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5.0 out of 5 stars
The grim reality of Belfast boarding house blues, Aug 25 2000
What a novel! Here in a tantalyzing weaving of different characters' perspectives, we learn about the various levels of Belfast society and its intolerances. The main character is an Irish woman who let her shorthand slide, so she teaches piano for a living, and continues to lose her students steadily as the children's parents discover she has alcohol on her breath. Surreptiously she takes long bus rides to the edge of town for whiskey-buying expeditions, and has to take the clinking bottles back up the stairs of her lonely room. She seems to have no real friends or interests, and is moving from boarding house to boarding house as her alcoholism is discovered; landlords kick her out. What is new and exciting in this parish is the older brother of the landlady just back from 30 years of living in New York, making allusions to his life in the hotel business. She finds out by accident that he was a doorman for a hotel. He'd done every job he could find in the rough streets of NYC, and thought his doorman job the best ever he'd found, until he was injured by a car hitting him, giving him one bum leg dragging. These and many other details are piled up upon the reader through various characters' gossiping with each other. For example, the 30-year-old Mama's boy, son of the landlady, is screwing the 16-year-old maid, and hangs out all day with no job, telling tale tales and spreading malicious humors to keep his own reputation clean. The ex-NYer was a very disappointed fellow who started drinking at bars, just to stay out of the house, realizing that he had no place in his old home country, neither in his small village in Donegal, nor in Belfast, so he mutters about "going down to Dublin", but never does he leave. He can live rent-free at his sister's, and she resents it o boy! The sad decline into a drinking binge of this woman is quite a feat; one suspects the writer must have himself experienced it or known someone who'd done the same. It's peculiarly Irish, how far down she goes, in her last faint hopes for romance, crushed when the NY'er begins to ignore her when he realizes she has no money and can't be a business partner. And so it goes... better not give away anymore of the plot.
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