The Boy [Paperback]

Naeem Murr (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1999

Who is the boy? And whose body lies beneath a sheet of blue tarpaulin in the basement of a derelict brewery? The discovery of a chilling diary sends Sean Kennedy, once a foster father to the boy, on a desperate search to unlock the secrets of his tragic past and to learn the truth about the boy's part in the disintegration of Sean's family. The boy's compelling and protean personality (he is Devon to the keepers of the Boys' Home, Alex to the Fatman with whom he lives, Priestly to the young rent-boy who reveres him, and Durwood to Sean's daughter) arches over this disturbing novel and is mirrored in the lives of all the people Sean encounters. From these different perspectives we witness the boy's many incarnations, which reflect, aggravate, and distort the desires of those around him, involving these characters irrevocably in his own mysterious intentions. The boy keeps just beyond Sean's reach, then draws him into a final encounter that is both poignant and brutal. This first novel is a penetrating study of innocence and malice ineluctably bound. With his protean sexuality and personality, the boy insinuates himself into the lives of those he encounters. We witness how he feeds their deepest desires, nourishes their greatest needs, and involves them irrevocably in his own intentions. Winner of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Editors' Choice Award for 1998!

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Just when you think, a bit mournfully, that this delicious nightmare of a novel has come to an end, you remember the first chapter, addressed by "I" to "you." "I" boasts of a self-effacement from the story so artful that we readers may notice only "the vaguest scar" of the narrator upon the body of the story. Of so many characters so well drawn, given the brevity of the book, whom might the speaker be? Have we, too, fallen prey to the wiles of the eponymous, much-aliased and entirely shameless Boy?

Thank god the mystery persists. If the houselights rose too quickly, returning us to an unequivocal world, it would refute what's uniquely pleasurable about Naeem Murr's wickedly intelligent tale--its moral, aesthetic, erotic, and narrative ambiguities; a sullen lyricism that simultaneously obfuscates and illumines; a way of sprouting what feel like fully human characters from a yeasty compost of filial guilt and sexual desire. This story--foster father Sean Hennessey's quest for his estranged "son"--doesn't unfold so much as it refolds, reveals, revises a story that has already, in "real" time, begun with a sexual misadventure, proceeded through a series of betrayals and seductions, and ended with a number of bodies strewn along the Thames and through the English countryside, visiting the sins of the sons upon the fathers in a wonderfully Kafkaesque way.

If The Boy has a flaw, it is those glimpses of Freud's shadow sometimes visible in the story's brighter moments, but this is a tiny complaint measured against a work whose thrills derive from the terrible astuteness of its psychology. --Joyce Thompson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

A man combs the London slums for the foster child who destroyed his family in this overwrought, strangely original debut. Haunted by the disgrace of his father's alcoholism, Birmingham's Sean Kennedy grows up determined to distinguish himself in liberal politics and enters government as a social worker. After a secret transgression demolishes his self-respect, he atones by taking Durward?the charismatic, orphaned adolescent son of a client?home to live with his wife and children. Durward, however, proves to be a supremely troubled youngster with several personalities and identities. After causing the Kennedy family irreparable harm, he runs away for a life of prostitution. Sean's hunt for the boy leads him to the Churchill Home for Boys in Battersea, where Sean tries to piece his own life back together by having a love affair with one of the eccentric employees before finally facing his sociopathic foster son. Murr's characters seduce each other and explain themselves with operatic gusto: they seem to communicate in arias. This is especially true of the epicene, Nietzsche-spouting Durward, a pied piper who, wherever he roams, charms men, women and children into high-camp crimes of passion. As in old-fashioned gothic novels, the implausibility of the plot and characters reflect a compelling psychological truth that lurks somewhere beneath the clunky melodramatic machinery. If the results are sometimes messy, they never fail to interest or intrigue. Author tour; rights: Ellen Levine; British rights: Fourth Estate; German rights: Luchterhand. (May) FYI: Born in London and of Irish and Lebanese descent, Neem currently lives in Houston.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (October 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0395957907
• ISBN-13: 978-0395957905
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,948,760 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A really Gothic horror show--and a very involving read., October 15, 2000

By 

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews
(COMMUNITY FORUM 04)    (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Boy (Hardcover)

Reminiscent of both Steven King and Patrick McCabe in creating an atmosphere of fear and dread, Naeem Murr creates in The Boy a young man/demon who embodies everyone's worst nightmare--the intelligent and psychologically astute predator. Having grown up without the nurturing and love which makes us human, The Boy is being sought by Sean Hennessey, a social worker who was his foster father and may, in fact, be his real father. Both Messianic and consummately evil, The Boy controls the action throughout the novel, planning when, where, and how to wreak his vengeance against the world. Mere murder is not satisfying to him--it must be agonizingly slow and degrading.

Intensely dark and humorless, this is a taut and very fast-paced psychological thriller which draws you in because you think you "understand" this damaged creature. Murr further increases reader involvement by giving deep background information about the victims, too. You know why each victim was chosen and why each was so vulnerable to manipulation by The Boy, and you discover with horror that you, too, could easily be a victim because The Boy "found his form in others, in their memories." This novel is so absorbing that one overlooks the very convenient and well-timed coincidences in order to prolong the fun of reading. The perfect short novel to read all in one sitting!

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Some good points, March 14, 2000

By A Customer

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This review is from: The Boy (Hardcover)

I just finished this book tonight. A few other reviewers mentioned "over-written" and "pretentious". I agree. It's too bad that the author got so intrusive, because it's a great concept for a story. The psychological inferences were very insightful, sometimes brilliant. His sense of mood and place were wonderfully visual. I'm a push-over for a great metaphor, but too many get in the way of a fluid read. The build to the finale was well-paced, but the end was kind of a let down.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Black and brilliant, but..., July 17, 2002

By 

Eric J. Matluck (Hackettstown, NJ United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Boy (Paperback)

I came across this quite extraordinary novel by Naeem Murr while looking through some books by Iris Murdoch; which is to say, accidentally or, put in a happier light, fortuitously. I was intrigued by its title, the description on the back cover, the fact that The New York Times listed it as a notable book and, especially, its opening lines. In fact, the first chapter promised a novel of an unusual degree of finish and ingenuity. Broadly, the book tells the story of a teenage male prostitute (or rent-boy, to use the deliciously apt descriptor favored by the author) and the devastation he brings to the people around him. Said people are, primarily, Sean, his (foster) father, who spends the book searching for him; Megan, his step-sister; Ronan, Theresa, and Caitlin, caretakers at a home for boys where he lived; and a wonderfully drawn character called the Fatman (a cunning reference to the bomb dropped on Japan during World War II?), with whom the boy is having an affair. The boy may be pure evil, but the tragedy of the story derives from the emptiness of the lives of the people around him. Each one is seeking to fill a need and, so, finds him attractive in their own way (although we are told repeatedly that the boy is beautiful): for Sean the attraction is primarily familial, for Megan it is (for lack of a better term) psychological (she suffers from clinical depression), for Ronan it is sexual, for Theresa it is religious, and for the Fatman it is emotional. But even though the boy is an instrument of nothing but death and ruin, the characters are convinced that, without him, their lives would hardly be worth living: Faulkner once wrote that, forced to choose between grief and nothing, he would choose grief.

The book is not perfect. Although the writing and plotting are extraordinary, some passages are (as the British would say) too clever by half. The male characters emerge as much more fully drawn than the female characters. In particular, the character of Ricky, the 12-year-old rent-boy with a cold sore under his nose and a head too large for his body, and whose greatest fantasy is to convince people that his mother works as a make-up artist (or is it a hair stylist?) for the BBC, is supremely touching. On the other hand, Theresa, Caitlin, and Megan too often emerge as caricatures, and the dialogue between Sean and Caitlin, who develop a relationship of their own, has a cutesy awfulness out of keeping with the rest of the book. The conclusion, while dramatically satisfying (in fact, the lengthy final chapter represents some of the most sustainedly dramatic writing in the novel), is not (quite) intellectually convincing: while the final act that Sean commits is understandable given the circumstances, nothing in the 200-some-odd pages that preceded it led me to expect it could really happen. And yet, the most devastating moment of all comes just before the end. Sean, confronting the boy about something that occurred between him and his half-brother and -sister, says, But they were innocent, to which the boy replies, They were not innocent. I loved them both. In its context, that line is shattering.

I see that this book was published 4 years ago. I have no idea whether Mr. Murr has written anything since, but even if not, he has given the world a novel to reckon with, and that is something for which I, for one, am profoundly grateful.