I have joined a reading group in Stratford upon Avon. It’s called Books with Friends, and its 45 members
are divided into three smaller groups that meet at different times on the last
Thursday of each month. And …, thanks to firm but good-natured guidance from our
chair, who attends all 3 sessions, we spend most of our allotted hour and a quarter ACTUALLY DISCUSSING THE MONTHLY
BOOK !
This month’s book is The Loney
by Andrew Michael Hurley. It was published in late 2014 and in 2016 won the “Best Book of the Year” British Book Industry
award, as well as the Costa First Novel award. Although this was his first
full-length novel, Hurley had previously published two collections of short
stories.
The novel is about a Catholic family from
London and their teenage son Andrew (Hanny), who has not spoken since birth. His
younger brother, who is nicknamed Toto and tells the story, is very close to
Hanny and understands the language of objects Hanny uses to communicate his feelings.
The central narrative describes a visit
the Smith family makes to an isolated house (The Moorings) on a wild and remote
stretch of Cumbrian coast called “The Loney”. They are accompanied by some
close friends and their local priest. The visit is a religious retreat and a
pilgrimage organised by Hanny’s strong-willed mother, who desperately hopes her
son will be ‘cured’ by taking the waters at a nearby shrine on Easter Monday. The
novel’s setting is a familiar one, especially favoured by crime writers: a
small group of people thrown together in enclosed and isolated surroundings facing
uncertainty, unease and perhaps danger.
The Loney itself, and the local inhabitants,
play a big part in establishing a brooding atmosphere of menace, superstition and
hostile natural forces. A second focus of the action is a sinister house called
Thessaly on Coldbarrow, a spit of land twice a day cut off by the sea and separated
from the marshes around The Moorings by a treacherous stretch of beach with
unpredictable tides and dangerous currents. The locals are a motley bunch,
portrayed at once as superstitious, threatening, knowing, and somewhat
dysfunctional. There are unpleasant goings-on during the Smith’s visit: an
effigy of Christ is strung up at night in a nearby wood with a pig’s heart
inside, vandalism at a local Church stops the family celebrating Easter mass, a
mangled body of a new-born lamb is found near the house.
The book is beautifully written. The author has
the knack of bringing scenes vividly to life by his observations of everyday
objects, sounds and smells. He is also good at conveying his characters’ personalities
through their dialogue and their actions and reactions. You gradually learn
about them by what they say and do. The tender relationship between Hanny and
Toto is sensitively explored, and the religious and philosophical musings of
father Bernard, the priest, are cleverly woven into the plot and ring true. His
predecessor in the family’s London parish, father Wilfred, had preached church
dogma and moral certainties, sadistically chastising signs of human frailty in
the young. But we learn that he apparently took his own life when he could no
longer sustain the fiction of his own faith. By contrast, Father Bernard faces
up to his moral dilemmas and works hard to fulfil his duty of love to the
members of his flock, finding consolation in his hipflask when the going gets tough.
The dramatic build-up to the pivotal moment when Hanny is taken to
the sacred well is shocking, but well controlled and convincing. Faith and
prayer are not enough; miracles no longer happen. But sadly, from this point on,
the novel descends into poorly-plotted melodrama. Having so painstakingly
exposed the false hopes of a simplistic view of religion and the worthless points on its spiritual loyalty
cards, the author then hands unbelievable miraculous powers to the opposition. Satan
may often have the best lines but he surely doesn’t deserve a monopoly on
instant magical cures. I could probably have coped with some subtle hints of black magic at large in the primaeval hinterland of The Loney, provided that they had been sufficiently ambiguous. But here
the shenanigans in Thessaly’s dark cellar involving a sacrificial baby and a
back story of a woman once hanged nearby for witchcraft more than just strain
credibility, they descend into farce. At this point the short-story writer
clearly felt that he had gone on too long and needed to round things quickly off.
Fast forward of 20 years: Hanny is now happily married with his human faculties
fully restored, while his brother Toto is having therapy to cope with no longer being needed. Where the absence of explanation worked so
successfully in conjuring up the menace earlier, the same technique utterly
fails to make the necromantic events on Coldbarrow, and the motivations of the
people involved, even faintly believable, and my imagination certainly couldn’t make
good the deficiency.
At Books with Friends we
are each expected to give the book we have just been reading a score out of 10.
Half way through The Loney, I was all
set to award an 8 or 9, which are high scores for me, but by the end I was
sadly reduced to a 3 or 4. A real let-down after such a good start.
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