This is a memoir. The author's parents were Irish. They settled in Paisley, Scotland during the 1930s. The author was born during the war. Apart from the foreword and afterword, where the author speaks as an adult, the narrative unfolds in one place, the Galloway Street of the title, a place of run-down tenements, and is concerned exclusively with the author's childhood there.
It begins with his earliest memory. He was two and he saw a shape leaning over his cot. And it ends with the author on a furniture lorry, driving down Galloway Street for the last time, en route to a new estate, a new life. He was 11-1/2.
The focus on Irish tenement life is intensified by the author's literary technique. Galloway Street is written in the first person and the present tense. The author also restricts himself to the words and idioms of his Irish immigrant milieu. His fidelity to the norms of his culture is such, he doesn't even have inverted commas. This is because, in his boyhood, reported speech and descriptive narrative were part of one seamless whole. The resulting text is simplicity itself; it is literally a boy speaking. Yet the work compels complete attention because everything here, down to the last full stop, has been carefully considered.
Many memoirists have restricted their palettes in order to magnify their effect. McCourt does it in Angela's Ashes. The naive style looks easy. It is anything but. Graduated change is the problem; if the narrative is to convince, a child's astonishing growth must be charted. Boyle does this marvellously. He captures not only the expansions in the child's word bank as he grows, but the corresponding expansion in his personality as his word bank grows. The book convincingly shows how language and comprehension, words and understanding, are entwined; they come as a package.
Boyle at two years old is an unformed receiver. Things happen but he cannot explain them. The seven-year-old Boyle, by contrast, can not only process information but has appetites that he seeks to satisfy. For instance, Boyle's family couldn't afford comics, yet the boy longed for them. (Boyle, incidentally, is adept at conjuring up the wonderful lustre of objects and his hunger to possess them.) Fortunately for the comic-starved Boyle, he has a dim friend with pocket money. Month after month he persuades the latter to buy the Beano as they stroll home from school. He then relieves his friend of the comic at the top of Galloway Street. The gulling is cruel. It would fit snugly into a Restoration drama. But Boyle's description is clear-eyed. His emphasis is entirely on the psychological process, and he places no emphasis whatsoever on justifying what he did. In other words, he doesn't bang on about his poverty. He just wants us to know exactly what happened, as far as he is able to tell us. Of course it's only a memoir and the form is suspect. It's only what the writer remembers, isn't it? But this writer remembers so much against himself it's hard to dismiss this as selfserving. The post-script to the Beano incident is a good example of the writer's honesty. The diddled boy eventually twigs, calls to the Boyle family tenement, and demands the return of his property. Boyle's Achill islander mother, an unhappy woman of simple faith, discovers the stash of comics under her son's bed, and returns them with profuse apologies. Boyle's first reaction is fury and shame. It only occurs to him later that he has done wrong. Many memoirists rebuke themselves but only a few - Boyle being one - convince us that they are truly ashamed of what they did.
As Boyle grows older, his developing conscience and his developing body collide. This is well-ploughed territory for Catholic memoirists. Before Galloway Street, I would have said there was nothing new left to say about the subject. I would have been wrong.
Sitting on the "lavvy" (Galloway Street is in dialect but it's not nearly as truculent as that in, say, Trainspotting), the 10-yearold Boyle notices his testicles, which have just dropped. He does not know what they are but with a child's perfect logic he comes up with a hypothesis based on the limited knowledge at his disposal. He knows he has a soul but it's location has never been explained. However, now these strange things have appeared on his body, does it not make sense to assume that they are where the soul lives?
The mandatory confession scene follows. No Catholic childhood is complete without one. The priest, on hearing the young Boyle's news, is appalled. Hasn't Boyle been told about the birds and bees, he wonders. No, says Boyle, he hasn't. Say three Hail Marys and then go home and ask, the priest advises. How truly surprising, just for once, to encounter a sensible, non-predatory priest.
Women appear in Boyle's life at the same time as his testicles. The author is very good at describing the sexual nature of the innocent cuddles he had on many a woman's lap. Some readers won't like what Boyle describes but it is important to confront what he is saying. Sex and affection are often mingled together and we ignore this at our peril.
Very few writers have described the development of a psyche as acutely as Boyle does here. Galloway Street would not be out of place on a university course on the mind. However, besides its psychological truth, it is also a work of art. It is a precise and deeply moving evocation of the vanished Irish immigrant world that once flourished in Scotland. It is so good, indeed, it establishes a new benchmark other memoirists will have to strive very hard to reach. And of its many achievements, surely the most important of all is that Galloway Street describes a miserable childhood without a shred of self-pity.
Carlo Gebler is a novelist and writer-in-residence at Maghaberry prison in Northern Ireland. His memoir, Father & I, was published last year