Toxic Masculinity at the Cemetery

A review of Close to Home, by Michael Magee // Guest blog by Norm Sigurdson

Now in retirement and living in Calgary, voluminous reader Norm Sigurdson shares book reviews on Facebook which we are pleased to re-publish here, with permission and encouragement, on this blog. Enjoy.

I just read Irish writer Michael Magee’s bleak semi-autobiographical first novel, “Close to Home,” set in a working class neighbourhood in West Belfast, where Magee himself grew up.

It’s 2013, 15 years after the Good Friday Agreement ended most of the violence of the Troubles, and 22-year-old Sean McGuirre has just returned after earning an English degree in Liverpool. In the post-crash economy his degree doesn’t seem to be of much use to him and he has fallen back into his old life with his hard-partying dead-end friends, bartending in clubs at night and spending his days in a fog of vodka and cocaine.

The novel opens with Sean sucker-punching a stranger at a house party. “There was nothing to it. I swung and hit him and he dropped,” he says. We later learn that the attack was provoked by the man having earlier mocked Sean’s accent and class background.

Sean is sentenced to 200 hours of community service, which sends him to work cleaning up a cemetery and later a church. These relatively quieter breaks in his chaotic routine leave Sean time to contemplate, among other things, how his life is still being driven by the “toxic masculinity” programmed into him.

Sean is saved in a sense by a chance meeting with his childhood friend Mairéad, who is now a university student about to move to Berlin. “If there was anyone I thought would end up in jail somewhere down the line, it was Mairéad,” Sean says. “She was mad as fuck when we were young, always fighting, always getting into all sorts of trouble with the peelers (slang for police) and she had the stickiest fingers in Belfast.”

When Sean later asks Mairéad how she managed to change she simply says, “I made new friends.” I found the book very touching and despite all of the sorrows in it ultimately hopeful.

* I do want to say a quick word about the covers of the UK and North American editions. Penguin has given it an appropriately sombre cover in the UK but its US publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux has given it a definitely eye-catching cover that to me doesn’t really reflect the book’s overall darkness.