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THE ANATOMY SCHOOL by Bernard MacLaverty

THE ANATOMY SCHOOL

by Bernard MacLaverty

Pub Date: April 1st, 2001
ISBN: 0-393-05052-1
Publisher: Norton

Booker-winner MacLaverty (Grace Notes, 1997, etc.) portrays the coming of age of three Belfast boys during the early 1970s.

Although it’s pretty much the norm for adolescent boys the world over to feel cooped up and suffocated, in Northern Ireland this could be considered a rational understanding of the situation. Especially in the post-Beatles age, the provincial sectarianism of Belfast must have seemed rather galling to those who were just on the cusp of discovering the world for the first time. MacLaverty here takes us through the last year of high school with three Catholic boys who are all, in different ways, butting their heads against the same brick wall of complacent ignorance. Martin Brennan is the most sensitive of the three: a diligent but slow student, he is trying for the second time in two years to pass his examinations and qualify for a civil service job—but keeps coming back to the question of whether he should enter a religious order as a welcome escape from the harsh realities of life on the outside. Martin’s friends Kavanagh and Foley are also products of Belfast, and they have similar frustrations seen from very different perspectives: Foley is a foul-mouthed rebel who scoffs at the Church and scorns Belfast (“A godforsaken backwater where they lock up the swings on a Sunday”), while Kavanagh has fallen in love with the Protestant Philippa Dobson, who not only refuses to sleep with him but wants him to accept Jesus as his savior. This is a leisurely old-fashioned Bildungsroman in which much of the attention is devoted to the discovery of new ideas, and the arguments that they engender among the young, and the sense of nostalgia is palpable from the start. By the end, Martin has changed as much as Belfast (and the world) has.

Slow and somewhat aimless, but a nice account all the same of youth lusting after experience.