Eoghan Walls

Walls’s very peculiar novel begins with his 14-year-old protagonist, Orla McDevitt, attempting to make a nighttime escape from her troubled home. She wants to get to Liverpool and cross to Northern Ireland. Aunt Sinéad lives in Drumahoe and the girl’s mother was recently buried there. Orla’s mum died of esophageal cancer two months before, and the McDevitt house has been in chaos ever since. Mr. McDevitt drinks heavily, the house is squalid, and Orla is often left to care for her two-year-old sister. At school, she’s doing poorly. The teachers have cut her a fair bit of slack, but they know her home life is unstable. The family is on the radar of child welfare services, and the children may be taken into care. Fear, anger, and grief are fuelling Orla’s plan to run, but there may be other factors at play as well. Soon the girl’s hope for a miracle will become her main motivation for leaving home.

Orla is an unpleasant, even unsympathetic protagonist—foul-mouthed, egocentric, and a shoplifter. Her best friend, Jamie, was recently suspended from school after a bag of stolen iPhones was discovered in his locker. Orla’s missing him now because the ferry trip to Belfast can only be funded by selling what she’s nicked and it’s hard to work as a solo shoplifter when you’re used to being part of a dynamic “mad-dog” duo. Food for her trip must also be stolen. That, too, is something of a challenge, but Orla meets it.

Based on the elements I’ve described, I thought I was in for a realistic, somewhat gritty tale about an angry, grieving adolescent girl. I was wrong. This is a surreal narrative I could make little sense of.

Walls introduces an unexpected character—Jesus. He appears as filthy, foul-smelling homeless man, entirely naked but for a blanket. He’s come back to guide humanity, he says, having emerged from a box at the bottom of the sea where many bodies of the dead lie. He is now living in a derelict barn preparing for his mission, trying to find the right location to start, the place most in need of his message. He intercepts Orla as she attempts to make a late-night escape by bike. Why he does so is not clear. After scrabbling out of the canal into which she and her bike have fallen, the frightened girl is forced to return home.

A few nights later, her attacker—this strange man, Jesus—returns the bike to her home. Angry but curious, Orla follows him. This is when she discovers where he lives, who he claims to be, and the supernatural powers he possesses. She spies on him as he restores dead birds and other animals to life and wholeness, using his breath and his blood. There’s a catch, though: once restored, the creatures must remain within his orbit. If they’re exposed to the sun, they are vaporized, returning to the Father’s light. Having watched Jesus perform miracles, Orla decides that he needs to accompany her to Northern Ireland. She believes he can raise her mother from the dead. A fair bit of the novel details the challenges of Orla and Jesus’s journey, which becomes nightmarishly strange.Along the way Jesus tries to deliver his message of love and kindness in a pub. He ends up being told to return to Somalia or Pakistan or whatever foreign parts he’s from; he’s tossed out, badly beaten, and left for dead. Orla subsequently buries him, hoping he’ll rise again. The girl then attends a circus and arranges for the now newly risen Jesus to make a living there—performing resurrections as a sideshow act. She then rides off on an elephant. In the end, her father finds her and she agrees to go for counselling.

I cannot recall the last time I read such a weird book. When I began it, I wondered if I was getting a novelistic variation on the 1961 film Whistle Down the Wind in which three children discover a man in the family barn and believe him to be Jesus Christ. (He’s actually an escaped murderer.) Later, I wondered if the author was presenting a case of folie à deux, in which a grieving girl buys into the delusions of a schizophrenic man, possibly a refugee, claiming to be the Son of God. In the end, the only conclusion I could reach was that this was the story of a young girl’s psychotic break.

The book ends very abruptly. I flipped ahead, thinking my digital advanced reading copy must be missing pages. Apparently not. I won’t lie: I was relieved. By that point, I’d had enough.

I’m afraid I cannot recommend this novel. I’m surprised it was actually accepted for publication. I can’t imagine why this book is being praised. I’ll grant that there was potential, but that potential was not realized. It’s possible I’m missing something. If someone figures out what that is, please let me know.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for providing me with a free uncorrected proof for review.… (mehr)