Sean is a twenty-something Irish university graduate struggling to find decent-paying work in Belfast. His prospects are further dampened when he punches some guy at a party and he’s taken to court for assault. Also in Sean’s life is his older brother Anthony, whose spiralling drug abuse masks a horrible past, and his childhood friend Mairead, who dreams of leaving Ireland behind and making it in Berlin.
Michael Magee’s debut novel Close to Home isn’t the kind of book that has a plot - it’s more of a snapshot of a particular time and place in certain people’s lives. And for that, it’s fine, but I was hoping for, in place of a driving narrative, some thoughtful insight/commentary or memorable characters instead and didn’t get those either. And so what Close to Home turned out to be was a rather mundane and uninteresting book that I didn’t find very engaging and was very easy to keep putting down.
Being poor sucks, bar jobs are tough gigs, bad things happened during the Troubles, university degrees don’t automatically entitle a person to a great job, child abuse is bad, and some people in their 20s go abroad to find better opportunities for themselves. So far, so ordinary. But those are all of the things Magee highlights in his novel and they make for unimpressive reading.
Sean and his mates party a lot, he and Mairead have a will they/won’t they pseudo-romance, and all of the stuff I mentioned in the paragraph above get repeated over and over.
Magee’s a decent writer but the lack of a strong narrative or a fresh perspective or even a point became more noticeable the longer the novel went on. I don’t know what Magee was trying to say or why - methinks this is just that cliched “autobiographical first novel” that some writers start their careers with - but I wasn’t taken with the consistently dull Close to Home.
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