Close to Home by Michael Magee: deft depiction of a generation facing an uncertain future

The start of Michael Magee’s debut novel is a knockout. Literally. “There was nothing to it,” says Sean Maguire, our first-person protagonist. “I swung and hit him and he dropped.” Provoked into throwing a punch by put-downs from “posh pricks” at a house party, he finds himself on trial for assault and facing the possibility of jailtime.

It’s 2013, and Sean has come home to west Belfast with an English degree from Liverpool. But post-crash, jobs are hard to come by. “We’re twenty-two,” his mate Ryan remarks. “We’re men.” But at the outset of this coming-of-age story, the word “man” strikes Sean as not quite right.

The first in his family to go to university, Sean lives in a squat and hopes to save up for a master’s degree. But he falls into old habits of partying–”padding [himself] full of vodka” and “tooting keys in cubicles”. When he’s fired for failing to turn up to his job as a club barman, he has trouble finding work despite his best efforts.

Sean’s mother would like to help him financially but struggles to make ends meet herself: she cleans houses for six quid an hour with no job security. His half-brother Anthony is volatile, struggling with addiction. As Magee smoothly unspools the backstory, we learn the root cause of Anthony’s rage. Sean hasn’t spoken to his father in years but tracks him down on Google Maps and protectively watches over his half-sister on Facebook.

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He also reconnects with an ex-girlfriend, Mairéad, who is working as a shot girl after graduating from Queen’s and saving up to move to Berlin. She encourages Sean to send a story to a literary magazine. The story gets rejected, but with kind feedback, which mirrors Magee’s experience first submitting to Stinging Fly. (Ten years later, he now considers submissions himself as the fiction editor of the Belfast literary journal The Tangerine.)

[ Michael Magee interview: ‘My family for a long time couldn’t really show their Irishness, it wasn’t safe’ ]

Magee skilfully paints the landscape of a city still scarred by the Troubles. Sean passes a ceremony for a mural in memory of Carol Ann Kelly, a 12-year-old girl fatally wounded by a plastic bullet in 1981. Recent reports suggest the British army fired the bullets at children despite knowing they were dangerous. Sean’s father had been on an IRA hit list, and his mother was asked to hide guns in the house. “Back then, she couldn’t walk down the street without being pushed up against a wall,” he shares. “She had to stand there and take it, quietly, while the Brits frisked her, their hands going down between her legs and up. No wonder she couldn’t sleep.”

In the aftermath of the conflict, working-class communities in the North continue to suffer disproportionately. “People born either side of the Good Friday agreement, like Sean, were promised they’d reap the spoils of peace,” Magee told the Observer, who named him one of the 10 best new novelists this year. But as Sean summarises a lecture on trans-generational trauma, “even now, twenty years into the peace process ... people were still skint as f**k, and all their kids were killing themselves”.

With his semi-autobiographical novel, Magee joins a clutch of authors penetrating literary fiction with working-class voices, including Gabriel Krauze, Douglas Stuart, Kit de Waal and Tom Benn. As Sean straddles two worlds – reading highbrow novels but stealing food at the Asda self-scan – he realises “with a cold feeling” that his inner self-conception doesn’t match the world’s perception of him. The people in the courtroom as he stands trial for the assault “were on the outside looking in,” he tells us, “and the person they saw wasn’t me”.

[ ‘Never swear, kiss a boy or moan’: Kit de Waal on her Irish Jehovah’s Witness mum and West Indian dad ]

Close to Home sidesteps many common pitfalls plaguing debuts. Avoiding the solipsism that risks infecting in a first-person coming-of-age story, Magee’s secondary characters are fully fleshed out. What might seem like a lack of plot progression struck me as true to life, in which growth tends to come slowly, in fits and starts. The book’s themes – masculinity, class and history – don’t offer easy resolutions. Instead, Magee deftly conveys the anxieties of a generation facing an uncertain future. “I need to get out of this,” Sean thinks to himself, not exactly sure what “this” is.

Although ill at ease at first with Mairéad’s university friends, who speak like “those uppity f**kers on the news”, Sean gradually comes to feel if not totally at home with them, at least closer. The book ends with him reading Milan Kundera’s 1967 debut novel The Joke. One of Kundera’s principal preoccupations was the difficulty of returning home as an exile. “So here I was,” Sean reads. “Home again after all those years.”