Disaffected youth: Before the Fire by Sarah Butler and Here Are the Young Men by Rob Doyle

June 2011 and Stick and Mac are ablaze with the promise of adventure. Just finished school, they’ve bought a wreck of a car and are planning to drive from Manchester to Malaga, where beaches, girls and a washing-up job in a bar await them. But, the night before they’re due to leave, a random knife-attack puts a stop to that. Mac is dead and Stick’s going nowhere. Bereft and stunned, his family’s attempts to console him only fuel his anger, and the limitations of the law are like a slap in the face to his friend and others like him who live on the wrong side of town. His tentative friendship with the feisty J seems like the only thing that could save him. But she’s a firebrand with a grudge against the police, and the August riots are on the way to Manchester.

I found this to be an extremely compassionate story of youth in crisis as Stick continuously tries and fails to find an outlet for his inarticulate anger. Already a bit of a rebel, the young man’s inability to connect with his grief threatens to overwhelm him, to land him in hospital, or prison. Yet the story is not without hope. Personally, I wasn’t so sure about the ending, and had to go back to the prologue to check I hadn’t been misled (I hadn’t). Nevertheless, an engaging novel about the vulnerability of macho men. Thanks to Picador books for my proof copy.

Meanwhile, over in Dublin, Matthew, Rez, Cocker and Kearney are also facing their first summer after leaving school. Glad to be freed of the constraints, they nevertheless seem unready to embrace adulthood, and drift around the city, fending off the void they experience inside themselves with drink and drugs. For some of the teenagers, this period of irresponsibility could be one last fling before they settle down to the reality of the need to earn a living. But a couple of them seem to be particularly at risk: Rez, whose constant overthinking and philosophising drives away his girlfriend and makes him miserable; Kearney, whose increasingly violent fantasies begin to threaten, not only him, but the whole group.

Described in the blurb as a “fierce, shocking, blackly comic wild ride of a novel … a potent literary statement about the lives of disaffected and disillusioned young people, from an extraordinary new voice”, and with glowing quotes from esteemed publications, I couldn’t see what they were getting out for the first half of this novel. Although narrated in the past tense, I felt trapped in an eternal present, much like the characters themselves, who have very little backstory or relationships beyond the here and now. It was like being stoned, but without the highs, waiting, like the characters, for something to happen. I’m not sure if the parallel process was the author’s intention or symptomatic of my inability to connect.

Over the last 100 pages, things got better for me, while worse for the characters, as the moral dilemmas began to play out in their heads, e.g. (p210):

Lately I’d grown depressed at the thought – which not long ago would have felt exciting – that most of my friends were twisted, volatile outsiders. You started out playing with this stuff – the extremism, the chaos – and it felt vital and exhilarating; but then suddenly you couldn’t control it, you’d gone too far and it wasn’t exciting anymore, only frightening.

There was the nostalgia for lost childhood, reminiscent of the adolescent ambivalence I’ve explored in my own novel, and a link between the teenagers’ moral depravity and the “nation’s corrupted soul” (p262) as they helter-skeltered towards disaster, ending with a satisfying bump. Here, Rez and Kearney might have been the different sides of another game-obsessed and self-destructive teenager in Wolf in White Van, a novel I loved.

Here Are the Young Men was recommended to me by Isabel Costello, following my review of Septembers, another account of alienated youth, and Bloomsbury provided my review copy.

Pondering my different reactions to these two novels, two things stood out: gender and causality. The novel I preferred was both written by another woman and provided a plausible rationale for the main character’s disaffection. While I felt concern and sympathy for Stick, I was generally irritated with Rob Doyle’s young men who, at a time when the Irish economy was still buoyant, had no excuse (or no excuse I could see). I wanted to shake them out of their narcissism, to make them walk in the shoes of more heroic – or, at least, more excusably tragic – young men: fighter-pilot Teddy; desperate Curtis; the death railway prisoners of war. Yet I wondered, and I’m wondering still, whether there was something priggish in my dismissal of these characters. As one of my fictional psychotherapist tells us, each person’s pain deserves an audience, there is no hierarchy of hurt.