In The Glorious Heresies, Lisa McInerney draws characters from the margins of society: the fiendish, the faithful, the feckless and the fallen. Her skill is in making poets of them all. Her extraordinary use of language and turn of phrase endears us to the characters we might otherwise avoid, so that by novel’s end, we are rooting for (almost) all of them.
In the first chapter, Robbie O’Donovan is murdered in a former brothel by the hypocritically religious mother of arch-gangster Jimmy Phelan. Maureen has used a holy stone as the murder weapon, and this sets the tone for the anarchy of the underworld we come to inhabit.
Every great novel seems to have a lost child at its core and the one at the centre of the action here is Ryan, a 15-year-old drug dealer who might have become an accomplished pianist if he had grown up in a different housing estate. His love story is as real and affecting as any the Brontes or Shakespeare can offer. When it is threatened by his older, manipulative, paedophiliac female neighbour, we want nasty things to happen to her. Nasty things happen to most of the characters. We wait for her turn.
Ryan’s pathetic and apathetic alcoholic father makes Ryan effectively an orphan, fending for himself in a world riddled with sleaze and vice. Another character, Georgie, an addicted prostitute and girlfriend of the first corpse, is perhaps the character most determined to be a victim. We read helplessly, willing her to do something to save herself, but salvation is a theme. Looming large over this world is the Catholic Church, its authority more feared than that of the law.
What makes this novel so fiercely exciting and so compellingly enjoyable is the interweaving of the action, the outrageous sense of humour and the bald courage of the writer.
I’m sure comparisons have already been made to Kevin Barry, Jon McGregor and Irvine Welsh but Lisa McInerney has more than earned her place among such literary lights. This writer has balls of steel and a pen that drips with acidic ink, burning her characters into our hearts and minds.
Liz Nugent is author of the Irish No 1 bestseller Unravelling Oliver, the Ireland AM Crime Fiction Book of the Year 2014
