Toby Hennessy always considered himself lucky, growing up in affluent Dublin, in a stable middle class family, attending a good school, graduating university, and landing a decent first job as media manager for a small but cool gallery. He has a girlfriend he loves and mates who are always up for a pint.
Though he is an only child, his father is one of four brothers, and two of them also have a single child, so Toby has two cousins of like age and circumstance. The three cousins, more like siblings, spent many childhood summers together at their paternal grandparents’ home, the old and rambling Ivy House. This is nowadays occupied solely by the fourth, unmarried, brother, Hugo. And in the grounds of the Ivy House stands and old wych elm.
What happens over the next five hundred pages cannot be satisfactorily summarised without multiple spoilers, as the plot slowly warms, thickens, boils over, subsides and has the mess wiped off the cooker, but not without leaving stubborn traces that cannot be erased. Suffice to say, Toby’s good luck seems to be running out.
In addition to the satisfyingly rich plot, the dynamics of Toby’s relationships with his cousins, mates and girlfriend are picked apart, mainly by Toby who is the narrator throughout. Though not a reliable one, due to an early bump on the head that leads him (and the reader) to often doubt his memories. Other perspectives are provided as his cousins relate their versions of the past; but how reliable are those?
There is a violent robbery, and later a body turns up, so the police intrude too. Their questions only prompt Toby to ask harder ones of himself, and his cousins, about events of a decade previously, at the Ivy House, in the shadow of the wych elm.
It is a gloriously intensive novel that keeps
on giving, in a style reminiscent of the novels of Donna Tartt.
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