Himself

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Thank you to NetGalley, Atria Books and Jess Kidd for an ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review. But then, when Mahony looked around himself, everything was exactly the same. The same smeared mirrors over the same dirty seats. The same sad bastards falling into their glasses and the same smell crawling out of the gents. The pipes sing about a land lost, about forgotten honor and wasted bravery. They sing of sedge-edged water and white skies, of the mountains and the sea, of those who are gone and those who never even were." This book was a complete delight. It's a literary mystery, small town social satire and dark comedy with beautiful language (read with a variety of captivating voices by Aiden Kelly, the narrator of the audiobook). This moves mostly between the two main time periods of 1950, as in the prologue, and 1976, when Mahony arrives from Dublin. Kidd thoughtfully puts the date at the beginning of each chapter (thank you).

Himself by Jess Kidd | Goodreads

Tadhg withholds a fart, just while he’s thinking. “Shauna Burke rents out rooms to paying guests at Rathmore House up in the forest. That’s about it.” The man plans to kill both mother and son, but after burying the mother and returning to find the son, he is perplexed, puzzled. It is almost as if the very forest itself has hidden the child from him. No matter how hard he searches he cannot find the child. Ferns have curled around him, branches have stooped and dropped their leaves in a blanket covering him. I almost didn’t make it past the first sentence of this book, but I am glad I did. The prologue is, fortunately, mercifully short – and with a bit of magical realism at the end, it poses the questions: “Where did he go? What happened to him and his family?” The rest of the book sets out to answer those questions. Abandoned in a Dublin orphanage as a baby, Mahony, now aged twenty-six, receives a letter left for him long ago that hints he might not have been abandoned after all. NetGalley and Atria Books provided me an advance copy of the book in exchange for an unbiased review. Thanks for making this available!

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Mahony wiped his eyes and glanced around the bar; the drinkers were sculling through their own thoughts and the barman had gone to change a barrel. He was safe. What he finds after reading the contents of the letter sets up an amazing narrative filled with magical realism. Ghosts, start to appear everywhere approaching and engaging Mahony who is crestfallen because he used to see them all the time and thought that he was rid of them. Talking trees that don’t just talk, but gossip like a group of old ladies at their Sunday bridge game. Mahony will tell you to his dying day that the arse fell out of the barstool just after he opened that envelope. Then the barstool fell through the floor and the whole world turned itself about. Mahony turned over the photograph and studied her face. God, she looked young. He would have put her as his sister rather. She couldn’t have been more than fourteen.

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After what I’ve been afflicted with I’m sure I can handle her.” And Mahony turns his laughing eyes up to Tadhg. The Erris peninsula near Belmullet in Co Mayo. Jess Kidd’s familiarity with the landscape and dialect is evident in her writing. If Mahony could remember the place, which he can’t of course, he’d not notice many changes since he’s been gone. Mulderrig doesn’t change, fast or slowly. Twenty-six years makes no odds. I think this is a no-go for me. Something about it, though a mystery, though set in Ireland, though occasionally populated with ghosts, just failed to catch my attention. It could be me, certainly. But I'll also throw out there that it just seems a touch... Irish. ™ Your name is Francis Sweeney. Your mammy was Orla Sweeney. You are from Mulderrig, Co. Mayo. This is a picture of yourself and her. For your information she was the curse of the town, so they took her from you. They all lie, so watch yourself, and know that your mammy loved you.

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I laughed out loud more than once. The relationship between Mahoney and Mrs. Cauley (“Mrs. Marple with balls”) was sweet. And I also loved Bridget. The characters, the writing,

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The first chapter will vault the reader twenty-six years into the future from the prologue. Mahony will exit his bus and find himself in a village named Mulderrig. Mahony has not been here for twenty-six years and even if he could remember, he would not notice that nothing has changed. Mahony causes a tremendous stir in the village, with his brooding good looks, unshaven appearance, easy charm and – less palatably to its residents – relentless pursuit of the truth of what happened to his mother. The official story is that Orla, the local good-time girl, who grew up in a filthy hovel at the edge of the forest, left Mulderrig one afternoon in May 1950, and abandoned her child to the “care” of nuns. Yet as the novel opens with Orla’s brutal murder in the forest all those years ago, as witnessed by her infant son, it is evident that most of the village is, if not in cahoots with her killer, at the very least unwilling to uncover the past. Teaming up with Mrs. Cauley, an eccentric former theater actress who likes nothing more than to stir up trouble among Mulderrig's residents, Mahony is determined to uncover the truth about his mother. The two concoct a plan to interrogate those who might know something, and hopefully flush out the truth, with the help of some of the town's colorful residents. But this scandal ran far and wide through Mulderrig, and the two might be putting themselves and those they care about in danger as they get closer and closer to the truth. Due to the fact that the author is of Irish descent, Jess Kidd believed that it was only right that her first novel, Himself, should definitely head to the West. Furthermore, an imaginary town and village seemed like an ideal place to experiment with the blending of crime fiction and other elements. Kidd recalls the summers that she spent as a child on Ireland’s West Coast wandering across her relatives farm. Jess Kidd believed that each place that she went was inhabited by different types of creatures. For her main character, puzzled ghosts of the dead, who follow the protagonist throughout the town as if they are trying to find answers, inhabit the town of Mulderrig. As the book begins to get shape, the author begins to reveal some of the major questions that revolved around the disappearance of the outcast mother, Orla.

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There’s a hideous dog-murder, which felt like a gratuitous assault. It was a lazy way of showing us the psychopathy of one of the characters, by having them brutally kill a lovely and loyal-to-the-end animal.