John the Revelator

When the likes of Roddy Doyle and Colm Tóibín praise a debut novel about life in a small Irish town, it is fair to assume that it's going to be worth reading. And so it proves with John the Revelator.

John Devine is an adolescent boy living an ordinary adolescent life: 'Most boys are all balls and elbows and bad moods when they turn fifteen, and I was no exception.' Content with reading comics and paperbacks, he a solitary boy who spends his afternoons reading encyclopedias in the town library and rereading his Harper's Compendium of Bizarre Nature Facts.

This all changes one hot summer's day when he meets the enigmatic, snappily-dressed Jamey Corboy in the market square. Jamey is a boy with a reputation, a 'blow-in from Ballo town' who talks about Rimbaud and carries a spiral notebook around with him.

In spite of his mother's entreaty to 'stay away from that Jamey Corboy', John goes round to his house to look at his books. Thus begins a friendship that will get them both into trouble.

Despite containing several episodes of shocking violence, John the Revelator is actually one of the tenderest novels I've read for some time. John's relationship with his mother, Lily, with whom he lives alone, is beautifully realised. She is strict in the way of many mothers in Irish fiction - she gets rid of their television when John admits to having bad dreams (' "that fecken thing," she said, her face stony with resolve. "The devil's teat." ') - but she gives the boy more leeway than perhaps he is aware of.

The novel contains some dark, supernatural, distinctly unnerving passages, but also some very funny ones. John and his mother have a nosey neighbour, Mrs Nagle (another staple of Irish fiction, who nevertheless transcends the stereotype).  A constant visitor to the Devine's home ('My mother reckoned the smell of cooking drew her out of her lair') Phyllis Nagle has the hide of a rhino, and as a result Lily is forced to be very rude to get rid of her:

' "I'm telling you. Be on your way. I've had my fill of you for one morning."

A chair scraped.

"All right," Mrs Nagle said. "If you can't be civil with me, you can keep your own company. God knows you're used to it." '

Such cracking dialogue is just one of Murphy's considerable gifts; he also brilliantly evokes 'all the frustrations and pent-up energy of a parochial adolescence' (as the dust jacket so rightly says) and is lucid about the lengths to which people are prepared to go for friends and family.