Orange Rhymes with Everything

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Ulster. Hard. There's too intense a feeling there. Like you're living on a wire." Like the rest of this sober if promising debut from Northern Irish writer (and now Manhattan resident ) McKinty, this tough sentence reflects bitter realities. In framing the story from the Protestant point of view, McKinty provides some keen insight on the Loyalist ethic. The narrative alternates between the gray boredom of an unnamed schoolgirl in a small seaside town just south of Belfast, and the escapades of her father, a psychopathic Protestant terrorist on the run from the authorities in New York. The man's hatred is long-engrained, and his brutality instinctual and cold-blooded. In the course of the book, we realize that he has tired of sectarianism and wants only to return home to see his child, who remains ignorant of his exploits. But the problem is that we never develop a real sympathy for either character: while the girl suffers the burden of a physical handicap, the details of her life are too mundane-and conveyed in difficult Irish slang-to engender empathy. Despite several flashbacks of her father as a confused teenager braving the riot-filled streets of Northern Ireland, we ultimately feel only repugnance for him, aware that when he was incarcerated after his original flight to the U.S., he "ripped apart" his cell mate in prison Finally, upon his eventual return to Northern Ireland, he carries out the knee-capping of a teenage Catholic boy. The last incident is so vile that even readers who have been unfazed to that point will probably flinch. Without a solid plot or sustained characterization, McKinty offers a harrowing depiction of hatred and violence that seems content merely to mirror Northern Ireland's troubles. (Jan.)

Library Journal

The current vogue enjoyed by writers like Patrick McCabe and Roddy Doyle has inserted Ireland's once-unfamiliar dialect and vocabulary into the collective consciousness, making a first novel by a new Irish voice cause for excitement. In this novel, two stories unfold in alternating chapters until it is clear that, by the end, they will converge. One is the story of a teenaged girl in Northern Ireland making her hazardous way through the usual adolescent minefields with the added burdens of a physical handicap and a missing father. The other is a suspense-packed thriller that begins with a violent escape from a New York mental hospital. As the bodies pile up, it becomes evident that the escapee, a former Protestant paramilitary extremist, will stop at nothing in his determination to return to Ireland to see his family again. This stunning debut should propel McKinty into the front ranks of contemporary Irish authors and is highly recommended.-Barbara Love, Kingston P.L., Ontario

Kirkus Reviews

If James Joyce had got his start as a Belfast Protestant with more of an interest in politics and less of a sense of humor—but with all of his scatological obsessions intact—he might have given us something close to McKinty's grim debut novel.

The gritty realism that seems to be the fashion in Britain and Ireland these days has cast a long shadow over the younger generation of writers, many of whom apparently feel compelled to mimic the obsessions of Irvine Welsh and James Kelman, just as young Americans have aped the simplicities of Hemingway for the last 50 years. McKinty's version of the new realism involves a walking tour of the uglier stretches of Belfast and New York, narrated from the points of view of a hunchbacked teenager and a terrorist who is very likely her father. The young girl, who lives in a Protestant neighborhood of Belfast, attempts to carry on a normal high school routine of sports, classes, and amateur theatrical productions despite the obsessive interest of a perverted biology teacher who persuades her to photograph and describe her bowel movements for him. Her father, meanwhile, a paramilitary hit man who has fled the country to avoid arrest, finds himself stuck in a Manhattan mental institution. Whether this is a mistake, a ruse to avoid deportation, or simply his natural habitat is not made much clearer than the rest of the story, which has little semblance of plot and proceeds along an uneven line from murkiness to utter incomprehensibility. To some extent, the lack of a clear storyline is part of the story in its own right, seemingly meant to express the aimlessness and deracination of the Protestant Loyalists of Ulster: "Orphans of history with only their mad religion to give them any identity at all." But it also has the effect of keeping readers outside that hermetic world rather than bringing them into it.

Rambling, incoherent, and gratuitously squalid.