The Good Son: ‘the literary triumph of the book lies in its tone and its charm’

What first struck me when Paul McVeigh’s book arrived on my desk was its context – Belfast, 1980s, the Troubles, a traumatic childhood and of course comedy, lots of comedy. That context is still raw for people in these islands – it’s recent memory, not distant history. The losses and catastrophes are still being lived with. So this is a daring work. I remember thinking, how is he going to set the narrative of a child against such a background? I also remember thinking: will readers want this?

That historical period is a time burned into the minds of anyone born in the ’60s and ’70s who lived in these islands, all these islands, off the coast of Europe. Yet what convinced me to take on the book was something much deeper. This is a serious novel – don’t get me wrong, it’s laugh-out-loud funny, it’s packed with nostalgic references to its period, it’s written with the urgent emerging dialect of a 10-year-old boy and littered with idioms that pin down 1980s Belfast in ways readers have loved – and yet it’s a serious book that cleverly unfolds its sometimes violent concerns with insouciance, charm and filmic drama. Quite a package then.

It’s also a great liminal work, a work about thresholds. Let’s just unpack some of those: we have the irrepressible Mickey Donnelly, sitting between schools, in that no-child’s-land between primary and secondary, and there’s a class boundary, hoping that his move to St Malachy’s grammar will lift him from his old life to something grander, prefigured in the idea of America. There are the boundaries of poverty and family that may keep Mickey locked in a world he might never escape from, too. There are the borderlands of Mickey’s sexuality, that first flowering of his own psychological make-up and something that makes this book a great work of vulnerability and prejudice. And then there are its edges of violence, those of occupation and sectarianism and the more commonplace violence of a venal gangster subculture that pervades the story and the communities that inhabit it. Sure, there’s comedy here, but there’s tragedy, too. What you won’t find is bitterness.

So Mickey’s life, and this novel, is about transition from one world to another – in this respect it is one of the most striking novels to emerge from a Northern Irish writer about coming to terms with and making peace with recent history. McVeigh’s novel steps in and out of these thresholds, revealing something we have, in more recent times, come to see with terrifying clarity: the thin veneer of civilisation. We may think of peace as a passive act, but McVeigh’s book shows how insistently peace must be made. We might even go further to see peace as an act of fragile confrontation and continual acts of engagement and transcendence. But let’s not get too hifalutin’ – Mickey’s world is always one to bring folks down a peg or two. After all, that’s how you survive in world of The Good Son.

You might think, phew, heavy stuff, reading that list and my weighty take on this text, but you’d be wrong. The literary triumph of the book lies in its tone and its charm. It breezes along in a page-turning drama that has left readers gripped, reading through the night. It navigates its sibling loves and sibling rivalries with ribald humour and earthy language, it loves its Ma and, whoa, what a Ma! It has a dog called Killer and it has its panto villains (Briege McAnally provides the standout portrait of childhood despot and ne’er-do-well) all played out in tightly-controlled domestic set pieces that project the story from scene to scene.

Perhaps exceptionally for a book so driven by its diction, it is a story painted with gorgeous visual extravagance – Glue World, the Bone Hills, the McNulty’s garage, 23 Havana Street, it’s not hard to see McVeigh’s skills as a playwright being brought to bear in the storyline – you can see the story as much as read it. Does Mickey manage to move through these thresholds to the other side? You’ll just have to read the novel to see how things pan out for him.

And what about Paul McVeigh, how have things panned out for him? Well, the book became one of The Reading Agency’s Books of 2015, an Elle Best Book of 2015, it was shortlisted for the Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize, it was shortlisted for the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, it’s a finalist in the 2016 People Book Prize, it was selected for Brighton’s City Reads in 2016 and featured in a sell-out show at the Brighton Festival and now it’s longlisted for the 2016 Polari First Book Prize. Paul is touring the world on the back of his debut, and the success of the books (already reprinted) have already established him as a novelist to watch. The past 15 months have put Paul on the literary map.

Being the editor of this remarkable book I can, naturally enough, take full satisfaction in my judgement in taking it on. Okay, okay, there was some luck involved in all this success. But what is clear is that the answer to my question at the end of the first paragraph of this piece is that, yes, readers will want this. In fact, I’ll make a bolder assertion, what we have here is a new entrant into that canon of national literature, something that readers will want for many, many years to come. Because once the violence is over (even the violence of childhood) we all need to heal and transcend our losses.

I’ve no idea just how closely Mickey’s world resembles Paul McVeigh’s childhood – and it doesn’t really matter. As a publisher, I’m looking forward to seeing Paul tackle the stories that come after innocence. Both he and his narrator have passed through a door and I can’t wait to see what the world offers them both. Anyway, I’ve done my job – here’s a new talent for you and a book you’ll not forget. I’m confident that you, the reader, will want whatever Paul now writes and his natural gifts as a performer of his work will endear him to festival-goers around the world. It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke. We’re lucky we have him, all we have to do is share him now.

Jen Hamilton-Emery is fiction editor and director of Salt, an independent publisher based in Cromer, Norfolk