Keith Maguire

I loved this, a wonderful evocation of a group of teenagers from Dublin at a fancy private school. A joy to read characters in a book calling each other geebags :)

A lot more enjoyable than I was expecting. The main characters are mostly incredibly grating and speak exactly as you would imagine main character written by Oscar Wilde to speak - all witty aphorisms and cynicism. They are so annoying at the start of the book it almost feels deliberately alienating. It's difficult to separate what you expect the book to be from previous knowledge from a direct experience of reading the text. It's also it is difficult to be certain what you are seeing anachronisticly and what is genuinely in the text. As with, I suspect, all Irish readers of Wilde it feels to have an undercurrent of rage and sadness at the particular rapacity of late nineteenth century Empire (1890 is 40 years after the height of the famine, or as close to the time of this book as the 1980s are to now). There is also a huge amount of what a contemporary reader can only read as a gay subtext.

What is enjoyable about the book is following a character through a disastrous implementation of a stereotypical cynical separation from the consequences of most of what people hold dear to the inevitable result. Cynicism is understood and demonstrated as destructive and pointless to life.

As Coil reminded us: Constant Shallowness Leads to Evil