Review: “The Loney” by Andrew Michael Hurley

The Loney. A desolate stretch of land on the northern coast, notable only for an ancient shrine to which a young boy’s devout Catholic parents take him and his brother, Hanny, every Easter in the hope of find an miracle cure for Hanny’s muteness. But when a new priest is assigned to the parish, the family’s religious certainty is challenged, and the cracks in faith and ritual begin to show. This was an interesting read. I loved the story. I also loved Hurley’s style. He does a wonderful job of writing around what is actually happening. It’s the perfect depiction of a child’s point of view: being witness the lives of the adults around him but never having anyone engage with him to explain exactly what’s happening. Everything was inferred. All the character backstory was there, but you have to work it out. These are not the kind of people willing to be open and honest about their feelings.The setting was perfect for the story. Looking at it objectively I would have said it was a little too on the nose. But actually, sometimes simple is the best way to do something. The Loney and the house work as a perfect representation of the fragile and isolated world the protagonist’s family have created; with their strict religion and belief that simply religion-ing hard enough will eventually solve their problems.But as much as I enjoyed The Loney and got a lot out of it, it’s one of those books that didn’t quite hit that point of satisfaction. I loved the story and the writing, but found it hard to get into and a little disappointing at the end.Thinking back, I think the fact I took a while to get into it was down to me. I wasn’t sure of either the year the story was set or the protagonist’s age until well into the story. This niggled at me, preventing me getting lost in the story as I was searching for clues to work it out.And the ending was, I’m afraid, a classic case of not hitting the same feel as the rest of it. It didn’t feel to me like it flowed naturally. From a wonderful, elusive story where everything was inferred, we were suddenly handed a climax that hadn’t been prepared for. Without wanting to give too much away, the climax relied on a certain element that either should have been set up much earlier, or removed entirely.The Loney is essentially a story about how damaging adhering to a strict dogma can be to people and communities. It uses religion as the example, but doesn’t attack it directly. Rather it shows how a small community and family clutching to its own strict interpretation can only survive until the first cracks of doubt appear, and all too often refuse the see the damage it inflicts on those without their own agency. But I just felt that the framing devices didn’t match this theme, and kind of undercut it.All in all, though, I greatly enjoyed it and I’ll be looking to pick up more of Hurley’s work. The Loney was his debut novel, and so hopefully his next two will have followed up in the same style, but with a little more evenness at the start and the end.