No Bones (Tpb) [Hardcover]

Anna Burns (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 18, 2001

This novel tracks the tragi-comic fortunes of the Lovett family of Belfast - the violent father; the shrewdly mad mother; malevolent Mick and dreamy Amelia, our narrator, who records their antics over the years - fights, school, kickings, and the IRA and the RUC vying for "Most Inept Police".

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

No Bones, Anna Burns's magnificent debut, is a heartbreaking but astonishingly funny account of growing up in Belfast during the "Troubles." Without meaning to diminish this wonderful and inventive work, it's possibly more accurate to describe it as a series of interlocking stories rather than a novel. At its center is Amelia Lovett, a naïve, sensitive girl who matures, although never losing her youthful incredulity, as the book progresses. Her often tragic life story is recounted through an array of characters, vernacular voices, and episodes that with mordant humour track the sheer brutality of the era. Burns unflinchingly portrays the casualness, even banality, of the violence. The 9-year-old Amelia easily drifts from collecting buttons to plastic bullets; teenage girls shoot each other in the playground; wayward youths are kneecapped, and even a walk home from a disco can result in a "protracted, grisly and truly awful end."

What Burns manages to capture, through comic exaggeration, is a real sense of how fragile the boundaries of normality are. The sectarian killings are matched by equally senseless domestic feuds and conflicts. Amelia's mother's observation that "she could see that beating the crap out of her sister was one thing; kicking an IRA man to death or nearly was another" offers a measure of just how distorted their values have become. Amelia reacts to the madness around her by internalizing the violence, choosing to harm herself rather than others: first by becoming an anorexic and then an alcoholic. Burns has produced a compassionate, bitterly acute, witty portrait of the darkest days of Northern Ireland's history. No Bones could well emerge as Belfast's Dubliners. --Travis Elborough, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

A young woman struggles with growing up in Belfast during the Troubles in this darkly humorous, sexually twisted debut. It starts off solidly as a coming-of-age story about Amelia Lovett, who spends her childhood playing with rubber bullets while her family dodges real ones in the ongoing battle between the Brits and the IRA. Amelia's dangerous road continues when she enters school and has to fight off some fellow schoolgirls after they start a riot. Once her brief academic career peters out, she immediately goes on the dole and begins to hit the local Belfast clubs. Real trouble creeps in when she begins displaying symptoms of anorexia, and it doesn't take long before living with her crazy family in the ongoing calamity that is Belfast sends her straight toward a full-blown breakdown. Burns does well in the early going as she captures the tainted innocence of Amelia's early childhood, but her narrative turns lurid during a lengthy passage describing how escapees from a mental home wind up in the middle of the fighting and then end up hanging out with Amelia. The chapters detailing her subsequent mental collapse are downright cartoonish, but the biggest problem is that Burns never really connects the character dots in Amelia's downfall, making the transformation from innocent child to party girl to mental patient seem disjointed and unreal. Burns shows flashes of talent in the early chapters, but the problems in the second half overshadow the early promise.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 321 pages
• Publisher: Flamingo (June 18, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0002261804
• ISBN-13: 978-0002261807
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,634,345 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great Start but Loses Focus, March 7, 2003

By 

A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: No Bones (Paperback)

Few things can turn an abstract conflict halfway across the world into reality than to see it through the eyes of a child growing up in the middle of it. That's really the strength of this book about Amelia, a Belfast girl who is seven when the "Troubles" kick off in 1969. Most readers will be comparing their own (comparably) sheltered and secure childhoods to that of Amelia's, who collects plastic bullets, sees a friend shoot another girl on the playground, and grows up in an area under military occupation, where IRA thugs dole out kneecappings, and being in the wrong place in the wrong time can get you very dead.

The clear central theme is that growing up in such an environment is scarring-and as one reads Amelia's story, it's not hard to think of children from El Salvador, Palestine, Algeria, and other areas of recent civil war. Amelia is emotionally broken by the violence around her- totally ambivalent toward her family (as they are to her), and closed to deep friendships, love, or any kind of intimacy. While some of her schoolmates recycle the omnipresent violence into acting out, Amelia absorbs it and rechannels it into self-destruction. She anesthetize herself first through anorexia and then alcoholism, drifting through her twenties before suffering a total breakdown as the ghosts of the dead haunt her.

While Amelia's story is a novel, it's comprised of 23 disjoined episodic vignettes that unfold in chronological order over 25 years as Amelia passes from childhood to mentally ill adult. The first third of this debut-spanning 1969-79-is really, really good, unfortunately the focus is lost with the chapter "Mr. Hunch in the Ascendant, 1980." The longest chapter, it's a rambling, surreal story about a mentally ill neighborhood guy who escapes and hangs own with Amelia. It's so long and so unconnected to her that the dark spell of her story is broken and is never recaptured. There are too many gaps between her childhood, alcoholic adulthood, and breakdown to get a full sense of the tragedy.

There are some nice part in the rest of the book though, such as the chapter "Incoming, 1986" where two old schoolmates run into each other and over the course of a drink contrive the murder of one's husband (all of which is totally unrelated to Amelia). One the whole, the novel shows great promise, although as the author grew up in Belfast at the exact same time as Amelia, and moved to London just as she did, one wonders what she'll draw on for her next book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Chilling and funny, May 10, 2002

By 

Porter Crane (Wokingham, United Kingdom) - See all my reviews

This review is from: No Bones (Paperback)

How often do you get to put together the words chilling and funny? But this book is both and does it well. It enmeshes you so deeply in Belfast, during the Troubles, than when you look up you eye everyone to see if they are IRA or British soldiers. I was amazed by the author's control over voice as perspective shifts from the protagonist to other characters and was moved by the horror that is drawn so well by the young voice recounting it. Every Brit and every Irish American should read it to discover and uncover the not-so-secret secrets of the Troubles that we all scoffed at. There was nothing to scoff at. The ghosts come back to haunt you.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "No Bones": A Review, May 24, 2002

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: No Bones (Paperback)

For the reader who is an enthusiast of Northern Irish fiction, this is a must. Enjoyable reading, although at times painfully disturbing for its realism and humanity.
It does not escape the "political" situation, yet it escapes the usual cliches in novels about this country. People's lives are still affected by "the Provies," Protestants and Catholics fall victim to bigotry, both sides are maimed and killed. However, this gives much more intense insight into the mind and body of Amelia, her views toward life in the war-torn country, her ambivalent feelings towards family,friends, and sexuality, and her combatting madness--her own and that which permeates her society as a whole.

An "Angela's Ashes," Ulster-style. Definitely difficult to put down.