Orange Rhymes With Everything - Hardcover

For his first novel, author Adrian McKinty has chosen Northern Ireland's age-old conflict between Protestant and Catholic as his stage and peopled it with two unnamed narrators, a violent Protestant paramilitary man and his hunchbacked teenage daughter. The story opens with the man breaking out of a New York mental hospital and proceeds on a violent, bloody path back to Ireland. Alternating with this killer's progress are chapters describing his daughter's daily life in working-class Ulster.

Mr. McKinty writes close to the bone, taking the reader right inside his characters' heads so that each thought, each action, resonates in the mind almost as if it had been the reader's own. Given the harrowing lives these characters lead and the graphic depictions of violence throughout the book, Orange Rhymes with Everything can prove a disturbing read.

If James Joyce had got his start as a Belfast Protestant with more of an interest in politics and less of a sense of humor--but with all of his scatological obsessions intact--he might have given us something close to McKinty's grim debut novel. The gritty realism that seems to be the fashion in Britain and Ireland these days has cast a long shadow over the younger generation of writers, many of whom apparently feel compelled to mimic the obsessions of Irvine Welsh and James Kelman, just as young Americans have aped the simplicities of Hemingway for the last 50 years. McKinty's version of the new realism involves a walking tour of the uglier stretches of Belfast and New York, narrated from the points of view of a hunchbacked teenager and a terrorist who is very likely her father. The young girl, who lives in a Protestant neighborhood of Belfast, attempts to carry on a normal high school routine of sports, classes, and amateur theatrical productions despite the obsessive interest of a perverted biology teacher who persuades her to photograph and describe her bowel movements for him. Her father, meanwhile, a paramilitary hit man who has fled the country to avoid arrest, finds himself stuck in a Manhattan mental institution. Whether this is a mistake, a ruse to avoid deportation, or simply his natural habitat is not made much clearer than the rest of the story, which has little semblance of plot and proceeds along an uneven line from murkiness to utter incomprehensibility. To some extent, the lack of a clear storyline is part of the story in its own right, seemingly meant to express the aimlessness and deracination of the Protestant Loyalists of Ulster: ``Orphans of history with only their mad religion to give them any identity at all.'' But it also has the effect of keeping readers outside that hermetic world rather than bringing them into it. Rambling, incoherent, and gratuitously squalid. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.