Reading matters

'How the Light Gets In' by M.J. Hyland

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 320 pages; 2004.

A couple of years ago I read MJ Hyland's Booker Prize shortlisted novel, Carry Me Down, which I greatly admired. Her ability to get inside the head of a disturbed 11-year-old boy was nothing short of extraordinary.

Her debut novel, How the Light Gets In -- written two years before Carry Me Down -- covers similar terrority, but this time the protagonist is a 16-year-old troubled girl. But that's where the similarities end.

This time the narrator is not from Ireland, but Australia, and the setting is the suburbs of Chicago.

Louise Connor is an exchange student from an underpriviledged background who has high hopes of reinventing herself as a new person, free from her emotionally distant family -- her unemployed parents, two bullying older sisters and their no-hoper boyfriends -- where evenings are spent 

all in the boxy lounge-room, all smoking; so much smoke you can hardly see, the burning ends of their cigarettes glowing, moving from lap to mouth, somebody waving at the smoke to see the TV screen.

When she moves in with her clean-living morally upstanding host-family, Margaret and Henry Harding, and their two children, 14-year-old Bridget and 15-year-old James, she believes it won't take long to "unlearn the tricks of my own family". But despite the love and affection shown to her -- Margaret is especially touchy-feely and goes out of her way to make Louise feel at home -- it doesn't take long before Louise starts to crack under the pressure.

'Carry Me Down' by M.J. Hyland

Fiction - paperback; Canongate; 256  pages; 2006.

Carry Me Down is about a year in the troubled life of a boy trying to comprehend a confusing and painful adult world.

John Egan is unusually tall for an 11-year-old and his voice has already broken. He is obsessed by the Guinness Book of Records and has a 'gift' for detecting lies.

An only child, he lives with his mother, father and grandmother in a small village in rural Ireland in the early 1970s. But when he moves with his parents to a council estate in Dublin, the notorious seven towers of Ballymun (U2 fans will appreciate this reference), his relatively happy homelife takes a serious downward slide.

When John's obsession with truth telling goes a step too far, it has drastic -- and quite unexpected -- consequences for his parent's relationship and his own sanity.