Customer Reviews

The Divine Ryans

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I found this book quite intriging. In the spirit of "American Beauty", it is a tale about a dysfuntional family. It is told as almost a bitter sweet memoir of a real person's childhood in Newfoundland in the 1960's. You learn to dislike and like the different characters in the childs eyes and see how his divine family has truely fallen from grace. The characters in the book that should be the most devout and true are the most ignorant and irritating, these people being the preist and nun in the family. The leader of their Irish-Catholic, you could almost say cult, is the aunt of Draper Doyle (the young child). She is the most nauseating character I have yet to come across. She is filled with Hipocrisy and all the things that she is against. She also threatens the safty of Draper Doyle's newly widowed mother. Their entire future depends on Draper Doyle's recognization of his nightmares which cause him unbelievable embarassment in the face of his relative. His only refuge from his devout aunts and uncles is his uncle reginald who is one of the most endearing and genuinly funny characters I have come across. This book is fantasticly written (unlike this review, I have need of spell check) and keeps your attention from one paragraph to the next which is always a Divine thing in a book.

If you are Canadian, know anything about hockey or love oddball families, you will enjoy this book. It is the touching story of the Ryan's, a Catholic family in Newfoundland who run the local Catholic newspaper. The trials and secrets of this lovely bunch of nuts, as seen through the eyes of their youngest member, is a truly memorable story.

This book was pure enjoyment. A great read and never disappointing. Very different from Colony of Unrequieted Dreams. I feel as I have found an author that I will able to follow for years to come.

Hilarious and scalpel sharp, Wayne Johnston's 1990 novel looks back at 1967, the awful year following the death of 9-year-old Draper Doyle Ryan's father. Narrator and stumbling hero, Draper Doyle battles the buffeting winds of his formidable relatives, the terrors of burgeoning sexuality and the mystifying appearances of his father's ghost.

The Newfoundland Ryans, a viciously insular clan known throughout the city of St. John's as "Divine" for their plethora of priests and nuns, own a failing newspaper and a thriving funeral home. After his father's death, Draper Doyle, his 12-year-old sister Mary (a marvelous mix of awkward, kindly, petty and roguish adolescence) and their mother, Linda, are forced to move in with the family matriarch, Aunt Philomena, their own home sold to keep the Catholic-biased "Daily Chronicle" afloat.

Also housed at Aunt Phil's is caustic and irreverent Uncle Reginald, whose house had gone into the maw of the "Chronicle" ten years before. Aunt Phil's siblings, the sanctimonious, sadistic Father Seymour and crippled Sister Louise, are frequent visitors and supporters of Phil's narrow-minded, humorless tyranny.

Formidable Aunt Phil rules the roost with implacable righteousness, dragging Draper Doyle to strangers' wakes at the funeral home, dragging her sister-in-law to the cemetery. She celebrates her own widowhood and Linda's too, saying, "He's free now...free from the marriage bed."

Early on, she announces that Draper Doyle will forego his beloved hockey to become one of Father Seymour's "Number," a group of 100 orphans who sing in a chorus, tap dance and box. A fanatical Montreal Canadiens (Habs) fan, Draper Doyle plays goal because he can't skate well enough to be anything else. Unfortunately, he's not much of a goalie either.

"I subscribed to the little-known dodge ball school of goaltending, which was founded on the economy of pain principle, which stated that if it would hurt more to stop a shot than to let it in the net, you should let it in. In short, I played as if the point of playing goal was to keep the puck from hitting me."

But Father Seymour has no intention of spoiling his Number with untalented Draper Doyle and shunts him aside while compelling him, nevertheless, to attend practices. Bored and miserable, Draper Doyle finds some solace in his Uncle Reg's sessions of "psycho-oralysis," "the opposite of psychoanalysis."

Uncle Reg institutes the sessions because of his nephew's frequent nightmares and sighting of his father's ghost, always with hockey puck in hand. "He told me the job of an analyst was to listen while the job of an oralyst was to speak. The job of an analyst was to take his patient seriously. The job of an oralyst was to make him laugh." The oralyst can lie, veer off on irrelevant tangents and have fun at the patient's expense - literally.

Since the sessions will cost him half his allowance, Draper Doyle asks if they will do him any good. " `You should consider yourself lucky,' he said. `Hamlet, who also saw his father's ghost, did not have nearly so nice an uncle.'"

Draper Doyle's year is punctuated by towering moments - his "last" hockey competition against his sister, the Number's Christmas concert disrupted by his father's appearance, his first and final boxing match. Between these crisis crescendos, the rich interplay of Ryans keeps things hopping through the nightmare of weekly confessions to Father Seymour, televised Habs games and psychological warfare, until repressed memories about his father's death begin to surface in Draper Doyle, leading to terrible but liberating understanding.

Johnston ("The Colony of Unrequited Dreams") writes with seemingly effortless wit and insight. His characters, no matter how awful, weak or bumbling, are vividly human and Draper Doyle's story is heart-breakingly, side-splittingly compelling.

Another great by Wayne Johnston. I first got into this author with the book Colony of Unrequited Dreams, and while a bit slow, you could hear a certain voice in his writing. Divine Ryans didn't have a chance to be slow. It's a fairly short read, yet it's near impossible to put down. If you want an awesome read, with quite a change of pace from your average novel, make sure to pick this one up; the view from a child's perspective is worth it alone.

I picked this book up mainly for the name and intriguing cover (yes, you can pick a book by the cover!). Inside was a look into a child's life, reminding me of Angela's Ashes... this poor child suffered at the hands of his relatives and lineage. I probably wouldn't read it again, but I will pass it along to my friends who read.

This is a pretty good book. The writing is clever, intelligent, and funny. However, I found virtually all of the characters to be dislikable. Also, I was hoping for the Newfoundland setting to affect the story, but really it could have taken place anywhere in Canada or even the US where hockey is popular.

And I expected great what with Catholic guilt and hockey and comic writing all in one novel. There are some very funny moments -- for example, a devastating take on tap dancing and the poor starving children of -- in this case -- Latin America. The memories of the Canadiens and the other original NHL teams before expansion, and the frigid days and nights of street hockey are exactly right. Plus, Uncle Reginald and Draper Doyle are consistently engaging and give the book most of its considerable energy, although it stretches credulity that a nine year old boy should so completely recall over several detailed pages a dream absolutely crucial to the novel's climatic moments. Bigger problems: Draper's mother is too peripheral, as ethereal as the ghost father, and Aunt Phil and Uncle Seymour are so unremittingly mean-spirited that they become more parody than human. Finally, the twist as Draper Doyle begins to recall the lost week of his father's death is unexpectedly nasty, and leaves this novel uneasily perched between the comic and terrible personal discovery. Still, while The Divine Ryans is not a must read, it is the work of an author with talent clearly under development.