they were and weren't entitled to.

At its heart, The Glorious Heresies is also a scathing indictment of the Irish Catholic Church and its historic meddling in the uterine status of Irish girls. From every generation we see stories of unwed mothers and what becomes of them: what a horror to imagine the Magdalene Laundries, where pregnant girls were sent to toil over the caustic tubs, bleaching the cassocks and surplices of the condemning priesthood, having their suckling infants literally ripped from their breasts to be placed with “good” families; the girls suited for nothing better at this point than continuing to work the laundries. We see repeated stories of disappointed parents sending their sinning daughters away while raising their infants as their own (which is apparently how McInerney herself was raised), and we see repeatedly the vacuum that the decline of the Irish Catholic Church has left in its wake: from the revolutionary spirit of bitter old heretics to the rise of hypocritical new Christian cults. 

Shades of dead people rising on the sides of the road, lads there since the Rising. The devil picking his teeth at the crossroads. Weird shit. We've more history than we're able for.

I have an abiding fondness for Irish storytellers and The Glorious Heresies does for the Cork of today what Trainspotting did for the Edinburgh of the 1980s: both books explore the effects of economic and social collapse on those most vulnerable; the poor underclasses (those born to poverty and those who reject the societal norms of their parents and choose to drop out). Like Irvine Welsh, McInerney employs gritty vernacular and realistic degradation to explore the lives of these (usually) invisible people, and her great accomplishment is to provoke empathy without pity: these are real people who would need very little support to escape what they accept as their sorry destinies. Along the way, there are shocks and laughs, an encapsulation of the modern situation and historical insight, lovely, lovely language and an artful structure: what more could a reader ask for?

I am delighted that The Glorious Heresies won the Bailey's Prize: the best of an uneven but respectable shortlist; here in my ranking order.

The 2016 Bailey's Prize shortlist:

Lisa McInerney: The Glorious Heresies
Anne Enright: The Green Road
Elizabeth McKenzie: The Portable Veblen
Cynthia Bond: Ruby
Hannah Rothschild: The Improbability of Love
Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life