cover image The Corner Boys

The Corner Boys

Geoffrey Beattie. Gollancz, $28 (220pp) ISBN 978-0-575-06432-4

Beattie, the author of several nonfiction books and a professor of psychology at Manchester University, ventures into fiction for the first time with this earnest coming of age tale set in strife-torn Belfast before the cease-fire. In a Protestant, working-class neighborhood, James is a 17-year-old school dropout who hangs out on a street corner with his friends. There are no jobs, and their prospects are limited. Their only role models are the bosses of various paramilitary organizations who boast of violent acts against enemies of Ulster, but are no more than cheap thugs. James's friend Tucker gets sucked into one of these loyalist organizations and he's soon collecting protection money from local businesses and working on James to join him. But it's all too obvious to James that each side is as bad as the other. Beattie takes his time setting the scene, and it is not until the final 40 pages that the pace picks up, when James meets a Catholic girl and they begin a secret affair. There is no happy ending in the offing, but some of the plot twists are genuinely unforeseen, and the sex scenes are surprisingly engaging. Though Beattie's prose takes on a documentary slant in places, slowing down the progress of the tale, he sketches a convincing picture of the shifting alliances and rough and tumble life of a city in the throes of a miniature civil war. (Jan.)