A wonder ... Betrayals beget betrayals as the author leads us through a maze of entwined lives ... Moves with the lightness and felicity of a story collection, sifting relationships built on sand, pummeled by tides of human folly.
[Ryan] is a writer who likes a conceit: a chronological structure to contain the narrative; multiple voices. It is a measure of his skill, and gift for both language and character, that these techniques don’t seem like contrivances, but rather widen the reader’s sense of what a story can be ... Ryan deftly interweaves a larger sense of danger, and an understanding of Ireland’s history, with domestic concerns ... This is Ryan setting up the mechanism of his plot, although it never moves in a linear fashion. We have some work to do, as readers, in mapping the connections between one voice after another—but this is not by any means a failing. It’s a kind of simulacrum of life ... Resolution, if examined closely, is perhaps a little too neat. Overall that doesn’t detract from the rich pleasures of this novel, in which Ryan captures the varieties of Irish English ... There is a sense too, sometimes, of eloquence a little divorced from who these people might actually be ... And yet Ryan reminds us that everyone we meet might be more than our easy assumptions, if we could only know their hearts.
The book can, his publisher says, 'be read independently'. But for the initiated it is fascinating to catch up with characters we last saw 12 years ago ... Ryan dives deep into his characters’ hopes and grievances, drawing out their voices with such precision that you can almost hear their breath between words. He is as confident writing from the perspective of a teenage girl as he is from that of a retired policeman. His characters’ thoughts are not original but they are authentic and resonant ... Ryan’s prose is poetic but never florid, the book’s pacing is perfect and the well-controlled plot has us holding on for revelation and an unpredictable denouement ... Ryan’s faith in redemption is on a par with Dostoyevsky’s in Crime and Punishment ... The only caveat is that Ryan’s novel should have been longer. Several characters warrant more than one chapter and the story could have returned to them. But it seems likely that Ryan agrees and is not finished with writing about his fictional community ... With any luck we will be back in this small place of vast intrigue to pick up with its people again a decade from now.
