I’m tempted to say I had never heard of this book by John Boyne before my book club elected to read it, but when I went to add it to my Goodreads shelf, I found I had marked it as “to read” back in 2017 and a bunch of my friends had read and loved it. I’m happy to say I was able to join them in their very positive assessment of this wonderful book.
I’m not even sure what it was about the book that had me so entranced. It was not particularly fast paced, but there was something about the writing that was just so powerful. Boyne had my attention from the very beginning and he held it all the way through to the very end, which, by the way, I am going to talk about, so consider this your SPOILER ALERT!
The narrator of the book is Cyril Avery and the book is basically about his whole life, starting with his mother’s unexpected and unplanned (and “sinful”) pregnancy almost up until his death. Catherine Goggin, living in Cork, Ireland during the second world war, is 16 years old when she gets pregnant by her uncle (her uncle by marriage, so it’s not quite as gross as it initially sounds). We meet her on Sunday morning, in church, just after her parents have discovered her “condition”. The priest calls her up to the altar in the middle of mass, condemns her in front of everyone, kicks her out of the parish, and tells her no man will ever want to marry her. Her family sits silently by, although her uncle/babydaddy does sneak out and try to give her a little money as she leaves. She tears it up in disgust, telling him he’s done enough.
When she gets home, her parents have already packed her bags for her, with the expectation that she’ll be gone by the time they get home from church. So she takes her stuff and buys a one-way bus ticket to Dublin. On the bus, she meets Sean MacIntyre. They quickly become friends and he explains he’s going to meet his friend, Jack Smoot, in Dublin. Jack has a job and an apartment all lined up for Sean, and when Catherine tells him she doesn’t know anyone in Dublin and has nowhere to go, he invites her to stay with him and Jack, although Jack is less thrilled when he finds out.
As it turns out, Sean and Jack are a couple and are renting a one-bedroom apartment, which goes from cozy to cramped with the addition of a pregnant girl. It takes Catherine longer than it should to figure out that they’re a couple. In the meantime, she buys herself a wedding ring and claims to be a widow in order to get a job in a tearoom. The woman hiring her sees right through the lies, but she has her own past, so she takes pity on Catherine and decides to give her a chance. This being Dublin in 1945, Catherine knows there are no paid sick days and she can’t afford a nanny, so she gives the baby up for adoption.
One night, Catherine is coming home from work and there’s a drunk and rather surly man she doesn’t recognize waiting outside the door of the apartment. When she unlocks the door to try to get away from him, he pushes past her and up the stairs to the apartment. He kicks in the door, screaming about what he said he would do to them (Sean and Jack) if he ever found them together again.
Sean and Jack were clearly in bed together when the man (who turns out to be Sean’s father) interrupted them. Sean’s father, drunk and already enraged before he even showed up, kills his own son, nearly kills Jack, and hits Catherine at least once before she manages to hit him over the head and stop him from killing Jack. Then she promptly went into labor.
The next section starts with Cyril at seven years old, describing the life he had known up until that point. He was adopted by a couple who had had a child that hadn’t lived very long, and complications from the pregnancy meant Cyril’s adoptive mother, Maude Avery, couldn’t get pregnant again. At first, this sounds like a story of a very sad couple who just want a child of their own to love, but they don’t seem to even take much notice of Cyril, much less love him. They insist he call them Charles and Maude and not Father and Mother. When he refers to them, he is always to refer to them as his adoptive mother and his adoptive father. Charles tells Cyril over and over again that he’s “not a real Avery.”
As sad as that sounds, Cyril has never known anything else, so he’s not upset by it. He might not have been very well loved, but he was well fed, well cared for, and educated.
Cyril’s life takes a turn when he meets Julian Woodbead, a boy his own age who introduces Cyril to sex. He wants to compare penises (Julian’s turns out to be larger), and all he talks about is how he can’t wait to have sex with lots, and lots of girls, and how much sex he’s going to have.
It’s just one encounter, but Cyril continues to fantasize about Julian for several more years until they meet again in private school and, as fate would have it, become roommates. Cyril recognizes the name Julian Woodbead immediately, although Julian has to be reminded of their meeting. When he is reminded, he asks if Cyril is the boy who asked to see his penis. Cyril denies it, but does not correct Julian that he was the one who wanted to see Cyril’s penis and not the other way around. This comes up several more times throughout the course of the novel and Cyril never corrects Julian, and I don’t know why I wanted so badly for Cyril to set him straight. Why was it so important to me? I don’t know.
Anyway, Cyril and Julian soon become best friends, but Julian, fulfilling his promise to his seven-year-old self, promptly starts going out with girls and (presumably) having lots of sex with them. Cyril, on the other hand, can only think of Julian, but he’s terrified of his true feelings becoming known, so he does his best to hide them and pretend to be a “normal” heterosexual man.
Throughout it all I kept thinking Julian was secretly gay. All his talk about having sex with girls seemed like overkill … like he was trying to compensate for something. At one point, Cyril said Julian seemed unusually obsessed with sex, even for a 14-year-old boy. Who’s more obsessed with sex than a 14-year-old boy?
Later on, a few people make allusions to the idea that Julian was gay, but since he died of AIDS, Cyril just chalks it up to people misunderstanding the disease, but I’m not so sure. At one point Cyril says Julian was practically defined by his heterosexuality and that set off a lot of red flags. Who’s defined by their heterosexuality?
It’s never confirmed that Julian was gay, but I stand by my theory.
In any case, as Cyril and Julian grow up together and Cyril comes to terms with the fact that he is most definitely gay, but that he can’t ever be with the man he loves, he instead turns to illicit sex with strange men in public bathrooms and parks at night. Meanwhile, he’s still carrying on his heterosexula facade, which leads to him dating, and eventually marrying Julian’s sister, Alice. As the wedding draws closer, Cyril becomes increasingly nervous about the whole thing and ends up kissing Julian and confessing his feelings right before the ceremony.
Julian (who is also the best man), hits Cyril and declares they’re no longer friends. He says it’s not because Cyril is gay, but because he lied all these years. Nevertheless, he’s insistent that Cyril go through with the wedding because his sister has already been left at the altar once and Julian will be damned if he lets her go through that again.
So Cyril makes it through the ceremony and most of the reception before he bails.
We meet Cyril several years later living in Amsterdam with a man named Bastiaan. Even after having spent years in Amsterdam, Cyril still has a hard time with the idea that two men can walk down the street holding hands and not get their faces kicked in. As it turns out, they met in an Irish bar called MacIntyre’s owned and run by a man named Jack Smoot, and, yes, it’s exactly who you think it is.
Shortly after we meet Bastiaan and remeet Cyril in Amsterdam, a teenaged boy named Ignac shows up on their doorstep, unconscious and strung out on something (probably heroine). It’s a very cold night, and Bastiaan (a doctor) insists they have to take him in. Cyril is afraid the kid will wake up in the middle of the night and murder them in their bed, so they agree to lock Ignac in their guest bedroom.
When they check on him in the morning, Ignac is understandably upset at having been locked up and demands to be paid for the night. He’s a prostitute and was so strung out the night before he assumes Bastiaan and/or Cyril had sex with him and he just doesn’t remember. Of course they refuse to pay, but Ignac steals Cyril’s wallet on his way out the door. I did think it odd that Cyril, the paranoid one, was afraid Ignac would attack them but didn’t think to hide the valuables.
Ignac returns a few days later and returns Cyril’s wallet, although it’s empty, of course. He says he wants out of the sex-for-money life and can he stay with them for a few days until he figures out his next steps? They agree, but of course “a few days” turns into months and then years. I don’t think they ever officially adopted him, but he becomes the closest thing they ever have to a son.
The book then skips ahead a few more years and Cyril and Bastiaan are in NYC during the height of the AIDS crisis. Bastiaan had gotten a job at a hospital (I can’t remember which one) and ends up studying the disease and helping to treat patients. Cyril doesn’t have a job in NYC but volunteers at the hospital to just keep patients company. At a time when there was still so much homophobia and AIDS did nothing to help the situation, many of those dying of the disease (both straight and gay) had been abandoned by their families so they had no one to visit them, so Cyril would visit them. Who should turn up but Julian?
It’s never explained how Julian ended up in NYC, but at least he and Cyril get to sort of talk through their issues with each other. Although, for someone who claimed he wouldn’t have cared if Cyril had told him from the start that he was gay, Julian still blames Cyril and all homosexuals for AIDS, saying it’s not fair because, even though he had lots of sex with lots of different people, he only had sex with women, making him “normal” and therefore undeserving to die of AIDS, the implication being that homosexuals deserve to die of AIDS.
Julian also gets a chance to tell Cyril he’s a father. All those years, Cyril never bothered to check on Alice or write to her to apologize for bailing on her on their wedding day. He just assumes she had the marriage annulled since it was never consummated, forgetting that he had had sex with her once before the wedding and once is all it takes. So not only was she was left a single mother, but she couldn’t have the marriage annulled because that would make her son illegitimate, and we’ve already seen how Ireland treats women who have babies without a husband.
The same night Julian dies, Cyril and Bastiaan are walking home through Central Park when they’re attacked by a couple of homophobes. Cyril ends up in a coma and a limp for the rest of his life, while Bastiaan doesn’t make it out at all. So Cyril has to take time to recover and grieve before finally picking up and moving back to Dublin to try to make things right with Alice and Liam (his son).
They are both understandably reluctant to let him back into their lives, but he does eventually win them over. And as a bonus, he finally gets to meet his birth mother!
He and Catherine kept running into each other and it drove me crazy wondering when they were finally going to realize who they were to each other, but of course Boyne makes us wait until the very end to get that resolution. She spent fifty years working in the same tearoom where she first got hired and Cyril patronized the same tearoom at least a few times in the course of his life, so their paths kept crossing.
Also, when I looked up “tearoom” just now to see if it’s one word or two, I found a colloquial definition of tearoom is “a public restroom used as a meeting place for homosexual encounters.” So that adds a whole other layer to that storyline that I hadn’t realized was there.