The First Day

Harrison’s deeply disturbing, morally challenging first novel opens as Samuel Orr, a married Belfast preacher, falls headlong into a love affair with Anna, a young poet and student of Samuel Beckett. Orr is a man of profound faith and Anna is a thoughtful scholar. Each makes a worthy partner for the other, and together they contemplate the absurd, mysterious world around them. The first pages track the beginning of their affair and are an elegiac tribute to love, to “that brief moment of continuity between two lovers.” But their transgressive love has tragic consequences. After Anna becomes pregnant, and Orr confesses to his wife and later to his congregation, knowledge of the affair will irrevocably change everyone involved. The book concentrates in particular on the suffering of Orr’s oldest son, Philip, and of his half-brother, Samuel, the love child, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children.” A calculated and violent vengeance is meted out by Philip in the first half of the book, and terrifying, creepy aftershocks continue to reverberate in the lives of the grown-up Samuel and his enfeebled father, living together in New York City decades later. Harrison’s remarkable writing elevates a story that is all the more powerful for its eschewing of easy answers and resolution. (Oct.)