Nicky was going with Doll by then and got to experience the house first-hand. The atmosphere was that of a continuous, continuously improvised party that periodically doldrums and never ended, contending playlists emanating from different rooms, a standing bank of smoke shimmering in seeming permanence in the sitting room, pin-eyed young ones rattling on the front door at all hours. And things had gone on that way until a year or so ago, when Cillian suddenly stopped dealing. With the drugs gone, Cillian’s customers went away too. What Doll had told his mother was true; Sara and Cillian’s house was no longer a wild house.
Wild Houses is promoted as “darkly funny and deeply moving”, but I’m afraid I didn’t find it particularly funny or moving. Sure, it’s a bit of a crime thriller, but it’s small town, small stakes, petty criminals at war with one another; and every time I thought that the plot was on the edge of dropping the beat and tying all the loose threads together, everything would just carry on as though random events — even strangely coincidental events — are just incidental facts of small town life, thrown in for colour, not meaning. I do love an Irish storyteller, and debut novelist Colin Barrett brings the craic through setting and dialogue, but to me, this was a novel perpetually on the edge of becoming something, but never quite arriving. I’d give 3.5 stars, rounding down.
He knew, from the outside, how small and meagre it all might seem, but he had been living in a way that was his own. And then the Ferdias had arrived. They had insinuated themselves, bit by bit, into his life, and now they had brought the kid. It was an intrusion that had thrown things all off course. He could feel it in the pit of his stomach. Nothing now would be the same.
Ever since the sudden death of his mother, young Dev Hendrick (near on seven foot tall, with hands like excavator buckets) has lived alone in the remote family homestead, making a bit of money stashing drugs in the outbuildings for his criminal cousins. The novel opens with these Ferdia cousins, Sketch and Gabe, showing up at Dev’s door with a kidnapped Doll English: the seventeen-year-old brother of a drug dealer, Cillian, who owes their boss money. Dev is an interesting character: we learn that his father is in a psychiatric hospital, that Dev had been brutally bullied in school (and when his impassivity eventually forced his bullies to move on, he would come to miss the beatings as the only human contact he ever knew outside the home), and that he suffers not infrequent panic attacks. Impassivity is Dev’s main outward attribute: He stashes the drugs for the Ferdias because saying no would be more trouble, and despite not wanting to be involved in a kidnapping (and being inwardly appalled by Doll’s treatment), he goes along with whatever the Ferdias say.
Meanwhile, it takes some time for Doll’s girlfriend, Nicky, to realise he’s missing: they had had a fight at a party the night he was abducted, and Nicky vacillates between being annoyed that he’s ghosting her and worrying if her words had been too sharp during the argument. Nicky is also an interesting character: An orphan living with her truck-driving brother, Nicky intends to go to college after high school (more than one character says she’s the only young person they know in their small town with a head on her shoulders), and between being a good student and working hard at a local pub, it’s tough to see what she’s doing with the feckless Doll.
All that mattered was what would happen next. As she made her way over the uneven ground, her mind was racing, lit up with fragments of animal premonition. She knew violence was close, could sense with each step the approach of some dark, whipping torsion of bodies and limbs that might sweep her up and buffet her away with the powerful headlong indifference of the sea.
Ultimately, this is the story of these decent characters finding themselves drawn into a small town’s criminal underbelly (such as it is) and learning to accept crime and violence by incremental steps. Again: while the plot didn’t really move me, I did enjoy Barrett’s poetic use of language — factory workers facing each day with “a spirit of inured rue”, a young lad chewing gum with “arrant indifference”; young people are separated into beoirs and gaums; folks routinely walk the boreens but can live their whole lives in County Mayo and never have heard of a turlough. That’s the kind of colour I appreciate and I’m not entirely disappointed to have spent a day in this world.
