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The House Of Slamming Doors
It's 1963 in a country house in west Wicklow during the heady summer of JFK's visit to Ireland. Turbulence is in the air as Justin is locked in combat with his angry and inebriate father. A dark and poignant comedy unfolds and progresses to winter as Kennedy is assassinated and Justine ends his oedipal struggle and comes of age. Replete with the perennial tensions between native and settler, servant and master, Camelot and Leinster House, this poignant tale concerns identity and first love, and the pain of a knowing child living amongst aliens. Told with the panache of PG Wodehouse crossed with Caroline Blackwood, it conveys the spirit of a bygone age and the very present emotions of a fast-growing boy. It is a masterful debut novel.
183 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 29, 2023
The House of Slamming Doors is an engaging debut novel that shows quite a lot of promise, but may suffer a little from a lack of ambition. The book has a wonderfully Irish authorial voice, that tells the story with lots of yarning - largely long asides about various workers on the estate and their misadventures - that makes it persistently entertaining and easy to breeze through on reading. Mark Macauley also has a good eye for irony to cap these sequences and chapters, and shows gift for saying a lot with a single well-judged sentence rather than overlabouring a point.
The book is relatively plotless, and is a coming of age story of a young man (it would seem around 12 or 13, but the narrator's maturity seems to shift a bit) who has been born into a wealthy but highly dysfunctional family, and his struggles to deal with his parents' oscillating disinterest and contempt. Most of the focus is on dad, a Canadian expat with pretentious aspirations to play the part of the England squire complete with affected accent and denial over where his wealth has come from. In fact, one of the more obvious flaws of the novel is most readers will likely be waiting for a gentler dimension to the family patriarch, and largely be disappointed with further naked acts of petty bastardry.
The book is narrated in first person, presumably as a reminiscence, athough our narrator doesn't diverge from the story by telling us of any events that have happened after the events in the storyline, just lengthy diversions into the pasts of the characters. Interestingly there are sections written in italics that provide the perspective of other characters - these sequences are well judged for providing dramatic irony, but unfortunately are probably the book's biggest wasted opportunity. They tend to jump detached from one character to another, and be concerned with exposition and surprises. Having such a strong and opinionated voice for the narrator, providing little chapters from another POV with equally defined character voices could have brought a lot of depth to the story. As it is, unfortunately, these sequences tend to more often further flatten characters rather than expand them.
So The House of Slamming Doors is a simple story that is fairly well told and a technically solid book, wonderfully Irish in its humour and illustrating a world most of us don't know, but it doesn't quite have the substance to be an instant recommendation.
The book is relatively plotless, and is a coming of age story of a young man (it would seem around 12 or 13, but the narrator's maturity seems to shift a bit) who has been born into a wealthy but highly dysfunctional family, and his struggles to deal with his parents' oscillating disinterest and contempt. Most of the focus is on dad, a Canadian expat with pretentious aspirations to play the part of the England squire complete with affected accent and denial over where his wealth has come from. In fact, one of the more obvious flaws of the novel is most readers will likely be waiting for a gentler dimension to the family patriarch, and largely be disappointed with further naked acts of petty bastardry.
The book is narrated in first person, presumably as a reminiscence, athough our narrator doesn't diverge from the story by telling us of any events that have happened after the events in the storyline, just lengthy diversions into the pasts of the characters. Interestingly there are sections written in italics that provide the perspective of other characters - these sequences are well judged for providing dramatic irony, but unfortunately are probably the book's biggest wasted opportunity. They tend to jump detached from one character to another, and be concerned with exposition and surprises. Having such a strong and opinionated voice for the narrator, providing little chapters from another POV with equally defined character voices could have brought a lot of depth to the story. As it is, unfortunately, these sequences tend to more often further flatten characters rather than expand them.
So The House of Slamming Doors is a simple story that is fairly well told and a technically solid book, wonderfully Irish in its humour and illustrating a world most of us don't know, but it doesn't quite have the substance to be an instant recommendation.
June 16, 2014
A bit lightweight, but an enjoyable read.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews