Much of that is due to the seven-year format.
There’s a gentleness to the story overall, a subtle distance that keeps the reading comfortable even as Boyne tackles deeply troubling subjects. We meet the people in and around Cyril’s life - his birth mother who was chased out of town by her parish priest for having a child out of wedlock his adoptive mother, a novelist whose greatest tragedy was that people loved her work his adoptive father, a wealthy man who skirted tax laws and always reminded Cyril that he was “not an Avery” his best friend and first love Julian, a handsome and charismatic young man and Bastiaan, the warm and loving doctor whom he takes as a partner.īoyne’s writing is beautiful and wry he inserts biting commentaries about the violence of homophobia and hypocrisy of religious fundamentalism with such finesse that the humour feels gentle even as the observations are sharp. Boyne dips into Cyril Avery’s life in seven year intervals, from his birth after World War II, through the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, and all the way into the legalization of marriage equality in this century. The Heart’s Invisible Furies is a Dickensian epic, a coming of age story set in 20th century Ireland.
Going to work, running an errand and even going to sleep all interrupted my experience of this book, and I often wished I had saved it for a time when I wouldn’t have to take a break from reading quite so often. It took me over a week to finish this (at 600 pages, probably no surprise), but it was a struggle each and every time to put it aside for real life. In fact, I recommend you save it for a lazy weekend or your next staycation. This is one of my favourite books this year, and I cannot recommend it enough. What an incredible, beautiful, captivating book this is! It’s the kind of book that begs to be read slowly, to have its words savoured as we dip in and out of Cyril Avery’s life and allow ourselves to be lost in John Boyne’s Ireland.
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