The Heart's Invisible Furies: John Boyne

Product Information

A radical statement, about a novel? Perhaps, but Boyne’s story and characters have remained with me and popped into my head many times over the past month, and the affection I feel for his protagonist, Cyril, is akin to something I would feel for a kind man I really knew. I was invested in Cyril’s story from the minute I met him, and Boyne succeeded in gently bringing me through the moments of joy and grief in his life as we would go through them with a dear friend.

Cyril's birth, in a dingy flat on Dublin's Chatham Street, is married by extreme violence and prejudice. It wasn't aimed at his mother, but at her flatmate, a young man she met on the bus to Dublin. It is heartbreaking.A degenerate race. No one talks about sex, yet it's all they think about".....( says one New Yorker character in the story). The story is told in different times of Cyril's life, from birth until old age. It is all very bittersweet and there are some really funny moments. I really enjoyed Cyril. I thought he was funny and sweet and as an adult he had some hard times. Friends dying or being killed. John Boyne's The Heart's Invisible Furies is epic, cinematic, poignant. It lingered long after I read the final words. It is a story of Ireland from the 1940's to the present day. It broke my heart in places, it pieced it together again in others. Though full of well-crafted characters, it is essentially the story of one man's search to find out who he is and where he belongs. I'm not sure where to start. This book has been doing well with critics so I expected it to be pretty good - I just didn't expect it to be unputdownable. I also thought it might be hard-going, but it was a really easy read, albeit long and sometimes depressing. At one point, the characters have a discussion about authors and what makes a good book and I found this quote especially fitting: Boyne is attempting something rather epic here, letting one man's story stand in for the history of homosexuality over the last five decades and in several locations. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. He also strives to bring the characters full circle; Cyril unknowingly keeps running across his birth mother, and the figure of Julian, his first crush, makes several reappearances. An interesting effort, if not always successful (Deborah M). Although I enjoyed the read, many themes were repetitive and too long. I think the novel would have been improved with tighter editing (Viqui G).

We begin in 1945, with the pregnancy of sixteen-year-old Catherine Goggin, and her being publicly cast out of her community by the laughably hypocritical parish priest. (See the quote at the top of this review, which is also the opening of the book)

BookBrowse Review

Of the 20 First Impression reviewers of The Heart's Invisible Furies by John Boyne, 16 gave it four or five stars, netting an overall rating of 4.6 out of 5. John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies opens in 1945 in a small, conservative village in West Cork, Ireland. Instead of a nostalgic introduction to Boyne’s homeland of sweeping cliffs and vibrant greenery, the novel begins inside a church where Father James Monroe denounces pregnant 16-year-old Catherine Goggin as a whore, before banishing her from the Parish. This book. THIS BOOK. I cannot remember the last time I became so thoroughly immersed in a story, fell so deeply in love with the characters, and had my heart so fully ripped out. The Heart's Invisible Furies is a masterpiece. Most people will know Boyne from his hard-hitting children's book The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, but this book is something else entirely. It is hard to tell what goes on in those “gap times” in his life (the book is written in seven-year intervals through his life span), but he does seem to start pulling himself together into an understanding that he is a being who is human and that maybe he’s not the only person in the world (or even Ireland) who has been challenged with hard choices and decisions to make in their lives.