John The RevelatorBy Peter Murphy
Faber & Faber, $35
This review by Nicky Pellegrino first appeared in the Herald On Sunday, 5 April.
Enthusiastic cover blurbs are all very well but you can oversell a book. This debut novel has a front cover rave from author Colm Toibin who describes it as “so fresh, so original and brave…it’s an absolutely wonderful novel”. If that weren’t enough Roddy Doyle is on the back proclaiming: “It was like reading for the first time, almost as if I’d never read a novel before.”
Not surprisingly I began the book in a state of high expectation, and was surprised to find myself in the middle of an entirely standard, coming of age story set in small-town Ireland.
With a title taken from a gospel song, sung by Blind Willie Nelson, John the Revelator is the story of John Devine, born in a storm and raised by his devout Catholic and quite mysterious single mother Lily.
John grows into a small boy who’s fascinated by parasites and from there into the outsider figure so beloved of novelists until he’s befriended by the slightly risky Jamey Corboy. The pair of them racket around town getting up to no good and then Jamey winds up in a correctional facility where he occupies himself writing short stories that purport to be based on the secret lives of the town’s inhabitants. These stories are mixed in with the narrative along with John’s apocalyptic dreams about crows.
With a title taken from a gospel song, sung by Blind Willie Nelson, John the Revelator is the story of John Devine, born in a storm and raised by his devout Catholic and quite mysterious single mother Lily.
John grows into a small boy who’s fascinated by parasites and from there into the outsider figure so beloved of novelists until he’s befriended by the slightly risky Jamey Corboy. The pair of them racket around town getting up to no good and then Jamey winds up in a correctional facility where he occupies himself writing short stories that purport to be based on the secret lives of the town’s inhabitants. These stories are mixed in with the narrative along with John’s apocalyptic dreams about crows.
There’s a sense the story is building to a crisis and, when John’s mother starts to sicken, it becomes clear that her loss is going to be his watershed between adolescence and adulthood.
This is an enigmatic book, peopled by characters who may not be what they seem. Murphy captures that suffocating small town atmosphere and creates some memorable characters – particularly the Dickensian Mrs Nagle who moves in and takes over when Lily is sick. But Murphy is a music journalist and his writing has that same self-consciously trendy, perpetually adolescent music press feel to it. That said, the man can write, he has a particular flair for dialogue and a light touch with Irish idioms.
Do did I think it extraordinary? Well no. I reckon this might be the sort of book you have to relate to in order to feel the way Toibin and Doyle evidently did.
Having said that, judging by the hype surrounding it, I think it will very likely win a slew of awards….
Nicky Pellegrino
Nicky Pellegrino is a New Zealand novelist whose latest title, The Italian Wedding, has just been published by Orion in the UK, New Zealand and Australia.
2 comments:
Interesting review, though personally I found the review of this book by Steve Walker in The Listener this week more representative of the book and it's depth...I certainly agree with him that this book "is a disturbing vision of parochialism, bigotry and violence, infused with humour and poignant compassion and underlaid by nastiness".
'Blind Willie Nelson' is a slip of the pen, although I like the notion of Willie Nelson forgoing 'Blue Skies' for the apocalyptic 'John the Revelator'. I doubt that he could better Blind Willie Johnson, who recorded the song in 1930.
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