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About the author and blogger ...

Anne Goodwin’s drive to understand what makes people tick led to a career in clinical psychology. That same curiosity now powers her fiction.
A prize-winning short-story writer, she has published three novels and a short story collection with small independent press, Inspired Quill. Her debut novel, Sugar and Snails, was shortlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize.
Away from her desk, Anne guides book-loving walkers through the Derbyshire landscape that inspired Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre.
Subscribers to her newsletter can download a free e-book of award-winning short stories.

TELL ME MORE

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

6/11/2015

6 Comments

 
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.
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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.

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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.
Thanks for reading. I'd love to know what you think. If you've enjoyed this post, you might like to sign up via the sidebar for regular email updates and/or my quarterly Newsletter.
6 Comments
Charli Mills
7/11/2015 03:16:29 am

Interesting perhaps if we cannot connect with a book we wonder what the author had intended.

Reply
Annecdotist
9/11/2015 04:22:42 pm

Indeed: is it me or is it him?

Reply
Norah Colvin link
8/11/2015 07:05:52 am

The comment I found most interesting was that you began to enjoy the book more as the situation worsened for the characters. I don't think that is how you would feel towards "real" people. It's interesting that our expectations or wishes for fictional characters and/or their experiences may differ from those for "in the flesh" people.
I have to admit that I don't go a lot for these male macho coming-of-age lets do violence plots. Movies seem to make much of them. I am definitely not their target audience. :)

Reply
Annecdotist
9/11/2015 04:28:53 pm

Interesting that you picked this out, Norah, as I'm not sure that I intended it as a causal relationship. I think I liked it better as things got worse for the characters because there was movement from the statis, and I could start to understand a bit more what those young people are about. but yeah, I might have been even more disappointed if what I'd have wanted for them in real life had come about, e.g. if their nice girlfriends could have persuaded them to lay off the drink and drugs and start looking at the world around them a bit more. Writing teachers do tell us to put the characters in a bad situation and make it worse, and this certainly happened here. But I don't think I was really the target audience either as there was some quite disturbing violence in this novel that I didn't want to repeat in the review but would have preferred not to have had to read. But I do think the reader was intended to feel some sympathy for their alienation but it might have had the opposite effect on me. When I see gangs of young men strutting about in the real world I try not to judge them, but the message this has given me is that they're actually quite dangerous!!!

Reply
Norah Colvin link
12/11/2015 12:31:00 pm

I think, when I hear about some of the dreadful things that go on, that we must be doing something wrong in the way we bring up our boys. Surely there can be safer ways to transition from boyhood to manhood. Perhaps our culture doesn't do this well enough.
Then I hope that we are only hearing more things because we can, thanks to social media and instant international news etc; and I would prefer to believe Steven Pinker with his suggestion that we are moving towards a more peaceful future. It's very difficult to see any evidence of that at times. However I know most boys transition well and become loving, caring, compassionate and intelligent men, it's just those that don't that grab the headlines.

Annecdotist
12/11/2015 02:26:07 pm

Yeah, so difficult to tell, Norah – does there just seemed to be more disturbance or do we just get to hear more about it? Certainly, in terms of the riots that feature in Before The Fire, I do think they adolescent transition is difficult and potentially more dangerous than we like to think, and young people are looking for an outlet for their inner disturbance. (Which is why I think the response to the rioters in terms of prison sentences for stealing a bottle of water etc was unjustified.) Of course, earlier generations a young man had an outlet by going to war, which is one way of controlling the destructive urge. (Not that I'm in favour, but it's one way of managing disaffection.)




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