The Glorious Heresies opens with a metamorphosis.
In the dizzying glow of first love, hoarse with hormones and rattling with need, Ryan Cusack is the boy who becomes a man when he finally achieves the gilded moment with Karine D’Arcy.
But even as he peels off the insect skin of youth, the city around him is transforming, too, in the lights of his new adult perception, and very soon it will open up to full display its deathly serious games, its labyrinth of secret connections and consequences.
Ryan speaks from “a brand-new throat”, Lisa McInerney tells us, and as a first-time novelist, she must do the same, and trail out her cast, and build the city, and layer in all those connections, and then reap all the havoc that’s been sown.
RM Block
That she achieves all this brilliantly and does so with a preternatural, almost blithe confidence is what renders The Glorious Heresies canonical and allows us to declare it, just a fast and turbulent decade since its publication, a classic.
The timing is significant. A novelist can know no greater misfortune than to first approach her desk at a time of peace, love and prosperity, so McInerney’s good luck was to begin her career when Ireland was categorically on the ropes and in the howling depths of an existential despair.
To set it in context, The Glorious Heresies is a novel of the early 2010s, when the repercussions of the manic financial meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent austerity programmes meant that many of the certainties underpinning Irish life had popped loose and the country was in an unnatural flap of panic.
In the novel, the bleak macro-economic picture is tightened to a sharper focus when it is brought down to the micro-metropolis of Cork city.
Cork in the 2010s is presented to us as a place in a dangerously labile state and in an era of strange new criminal and digital frontiers, with all kinds of new-fangled desperados roaming the Grand Parade and, of course, this is ravishing territory for a novelist of a properly heretical and roguish talent.
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McInerney’s casting is sublime. In Ryan Cusack, we have a memorable portrait of a motherless delinquent who is also a kid with a great abiding spirit of tendresse. His father, Tony, a faltering boozehound who might as well have the words “bad” and “decisions” tattooed on his forehead, stirs our sympathy, too, and we have evil fun as we swagger about the quays with one of the city’s criminal princes, Jimmy Phelan.
It is Jimmy’s mother, Maureen Phelan, who is maybe the most vivid and abiding character of them all, and her homicidal response to a home intrusion sets the novel’s plot wheels swiftly in motion.
Also, we have Georgie, a sex worker who trades one habit for another when she signs up for the God squad and starts bringing the good word from door-to-door, prompting some definitively Corkonian responses.
These characters may be from the proverbial wrong end of town but they are never rendered as lowlifes, they are never caricatured nor patronised and, in fact, class can be intuited as a subtly expressed element of the novel, at least class when presented as reduction or negative entity, as a closing-down of opportunity, chances, openings.
But when life is curtailed in this systemic way, it must find its expression in other ways, and most explicitly in language, and here we come to one of the true glories of this novel.
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The language in The Glorious Heresies achieves a perfect balance of wildness and control, and a novel ain’t worth tuppence if it doesn’t have both of these things.
It is bawdy and sexy and properly profane, and it has its own insidious rhythm, one that’s sourced from the quays and streets and hills of Cork, a rhythm sprung from the heart of this swampy old town built on a marsh.
I could open a page at random and dollop out some ripe examples but the effect is in the whole, in the accumulating sense of narrative wallop the prose delivers. There must be a doffing of the cap, too, to McInerney’s dialogue – there are reams of the stuff in the book and nowhere is there anything even close to an off-note or cloth-eared construction.
The book runs on the engines of its dialogue and it is the gales of talk that help to give the novel an air of good old-fashioned Dickensian vivacity.
Where did this incendiary device of a writer explode from? Quaintly enough, Lisa McInerney first came to attention in what used to be known in the olden times as the blogosphere, and I was fortunate to be among a small cognoscenti who were drawn to McInerney’s blog, Arse End of Ireland, which gained currency back in the mid-2000s.
Writing under the nom de guerre Sweary Lady, McInerney documented life on a Co Galway housing estate and her posts had more fun and vitality and moxie in half a scabrous paragraph than you’d have gotten in a whole shelfload of the industrial-grade Irish Literature of the era.
The blog was also McInerney’s rehearsal room in which she was forming and honing her novelistic persona. To be a novelist, after all, is to offer a performance, to sustain a voice and note strong enough to hold together and animate a world.
McInerney did so memorably in The Glorious Heresies and, revisiting the book after a decade, it was exciting to note that the animation of the book still feels to be very much in motion – there is a strong, palpable sense that Ryan and Georgie and Karine and Jimmy and Maureen are still pelting operatically about the streets of Cork, and that with her first novel the writer created what we all aspire to make, a book that feels like a living thing, and one that will live on.
This is the foreword to the new edition of Lisa McInerney’s The Glorious Heresies for the John Murray Classics imprint, which is being launched this month.
