There have been a number of excellent explorations on sexuality in the face of AIDS in recent years. Kushner’s ‘Angels in America’ play is significantly older than many and perhaps therefore closer to the events. Russell T Davies’ television drama ‘It’s a Sin’, is based on recall of the 1980s, and ‘The Inheritance’ a play by Matthew Lopez, uses the conceit of updating Forster’s ‘Howard’s End’ and moves the issues of sex and money firmly into the late twentieth century. All have moved me to tears and reminded me how little I really know about this perspective. Although maybe more so for my money, John Boyne’s ‘The Heart’s Invisible Furies’ continues in the same vein.
It has all the elements of an epic. Its scope, set across seventy years; its reoccurring families, and their reoccurring moral dilemmas in the face of a slowly morphing society; the mountains and valleys of this thing called life, all echo across the pages with humour, wit and sadness. In truth, I have always loved Boyne’s writing and think of him as a master storyteller – silver tongued with the inkspell at his fingertips – but this was a different sort of story.
Firstly its protagonist, Cyril (what a choice of name! I am immediately alienated and forced to see my own prejudices) is so meek and lacking in agency that his abuse seems unsurprising. Can you deserve abuse? It raises important philosophical questions around who gets our sympathy and why. I also think Boyne is crafting a story about the unseen all around us. This is the story happening all over the world and we, the heteronormative, were unaware, or chose not to know. The initial part of the story is the story frequently told of the young, unmarried Irish woman in the mid twentieth century, so there is a settling into what is expected. The shame and agony of what happens is told in visceral detail, although there is analepsis that tells us we will come back to this place. We are then shaken by Boyne’s crafting.
Because he doesn’t leave us with the mother but follows the son’s development. He is not ‘a real Avery’ to his adopted parents. But far from making this about the neglect of the parents, the father remains a surprising and odd constant, perhaps as a slice of real life where people are not necessarily like you expect. It is a bildungsroman in that Cyril must grow, learn who he is, and then work out how both to accept himself and how to receive acceptance. As a child he falls in love with Julian, a boy born into privilege and good genetic inheritance. After many years apart, where Cyril does learn to love, and be loved, and to help others, he is settled in New York. The obsessive love for Julian becomes incredible pathos at a New York hospital at the height of the AIDS crisis. Boyne juxtaposes initial comedy with the (spoiler alert) death of Julian in Cyril’s arms: ‘How many times throughout my youth had I dreamed of such a moment and now all I could do was bury my face in his back and weep.’ If we haven’t empathised with Cyril by this point, we possibly need to check for a heartbeat. And then the loss becomes worse.
Yet this is a strangely optimistic book. Cyril does find his mother, who has popped up in his life a number of times in a quasi-guardian angel role, and there is a happy ending. Boyne celebrates the movement in society that has meant Cyril’s story is less common, although not yet consigned to history. Cyril is very much a flawed protagonist, and I particularly liked the painfully awkward scenes with his son and the son’s friend as he struggled to build the relationship from scratch. But his lack of honesty is strangely endearing if only because we understand the forces that compel the façade. I unreservedly recommend this book to those Year 10 and above. It is compulsive whilst also making you stop and think.
