“You have to reimagine the world when someone dies,” a character says late in Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace. Ryan’s wrenching, gorgeous new novel adds that, from any lonely observation point on “this motherless world”, you may also have to reimagine the entire cosmos.
Ryan opens Where Are the Kings with a mother, father and child standing precariously “at the lip of the well of their lives”, in the moment before the black hole swallows them all: Mam will drown herself, Dad will be confined to a mental hospital and 12-year-old Jack, dizzy with infinite grief, will be sent to live with his “Mam’s mad, mysterious family”.
The novel’s timeline runs through roughly two years of Jack’s floating, asynchronous life. But the story’s true clock is geological and almost mythological. Jack’s family is haunted by “some ancient strife”. His youngest uncle is “mercurial”, his aunt “the mistress of all the elements”.
His mother’s death and cremation have an elemental cast as well: “the fire she was burnt in ... the water she was drowned in”. Jack goes to work with his older uncles (“two huge, lumbering beasts”) in the family garage, where he meditates on the bone fuel of a car-rotten economy: “how beautiful engines are ... to make such noise and movement from the melted corpses of dinosaurs”.
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We’re never allowed to forget that the time it takes to feel okay again will be named by the spiralling of star and rock.
Where Are the Kings begins with the memory of a family trip to the astronomical observatory at Birr Castle, where Lord Rosse and his Leviathan telescope discovered the spinning heart of the Whirlpool Galaxy in 1845, on the eve of the Famine.
Nestled within the familiar landscape of Ryan’s extended fictional universe, the Birr observatory preoccupies the narrative, rising into Jack’s memory multiple times because “his grief ... seems at times to fill the universe, to radiate from every star”. A girl he meets, with eyes like “a pair of binary neutron stars”, gets it right: the boy’s “a space cadet”, adrift in the silence.
Ryan finds disquieting hilarity in this realm of reflex and of our involuntary obedience to gravity. It’s awful to be Jack’s age, both slapstick and sad to wake into grown-up loss every morning as “a foetal teenage boy with a morning horn and a growing realisation that he’s not dreaming”.
This is a book about the things we cannot control; and in it, Ryan finds that there’s not a terrible amount of distance between the stormy tempers of the natural world and the tectonic emotions of adolescence.
When Thomas Carlyle responded to the “System of the Heavens as revealed by Lord Rosse’s Telescope”, he toyed with what the Irish astronomer could reveal about ideas of personal and planetary development.
“Some think that our planet is in that stage of her life which corresponds to the playful period of twelve or thirteen in a spirited girl,” wrote Carlyle, forgiving Earth (“Poor thing!”) for the tempestuousness of her youth: “A little overflow of vivacity ... an earthquake plus or minus, what harm should that do to any of us!”
The same age as Carlyle’s planet, Jack too suffers “that sense of a pressure growing and growing until it can’t be resisted, spouting up like a volcano, a fiery apocalypse of laughter”. What harm should that do, a world of angry boys? What’s one more catastrophe?
In the novel’s third and final section, set almost entirely during a single day in 1997, Ryan’s command of narrative time rises to a terrific glamour. We’re near Jack’s “second mid-summer in a motherless world”, riding along the solar arc of “this strange day of sudden angels and unexpected beauty”, where Jack enters his own observatory at last. He finds that attaining universal knowledge, in the most literal sense of the universe, means knowing that there will “always be something wrong somewhere”.
Just as Heart, Be At Peace revisited the characters from Ryan’s debut The Spinning Heart, Where Are the Kings flashes back (if more briefly and obliquely) to his second published novel, also a story about the untimely death of a parent.
Sitting in a video arcade where Pac-Man isn’t the only one chasing ghosts, Jack remembers, impossibly, a line from his author’s second book. “The world doesn’t change, nor anything in it, when someone dies,” Ryan wrote in 2013’s The Thing About December. “There’s an awful cruelty in the business of nature, in the brutal sameness of things.”
It’s a moment of magic in which a character calls up a phrase his maker won’t pen for another 16 years, the very consistency of Ryan’s vision overwriting the menace of such “sameness”. There are new resources and a different scale in this later novel about earlier days. Jack’s uncle describes the possibility of “a mirror universe where time flows backwards”. In that mirror, the beaming light of dead and distant stars might attain a higher resolution.
Greg Londe lectures in English at Cornell University, New York
