Special .. ( )

Stunning it is not. Some of the writing is quite beautiful but the story just never seems to go anywhere in particular — so I was completely unmotivated to keep reading and gave up on the book. ( )

This was a very hard book for me to get into. I wasn't very taken in by the min character. Also there was so much Irish dialect that I totally didn't understand that it distracted me fro the story. ( )

I started to read this as I sat down to my lunch; that was a mistake, the narrator John Devine is fascinated by worms and parasites and provides in the opening pages many a lurid description of the subject of his interest. John Devine lives with his mother in the house she inherited from her parents. He is something of a loner but feels hemmed in by the Irish small town attitudes. When John is in his sixteenth year the hip and articulate Jamie moves into town and makes a friend of John on the spot, instantly confiding in him. John's life is suddenly opened up by this new friendship.

But John has his problems to cope with, a bombastic domineering local spinster, Mrs Nagle, intent on moving into and taking over John's and his mother's life; a local and possibly corrupt Guard officer; and some local heavies with criminal tendencies. He has to cope also with his own inner turmoil, troubled by dreams dominated by a large black bird, an old crow; what does it mean? But his biggest worry is his chain smoking mother's failing health, and as he tries to care for her needs he gradually learns of her past, and his origins.

The story covers John’s life from his very early years to his mid teens; it is eloquently told and beautifully conjures the troubles of youth. Into the fabric of the main story Murphy ingeniously interweaves other short or very short stories. John quickly engenders one’s empathy, and as the story entwines and unfolds towards its mournful yet ultimately positive conclusion one’s heart will ache for our young hero.

I did not much enjoy my lunch, but I did immensely enjoy John the Revelator; its humour, its re-creation of small town Ireland, its portrayal of friendship, but above all its evocation of the turmoil of youth. ( )

In this debut novel by Irish music journalist Peter Murphy, John Devine faces the typical problems of a teenager, including awkward moments with women, experiments in substance abuse, evasion of parental controls, and a complicated friendship (complete with an opportunity for betrayal). But beneath the surface of this conventional bildungsroman, John’s story is refreshingly unique thanks to powerful supporting roles played by several eccentric characters from the small Irish town in which John lives, including John’s chain-smoking, Bible-quoting, mysteriously ill, single mother, his Rimbaud-obsessed friend, and a chocolate-addicted busybody who won’t move out of the house until John threatens to shoot her with a crossbow.

Adding to this odd brew, John suffers from cryptic and unsettling dreams involving a God-like figure who takes the form of a giant black crow (described as "omnipotent but impotent") and including haunting end-of-the-world scenes like this one:
"Two blokes wearing billabong hats carry a cross improvised from railroad girders to the shore and lay it flat on the sand. A third man in a too-tight suit lies across it, his comb-over unwinding like a turban in the sea wind. They nail him through the wrists and ankles and raise it up. He hangs like a side of beef, bawling his head off, but they haven't planted the cross deep enough and it tilts slowly forward and hits the wet sand, the sounds of his torment muffled, mouth clogged up with silt."

This excerpt is a nice example of how Murphy’s prose, by turns coarse and poetic, creates beautiful and haunting images out of ugly things and inelegant words. Over the course of almost 300 pages, the effect is quite stunning.

Counteracting this novel’s brilliance is a fundamental infirmity of structure, primarily arising out of too many loose ends and a protagonist who’s less well-drawn than the supporting characters. Some of the book’s most distinctive elements—John’s unsettling dreams or his friend’s short stories—drift through the story like flotsam, untethered to the rest of the action and thus lacking in impact. Murphy is undoubtedly gifted as a novelist, but John the Revelator needs some structural refinement. I expect great things from this author in the future.

This review also appears on my blog Literary License. ( )