by M. J. Hyland
‘See?’ I say, laughing. ‘Nothing there. Just like I said.’
My father grins at me and says, ‘Just as well.’ But he’s not angry.
‘Yes, just as well,’ says my mother and she’s not angry either.
* * *
We leave the mansion and walk side by side to the car. I sit in the back, near the middle, and I lean forward so I can see their faces. My father drives away slowly, with one hand on the steering wheel, the other resting lightly on his thigh. My mother looks out the window, calm, I think, and happy. It’s a perfect day for the beach and perhaps, if I ask, that’s where we will go.
The stationmasters are together. The train is arriving and the boom-gate bells are ringing. When the last passenger gets on board, the stationmasters wave their white flags in unison and they watch the train as it pulls away from the platform. The driver waves at them from his cabin window, but they pay no attention. They are too busy talking.
When they get cold or need a rest, or when they need something sweet or warm to eat, they can go into the station buffet together. They can sit at a table near the window, drink tea, eat toast and cake, and watch the people come and go. And the fire inside will warm their hands and faces.
The door is open.
Acknowledgements
I thank my editor, Michael Heyward, whose excellent work made Carry Me Down a better book. I also thank – for the same reason – Stewart Andrew Muir, Carolyn Tétaz, Jenny Lee, Marion May Campbell and David Winter. Thanks also to Jamie Byng, whose steadfast confidence makes it possible for me to write every day. Special thanks to my Irish proofreader, Anne McCarry in Wexford, for her painstaking and patient help. Thanks also to Mark Monnone, Rosalie Ham, Sue Maslin, Helen Bleck, Karen McCrossan, Polly Collingridge, Jessica Craig, Alice and Arthur Shirreff, Barbara Mobbs and David McCormick. And for his generous last-minute fact checking, my grateful thanks to Colin Brennan.
“Carry Me Down is almost claustrophobically narrow, reducing the big events of John’s life to immediate, sensory impressions. But it is also enthralling and absorbing and capable of arousing sympathy to a degree that is almost painful. At the end, my feelings for John were so strong they were like a physical ache.”
Geraldine Bedell, Observer
“In beautifully detailed and understated prose, Hyland’s meditation on the nature of falsehood uncovers precious truths at every turn.” The Times
“M.J. Hyland’s Carry Me Down is subtle, powerful and riveting. Here are the things that surface in ordinary families, tear them apart and hold them together – truth, betrayal, unconditional love and forgiveness. This book has a fierce grip, and it doesn’t let go. Hyland is wise and shockingly talented.”
Lisa Moore
“Vivid, disquieting and extremely hard to put down, M.J. Hyland’s second novel shows a great talent … a clever and subtle writer who can tap into the fears and neuroses of childhood, as well as the dynamics of a dysfunctional family, and turn it into gripping fiction.”
Alistair Mabbott, Herald
“Carry Me Down … doesn’t have a phoney thing about it.”
Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday
“It is difficult to combine realism and surreal interludes in a single narrative structure, but Hyland manages this effortlessly.” Ruth Scarr, Daily Telegraph
“M.J. Hyland’s follow-up to her critically acclaimed debut, How the Light Gets In, again uses a sensitive, unstable and complex child narrator to illuminate the perplexing state of childhood, where lies and half-truths are frequent commodities. John’s poetic humorous voice has a ring of authenticity to it, too; this is a humane and compelling novel.”
Clare Allfree, Metro
“Profoundly affecting … [M.J. Hyland] is indeed a rare talent.”
Sydney Morning Herald
“The first-person narrative dives right into the mind of 11-year-old John Egan and is most convincing as it chronicles the unravelling of that precocious mind. Its originality stems in part from Hyland’s sketching of John as a quintessential misfit … We follow John through toothache, heartache and headaches. The novel chronicles the trials and tribulations of growing up too fast, which often leaves some part of the self lagging behind. The snow falling throughout provides beautiful imagery and the use of the present tense lends a compelling immediacy to the narrative.”
Anita Sethi, Mslexia
“This is an unsentimental and sometimes astonishing journey into a damaged life.” Dallas Morning News
“Hyland’s second novel owes less to Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time or to Roddy Doyle than to Gulliver’s Travels. The trials and traumas of John’s twelfth year … are sketched with Swiftian disgust … Hyland isn’t out to manufacture either gross-out thrills or Angela’s Ashes-style emotional hyperbole – and her simple, uninflected sentences make the brutality of John’s surroundings all the more shocking.”
Financial Times Magazine
“Though the book could have been an exercise in miserabilism, the author deals with larger themes: the otherness of children, the fragility of security and the pain of being a sensitive child in a brutal world. Hyland gives a sympathetic portrayal of a child on the edge of mental disintegration, defending himself with rituals and talismans that are increasingly ineffective.”
Hugh Bonar, Ireland on Sunday
“The child narrator of Carry Me Down has some obvious fictional forebears: Holden Caulfield … Christopher Boone in Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time … but John Egan, the precocious, towering misfit who tells this story, is unique as well as unforgettable … Hyland is excellent at depicting the deadening, degrading effects of poverty … [she] shrouds the narrative in an engrossing uncertainty, forcing the reader to suspend expectation … Freud would love this novel and Hyland knows it. It is a subtle but uncompromising portrait of mental anguish and burgeoning psychosis – courageous and deeply unsettling.” Joanne Hayden, Sunday Business Post
“A spare, piercing testimony to the bewilderment and resiliency of youth … John’s voice is singular and powerful throughout … By the subtle, satisfying dénouement, one is rooting for John’s place in the Guinness book and saving a space for him among the year’s memorable characters.”
Publisher’s Weekly
“As in her first novel, How the Light Gets In, Hyland demonstrates a mature sense of characterization and suspense in a thoroughly engaging narrative. A close, creepy, masterly exploration of a shattered preadolescence.” Kirkus
“A fast-paced psychological drama … Hyland’s novel is a fresh yet troubling reminder of the pain of lost innocence and the price of pursuing the truth.”
People Magazine
“Hyland maintains the same steely control she exercised in her debut, How the Light Gets In. She is not a writer to wax lachrymose or prolix. Her sentences are so crisp they have hospital corners.”
Michelle Griffin, Australia Book Review
“Hyland writes in unadorned, clear prose, evoking period, place and setting with intense clarity and a lovely, restrained lyricism. If How the Light Gets In made me think of Salinger, Carry Me Down makes me think of William Faulkner and James Joyce.”
Cath Kenneally, Weekend Australian
“Carry Me Down is a heart-rending domestic work full of compassion for the most ordinary of our human frailties.” Gregory Day, Age
“In taut, simple prose, Hyland meticulously captures the specific pains of growing up poor and lonely in Ireland and deftly anatomizes her judgemental protagonist’s odd mixture of ‘little boy and grown lad’.” Entertainment Weekly
Also by M.J. Hyland
How the Light Gets In
Copyright
First published in Great Britain in 2006
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
Published simultaneously in Australia by
Text Publishing, Melbourne
This digital edition first published in
2008
by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright ©M.J. Hyland, 2006
the moral rights of the author have been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 88150 715 7
www.meetatthegate.com