McInerney writes an energetic, profane prose laced with the vibrant idiom of Cork street life ... There’s not much of a respite for the reader in this bleak, powerful novel. A tough gallows humor pervades, but there is little in the way of redemption or hope for McInerney’s characters. In that regard The Glorious Heresies remains unstintingly true to its own subject matter.
...[a] wonderfully offbeat voice ... McInerney’s characters aren’t what anyone would call saints, but they’re so richly drawn you have to respect the way they think and sympathize with their moral conflicts ... Not only is McInerney’s prose ripe with foul language and blasphemous curses delivered in the impenetrable local idiom, but her style is so flamboyantly colorful it can’t always be contained.
You can’t fault McInerney for lack of exuberance, though she has a tendency to treat paragraphs like pinball machines, firing off bold, extended metaphors and letting them ricochet down the page ... Such profligacy seems unnecessary when McInerney is equally capable of writing with great clarity and economy ... There is no question that McInerney has talent to burn; indeed, the book often gives the impression of her starting fires in order to reignite a plot that has run out of fuel. At its best, it finds the erstwhile Sweary Lady on bellicose form: an irrepressible volley of unrehearsed words from a brand new throat.
Like her compatriot Kevin Barry, McInerney writes in local vernacular, with a smattering of Gaelic. Her cynical voice is pitch-perfect for a community left behind by a Church that has done its damage and a Celtic tiger that has made a dash for the airport. There are minor flaws: it jars when these characters refer to 'metaphors,' and there is a hastened tying of loose ends. But this is a rich, touching, hilarious novel.
It’s all pretty haphazard. On the other hand, the individual scenes are excellently done and convey the disappointed, dead-end feeling that pervaded the land in the last several years. McInerney portrays the lot of the losers with excruciating verisimilitude ... The novel ends on a note of redemption that, if not entirely credible, offers at least kindness in a world of souls starved for it.
The novel’s searing take on contemporary Cork is elegantly leavened by empathy and humor ... Lacing her prose with tactilely tart phrases McInerney keeps the tale’s momentum fizzing and bubbling along with sharp-as-spears digs at the accepted levels of injustice permeating her characters’ lives on a daily basis ... The Glorious Heresies is no fairy tale, but McInerney’s characters are vibrantly-drawn, richly-rendered, and wonderfully full of surprises.
Lisa McInerney's first novel takes off like a house on fire and doesn’t stop until it has singed the reader’s heart ... Ms McInerney draws memorable characters, skewering them in a phrase ... Ms McInerney takes the story deeper, skilfully setting a funeral pyre 'for that Ireland.'
