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24 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Heartrending, long after you've closed the cover, August 28, 2006
Carry Me Down leaves you with a lump in the throat after you've closed the cover. It's such an authentic portrait of what it is to be a lonely adolescent who's an awkward misfit, though thankfully not every lonely adolescent tries to smother his mother. The focus of this book is on the brutality of childhood, as well as the huge impact parents play in forming the psyches of their children. Though not an abused child per se, John Egan is raised by somewhat unstable parents who don't always provide him with the emotional and financial stability he so desperately needs. He becomes a compulsive liar who's convinced he has a preternatural ability to detect lies in others, and as such he's somewhat an unreliable narrator. The reader can read between the lines and get a good general idea of the truth, by knowing the reactions of the other characters, so the occasional delusions of John are easily seen through. He is a liar, but not a sophisticated one. There's a lot of innocence in him, through it all, and this is what gets our sympathy. He's a child who needs a lot of love and who gets precious little, and that's what breaks the reader's heart more than anything. After finishing this book last evening I cannot get it out of my head. It's dark and sometimes depressing, but in the end redemptive. No wonder the Booker committee chose it. It illustrates a very good instinct for picking out another up-and-comer to watch. I expect Hyland may not have the visibility to actually win the prize, but this is one of the most heart-rending books I've read in a while, and it definitely deserves making the Longlist. It's so worth making the effort to fit this one into your reading schedule.
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Quietly disturbing and deftly written, March 17, 2007
This review is from: Carry Me Down (Paperback)
After I had read the first 20 or so pages of this book, I thought I might have to put it down and not read the rest. There is a scene of such quiet violence inside an otherwise placid domestic setting that I could not bear to read it. But I did continue, at first through slightly squinting eyes (not to be caught off-guard again), and quickly found that I couldn't put the book down. One might say that 'nothing happens' (as I've read earlier here), but I'd argue that everything happens. We watch as the author carefully and quietly dessimates an entire personality before our eyes. She never releases the tension, from scene to scene (I had much trouble sleeping at night after reading this -- a warning to other bedtime readers), and I couldn't stop turning the pages. I did have a little trouble with some of her characters who are slipped in but never developed: the teacher, Mr. Roche, is a complete mystery to me (what did he want with John? What was that all about?). The gang who threatens John disappears as if they never existed, despite the fact that he does not complete the task they set for him. The author always comes back to this troubled triumverate of a family (calling them dysfunctional does not even begin to describe the destructive forces inside them). I wish I knew someone who's read the book so that we can analyze it to death. The parents seem to love the boy genuinely, and yet they also seem to fear him, and to infantalize him. The broken aspects of their marriage, and the psychological violence that springs from it, has a profound affect on the boy which they seem never to realize (until, perhaps, the end, and even then it's hard to tell if they really do see, or if they've made a pact to ignore it). The reader watches the boy's personality slowly break, but it's done with such fierce tenderness -- the contradictions in this writing are, I think, profound. And to call the ending 'redemptive' is, to me, inaccurate. I felt relief to find them back in the place where they began, and yet the dysfunctions remain. One wonders who John Egan will grow up to be; there is no real healing here, only an attempt to be loved again. That paradox kept me awake late into the night after I finished this. A tour de force, I think, despite some quibbling flaws.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Liars, May 9, 2007
This review is from: Carry Me Down (Paperback)
The narrator of this story, John Egan, an 11-year-old Irish schoolboy, wants to get into the Guinness Book of Records as a human lie-detector. An only child, clever but thank goodness not precociously so, he tries to make sense of the world around him, but sees only its inconsistencies. Things are changing too fast: his body undergoes an unexpected growth spurt, his voice begins to change, he encounters problems at school, and some trouble erupts between his out-of-work father and long-suffering mother. The one thing he does know is when he is being lied to, and before long he has begun lying himself in self-defence. Almost imperceptibly at first, his life begins to spiral downwards, reaching a climax towards the end which makes everybody around him stop and take stock. Paradoxically, the trigger for this near-disaster is not another lie, but John's insistence on the truth; one of the most interesting aspects of Hyland's writing is her ability to see the shadings in what others might regard as moral absolutes. A summary of the story might make it appear relentlessly grim, but not so. Despite the rural Irish setting circa 1969, this is no piece of Celtic Gothic, but something that might be written of families anywhere. John is a sympathetic character, often funny, and surprisingly resilient. For most of the book, the story seems like some kind of preadolescent adventure. The climax, when it comes, takes you by surprise, although you can recognize the earlier hints if you think back. Also, Hyland does not leave the reader with an entirely bleak ending; there is hope around the corner. But (partly from personal experience) I do feel that the ending is a little simplistic; the implied upward trajectory is likely to be neither short nor easy. Nor entirely one-sided; the emphasis on the troubled child hides the fact that his father may be an even more deeply disturbed character, and this is something that is neither fully explored nor satisfactorily resolved. But for all its troubling elements, CARRY ME DOWN also contains great warmth which I think will last long after the book has been returned to its shelf.
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