John Boyne's The Heart's Invisible Furies



'The Heart's Invisible Furies,' by John Boyne, is a 700-page epic novel about the life of a gay man named Cyril Avery that also covers Ireland's social history in the second half of the twentieth century. The story is told in seven-year increments, beginning with the circumstances surrounding Cyril's birth in Dublin in August 1945 to an unmarried teenage mother, Catherine Goggin, and ending in 2015, when Ireland legalized same-sex marriage through a public vote. Cyril is adopted as a baby by novelist Maude Avery and her banker husband Charles, who constantly reminds Cyril that he is "not a real Avery," depriving him of genuine affection. Cyril has an unrequited crush on his best friend, Julian Woodbead, throughout his adolescence and beyond, and this experience shapes the rest of his life as he struggles to be honest with others and with himself.


XEM THÊM : 

Nhất Lộc ⚡️ Game bài đổi thưởng ăn tiền thật


Cyril unknowingly crosses paths with his biological mother in each chapter, comes face to face with death in some form, and ponders the meaning of happiness and loneliness. We know from the start that Cyril will eventually learn how he is related to Catherine, but the details of how this happens are not revealed until much later. Similarly, after many years apart, he encounters characters from his early years such as Jack Smoot and Julian in unexpected ways. Even if these repetitions and coincidences appear contrived or too far, they are a structural device used just as effectively in so many other epic novels, from 'Great Expectations' by Charles Dickens to 'The Goldfinch' by Donna Tartt, where the protagonist is seeking to understand more about their identity.

Boyne is particularly critical of politicians and the Catholic Church in a country where homosexuality was not legalized until 1993 in a story that deals with homophobic violence and the stigma of AIDS, among other topics. While the themes may appear heavy, and tragedy strikes repeatedly throughout Cyril's life with devastating consequences, 'The Heart's Invisible Furies' is also frequently a very funny book. Boyne has a great ear for dialogue, which is where much of the humour comes from, and despite such apparent differences in tone, it never feels uneven.

'The Heart's Invisible Furies' is one of the best books I've read this year, and Cyril is one of the most memorable characters I've encountered in a long time. It's the first novel I've read by Boyne, and it won't be the last.











READ ARTICLES:

Top most beautiful beaches in the world

Coach of the volleyball team at Grambling State is fired after cutting every player and revoking their academic awards.

Yankees Remains No. 1, Mariners Getting Attention, and A's Dropping

Reasons to Take a Cruise

76 million-year-old dinosaur skeleton to be auctioned in NYC


 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shirley Barrett's The Bus on Thursday

Image
‘The Bus on Thursday’ by Shirley Barrett will appeal to those with a certain sense of humour, most likely a dark one. It opens with Eleanor Mellett discovering that she has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer at the age of 31. After being dumped by her boyfriend, she gets a new job teaching at a tiny school in Talbingo in a particularly remote area of rural Australia .  Miss Barker, the previous teacher, has gone missing under mysterious circumstances, and the outlier residents are puzzled by her sudden disappearance. Eleanor tells her story in a talkative tone over a series of short blog posts, being far more candid about the realities of cancer diagnosis and treatment, as well as the impact it has had on her mental health, than many of the most "honest" cancer blogs. After recovering from a serious illness, she struggles to find her place in the world, and it's unsurprising that arriving as an outsider in an isolated community doesn't help. She b
Read more

Sebastian Barry's Days Without End

Image
Sebastian Barry's 'Days Without End' tells the story of Thomas McNulty, a young Irishman who emigrated to Canada and later the United States in the mid-nineteenth century after his family died in the Great Famine. When they are teenagers, he befriends and falls in love with John Cole, and they work at a parlor where they dress as women and dance for miners. They later enlist in the US army and fight in two wars before adopting an abandoned Indian Sioux girl named Winona. Sebastian Barry is a new author to me, and I didn't realize until after I finished 'Days Without End' that his previous novels, two of which have been nominated for the Man Booker Prize, also feature other McNulty family members from different generations. Despite the fact that the books are interconnected rather than a series, 'Days Without End' reads well as a separate novel. It is a lyrical western, as opposed to the more typically harsh works of the genre. The landscape is beautifull
Read more

Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake

Image
I thought it was high time I read more of Margaret Atwood's work after reading and enjoying 'The Handmaid's Tale,' 'The Blind Assassin,' and 'Cat's Eye' before starting this blog. 'Oryx and Crake' is the first novel in Margaret Atwood's critically acclaimed MaddAddam trilogy, and it tells the story of Snowman, also known as Jimmy, who is thought to be the only human survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, along with genetically modified creatures known as Crakers. As Snowman returns to the site of the destruction that nearly wiped out the human population, we learn about how the world came to be nearly destroyed and what happened to his friend Crake and the mysterious Oryx through flashbacks. 'Oryx and Crake,' according to Atwood, is a work of fiction rather than science fiction: "Like The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake... contains no intergalactic space travel, teleportation, or Martians." It, like The Handmaid's
Read more