Estelle Birdy’s debut is a sprawling social novel that aims squarely at capturing the lives of a group of boys becoming men in working-class Dublin. Ravelling charts the year when Deano, Karl, Oisín, Benit and Hamza prepare to take “the Leaving”, as they all refer to their Leaving Certificate, in one of a profusion of beautifully poetic dialectical noticings Birdy crams into her story. Her work has been compared to Roddy Doyle, who shares her pleasure in documenting the Dublin dialect; but the artist who comes most strongly to mind is Richard Linklater, whose films showcase similar moments in young lives through multiple protagonist narratives, and also take an interest in time as the engine of a story. Succeeding seasons provide the rhythm of Birdy’s novel, the tension of this passing time always heightened by the knowledge that it is limited – that the Leaving is coming.
What is most successful in the novel is Birdy’s depiction of an immediately recognisable young manhood that will be familiar to readers far beyond the Liberties area in Dublin, where Ravelling is set. Birdy has a fantastic ear, and is meticulous in portraying the profoundly articulate inarticulacy of young people, the idiolects through which their lives are negotiated. The casually bruising way young men talk to one another is brilliantly rendered – “He’s all Men’s Sheds and helping the junkies”; “Take all the freebies you can for mentalness, sickness, postcode”. She writes with candour, clarity and humour about the way these young men interpret the world.
Birdy is also gifted when it comes to evoking the buried past. There is a powerful sense throughout the book of life playing out on the site of old battles, the legacies of which are still shaping the characters today. It’s striking how many of the lives depicted are scarred by past events that are swiftly introduced as fact, rather than explored as dramatic material – dead siblings, lives deformed by poverty. Even if we never dive fully into the harm of the past, it is there at the edges of these young men’s stories, most extensively in Deano, whose mother is a recovering heroin addict, and whose father died horribly in the same part of Dublin where Deano now lives. Some of the people in Deano’s life were present at his father’s death, and others were responsible for it: the sense of buried bodies under the surface of the present is powerfully rendered. There is a fight under way to stop Deano falling into the same world that claimed his parents; all these young men are fighting, really, not to fall into a Dublin underworld of dealing and brothels and funerals, where heads turn up in canals.
There are weaknesses that mark this out as a first novel. Birdy’s reliance on the passing of time, rather than character choices or dramatic incident, to move the story forwards, makes the book seem slightly episodic, lacking its own internal logic and rhythm. There are moments – an early funeral, a house party in a rented Airbnb – where Birdy seems to lose control of her multiplicity of protagonists, so that it becomes difficult to follow what’s happening to everyone. This is a natural by-product of the Dickensian scale of her ambition – as well as the five young male protagonists, she depicts a profusion of secondary characters, love interests, parents, Gardaí, dealers and pimps and drunks, whose stories intertwine throughout the book. These are not always perfectly paced out. However, Ravelling presents a pugnacious, compelling social world with deep empathy, and as a portrait of five young men trying to keep their heads above water, it introduces an exciting new voice.
• Ravelling by Estelle Birdy is published by Lilliput (£14.99). To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
