Toastie Hughes goes to Paris, kills a stranger, and returns home to wife, family and adult education course without a second thought. Toastie earns his living as a contract killer. But, as his wife and the story’s title tells us, he’s “a good man”, by far the best adjusted of the raft of outsiders who people the stories in John Boyne’s diverting and disquieting first collection.
Told that he's good, Toastie concedes that he "had never thought about myself in those terms before. In moral terms, I mean." It's not that the moral dimension makes any difference to him; the only blot on his copybook that he acknowledges is pasting Wikipedia entries into his course essays. Still, the very fact that he recognises the dimension places him on a slightly more evolved plane than the rent-boy protagonist of Boy, 19, a story whose opening line – "I started charging for sex a few days after my 19th birthday" is almost a dare to read on, or the literally cow-loving novelist of The Schleinermetzenmann, the emotionally frozen father of Amsterdam, or that father's alarming counterpart in the title story – the Daddy of them all when it comes to repressive monsters.
Grotesque – or, depending on your taste, laughable – as it may seem, Toastie is entirely at ease with himself and the world, attends teacher-parent conferences and has a word over a drink about John Banville's Ancient Light (a bit of poker-faced fun, this, on John Boyne's part).
The same degree of control is not so darkly comedic in the unnerving states of most of Beneath the Earth's other protagonists, even if they too, in their off-the-wall ways, reveal how close to the surface of the everyday buried or potential selves are and what happens when those selves break cover. The walls that they are off are structural parts of the ordinary and unfortunate livingroom, classroom, bedroom.
At the same time, it's not what happens at home that causes the teenager to sell his body or drives the father in Amsterdam to fixate on his beloved youngster's "murder" in a car accident. The stories do feature loss of control in the world outside the protagonist's reality – the father's affair in Haystack Girl is a case in point. The focus, however, is on a kind of outing of an alternative persona that has evidently been present under the skin. Thus empowered, the protagonist is free to behave as he chooses (it's pretty much always a he), unrelated, without obligation, a law unto himself.
The unexamined life becomes the only one worth living for such characters, and their first person narratives attest both to the dire consistency of their choices and the destitution of their repetitious behaviour. Telling their own stories only makes them seem irretrievably opaque. And though they seem unaware of it, they’re effectively on a power trip – this is particularly evident in the case of the dreadful paterfamilias in the title story and his mantra of “I could do . . . what I liked.” This alignment of freedom and power ensures that the characters embodying it don’t have to take anybody seriously.
It's as if the culture of the selfie lurks around such narratives, or perhaps it is what could be regarded as the negative, in the photographic and other senses, of the selfie that's being suggested. But maybe that's reaching too far – even allowing for the devastating effect of social media in Haystack Girl, where the kid brother of the girl in question posts a video of her sexual activity on the internet, making her a star of a kind.
This outlandishness is in retaliation for the girl having texted her best friend (and in effect everybody) the minute her brother tells her he's gay. In this story, too, the kids hardly know what they're doing, yet what they do makes horrible sense. And that notion of things being said to add up that don't seem to do so is keynoted by the title of The Schleinermetzenmann, a German compound that appears plausible but has no meaning. In that instance, language is complicit in its own negation, and complicity is also conveniently suggested by the stories' use of twins and other twosomes, both visible and psychological.
Myself alone may be the subject of the most arresting stories in Beneath the Earth, but those mini-sagas of transgression are not the whole story of the collection. Other, on the whole quieter, pieces portray characters who suffer from not being as complete in themselves as they desire. Rather than ignore the reality of others, they wish to embrace it, typically in the most fundamental manner, which is sexually.
In both The Vespa and the fresh take on Araby (the Joyce story), the narrators' schoolboy crushes on older lads end in humiliation. In Empire Tour, even Agatha Christie momentarily perceives a physically more candid self on a trip to Australia with her philandering first husband; she hasn't a clue what to do about it, though. But sexuality is not the only way that identities articulate their queer but true configurations. Bikram Singh Sharma, the protagonist of Student Card, understandably wishes to undo the embarrassment of having his forenames represented by their initials.
More substantially, historical contexts can also elicit unsuspected versions of the self. In Rest Day, a soldier on the Western Front finds that the radical gesture of sticking to his guns at Christmas is a far more compelling assertion of who he is than transient respite, much less illusions of peace on earth, can provide. And in the more ambitious but somewhat too compressed The Country You Called Home, history repeats itself as the protagonist, Émile, enlists to fight in the second World War II. Not only had his father been killed in the Great War, he had also alienated his West Cork neighbours by putting up recruitment posters. He was of English extraction, and Émile's mother is French. Nevertheless, when it comes to it, Émile says he is Irish, though whether his thought that "It still came down to this in the end, didn't it?" acknowledges a sense of his own exceptionalism or not is an open question.
There were times when the scenarios seemed a bit contrived, and some of the stories may leave readers feeling like a James Bond martini. But, as might be expected from a writer of John Boyne's reputation, the collection is never less than inventive and extremely readable. It may not be news that, however they show it, all individuals are exceptions, but it's no harm for Beneath the Earth to repeat it.
George O'Brien's The Irish Novel 1800-1910 will be published later this year
