The Anatomy School - Softcover

Maclaverty, Bernard

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393324575 ISBN 13: 9780393324570

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2003

Synopsis

Set in Belfast in the late sixties, Bernard MacLaverty's new novel takes us into Martin Brennan's last semester of high school, when he finds old friendships tested and is forced to face the unknown. 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. Celebrating the desire to speak and the need to say nothing, The Anatomy School moves from the enforced silence of Martin's Catholic school retreat, through the hilarious tea-and-biscuits repartee of his eccentric elders, to the awkward wit and loose profanity of his two friends-the charismatic Kavanagh and the subversive Blaise Foley.

About this title

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."

Exceptionally skilled at entering into the lives of the lonely or impaired, [MacLaverty] depicts unfulfilment with an authenticity unmatched in Irish fiction since James Joyce's Dubliners. "

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

[T]he reader is captivated by its various evocations of voice and scene. Action in this story yields, happily, to rhyme and rhythm of memory. . . . MacLaverty suggests that the big questions, such as how to find one's place in the world, are answered not through serious or conventional means but in unexpected, quietly subversive moments. . . . Bernard MacLaverty's beautifully written portrayal of how a mind changes as it acquires new knowledge is masterful.

[T]he author's trademark qualities a clean, elegant style, combined with compassion, wit and moments of great insight are inscribed on every page."

MacLaverty is a master of many moods and this genial, intelligent novel finds him at his relaxed best.

[A] high-spirited, strongly imagined work, full of a doughty integrity and robust eloquence . . . [a] celebration of friendship, an exhilarating reconstruction of male adolescence.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0393324575
• ISBN 13: 9780393324570
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368