The Glorious Heresies
by Lisa McInerney
Summary
A woman kills an intruder in her kitchen with a religious ornament, and because she is the mother of the man who runs organised crime in Cork, the body is quietly dealt with rather than reported. That decision spreads outward through five lives over several years.
Maureen Phelan was sent to England decades earlier for the crime of being pregnant, and has come home unrepentant and very funny. Her son Jimmy has the city sewn up. Ryan Cusack is fifteen, dealing to fund a life his violent alcoholic father cannot provide, in love with Karine and clever enough to know exactly what is happening to him. Around them are a man hired to clean up the mess and a woman whose life the cleanup ruins.
McInerney writes Cork after the crash with real anger and a great deal of profane comedy, and the prose has a rhythm closer to speech than to literary fiction. The dialogue is exceptional.
The structure moves between the five of them over about five years, and McInerney is unusually good at letting a minor decision in one life detonate in another two hundred pages later. Nobody here is a criminal by disposition. They are people with almost no options making the choices that remain.
Be ready for the content. There is addiction, sexual violence, and the specific Irish cruelty of the church toward women, all handled without flinching and without wallowing. It is also, and this is the surprise, a warm book. McInerney likes these people, and the compassion underneath is why the darkness is bearable rather than punishing.
Historical Context & Significance
The Glorious Heresies won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction in 2016, and it was a debut, which the prize has always been willing to reward but which still made this a notable result.
The chair of judges described it as a superbly original and compassionate novel that delivers insights into the very darkest of lives through humour and skilful storytelling, and the pairing of humour and darkness was what almost every reviewer reached for.
McInerney had come to fiction through a blog written under a pseudonym about life on a Galway council estate, which is an unusual route to a major literary prize and part of why the win was received as a genuine widening of who gets published. She continued the story of Ryan Cusack in The Blood Miracles and The Rules of Revelation, making this the opening of a Cork trilogy.