Reviews are mostly laudatory:
Reading Matters has a crisp, insightful review
Geraldine Bedell, in the Observer, talks of acute physical ache that Carry Me Down is capable of evoking in a readerCarry Me Down is a deeply unsettling and disturbing read. Hyland's prose is carefully controlled so that the reader is barely aware of John's slow descent into madness. She conveys that nowhere time between childhood and adulthood with aplomb, and the tight, first-person narrative deftly captures John's confusion and naivety: a boy who looks and sounds like a man but is still very much a child unable to control the people and circumstances around him.
But as much as I admired this book, especially it's powerful, oh-my-goodness climax, I couldn't shake the feeling that I'd read this type of story before: poor Irish boy growing up in difficult circumstances who doesn't understand the own violence within him. (Patrick McCabe's brilliant The Butcher Boy and Roddy Doyle's Booker-winning Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha come to mind.)
In the Age, Gregory Day calls Carry Me Down a work full of compassionCarry Me Down is a tour de force character study. Beyond this, it is a portrait of a child in Ireland at a particular time, the Sixties or perhaps Seventies, oppressed by a lack of opportunity. It's also an attempt to track the mental damage done by misunderstanding, by neediness that is not met with affection.
It conveys its narrator's apprehension of the world brilliantly, but its triumph is also a novelistic drawback: John's is a powerful, utterly believable voice but by the end, it was leaving me gasping for air, for something to take me out of his partial, almost grub-like sense of the world.
In Hyland's work, ordinary life is drawn as a perpetual seesawing between the unconventionality of truth on one hand and the omnipresence of lies on the other. Her debut novel, How the Light Gets In, was widely acclaimed but perhaps will now be seen as merely the forerunner to Carry Me Down.
In the Guardian, Kate Thompson writes that troubled childhood/adolescence is an oft-repeated subject
The author introduces some interesting themes. There are Oedipal undercurrents when John succeeds in getting his father removed from the flat and moves into his mother's bed. There is a concern, very relevant today, about the effects upon a child when he is taken into the confidence of adults and told more about family relationships than he is mature enough to understand. The idea of a boy's reaching an early puberty and the resulting confusions surrounding it is potentially a fascinating subject, but this, along with the other themes, isn't well enough developed. A pity, because a closer examination of any or all of these ideas might have strengthened what is otherwise a rather unconvincing story.John is an only child, and enjoys a level of physical and emotional intimacy with his parents that would have been extremely uncommon in 1970s Ireland. This intimacy extends to practically every adult he meets, and rarely does a scene go by without some attentive and supportive person taking John's hands and responding to his concerns. This grates, not only because it is inconsistent with the time and place, but because it makes it hard to understand why John should react to the events of his life in the way he does.
...
The narrative is one-paced and somewhat meandering, with many repetitive and redundant scenes, particularly towards the end. A mild, ghoulish curiosity kept me turning the pages, but the novel's tidy resolution left me with more questions than answers.
Others: Carry Me Down on TimeOut, an MJ Hyland interview soon after her first book How the Light Gets In was out, another interview (dated) at B&N, a review in the January magazine, the author website (for How the Light Gets In) that has not been updated in a long while.
Though the work is widely acclaimed, it does not seem likely that Carry Me Down will make the shortlist given that its subject matter has already been favoured often for the Booker. But then, let's wait and watch.
1 comments:
This novel held me in thrall for all its pages. These passed too quickly, except for the excruciating pain of the move to the project slum in Dublin, with its unforgettable stench and filth- particularly the scenes around the elevator and the gang bullying. These were so vivid and real that each second dragged by painfully. I found John totally believable and not nearly as weird or eccentric as others have. I find John's reactions to his world a credible and deeply moving reaction to the adults that stifle his creativity and his peers that reject him when he behaves differently to the norm- or simply because he matures early and is a target for bullying and derision. His hopes to make his mark in the world and achieve something beyond the moribund pretensions of his father fuel an obsessive need to excel and be noticed. This is so common a need in teenagers as to be a cliche. John's methods may be unusual but his motivation is a deeply innate part of the individuation process essential but so painful during adolescence. That he chooses lie detection as his "gift" perfectly reflects the role he takes in the family- as the go between from his mother's sensual and imaginative life and his father's closed intellectualism and his granny's cloying possessiveness. John understands his purpose in life is to reveal the truth- like all art at its highest levels. Taking on this role is a potential minefield, and explosions abound.
John's mother's lively encouragement of his imagination and creativity, reflecting her own love of fantasy and theatre, add to this explosive mix, and his sensual attachment to her is poignantly expressed, as are his other emerging sexual feelings. The betrayal of Brendan is keenly observed by Hyland, and the claustrophobic intensity of the shed scene was unforgettable. Kate makes for a villain of operatic proportions.
Tragically, just as Mr Roche- a potentially redemptive and inspirational force for good in John's life arrives on the scene, his father's failure to provide any stability for his family ruptures John's hopes of finding acceptance and self esteem through the new school experiences. The later appearance of a more subdued and flattened Mr Roche was disturbing- a teasing inclusion, perhaps left a little too loose ended....No ideal saviour was to be provided in this novel, all are compromised by the world that refuses acceptance to the ill-fitting pegs...
Life in Dublin is a nightmare of terrifying proportions. John's earlier life appears as a paradise by comparison. Hyland paints this ghoulish world of the ugly ordinariness of poverty and ignorance unflinchingly. How a boy of John's sensitivity survives at all is surprising. His mother almost capitulates to the horrors and his father is dragged into the dark meaninglessness all too easily. While John's actions to save/destroy his mother in her depressed despair are shocking, the ultimate result saves the whole family. Like a bushfire that regenerates, John's desperate act transforms his life and his parents'. By at last realising the catastrophic damage their actions have reeked on John's mind, they burst into positive action to save John's future- and their own. One can only hope that Hyland is not overly optimistic about John's future, unfairly cast as he is as the guilty party .After so much damage has been done, one hopes his resilience and intelligence will win through. The ending promises hope and redemption- a brave move in a world that so often preaches only doom and hopelessness.
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