‘Heart, Be At Peace’ by Donal Ryan    (2024) – 194 pages

‘Heart, Be At Peace’, like its 2012 predecessor ‘The Spinning Heart’, has twenty-one separate voices, each with their own chapter, telling the story. In ‘The Spinning Heart’, Ireland, including this neighborhood centering around Bobby and Triona Mahon, faced a severe economic downturn. In ‘Heart Be At Peace’, Ireland has recovered. It is 2019 and the people in this neighborhood are doing quite well economically, but Ireland is beset by a new terrible problem. Many of the young people are taking cocaine and other drugs.

“Do you want your child born into a world ruled by those scumbags? No, Bobby. Do you want them pushing drugs on your children? No, Bobby.”

This is a fairly tight community of neighbors. Each of these 21 voices embellishes this Irish story from their own angle, only knowing what they themselves saw and heard. Some of the voices, especially the older people and the young hoodlums, speak in heavy Irish dialect, while a female lawyer and a female accountant speak a more formal modern Irish. At first the whole picture is quite confusing but it becomes clearer as more voices speak.

‘Heart Be At Peace’ is rather a demanding novel to read. It is difficult to keep track of twenty-one separate persons especially when they are usually called by their first names or nicknames. Each of these voices adds bits and parts to the overall plot like a jigsaw puzzle, and eventually the main plots and themes of ‘Heart, Be At Peace’ reveal themselves.

There is a group of young men, “Augie Penrose and the three musketeers he carries around in his car, Pitt, Braden, and Dowell” who are shamelessly driving around and dealing drugs to young people nearly out in the open. Even the police seem to leave them alone.

“So no one will do anything about this whole place going to shit because if Augie and the boys weren’t poisoning the place then someone else would be, is that it?”

Donal Ryan reveals his own unusual technique in ‘Heart, Be At Peace’ when one of his voices, a convict who is writing his own novel while in prison, says:

“I composed a series of monologues. I gave each speaker a unique voice. … And when I had the language leashed, the characters were suddenly beyond my control. They were crazy! The things they said and did. The wild joy I felt. The rightness of it all.”

Usually when a writer has a chorus of voices telling the story, the voices are given multiple chances to have their say.  Here each voice gets only one opportunity to speak.

Grade: B+