Source: Review copy from Doubleday – thank you – for the Random Tours blog tour
A new novel from Donal Ryan is always a treat, and Where are the Kings (no question mark), delivers a touching coming of age story following twelve-year-old Jack. He lives with his grandparents and their children: Theo and Haulie born close together, then Rose after Jack’s mum, some years later, and JJ more years later. JJ is more like a cousin than an uncle, being only slightly older than Jack, and he resents having to share his bedroom when Jack comes to live with them.
Jack’s there because his Mam committed suicide by drowning, and his Czechoslovakian father, Tom Frištenský, went mad (probably being bipolar) and was committed to a mental hospital. People don’t talk about his Mam – they ‘allude’, never saying what happened out loud. Jack is a bright boy, he loves his encyclopedias, always looking things up. He’s thoughtful, a bit of a daydreamer too, running what ifs in his head which are usually quite dark rather than Walter Mitty-ish.
Ryan structures the novel in three parts titled in Latin: tempus edax, tempus fugit and tempus imperator – time devours all, time flies and time rules all. Apparently, his title comes from a play by WB Yeats, which itself is inspired by Sophocles, so the novel is full of elements of Greek tragedy.
But you don’t need to know that to enjoy the story. I had no idea, until I read Will Fleming’s review of it in The Literary Review!
Ryan takes us through lots of different episodes as Jack grows up, which illustrate his sensitive yet enquiring nature, and also conform in one way or another to the Latin section headers. He is taken hunting for the first time by Theo and Haulie, the latter explains:
We’ve only one gun and four men but every man has a job to do, each as important as the next. JJ, spotter. Theo, levels. Me, bagman. Jack, this is your shoot. You’ll take a hide or we’ll be damned and dirty. You’ll bring venison home to your grandmother this day. They’re all looking at him. Theo puts a hand on his shoulder and squeezes it. JJ punches him lightly on the upper arm. Haulie nods. Right, let’s go.
Two pages later, the deed is done…
And the deer lies dead on the mountainside. Jack stands by her body while his uncles prepare to rope her slender legs. And in the still round blackness of the deer’s beautiful eye he can see all the pain in the world, all the sorrow, so close to him, so close that he could touch it, if only he could touch it.
Another darkly funny episode occurs when a young curate comes to visit to order his grandparents to deal with their daughter’s ashes, which remain in their urn on the mantel, in order regain their right to grace. Jack realises he’s wearing his AC-DC Highway to Hell T-shirt, and he gets the giggles badly.
Thoughts of Jack’s dead mother are never far from his mind. He misses his father too. It’s a tough time to be a teenager, but helping Theo and Haulie in the family business, a garage, helps, as does discovering girls. At the beginning of the final section, Jack comes to a realisation:
Jack wakes early one still clear morning near his second midsummer in a motherless world. Something is wrong. What? He doesn’t know. It could be anything. There’ll always be something wrong somewhere. Every single particle in the universe exerts a force on every single other particle. Nothing exists in isolation. Every single particle that made up Mam still exists. There are bits of her all over the house at home, in the carpet, on the couch, on the countertops and cutlery and the handles of pans. There’s a whole urn of her particles sitting under Jesus in the kitchen. There are parts of her in the atmosphere, the troposphere, maybe even in the stratosphere, lifted up with the heat of the fire she was burnt in; there are bits of her in the water she was drowned in.
Ryan’s prose is, as always luminous, if I can dare to describe it thus. The way he expresses the science above is so eloquent, as is the way Jack suffered with the deer.
You might expect the cement that holds this family together to be Jack’s nana and grandfather, but it is actually his uncles, Theo and Haulie, good men who are always there to guide and rescue.
I would have liked to hear more about Jack’s father. He appears a couple of times on reciprocal visits, but otherwise is absent, except in Jack’s thoughts now and then, as he would appear to take after him in his quest for knowledge of the universe as their world seemingly descends into entropy. Don’t forget the entire novel is told from Jack’s perspective, something that Ryan encapsulated brilliantly in the text.
Doubleday hardback, 224 pages. BUY at Waterstones or Amazon UK via my affiliate links.
I was also lucky enough to receive a review copy of this and I thought it a beautiful novel. As you say, Ryan’s writing can be luminous.
I hadn’t picked up on the Yeats references, so thanks for sharing.