Irish literature's age-old love affair with misery is rekindled in Gerard Lee's debut novel, Forsaken. Lee trained as an actor at Trinity College Dublin before doing an MPhil in creative writing at the Oscar Wilde Centre. His film credits include Angela's Ashes, adapted from Frank McCourt's misery memoir, which is often charged with kick-starting a whole genre of unhappiness since its publication, in 1996.
Forsaken trumps McCourt's book in the misery stakes. Following his father's suicide, 11-year-old JJ becomes increasingly unhinged as he tries to cling on to what remains of his home and family.
Over the course of 12 months his efforts to remain with his fragile and mentally ill mother result in beatings, hospitalisation, State care, multiple murders and gruesome survival tactics that include, among other delicacies, a diet of raw crow. It is a dark and disturbing piece of work that offers its characters no redemption, no hope of escape except in death.
The first-person narrative draws the reader into the mind of the troubled child. It creates a claustrophobic atmosphere that suits the dark material. We are with JJ from the beginning, battling the external forces that seek to take away his family. It is a convincing voice, primal and childlike, relaying the horrors of JJ’s world and his attempts to surmount them.
There are echoes of other Irish novels in Forsaken. Donal Ryan's The Thing About December also follows a marginalised male protagonist, Johnsey Cunliffe, over the course of a year in rural Ireland as his family life and mental health disintegrate. While Johnsey lives a solitary existence, Ryan introduces side characters who offer interesting storylines. There is no such distraction in Forsaken.
A far more obvious parallel exists between JJ and Francie Brady of The Butcher Boy. With its unhinged narrator who mistrusts authority, a carefully crafted child-adult voice, flashes of black humour, a cast of neighbourhood busybodies and suicidal parents, fantasies of severed heads, and its repeated use of pig imagery, the book reads like a homage to Pat McCabe's macabre tale.
There is the sense that the damage has been done to JJ long before the novel opens. His actions from the beginning show someone living on the fringes of society, distrustful of the adult world. A boy of his age might still play at cowboys and Indians, but JJ doesn’t seem to understand the difference between performance and reality.
The opening sequence sees JJ barricade himself and his mother in their farmhouse, turning his father’s gun on the townspeople who come knocking.
Reality is suspended as the child’s strange logic takes us farther down the rabbit hole later in the novel: “Then, in the middle of all the grunting and skitter about being calm, I had the kill feeling.”
A liminal sense comes through in other ways, with JJ never referencing the town itself or the exact era. It is rural Ireland at a time when the Catholic Church is at the heart of the community. JJ’s parents met each other at a Tops of the Towns competition. They gave their son, who has never seen the sea, a Chopper bike for his sixth birthday. The lack of setting adds to the nightmarish tone of the book, with italicised passages at the end of some chapters adding further distance from reality.
As JJ is shunted between his abusive Uncle Patsy’s house to St Somebody’s to another care home for emergency cases, he starts to withdraw completely. Lee has worked in residential homes, and he brings an authenticity to the practices and procedures of the system.
A published poet, he writes with rhythm and uses striking imagery: “Uncle Patsy had a long face that could kiss a goat between the horns.” The “frog-gardaí” search the lake for the body of JJ’s father. Restrained by his carers for violent behaviour, the child feels “like a half-dozen eggs that someone had dropped”.
While in care, JJ experiences moments of light with other children, but they also teach him to be wary of adult help and how best to exploit it.
The continuing hurtle towards darkness causes problems for the narrative arc and also for the arc of JJ’s character, who starts out alone and unhinged and ends up the same way.
There is no denying, however, the wry social commentary underpinning the book. The plight of a disturbed child in a cruel world is rendered vividly. Lee’s talent in depicting this world through such a narrow lens is commendable, and it will be interesting to see what the writer does next.
