The Heart's Invisible Furies: An Absolute Masterpiece

John Boyne's new novel (out today!) The Heart's Invisible Furies is an absolute masterpiece. It's the story of a life, an Irishman named Cyril Avery, born in Dublin in 1945. But that single simple sentence belies the power, intensity, humor, emotion, and pure reading pleasure of this 600-page piece of fiction. It's a novel about guilt and redemption, about fate and free will, about love and loyalty, about secrets and betrayal, and simply about living a life in your own skin. It's absolutely brilliant — honestly, one of the best things I've read in a long time, at least since A Little Life, to which this novel shares some similarities.

It's also a good read for fans of stories as wide-ranging as Forrest Gump to The World According To Garp and A Prayer For Owen Meany. Indeed, Boyne's dedication is simply, "For John Irving" — which, frankly, is what initially drew me to this novel. The first two sections of the novel are an unmistakeable tribute to Irving — both in style and substance. The first describes the circumstances of Cyril's birth — his mother is a 16-year-old unwed Catholic in rural Ireland. Her pregnancy causes her to be shamed in front of her entire church, and then banished from her town and family. She moves to Dublin to make it on her own. The second section describes Cyril's childhood as a seven-year-old boy living with adoptive parents Charles (about to go to jail for tax evasion) and Maude (a novelist who hates popularity) in Dublin.

From there, Boyne tells Cyril's life story in seven-year increments. I don't know what else to tell you about this novel to pique your interest if you're not already intrigued. But one of the things I loved about this book is how surprisingly funny it is. I can't emphasize this enough: It's consistently laugh-out-loud funny. Frequently, there are several-page strings of dialogue, which is almost always annoying when other writers try this. Here, they're simply fantastic and fully display Cyril's sarcastic, dry sense of humor. I chuckled on just about every page.

But this novel is massively heart-breaking as well. This isn't a spoiler: Cyril is gay, and the first half of the novel is about him trying to come to terms with this fact of himself—how impossible it is to be himself in mid-century Catholic Ireland, and how he keeps that secret from those closest to him.

The novel follows Cyril from Ireland to Amsterdam to New York in the 1980s (devastating sections on the AIDS crisis) and then back to Dublin for Cyril's twilight years. From the very beginning, we know at some point he and his birth mother reconnect (the whole novel is Cyril's first-person account, and Cyril tells us he's narrating from before he was born based on the story his mother told him later). This creates such glorious tension throughout the novel because there are several instances in which fate puts Cyril and his birth mother in each other's paths. And the conversations they have before they know who each other is are some of the funniest, even as they ooze with tension and drama.

This is the best novel I've read in a long time — it has definite "new classic" potential. Every once in a while, you really should find a book that reminds you why you love reading so much — and for me, this was that book. It's all I can do right now as I write this not to pick it up and start it all over again.