Cal by Bernard Mac Laverty
Posted in Other fiction, Reading Reviewed at 12:00 on 2 January 2025
Heinemann, 1988, 158 p.
The setting is Northern Ireland during the troubles. Cal spends his days lazing about as he is unemployed, having not been able to stand the job he had in the slaughterhouse where his father works. They are the only remaining Catholics in an otherwise Protestant street and subject to threats as a result. He is plagued by Crilly and Skeffington, Provisional IRA members wanting him to go on more jobs but is haunted by the memory of his part in the killing of a police officer where he drove the car they used. A new woman assistant at the local library begins to consume his attention. She is Marcella, and happens to be the wife of the man that was killed.
Being burned out of his house gives him the chance both to evade Crilly and Skeffington and to take a job at the farm where Marcella lives. He is a man living, if not a life of lies, at least one of omissions. A situation like his cannot end well.
Quite how psychologically perceptive all of this is is perhaps questionable. Not Cal’s reluctance to be drawn deeper into acts of violence but his attraction to a woman he feels he has wronged. The atmosphere of constraint though, of circumscription, is entirely credible.
Note: Mac Laverty is how the author’s surname is spelled on the book’s cover and title page but it is more usually rendered MacLaverty
Pedant’s corner:- “and how he would kiss her and touched her” (and touch her.) “‘You’re a boy without?ELSomebody might’” (I have no idea what that ‘?EL’ is about.)
Tags: Bernard Mac Laverty, Bernard MacLaverty, Cal, Irish Fiction, Literary Fiction