Product Description

A debut novel explores the world of Protestants in Northern Ireland, as seen through the eyes of a teenage girl living in Ireland and an Irish man being held in a New York City mental hospital awaiting extradition, a man who may be the girl's father.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1274100 in Books
• Published on: 1997-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 295 pages

Amazon.com Review
For his first novel, author Adrian McKinty has chosen Northern Ireland's age-old conflict between Protestant and Catholic as his stage and peopled it with two unnamed narrators, a violent Protestant paramilitary man and his hunchbacked teenage daughter. The story opens with the man breaking out of a New York mental hospital and proceeds on a violent, bloody path back to Ireland. Alternating with this killer's progress are chapters describing his daughter's daily life in working-class Ulster.

Mr. McKinty writes close to the bone, taking the reader right inside his characters' heads so that each thought, each action, resonates in the mind almost as if it had been the reader's own. Given the harrowing lives these characters lead and the graphic depictions of violence throughout the book, Orange Rhymes with Everything can prove a disturbing read.

From Publishers 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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From 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
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Dark, twisted, and funny.
This is a surreal, and compelling novel about among other things - redemption through violence. Like the Amazon reviewer I found it a little disturbing but no more so than Cormac McCarthy or J G Ballard. The humor is dry and the tone is one of obvious irony. There are passages of great lyricism and beauty but lovers of Irish fiction beware: Maeve Binchy it isn't

Tries hard.....can and will do better
There is a good novel in this writer, but this isn't it. The depiction of the teenager's life and day to day trials and tribulations are well written, dryly humorous, and showcase the writer's talents. Much less believable are the passages involving the psychopathic ex-terrorist. The senselessness of the overall N.I. situation comes through loud and clear....but we know that without having to read this book. Perhaps having worked his home town problems out of his system with this book, he can get to grips with the novel that parts of this work suggest he is capable of writing. I for one will be looking out for it.

Orangemen had difficult Irish childhoods too!
At first I thought this was an *Angela's Ashes* clone, beginning as it did with a grim Irish childhood. But no. Adrian McKinty speaks with an Irish voice, to be sure, but it is his own voice. Like Joyce Carol Oates, he refrains from using quotes in his dialogue, to good advantage. The device brings his characters closer. After some confusion about who is talking when and where, the reader adjusts, understands and gets with the flow. It's "wee" for "little," "arse" for "ass" and sentence construction contains somewhat of the brogue, "Black and voracious are the lines between us" says he. Toward the end it all pulls together philosophically.

"This whole society was sick. He could see that now. Sick and indifferent to it all. They had their hard wee God; white and dour and manifest. Their country crawling with believers. The homogeneity of it was crippling." And later,

"Couldn't they see? How could they? With their pariah eyes and the schizophrenic noose of their allegiance. Split between loving England and hating it. Booing the English at football games and mourning when their soldiers died. These people who didn't even know if they wanted to be called Irish or not. Stateless. Orphans of history with only their mad religion to give them any identity at all."

I don't enjoy violence in novels or movies, but this is not gratuitous violence. The author is telling it like it is. My only problem is with the female protagonist. She's not convincingly female - not because she's precocious and perceptive, not because of the nose-picking or scatological references. It's a "je ne sais quoi". I hear a young boy talking - not a young girl. McKinty's other female characters are believable enough, but then, they are all in the background.

This is, in my opinion, a stunning first novel with a great deal of promise. I will be looking forward to future contributions by Adrian McKinty.

pamhan99@aol.com