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.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
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.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Dark, twisted, and funny.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Orange Rhymes With Everything (Hardcover)
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
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Orangemen had difficult Irish childhoods too!,
By
This review is from: Orange Rhymes With Everything (Hardcover)
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
5.0 out of 5 stars
Tremendous book,
By Rick Ollerman (Littleton, NH USA) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Orange Rhymes With Everything (Hardcover)
This is a fully realized literary statement of nihilism, a foreboding read in the best noirish tradition. Yet throughout there's a pervasive sense of unity of all things. Dismissing this as a first novel is a mistake; it is deficient in neither theme or quality of prose. I applaud the author's vision and his commitment to style, something almost completely missing from today's bestsellers. This book is disturbing on many levels and I will be thinking about it for weeks to come. I find that so many authors write two excellent books and then descend to some comfortable formula. In this book McKinty's is an original voice that I emphatically hope he maintains. Now on to the rest of his work...
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