The Anatomy School - Hardcover

Maclaverty, Bernard

3.48

283 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393050521 ISBN 13: 9780393050523

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Co., 2002

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SET IN BELFAST in the late sixties, Bernard MacLaverty's latest novel takes us into Martin Brennan's final semester of high school, when he finds old friendships tested and is forced to face the unknown future. Before he can become an adult, Martin must unravel the sacred and contradictory mysteries of religion, science, and sex; he must learn the value of friendship; but most of all he must pass his exams--at any cost. With characteristic "wise humor" (Publishers Weekly), MacLaverty "moves beyond the cloistered realm of school to capture the rhythms and pressures of provincial life, as well as [Martin's] desire to overcome them." (Denver Post). This absorbing, often funny novel "turns high anxieties and pain into well wrought fiction. MacLaverty has a wider vision, greater depth and technical craft than J. D. Salinger, a more subtle style than William Golding and a moral imagination to match that of James Joyce" ([Toronto] Globe and Mail).

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Review:

With The Anatomy School, his first novel since 1997's Grace Notes, Bernard MacLaverty returns to the dual concerns that animated that Booker-nominated success, and his earlier novels Lamb and Cal--the troubled politics of late 20th-century Ireland, and the familiar comedy of working-class Irish life.

We meet innocent Belfast Catholic teenager Michael Brennan as he enters a three-day retreat at Ardglass on the eve of his final year at school, resitting his A levels, to the increasing despair of his mother; by the end of the novel, at the end of the 1960s, Michael's innocence is somewhat tarnished, both by his own sexual awakening with an Australian girl in the local university's anatomy department, and by the sectarian bombs providing an inappropriate soundtrack outside. The bulk of the novel is given over to the schoolboy adventures of Brennan with his two friends, the popular sportsman Kavanagh and the sexually and politically mysterious new boy Blaise Foley. Seeking to spice up their workaday world of mocking their schoolmasters and sniggering about masturbation and pornography, together they embark on a torturously complex plot to hijack the year's A level papers--in Foley's eyes a blow against British imperialism but also a self-serving prank that leaves the ethically serious Michael in no small torment.

MacLaverty is at his best in the humorous moments, spinning out tense situations with the wandering skill of a stand-up comic and breathing new life into the compulsory old-folks' tea-party, the "dotery coterie" of Michael's fastidious mother, Nurse Gilliland, Father Farquharson and Mary Lawless. But undercutting the easy whimsy is a harsher tale of the inevitable death of innocence in a world of religion, politics and deception.--Alan Stewart

Review:

"This quirky, appealing, new coming-of-age novel ... celebrates the small, mighty joys of being alive." "This quirky, appealing, new coming-of-age novel...celebrates the small, mighty joys of beign alive."

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