Finn and Joe O’Reilly are brothers growing up in Bojaxhiu or “The Jax”, one of four towers in central Dublin “named after someone who inspired change, hoping that the names would rub off on the dossing sponging bastards who existed there”.
The brothers aren’t dossing or sponging: Finn (12) likes school, especially reading and playing football; and Joe (17), a budding artist, has a scholarship at a private school. Their mother, Annie, pulls pints in the local pub; their father, Frank, is a fixer and hard man for the estate’s drug dealer. Frank is violent to his family as well as his boss’s enemies, but – in the confusing way of abusive parents – he also cares about them, wants Finn to do well at school and Joe to find a better future. The boys love him even as they hate what he does to their mother.
Joe and Finn narrate alternate chapters, and the reader soon realises that they are speaking from different time-frames, Finn recounting his illness, diagnosis and decline while Joe looks back months later. Joe speaks in the present tense and Finn in the past. The doubling of time as well as voice could feel tricksy, but it comes naturally, partly because the suspense in Boys Don’t Cry is not related to Finn’s health.
We know from the end of the first chapter that Finn and Joe know that Finn is dying, and the tenses of Joe’s first section tell us that he speaks from after his brother’s passing: “I used to hide funny messages for Finn … In the time before, I’d be legging it in to get Finn and Dart it out to Dollymount.”
Both boys are observant and darkly funny. “You wouldn’t get much football done in a garden,” Finn comments of the council’s failure to fulfil a promise to replace concrete yards with plants and trees, and he “really laughs” when his footballing friend Jasmine tells him to stop doing his homework: “Like what’s the point in having cancer if you’re not going to milk the perks.”
Joe, like any bright teenager, reads his environment and the adults apparently in charge with raw acuity. It’s his jeopardy that holds the book in tension: can he (does he want to) succeed at the school where he is and will always be an outsider? Can he (does he want to) balance his loyalty to the people with whom he grew up against the possibility of a more secure and creative adult life? Can he resist the circumstances pushing him towards repeating his father’s mistakes?
His wealthy classmates, in fact much more debauched than his neighbours, regard him as an exotic alien and expect that anyone from his background will be able to supply them with drugs. (He can, but unlike them, knows the consequences.) His teachers expect him to perform social mobility to vindicate the provision of the scholarship, while his friends and neighbours regard him with varying blends of suspicion, envy and hope.
The characters around Joe are strong and sympathetic. Annie is coping as well, or badly, as anyone would with the death of a beloved child, presented to us as neither impossibly tough nor in pitiful collapse. Joe’s friend Sabine matches his intelligence but not his opportunities, sharing his understanding of the unspoken rules and hierarchies of life in a community where most people are just trying to get by and raise their kids but everyone’s life is touched or shaped by organised crime.
Unlike Shuggie Bain, a superficially similar novel about growing up in hard times and hard places, the people in Boys Don’t Cry are not monstrous, broken or precocious but quietly doing the best they can in circumstances where “good” choices are few and come at painful cost. For my money, this is the better book: the voices are strongly realised, finely balanced between sadness and humour; the gritty setting is presented with affection and the story is moving and compelling but never mawkish.
Sarah Moss is assistant professor of creative writing at University College Dublin. Her latest novel is Summerwater
