The Good Son - Book Review

First off let me just say emphatically that I loved this book. For a start it is quite short (234 pages) which is always a relief after slogging through book after book of 350/400 pages plus. I also hugely liked Paul McVeigh’s writing style, easy to read, at times in your face, but never contrived. His characters seemed so natural they just flowed onto and over the pages. It was almost as if I had travelled back to Belfast in the 1980s and was a fly on the wall watching events and relationships unfold.

This is McVeigh’s debut novel and it won the Polari First Book Prize 2016. It was a finalist for The People’s Book Prize 2016 and was shortlisted for both the Guardian’s Not the Booker prize and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award 2016…a pretty impressive CV for a debut novel.

The book centres around Mickey Donnelly who was ‘…born the day the Troubles started…’ and his dysfunctional family, but I would question whether they really are truly dysfunctional or a product of 1980s Belfast and the Troubles. He loves his Ma unconditionally always trying to be the ‘good son’ of the title, to win her acknowledgement and love. As much as he loves Ma he hates his alcoholic Da and what he does to the family in equal measure. Through one hot summer Mickey is on a voyage of self-discovery from panic and fear at the impending end of the summer holidays when he will be off to secondary school (not St Malachy’s where all the good, bright children go, but to St Gabriel’s where he’ll get his head kicked in), through to discovering the effects of first kisses and where his proclivities lie. He feels a ‘...funny feeling down there...’ when he kisses Martine, but similarly feels the same funny feeling when he is mesmerised by the hairiness of Pierre’s legs on a field trip to Cave Hill.

To make life more bearable Mickey Donnelly lives in a part fantasy world. His best friend is his little sister Wee Maggie, seconded by his puppy Killer. His archenemies are his older brother Paddy and a bully from down the street, Briege McAnally. The McAnallys and the Donnellys are rival families on the street and the scene where Mickey’s Ma finds out that Mrs McAnally has got an IRA heavy to frighten Mickey had me cheering Ma on. Mickey is on a quest to better himself and take him and the family to America for a better life, except for Paddy and especially his Da, he wants to leave them behind.

The book is at times laugh out loud funny and at others heart rendingly sad, sometimes it strikes a note of fear, but at all times it is real. It doesn’t steer away from the fears engendered by sectarianism, the IRA, bombings, house raids, shootings, police street patrols and the division and rivalry between the Catholics and the Protestants, but many of these are given Mickey Donnelly’s own twist of interpretation. I finished it a few weeks ago and Mickey Donnelly with his antics and sayings are still popping up in my head, a rare thing when I have moved on to the next book.

The Good Son by Paul McVeigh. Published by Salt Publishing 2015.