Stephen Hayes reviewed The Valparaiso voyage by Dermot Bolger
None
3 stars
Yet another miserable Irish childhood book leading to a miserable Irish adulthood, with lots of sleazy financial transactions, sleazy sex and sleazy politics thrown in.
Brendan Brogan's life takes a turn for the worse when he is 8 years old, and his mother dies. His father remarries, and the wicked stepmother moves in, with her own son, Cormac, a year younger than Brendan. She sees to it that Brendan is banished to the outhouse. Brendan, who is bullied at school, diverts the bullying to his younger brother.
Brendan grows up to be a compulsive gambler, gets married, and has a son of his own, but when an opportunity arises for him to fake his own death he takes it, and disappears abroad until his purloined passport is about to expire, so he returns to Ireland in disguise to try to get a new one, and his past starts to catch …
Yet another miserable Irish childhood book leading to a miserable Irish adulthood, with lots of sleazy financial transactions, sleazy sex and sleazy politics thrown in.
Brendan Brogan's life takes a turn for the worse when he is 8 years old, and his mother dies. His father remarries, and the wicked stepmother moves in, with her own son, Cormac, a year younger than Brendan. She sees to it that Brendan is banished to the outhouse. Brendan, who is bullied at school, diverts the bullying to his younger brother.
Brendan grows up to be a compulsive gambler, gets married, and has a son of his own, but when an opportunity arises for him to fake his own death he takes it, and disappears abroad until his purloined passport is about to expire, so he returns to Ireland in disguise to try to get a new one, and his past starts to catch up with him.
It's a rather depressing story, but I kept on reading to find out how things turned out for the characters, and also because reading about such levels of corruption in fiction is more tolerable than reading about them in real life. There are similar books about similar corruption in South Africa -- a good example is [b:Black Diamond|60387382|Black Diamond (Stark Springs Academy Book 1)|Ali Dean|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1644516170l/60387382.SY75.jpg|47404833] by [a:Zakes Mda|55103|Zakes Mda|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1267085560p2/55103.jpg], but in Mda's writing the sleaziness is somewhat lightened by humour.
The story is also told in a strange way, but perhaps appropriate to the theme. The reader is told early on about the what, where and when of certain events, but often not the how, or the why, or the who. This reflects, but is not necessarily synchronised with the first-person narrator's experience of events. He discovers the significance of events in his childhood much later, but there are other things that the narrator knew about and experienced that he does not tell the reader until much later. So the story jumps backward and forward in time.