[spoilers throughout]

Gay Irishman narrates his life in seven-year increments. Begins in utero with his unwed mother being literally kicked out of her village by a sadistic priest (and a secret fornicator!¡!¡!); ends with his teenage grandson smooching his boyfriend before mother/great-grandmother finally gets married in old age while ancestral ghosts look on. Detours through cruising, cottaging, down-low adultery, priestly sex-abuse, filicide, parricide, incestuous pimping, the Anne Frank House, 9/11, dementia and Mt Sinai Hospital during the AIDS crisis. You look for respite from the relentless miseryporn and you get queasy, death-of-Little-Nell sentimentality.

I used to live in Ireland so some of the Hiberno-English dialogue was pleasing, but mostly I wished this book was more of its supposed place. There is no sense at all of why Ireland's sexual politics change over the novel’s seventy-year span; they just do. There's no sense of why Ireland was longer to secularise than the rest of western Europe. (No Catholic character, lay or clerical, is shown to get anything out of his religion except self-satisfaction.) There's a fine social novel to be written about being a gay Irish Catholic in the 20th century; this is a few of the author's pet likes and dislikes propped up against fashionable backdrops.

As to what's in the novel, the writing is just bad on the technical level. Boyne’s characters tend to speak in the same voice but at least they're pithy next to his prose, which is packed paragraph-full with colourless description and woolly qualification. Events of enormous moment (I'm mainly thinking of the homicides, but I could go on) come and go in seconds as we race to our passive cypher of a hero's next oppression.

A Little Life for normies.