Jamie O’Neill stands apart from other kids his age in Emory, a fictional town in the west of Ireland. A lifelong reader of Edgar Allan Poe, he nevertheless favours the symmetries of mathematics over fiction, revering the work of the late Iranian Fields medallist Maryam Mirzakhani. On his first day at Christ’s College, the local all-boys secondary school, he knows exactly how many steps it will take him to walk there from home (2,816). And he wants to build a perpetual motion machine so that, by some complex logic that only he understands, he can reconnect with his mother who died giving birth to him.
Jamie is the singular centre of Elaine Feeney’s second novel – after As You Were, winner of the Kate O’Brien award in 2021 – though he shares the narrative with Tess Mahon, an additional needs teacher whose life is in the grip of the kind of chaos that Jamie abhors. Trying for a child on IVF, she finds herself increasingly estranged from her self-satisfied banker husband, Paul. She feels out of place, too, at Christ’s College, whose headmaster Father Faulks is fostering a culture of intolerance against anyone different. When she connects with Jamie, bullied on his first morning, it’s uncertain whether she is throwing him a lifeline or vice versa.
As You Were captured rural Irish life in striking, impressionistic prose that belied Feeney’s background as a poet. The milieu is similar here – both novels are set in Feeney’s native County Galway – and so are the prejudices and secret shames that fester beneath the surface. In contrast to her husband’s snooty respectability, Tess comes from a broken home: her mother died young and her alcoholic father roams the streets. When the two worlds collide, Feeney does not temper the cruelty. “We’ve got nothing for you,” Paul snaps at his father-in-law, who turns up drunk on Christmas Eve. “Scram.”
It’s no mystery where Feeney’s sympathies lie – with the outliers, against social and religious orthodoxies – and at times she overreaches, nailing down what should remain ambiguous or implicit. When students emerge from a start-of-term assembly, puffed up by Faulks’s moralising, the scene, she writes, “was both distracting and powerful. And dangerous.” Jamie facing off against his bullies, meanwhile, is credited for “his off-kilter way of dealing with the world, which was naive and beautiful”.
Her writing is strongest when she takes us inside Jamie’s head. The headlong rush of his thoughts suits her fidgety, flickering prose, which darts this way and that, snatching vivid glimpses as it goes. Long, breathless paragraphs crammed with information shatter into short gasps that resemble poetry. “I just think: / this is a stupid rule of thumb, / it is not uniform, / and it will surely all go belly up. / Which reminds me of the zip pinching my belly skin.”
That’s Jamie reflecting on an enterprise that gets going midway through and gives the book its title. In an effort to channel Jamie’s energies, and perhaps for more selfish reasons too, Tess takes him to the workshop of Tadhg Foley, a new woodwork teacher who rejects the school’s conformism. Foley, who sails a handmade currach on the local river, proposes that he and Jamie build a boat together – a perpetual motion machine of a sort, given the restless nature of both water and wood. Jamie reluctantly agrees, and soon other pupils and parents get involved, to the horror of the headmaster who believes his boys are above such work.
The idea is to demonstrate to Jamie the value of communal endeavour over solitary toil, of intuition over cold logic, and it is to Feeney’s credit that Jamie never fully buys into these notions to sentimental effect. But the tides of the novel carry him elsewhere, towards a reunion of sorts with his mother, and on the way Jamie learns to cede control, for a short while at least, and go with the flow.
• How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney is published by Harvill Secker (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
