Kim at Reading Matters was enthusiastic about this debut book and her description of being swept up in the story persuaded me. And I don’t know when I’ve read a book with a story so intensely told. I hope to write about some of the remarkable aspects of this book without recounting the whole plot. It is set in 2012 in Belfast as the city was recovering from The Troubles. The Belfast of this book is a different world, as a central figure was a Bible-quoting evangelical preacher with three children. He and a young woman who is a Samuel Beckett scholar meet by chance, fall in love, and she becomes pregnant.
The first half of the book, we slowly come to understand, is told by that son, Samuel, many years later. What he says about each of them is what makes the book for me. Here’s one quote:
And this, Anna said, was the attraction. He was handsome enough. He could stand upright in a room in a way that drew from others both authority and warmth. A not inconsiderable quality. He listened to you when you talked. But it was his connectedness, his sense of being caught up in the unfolding presence of God in the world, that struck her as being extraordinary. It wasn’t that he was constantly trying to make everything holy, but that, for him, there was no line between the sacred and the profane.
What intrigued me is the author’s successful creation of these two unlikely characters and how they respond to what befalls them.
The second section of the book occurs when Sam is grown and has been in New York for some years. Sam is an employee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, having begun as a guard and moved to a higher level position. I was reminded of that beloved book All the Beauty in the World by Patrick Bringley, a non-fiction memoir of his ten years as a guard at the Met while he healed from the death of his brother. There’s something about being around all that beauty.
This section is also very intense and includes the desecration of a painting, but I had some questions that left me confused or vaguely unsatisfied.
Along the way, there are descriptions the author gives us that took my breath away. Here’s one:
The year was rushing towards Christmas, as it does in Belfast. The days shorten, darkness takes over. The rain, a steady presence throughout the year, becomes colder, the angles harsher. But then those days come like an unexpected grace: green and yellow and brown leaves littering the pavement, the early dew glinting, flickering in the low sun.
Phil Harrison, The First Day, Little Brown Books Group, 2017, 224 pages (I read the kindle version). Not available in the public library.