In an attempt to find people interested in literature, and to integrate myself more with the local community, I decided to join a book club. It might be that I just got unlucky, or maybe I've lost touch with the sorts of books that make bestseller lists, but John Boyne's The Heart's Invisible Furies is one of the worst books I've ever read. The stock cover art, gauche title, and innocuous blurb did not prepare me for the relentless puerility of what lay within. I have a feeling Boyne was going for a Ulysses style epic or a bildungsroman of a gay man growing up in Catholic Ireland, yet at 700 pages, the result felt vacuously hollow. In spite of the delicate subject matter, the book is written with all the insensitivity and subtlety of a drama student's first stage play. Described as a comic novel, the farcical exchanges between characters, which take up the bulk of the novel, are desperately unwitty and amateurishly delivered. As Boyne has one of his own characters remark at one point, 'some people just shouldn't try to be funny.' The characters themselves are indistinguishable from one another due to them all speaking like foul-mouthed teenage boys intending to unsettle a prudish authority figure; they're either sex-obsessed perverts or self-proclaimed child molesters. For instance, I assumed that facetiously showcasing paedophilic tendencies at a polite dinner party might be counterproductive to one's success in that trade, but this is not so in Boyne's world.
The main protagonist, Cyril Avery, is forced to suppress his homosexuality from an intolerant and bigoted society, but such are his flaws and disreputable actions, one fails to feel a shred of sympathy towards his largely self inflicted plight. His life is also completely unbelievable. He floats from one garish soap opera tragedy to the next, accidentally witnessing or causing the deaths of several characters along the way. Boyne is a writer who wants to deliver all the big moments to thrill or upset the reader, none of which he attempts to earn or build up by having us first relate to the characters. This results in the unfortunate effect of everything feeling like an absurdist cartoon. Among the constant string of crudities and shock value nasties, Boyne liberally peppers the text with Greek mythology in an impotent attempt to elevate matters, a tactic many writers are guilty of. The world building is also clumsily delivered, as we move from 1945 to the present day, characters find ways to unnaturally remind one another what year it is, also 'helpfully' pointing out their ages at every opportunity to mark the passage of time. I am baffled by the overwhelmingly positives reviews for this appallingly bad novel, and can only put it down to cripplingly bad taste and learned masochism. At the end of the book, Boyne delivers a note on the text which amounts to him bitterly slandering ex-boyfriends who betrayed him. I only hope the other book club members share my opinion or things might get awkward.
Rating: 1/5
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