Customer Reviews

This Side of Brightness: A Novel

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Colum McCann has written a beautiful book with his work, "This Side of Brightness". Beautiful in this case may seem odd, but I would use the word here as I would use it to describe a work by John Steinbeck. Human nature and behavior often has trouble rising above decent much less beautiful, but a talented writer can bring painful lives and experiences to paper in prose that is wonderful to read. The pain that is documented is not minimized, rather written in a way that allows the truth to remain unvarnished, and the prose to be rendered by an artist like Mr. McCann.

I have read about the men who dug the excavations for the caissons of the Brooklyn Bridge, but never for the hundreds of miles of tunnels throughout the boroughs of New York. Tunneling is an extremely dangerous occupation, and if possible is even more hazardous when tunneling under water. The men must work in highly pressurized rooms in order to keep the river from collapsing in upon them, and yet the pressure cannot be so great that the air violates the walls of the chamber blowing outward as opposed to being crushed. The book documents a true story of men that were literally pushed through the walls of the tunnel they were digging until ejected in to the river and then being blown out of the water. To live through such an experience has to rank with the most remarkable stories of survival.

The book shares two lives that are revealed in parallel as far as narrative, but are intertwined in practice. The lives of both men are occupied at various times by living/working underground, but ultimately one life is spent and finally ends beneath the river, while for the other it is a refuge that ultimately allows him to emerge once again to life above ground leaving his demons buried.

The author also explores prejudice in a variety of forms, and from the book's very beginning shows prejudice and racism for the absolute stupidity it is. Men of various color and ethnic backgrounds enter a vicious working environment where they not only work together but are willing to risk their lives for each other. Black, white, Irish, Italian, Polish, none of these characteristics have any meaning when below ground, once returned to the surface every vile behavior associated with race, and religion once again is in full blossom. Church leaders reinforce the worst and most ignorant tenets of institutional stupidity; de facto Jim Crow rules dehumanize its victims.

Colum McCann does not shy away from any topic of traditional controversy. He takes the reader through generations of a family begun by a white wife and her black husband, their children who are born in to a world that hates them even more than their all black father, if that is possible.

There is one issue I am unclear on and it stems from a quote on the jacket of the book. Frank McCourt writes of McCann's, "having been there", when he writes about homeless living under the city. My question is whether the author did live there for a time while writing this book, or whether he actually was homeless for a period of time. In either event it took courage to live there as an observer, and if the latter, both courage and a willingness to share a desperately difficult and personal part of his life.

'This Side of Brightness' is a throbbingly good read which trawls the making of the underclass in trenchant prose. The voice is unmistakably McCanns', though the subject matter recalls the marvellous McCarthy's,'Suttree' and my favourit Ondatjee,'Skin of the Lion'. The fact of 'blackness' cuts through this tale. Using time shifts in alternating chapters, we reach the intersection between 1916 and 1991 as the third generation descendant of an Afro American tunnel builder, Clarence'Treefrog' Walker, copes with his family's checquered past. His grandmother was mowed down by car, his father murders the driver and is in turn done in by the cops. His mum turns to drink and then smack which kills her. He's raised by grandfather, Nathan. Some years after he marries and has a child. The rock in his life, the old man dies.He spins out and the wife, unable to tolerate his disintegration, abandons him taking the child. The gradual recognition of these connexions unfolds against the nefarious netherworld of New York's subterranean culture. Once an acrobatic genius on sky-scraper scaffolding, with his world imploding,Treefrog enters tunnel life, a descent with a radically different drive from the heroic grandfather. Treefrog rescues an attractive, drug-addicted whore from the violent clutches of a fellow denizen. Making love, a seeming reconciliation of emotions for his mother and wife, he is determined to, once again, scale the brighter world. The seemingly futile gesture which introduces him on the first page: freeing a heron from the frozen Hudson River, is given fresh resonance.

This book was a rare find. My brother actually bought it and when I looked on the publishing page, I found it's a first edition. I do believe it will become a classic one day.

Billed as a tale of the "homeless" I found it much more an adult type "Holes"--a magical story that weaves it's way through time, bringing us to a finale that's intertwined with the beginning. It's also a facinating look at the building of the train tunnels between Manhattan and Brooklyn and the men who toiled underground, now largely forgotten. I especially loved the way history repeated itself through time and space, making the tunnels themselves a character in the book.
You won't be disappointed if you read this great work.

In this epic novel, Mr McCann combines both historical facts and fiction. On the historical side, the story opens with the digging of a railway tunnel under the East River in New York in 1916. The reader follows the main character, a coloured man called Nathan Walker, a sandhog who struggles daily with his shovel against the earth. The working conditions are atrocious: the heat, the noise, the dirt, the physical strain - the digging was done by manpower in these days. Later Nathan marries Eleanor O'Lear, a white woman of Irish descent. Such a marriage was considered by most New Yorkers as a disgrace at that time. They bring up two children, both a social and a financial challenge.
Parallel to Nathan Walker's story, the reader follows another character, a homeless man nicknamed Treefrog who made his home in one of the many disused tunnels in New York in the 1990s. At first there appears to be no connection between Nathan and Treefrog but soon enough the reader discovers how and why they are linked in the novel.
With a marvellous narrative for its economy, Mr McCann constructs a beautiful epic story of laughter and tragedy, of sadness and small victories. It is an authentic account about homelessness, about living below the rich and about the stronghold of the past.

There are 1300 km of tunnels under New York city. They were built in the early years of this century by Irish, Italian and African-American navvies, working under the most appalling conditions. Today, as well as carrying millions of people in trains that are often overcrowded and sometimes dangerous, these tunnels are home to unknown thousands of vagrants and homeless people. Colum McCann sets his latest novel among these lost souls, telling the story of a family which is an unusual mix of Roscommon Irish and Georgia negro. This Side of Brightness starts with a historical event: the 1916 collapse of a tunnel which caused three workers to be forced up through tonnes of soil on a spume of pressurised water. They survived their ordeal, but the fourth member of their gang, an Irishman named O'Leary, was never found, his body stuck somewhere in the shale that separates the Brooklyn river from the tunnel that still carries trains beneath it. The book deals with the lives of the survivors, particularly the young black man named Walker who continues to work as a sandhog and marries O'Leary's daughter. The story is told with tenderness and understanding, carefully avoiding the temptation to sensationalise. This is how you write about the poison of racism sloshing through every corner of society; this is how you tell what racism means for ordinary human beings - the casual savagery of the police, the all-encompassing disdain of white people, the soul-destroying subservience of the blacks. Walker remembers the gentle times of growing up in Georgia. His wish to return there with his white wife and son is not dimmed by the realisation that if he ever did so, both he and his son would almost certainly be hanged. The book is written in alternating chapters, contrasting the struggles of Walker through four generations with the lives of the broken men and women who live in the labyrinths beneath Grand Central and other New York subway stations. Both narratives come together in the final few chapters in a resolution that is as frightening as the lives of the protagonists. This is the third of Colum McCann's books; the other two Fishing the Sloe-Black River and Songdogs foreshadowed the promise which is realised here. It shows a writer in scintillating form. His mastery of language is brilliant; he is as adept at evoking an image by a phrase - men working on skyscrapers high above Manhattan "piercing the virginity of space where steel hits the sky" - or by a single word - New York streets "cantankerous with car horns." In an Irish Times article last year, he told how he had avoided successive American St Patrick's Day extravaganzas to spend the time instead with the subterraneans who nicknamed him "Irish" and put out the word that even though he was a "white boy" he was not to be molested. The stories he heard and the life he shared on those occasions come through in this splendid book which puts him right at the top of today's Irish writers. Do not be surprised if it is mentioned for the Booker Prize.

Somehow, coldly descriptive and vividly warm at the same read. These characters and this story has remained with me for months after reading "The Side of Brightness" and I am grateful to the friend who recommended it....

I was overwhelmed with emotion at the beauty of this novel. I had never heard of the book before someone mentioned it on the internet and I"m certain it will become a huge success once more people hear about it. It is a very moving, passionate story about New York and some of it's inhabitants through the twentieth century. The harshness of racism that runs through the story will remind some of Ragtime. But even though the book is full of bleakness and despair, as the title suggests, this is always a story of wonderful hope and humour and promise. An excellent read.

This is a provocative, rich novel. Living only blocks away from the tunnels in Riverside Park, where many of the characters make their home, I was astonished at they way the author was able to inhabit their world and bring their stories to light (literally). By interweaving the stories of the homeless with those of the original "tunnel people"--hard-working immigrants of turn-of-the-century NYC-- the author manages to make these homeless people tragic figures rather than simply pathetic lost souls.

It has been a long time since I turned pages into the wee hours of the night and spent the next day looking forward to finding the time to pick a book up again. "This Side of Brightness is so well written and engrossing I was torn between wanting to see it unfold and dreading the moment when it would be "all read up."

McCann's characters come to life vividly as we watch him and them create themselves with choices, circumstances and reactions to the random acts that come their way.

It's also a journey into a fascinating world of experiences that you are not likely to take in real life.

After reading this depth of history, this understanding of New York, and especially this dialogue, it is very difficult to believe that the author is not a native New Yorker, much less someone who moved here only a few years ago. The magnitude of his research shines through in this very compelling novel.
McCann also has a very strong voice, and a great deal to say with it. The depictions are vivid, and the denouement deeply satisfying. I recommend this book to everyone who asks me for a good read. I wish I could read it again for the first time.