Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Montpelier Parade
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 5/31/1972
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_Geary * http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0311297/ * https://www.independent.ie/entertainment/books/karl-geary-on-his-first-book-i-find-writing-excruciating-35345365.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2008057780
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2008057780
HEADING: Geary, Karl, 1972-
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100 1_ |a Geary, Karl, |d 1972-
670 __ |a Hamlet (Motion picture : 2000), c2001: |b credits (Karl Geary)
670 __ |a Internet movie database, Apr. 16, 2008 |b (Karl Geary; b. 31 May 1972, Dublin, Ireland; actor, writer)
PERSONAL
Born May 31, 1972, in Dublin, Ireland; married Laura Fraser (an actor), 2003; children: Lily.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Scriptwriter, actor, director, club owner. Sin-é music venue, cofounder; Scratcher, cofounder.
WRITINGS
Scriptwriter of Coney Island Baby, 2003.
SIDELIGHTS
Irish-American scriptwriter and actor Karl Geary was born in Dublin then moved to New York City alone when he was sixteen. He was scriptwriter of Coney Island Baby, was an actor in Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet and Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall, and directed Dorothy Parker’s short story “You Were Perfectly Fine” for the screen. As a club owner, he cofounded two music venues, Sin-é in the East Village and Scratcher in Manhattan.
In 2017, Geary ventured into novel writing, publishing Montpelier Parade. Set in the 1980s in Dublin, the story involves clashes of culture, social status, age differences, and ambition. Sixteen-year-old Sonny Knolls is a high school student on the wrong path in life. He works part-time at a butcher shop, commits petty theft, gets blind drunk, and deals with his compulsive gambler father. Doing some handyman chores, he meets educated, posh, middle age Vera. She’s middle class and her world feels so out of reach from Sonny’s vantage. Yet they begin an affair that Vera knows will be no good for either of them. Despite the relentless dark lives and overtones and focus on flawed, desperate people, “That Geary makes this romantic relationship feel genuine and even touching, as well as unsettling and a little creepy, is one of the book’s several merits,” according to a writer in Kirkus Reviews.
Admiring the book for being brilliant and heartbreaking, and the romance utterly convincing, a Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: “Geary has an ear for snappy dialogue, and the economic strains on Sonny’s family are keenly felt throughout the book.” Giving the book five out of five stars, Galen O’Hanlon on the Skinny website said: “The precision in his prose belies his training as a scriptwriter; the plot unfolds with self-assured ease, and the dialogue lives on the page.”
In the New Yorker, David Kortava found that Geary’s choice to narrate the story in the second person was “a stylistic choice that produces moments of intense intimacy” yet leaves Vera’s emotions elusive for both the reader and for Sonny. Geary said that he did not intend to write in the second person. He remarked on the Independent Online: “I didn’t want to do that, but I tried writing in the first person and the third, and it didn’t seem to work in terms of getting as close as I could to [the character of] Sonny,” reflected Geary. “Writing it this way, the story almost becomes like an accusation.”
Highlighting the lack of opportunity and dead-end career opportunities, Geary brings to life the harshness of Dublin in the 1980s, according to Claire Kilroy on the Guardian Online. Kilroy said: “The novel reads as though it might become the first in a series charting Sonny’s life. He is a sufficiently intriguing character to carry them and Geary is a sufficiently intriguing writer. Montpelier Parade is an auspicious debut.” The story has a desperately moving romantic entanglement at its heart, noted Peter Carty, writing for the Financial Times Online, who added that “Geary captures time and place startlingly well. More important, he lays out the inexorable dynamic of this tragic relationship with masterly economy. At the story’s core is a drama of role reversal.”
Teddy Jamieson described Geary’s writing in the Herald Scotland Online as “Four-and-a-half years’ work distilled down to a quiet, dark, spare, vivid 232 pages.” Geary told Jamieson, “Most of the editing for me was about scraping back,” he said. “It’s almost like clearing rubble.” He added: “I’ve written all my life. This isn’t my first novel. It’s the first time I’ve been published.” According to Booklist reviewer Courtney Eathorne, Montpelier Parade is “Fast paced and highly engrossing, Geary’s debut perfectly balances dreary romance and sharp teen angst.” Sue Leonard said on the Irish Examiner Online: “I adored this unconventional love story. It’s tender, with luminous language, and should catapult the author to literary fame.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 15, 2017, review of Montpelier Parade.
New Yorker, November 13, 2017, David Kortava, review of Montpelier Parade, p. 77.
Publishers Weekly, June 5, 2017, review of Montpelier Parade, p. 29.
ONLINE
Booklist, https://www.booklistonline.com/ (June 26, 2017), Courtney Eathorne, review of Montpelier Parade.
Financial Times Online, https://www.ft.com/ (January 13, 2017), Peter Carty, review of Montpelier Parade.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (December 29, 2016), Claire Kilroy, review of Montpelier Parade.
Herald Scotland Online, http://www.heraldscotland.com/ (December 31, 2016) Teddy Jamieson, author interview.
Independent Online, https://www.independent.ie/ (March 24, 2018), author interview.
Irish Examiner Online, https://www.irishexaminer.com/ (January 7, 2017) Sue Leonard, review of Montpelier Parade.
Skinny, http://www.theskinny.co.uk/books/book-reviews/montpellier-parade-by-karl-geary (January 4, 2017), review of Montpelier Parade.
Karl Geary
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the English cricketer, see Karl Geary (cricketer).
This article includes a list of references, but its sources remain unclear because it has insufficient inline citations. Please help to improve this article by introducing more precise citations. (January 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this template message)
Karl Geary
Born 31 May 1972 (age 45)
Dublin, Ireland
Occupation Author, actor, club owner
Spouse(s) Laura Fraser (2003–present)
Children 1
Karl John Geary (born May 31, 1972) is an Irish-born American author actor and club owner.[1][2]
Contents
1 Early life
2 Career
3 Personal life
4 Filmography
5 Publications
6 References
7 External links
Early life
Geary was born in Dublin. In 1987, at the age of 15, he moved to the United States; he later obtained a green card in a visa lottery for Irish illegals, and ultimately became a naturalized citizen.
Career
Geary appeared in Madonna's Sex book. His acting roles include Sex and the City, Hysteria – The Def Leppard Story, and Hamlet (2000). He wrote and appeared in Coney Island Baby (2003). He appeared as Coffey in the 2008 horror film The Burrowers. He owns a bar in downtown Manhattan called the Scratcher,[3] and previously co-owned another club, the original tiny Cafe Sin-é on St. Mark's Place in the East Village, where he waited on tables alongside Jeff Buckley.
Personal life
Geary has seven brothers and sisters. In 2003, he married Scottish actress Laura Fraser. They have one daughter, Lila, and live in Glasgow, Scotland.
Filmography
Year Title Role Notes
1994 Nadja Renfield
1998 Sex and the City Tommy
2000 The Book of Stars Kristjan
2000 Hamlet Horatio
2001 Hysteria - The Def Leppard Story Steve Clark
2002 Happy Here and Now Eddie / Tom
2003 Coney Island Baby Billy Hayes Writer
2003 Mimic 3: Sentinel Marvin
2008 The Burrowers Coffey
2008 Stag Night Joe
2014 Jimmy's Hall Seán
2016 I Am Not a Serial Killer Dr. Grant Neblin
Publications
Montpelier Parade[1][2] 2017 ISBN 1-9112-1545-0
References
Born May 31, 1972 in Dublin, Ireland
Birth Name Karl John Geary
Mini Bio (1)
Karl Geary was born on May 31, 1972 in Dublin, Ireland as Karl John Geary. He is an actor and writer, known for The Burrowers (2008), Nadja (1994) and Hamlet (2000). He has been married to Laura Fraser since 2003. They have one child.
Spouse (1)
Laura Fraser (2003 - present) (1 child)
Trivia (4)
Migrated to U.S. at the age of 15 - later won a green card in the visa lottery.
Owner of such trendy downtown night spots as "The Scratcher" and the defunct "Sin-E".
Naturalized U.S. citizen.
One daughter, Lila Geary (b.May 2006).
FOLLOW
CONTACT
Entertainment Books Saturday 24 March 2018
Karl Geary on his first book: 'I find writing excruciating'
Emigrating to New York at 15, rubbing shoulders with Lou Reed and posing beside a topless Madonna in her 'Sex' book, Dubliner Karl Geary has led a life less ordinary. Here, he tells Tanya sweeney about his debut book
Versatile: Karl Geary - known for his acting work - says it took him more than four years to write his first book1
Versatile: Karl Geary - known for his acting work - says it took him more than four years to write his first book
January 8 2017 2:30 AM
It's not every day that you meet a Dubliner with links to Madonna, Peter Fonda, Breaking Bad, Sex and the City and Jeff Buckley. Suffice to say that Karl Geary has lived what can only be described as a life less ordinary. And it's precisely his life - taking in co-ordinates as diverse as Talbot Street, the East Village and Glasgow - that has made the 44-year-old one of the most intriguing debut novelists for some time.
After a five-publisher scrum, Geary signed a major deal with Harvill Secker, and now finds himself in the same rarefied stable as Karl Ove Knausgaard, Haruki Murakami and JM Coetzee. And after the self-imposed exile of writing a novel, such validation is… well, a welcome, if unexpected, result.
"It's kind of bizarre," says Geary, reflecting on the brouhaha. "When I set out to write this, I figured, 'if it doesn't get published, fine', but it was a story that I wanted to tell.
"You're spending so many years isolated [writing], and what threw me more than anything was how decent and kind each publisher was when I met them. I just fell head over heels with my editor, and there was a real sense of unity there in terms of what the book was."
Geary had tried his hand at writing a novel in his twenties, and is glad that the book never surfaced.
"I find writing excruciating," he confides. "I took me four-and-a-half years to write this book. The difficulty lies in where you need to go [psychologically] in order to do it. It goes beyond solitude. Some have described writing as an entirely masochistic experience."
Whatever agonies or self-consciousness Geary felt during writing are nowhere to be found on the page. In fact, Montpelier Parade - the tale of an unlikely relationship between a teenage butcher's apprentice and an older, complicated woman - is the work of a deft, fearless writer.
Evoking the subtly dark comedy of Patrick McCabe, and the delicious lyricism of Peter Murphy, Geary has a keen recollection of the folly and hunger of youth. Add in a gut-spinning plot twist, and it's safe to describe Montpelier Parade as one of the first significant releases of 2017.
The book is strikingly original, not least in its deployment of the second-person narrative: "I didn't want to do that, but I tried writing in the first person and the third, and it didn't seem to work in terms of getting as close as I could to [the character of]Sonny," reflects Geary. "Writing it this way, the story almost becomes like an accusation."
And while Geary's topography of 1980s South Dublin is vivid, his homespun dialogue authentic, Geary wrote the book in New York, the city that has (until recently) been his hometown for decades.
"There's a terrific history of Irish people writing in exile," he laughs. "Patrick Kavanagh puts it more eloquently than I could when he talks about how intimately we know the place we grew up in. There's a thing that happens in childhood where time feels very slow. I wanted the book to feel like a rural novel; something to do with the pace and timing and tempo."
Growing up the youngest of eight children ("a gaggle of Gearys") in a working-class neighbourhood in Blackrock, Dublin, Geary struggled with dyslexia in school; a condition that was only diagnosed later. He left school without doing the Inter Cert and found himself, aged 15, working in a wallpaper shop in Talbot Street. Armed with only the address of a character called 'Johnny One Eye', he decided to try his luck in New York.
A careworn path, certainly, but it's safe to say that young Geary had anything but the typical émigré experience. Within a fortnight, he was 'battered' by a Chinese gang and was nearly shot on Tenth Street.
Another Irish emigrant, Shane Doyle, asked him to help out with the running of a run-down bar called Sin-é. The rest is famously rock'n'roll lore. At the time, all roads led to the joint: Marianne Faithfull, Sinead O'Connor and Lou Reed were patrons, while Jeff Buckley recorded a live album there that would send him into the stratosphere.
"It was definitely a fascinating time in New York and being caught in that era was exciting and energising… I don't know that we knew it at the time," he says, referring to Sin-é's singular mythology. "We certainly didn't go to sleep at night thinking, 'we're doing something really special here'.
"Back then, you paid 200 dollars to live there and I feel bad that young people now live in the same apartment for up to $5,000. But because of those rents, I didn't have to work around the clock. I'm lucky to have experienced that."
Geary downplays the experience: "If you put in the perspective of its time, I don't think it was that unusual," he shrugs. "The Irish usually went to the traditional spots like the Bronx or Queens, so maybe because I ended up in the East Village, I wasn't your traditional economic migrant."
That's putting it mildly. Soon, Geary was running Sin-é, and started to meet some interesting characters at work. Among them was Jodi Peckman, photo editor of Rolling Stone.
The encounter led to Geary being photographed kissing a topless Madonna in Madonna's Sex book (understandably, he's sick of the subject). Later, he met film director Michael Almereyda in what became a rather fortuitous encounter.
"Michael approached me about doing a film with Peter Fonda… he was looking for an Irishman as he wanted to tip his hat to Bram Stoker," he recalls. "He asked me to audition and screen test.
"As a kid, I had an Easy Rider poster on my wall; the only one I ever had. And talk about a fella who doesn't disappoint," he adds of Fonda.
After appearing in Nadja and then training as an actor, the parts kept coming: Gold In The Streets (opposite Jim Belushi), Painted Lady (opposite Helen Mirren) and Hamlet (opposite Ethan Hawke). There was also a memorable appearance in Sex and the City, in which Geary plays a lovelorn Irish bellhop to Kim Cattrall's sexual libertine Samantha Jones. More recently, he has appeared in Ken Loach's Jimmy's Hall, and I Am Not A Serial Killer alongside his wife, Laura Fraser (of Breaking Bad fame).
For now, he and Fraser live in Glasgow with their daughter, Lila. "I love the idea of being closer to Ireland," he says. "I love getting to Dublin; Sligo, too [where his son Billy lives].
"New York, in a sense, had run its course for me," he adds. "I remember seeing Patti Smith talk in Brooklyn and a young woman artist put up her hand and asked, 'what would you say to an artist living in New York now?' And Patti Smith replied, 'leave'.
"It's very flat in New York - it's shifted more to the psyche of mainstream America and has become a home for upwardly mobile, middle-class people. I still have a bar there, The Scratcher, but it's the last place in the city you can walk into and have people know you by name."
While a lucrative multi-book deal was of no interest to Geary ("selling fiction before you've written it is dangerous"), another novel is percolating.
His remarkable life is surely a rich literary seam to mine, but the juicy memoir looks set to remain at large.
"I've no interest in biography," he says. "There's a truth to the fictional landscape that feels current and connected. The truth is the one thing I do find endlessly fascinating."
Montpelier Parade is out now via Harvill Secker
Indo Review
Karl Geary signs major publishing deal for debut novel
Dublin-born actor co-founded New York venues Sin-e and Scratcher
Fri, Apr 15, 2016, 13:44
Martin Doyle
Karl Geary with his wife, actor Laura Fraser in Los Angeles in 2014. Photograph: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
Karl Geary with his wife, actor Laura Fraser in Los Angeles in 2014. Photograph: Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images
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Karl Geary, the Dublin-born actor who co-founded music venue Sin-e and later the Scratcher in New York City’s East Village, has signed a major publishing deal with Harvill Secker for his debut novel after a a five-publisher auction.
Montpelier Parade, which will be published by Harvill Secker next spring, is the story of 16-year-old, working-class Dubliner Sonny Knolls, who wrestles with school, adolescence and difficult conditions at home. One Saturday, while repairing a grand, faded house with his volatile father, he encounters Vera, an older woman, English, educated, and living in strange isolation. The unusual relationship that blooms out of this meeting becomes all-consuming for Sonny, cutting him off from his family and reshaping his lonely, violent life.
Kate Harvey, Harvill Secker’s deputy publishing director, said: “Montpelier Parade held me from the very beginning. As a love story it has all the satisfactions of classic storytelling, but there’s an underlying restlessness and a dark twist that sets it apart. Karl Geary is a wonderful writer: he has a genius for a beautiful sentence; he also knows what should be left unsaid. Our publishing at Harvill Secker is about finding the best writers from all over the world, including the most exciting voices in English. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have Karl join us with his superbly accomplished debut novel.”
Geary, 43, has worked as a script writer (Coney Island Baby) and recently adapted and directed Dorothy Parker’s You Were Perfectly Fine for the screen. His acting credits include Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet and Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall. He lives in Glasgow with his wife, the actor Laura Fraser, whose roles include Lydia in Breaking Bad, and their daughter.
Beginner's pluck with Karl Geary
0
Saturday, January 07, 2017
Sue Leonard
A dyslexic, who was terrified of books, Karl left school without exams. Leaving Dublin for New York at 16, he started reading, loving the vibrant arts scene in East Village.
“When you need to fill gaps in your education, you over-compensate,” he says. “I became voracious about books.”
He wrote his first novel at 22. It didn’t work, but the dialogue was good, and it was turned into a successful screenplay.
He ran cafes and music spots, and, was acting at age 20. “A friend was making a vampire film — a love poem to Bram Stoker — and wanted someone from Dublin in it.” (Credits include Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet, and Ken Loach’s Jimmy Hall.) He recently directed Dorothy Parker’s You Were Perfectly Fine, for screen.
Meanwhile he kept writing.
“I started several novels but I could not sustain them.”
Who is Karl Geary?
Birth: 1972, in Dublin
Education: Newpark Comp.
Home: Glasgow. 11 years ago spent a year in West Cork.
Family: Wife Laura Fraser, children Billy 16 and Lila 10
The Day Job: Fulltime writer.
Interests: Going to the races.
Favourite Writers: Maeve Brennan; Colm Tóibín; James Salter; Alice Munroe, Hans Second Novel: “I’m working on something, exploring the idea of exile.” Top Tip: “Allocate yourself a time to write, and leave the table when that time is up. Then there is something in the tank for tomorrow.”
The Debut: Montpelier Parade: Harvill Secker: €19.00 Kindle: €9.36.
Sonny’s life is stymied. There’s no money, and there’s war in his house. He’s isolated at school, where he’s a charity case; his job at the butcher’s shop is going nowhere, and he has nothing in common with Sharon, his only friend.
Then one day, working with his father, he meets Vera. The solitary English woman, living alone in the large slightly dilapidated house in Dublin’s Montpelier Parade captures Sonny’s imagination.
She’s beautiful and elusive, and Sonny is determined to get to know her better. Gradually, he inveigles himself into her life, and she responds to him. But who exactly is Vera, and what is she hiding from the boy?
The Verdict: I adored this unconventional love story. It’s tender, with luminous language, and should catapult the author to literary fame.
© Irish Examiner Ltd. All rights reserved
31st December 2016
Novelist Karl Geary charts the plot-twists of his own life story
TEDDY JAMIESON
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"WELL, look, New York was a dangerous place. I near died a few times between muggings, hold-ups and shootings. There was a time a guy put a gun to my head and said, 'Give me your money …'"
On the inside back page of the new book Montpelier Parade there is a biographical note about its author. It reads: "Karl Geary was born in Dublin. Montpelier is his first novel." I think you could safely describe that as withholding information.
It doesn't tell us that Geary now lives in Glasgow. That he lives with his wife, the Scottish actor Laura Fraser and their daughter Lila. That he is also an actor. And sometime businessman. It doesn't mention that as a teenager he turned up in a photograph beside a topless Madonna in the pop star's infamous Sex book. It doesn't mention that he knew Jeff Buckley or that there was a time a guy put a gun to his head and said: "Give me your money."
About that. "I had only been in New York a short time," Geary explains. "It was a street I shouldn't have been down anyway. And it was utterly pathetic what I had in my pocket. I didn't have two matching socks at the time. I emptied everything I had. A lighter, 45 cents and a Walkman."
The mugger, understandably, was not impressed. "He looked at me and he very gently tapped me on the face and he goes, 'I'm very disappointed in you'," Geary recalls.
This was back in the 1980s, when New York was a wild place. Wild enough for Geary to be mates with someone called Johnny One Eye, so called because, Geary tells me, "his brother had knocked his eye out in a fight".
When Geary told Johnny One Eye about his run-in with the gunman, Johnny suggested the Irishman had been lucky. "Because he didn't shoot me?" Geary asked. "No, because he didn't have a knife." Johnny One Eye replied. "If he'd had a knife he would have cut you for kicks. Big thing to pull the trigger."
This, by the way, is the last story Karl Geary, tells me this afternoon. There have already been a few.
Geary, speaks in a soft Irish accent, even though he left Ireland aged 16, almost 30 years ago. He's returned there now, on the page at least in Montpelier Parade. The story of a teenager called Sonny, it's a coming-of-age tale set in suburban Dublin told in the second person that takes in brickies and butchers, class, sex and death. Four-and-a-half years' work distilled down to a quiet, dark, spare, vivid 232 pages. "Most of the editing for me was about scraping back," he says. "It's almost like clearing rubble."
His publisher has high hopes for the book. Geary is just thrilled it exists. "It's very moving actually," Geary suggests when I set my copy down on the table in the Hotel du Vin at One Devonshire Gardens in Glasgow where we meet. "I've written all my life. This isn't my first novel. It's the first time I've been published.
"By the time you get to this," he says, indicating the pristine slim hardback in front of us, "there have been so many versions but there's something very different about a hardback. You're putting yourself beside what I think is for me the most interesting form of art available. And you're looking at thousands of years of it and this is a small tiny stone you're thrown in the puddle.
He smiles. "It's cool. It's a lovely feeling."
He, his wife and daughter have lived in Glasgow for just over a year now. He's fond of the place. Indeed, a visit to Glasgow's Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum some 10 years back provided a form of inspiration for Montpelier Parade.
"I came across a Rembrandt stuck down the back," he recalls. "It was a painting called The Carcass Of An Ox. Phenomenal painting in that Rembrandt, painterly way. But it's almost like looking at Dante's Inferno. You have this almost crucified carcass and you go, 'Who cuts the meat? Who eats the meat? We ate the meat?'
"It really had this profound effect on me and I think I must have stored it away because when Sonny arrived he arrived both in the second person and working in a butcher's shop."
Geary is 44. Did he need to be in his fifth decade before he could write this novel? "I think I did. Some people are really bright young. I wasn't. And it took me a long time to just be able to sit. Sitting's hard. It's really tricky."
Montpelier Parade is fiction. Sonny's sex life, Sonny's failings are not Geary's. But the world he is describing is the one he grew up in. And one he left at the first opportunity.
"The 1980s in Ireland were brutal. It was a dreadful time. When I left in 1988 the interest rates were, I think, in the mid-20s. It was a rotten time. You had Trinity graduates flipping burgers. I had a learning disability so I didn't do well at school anyway. So I left and I was delighted to leave."
Were his parents, I wonder? What must it be like seeing your 16-year-old son, the youngest of eight, disappear to another continent? They can't have been thrilled. "I'm sure they weren't and I'm sure for any parents losing a son or daughter at any age to emigration is not ideal. You have to put it within the context of the 1980s. I've a 16-year-old son [from a previous relationship]. I wouldn't let him near the dishwasher. But that's the world today. And thank God. Isn't it great?"
Anyway, when he left for New York he got lucky. He had a number for a friend of a friend who turned out to be the aforementioned Johnny One Eye. Johnny ran a bicycle messaging company and gave Geary a job even though it turned out the teenager wasn't very good at it – even when his bike hadn't been stolen (a weekly experience). "It was a very rough time. It was a very dangerous place."
"The other side of that," he adds, "was it was desperately creative. Tons of artists, poets and musicians. This great clan of lunatics knocking about the place and they were fantastic to be around.
"It was very welcoming and it allowed you to look around and go, 'Oh my God there are these other possibilities and these other ways to be. Every conversation would nearly end with someone throwing you a book and going, 'Jesus, you've got to read that.'
"And at that time people didn't have that firewall around them. So you'd be sitting there getting your bread and milk with everyone else. Lou Reed would be there or Allan Ginsberg. Those guys were just knocking around the neighbourhood."
Who was the 16-year-old boy who washed up in the East Village then? "I think I was desperately curious. I had some adventure. I was a nervous kid in some ways but I must have had some curiosity about the world and how it operates."
He didn't stick it as a bicycle messenger. There were other jobs. Building sites and the like. But he ended up working in a Zydeco club in midtown where he ran into a guy who was opening up a cafe "in this sh***y little place on St Mark's Place," with a stake of $11,000 and no alcohol licence.
That "sh***y little place" turned out to be the Sin-e and Geary ended up running it, the first of a number of venues he'd run. St Mark's is one of the legendary hipster streets in New York and in its time Sin-e became hipster central. Passing British and Irish musicians would pop in and play. He remembers Sinead O'Connor duetting with Marianne Faithfull there. "And if you weren't there you missed it. Nobody had cameras. We ran that for a good seven years which was pretty remarkable."
Geary would go to the cafe in the morning, have a nap in the afternoon and then come back before closing the place in the early hours of the morning, at which point everyone would troop across the street to a place called Stingy Lulu's where all the drag queens hung out for breakfast.
"Then you'd walk out and someone would have been shot up the street. There were a lot of junkies around. The crack epidemic was in full swing. Aids was enormous. A lot of people we knew just didn't make it for all those reasons."
Sin-e was also the place where the late Jeff Buckley got his start. "He played every week there for over a year. He was always brilliant but you knew he was working out his thing. There'd be three, four people watching him some nights. There'd be no interest. He was doing his apprenticeship.
In 1993 Buckley recorded his EP Live At Sin-e in the cafe. "I think he insisted on it," suggests Geary. "He knew the room so well. He felt comfortable there. He felt safe. He was a very nervous performer. He was very shy."
Within a year Buckley would release Grace, become a young meteor and soar before drowning in the Mississippi River in 1997. "Someone was telling me he'd be 50 this year. That's amazing, isn't it?"
Buckley wasn't the only one getting noticed though. I need to mention the name Madonna to you, Karl. "I figured you would," he says unhappily. "It's one of the least interesting things I get asked about the most."
For those who don't remember, in 1992 the most famous and at the time lusted after pop star in the world teamed up with photographer Steven Meisel to release a book of photographs entitled Sex, which came in a sealed envelope. If you still have a copy you will find inside a picture of a long-haired teenage Geary kissing a topless Madonna.
"When I was young I was androgynous-looking," Geary says now. "I was a good-looking kid if that's your thing. I was approached a lot to take photographs because of the way I looked. And most of the time I turned them down."
But this was Madonna and even if her world wasn't the East Village world he lived in he was suitably intrigued to say yes. "It seemed like an interesting thing. I didn't really give a lot of thought beyond that."
He doesn't now. The experience was, he says, "as sterile as the photograph looks". And involved just a couple of hours of his life.
But he keeps getting asked about it. He once said it was like being in bed with the Coca Cola Company. "And I wasn't joking. You have Madonna and Steven Meisel running around going, 'Aren't we pushing the envelope?' Then you look at the photographs … Isabella Rossellini also had the same impression of the book. It's not sensual. It's not erotic. It's theatre. Everyone's dressed up – or not dressed up – with nowhere to go.
"And actually what you have is corporate exploitation of third-wave feminism. But the book itself is kind of bland."
When Geary was approached to appear in a little indie vampire movie directed by Michael Almereyda he was happier with the result. "Michael was doing a film called Nadja, which I think is a terrific little film. He wanted to tip his hat to Bram Stoker who was born in Dublin and I think I might have been one of the only Irish guys in the neighbourhood. And it was the most gorgeous experience.
"But then I didn't work for three years. I had to go and train and work out how to do it."
He has eked out a screen career over the years with parts in the likes of Sex And The City, Ken Loach's Jimmy's Hall and Hysteria – The Def Leppard Story. You may have seen him in the recent indie film I Am Not A Serial Killer (his wife is in that one too).
But acting doesn't seem to be his favourite thing. "I don't have the same feeling for it as a real actor does. I'll be f***ing shot by my agent for saying this, but the way it works for me, I'm always a second or two behind myself. That's a terrible way to work."
Still, it was through acting that he met Fraser, the star of Breaking Bad and recent BBC1 drama The Missing. They met on a film he had written called Coney Island Baby (based on an abortive novel he had tried to write in his 20s). "I wrote it and she showed up. Great."
I'm presuming Fraser had something to do with the decision to move from New York to Glasgow. "Well, she certainly had a big part in the conversation. And actually it's been great. It's been a treat being here.
"I get up very early and then I work for several hours, then I rewrite in the afternoon. But the bits in between – when you're walking around getting your milk – just to have someone comment on, 'Yes, it is raining again' is f***ing great. I really missed that being in New York for so long."
New York is not the city he once knew. "Unrecognisable," he says. "And not for the better. It's much more expensive now. The demographic is singular. It's become white upper-middle class. And I'm not knocking that. It's a terrific thing if you can pull it off. But it's not the most interesting demographic. And when that's the only voice in the room …"
So here he is. Writing. Writing about the things that occupy him. "We start out on these different projects and they always become the same thing. You're always trying to get at the same stuff. And I don't think your subconscious cares about how this stuff comes out. As long as it's coming out."
And for him what is it that keeps coming out? Sex and death? "Well, I've tried one. Narrowly avoided the other. Sex and death are huge. But sex and death are not enough to get you through a book. You have to deal with other things. The real stuff underneath. And then you're into grief and you're into longing and desire and the inability to communicate."
The latter is not a problem he seems to have. Karl Geary was born in Dublin. Montpelier Parade is his first novel. That's just the start of it.
Montpelier Parade by Karl Geary is published by Harvill Secker, £12.99.
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Print Marked Items
Geary, Karl: MONTPELIER PARADE
Kirkus Reviews.
(June 15, 2017):
COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Geary, Karl MONTPELIER PARADE Catapult (Adult Fiction) $16.95 8, 22 ISBN: 978-1-936787-55-5
The debut novel from screenwriter and actor Geary, set a generation ago in Dublin, depicts a dark, sad,
doomed, and deeply unconventional love affair.Sonny Knolls is a working-class teenager who earns extra
money as a dogsbody at a butcher's shop after school and on the weekend helps his father, a small-time
handyman. On one such occasion, as father and son shore up a homeowner's wall in the tony area that gives
the novel its title, Sonny encounters their employer, a middle-aged woman named Vera whose haunted,
ethereal beauty--partly bound up in her seeming an alien from the far-off land of Posh and Prosperous--
makes an immediate and indelible impression. Sonny begins to contrive ways to see her again, reasons to
return to her trim and lovely house. His own neighborhood is grimy, his family life bleakly unpromising;
Sonny's father is a crank and a gambler, his mother meek, resentful, but long-suffering; it's the sort of family
in which communication, if one has to indulge in such, is guilt-ridden, stunted, laconic, furtive. Geary
skillfully captures the milieu and establishes Sonny's hapless sense of where he's headed: blackout drinking,
petty theft, expulsion from school, a meat-cutting apprenticeship he'll be lucky to keep, a life of grim
hanging on. Vera, who has formidable troubles of her own with depression, is likewise drawn (there are
hints of a precipitating mystery and shame here, but there's no way to put it together until the end) to the
sensitive, vulnerable, good-looking teenager, and before long the tension between them explodes into an
erotic clinch that, she tells him, he'll eventually hate her for. That Geary makes this romantic relationship
feel genuine and even touching, as well as unsettling and a little creepy, is one of the book's several merits.
A relentlessly downbeat but often poignant novel about flawed and despairing lovers testing--and
transgressing--border walls of various kinds.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Geary, Karl: MONTPELIER PARADE." Kirkus Reviews, 15 June 2017. General OneFile,
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Montpelier Parade
Publishers Weekly.
264.23 (June 5, 2017): p29.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* Montpelier Parade
Karl Geary. Catapult (PGW, dist.), $16.95 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-936787-55-5
Geary enters the literary arena with a bang: this debut about an unconventional love affair between a
teenage boy and an older woman is unassuming but gorgeously rendered. Set in 1980s working-class
Dublin and told in the second-person point of view, the quiet, sensitive story follows Sonny as he slogs from
school to his part-time job at the butcher shop to home, where he's the youngest of many brothers and his
exhausted mother is cooking yet another meal while criticizing Sonny's gambling father under her breath.
Besides sneaking out to smoke cigarettes at a cluster of rocks called the Cat's Den with his only
acquaintance, a sexually promiscuous dropout named Sharon, Sonny spends most of his nonworking hours
worrying about his mom, trying to placate his dad, stealing bike parts, getting drunk, and wandering along
the canal at night--until he meets Vera, an educated, posh British woman who lives alone in the house he
and his laborer father are repairing. From the moment he lays eyes on her, Sonny is smitten, and the affair
that develops slowly over the course of the book is both deeply nuanced and utterly convincing. Geary has
an ear for snappy dialogue, and the economic strains on Sonny's family are keenly felt throughout the book.
Above all, it's the combination of Sonny's unwitting innocence and Vera's inescapable sadness that makes
their connection--and the novel--brilliant and heartbreaking. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Montpelier Parade." Publishers Weekly, 5 June 2017, p. 29. General OneFile,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495538304/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=29b09f19.
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Briefly Noted
David Kortava
The New Yorker.
93.36 (Nov. 13, 2017): p77.
COPYRIGHT 2017 Conde Nast Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The
Conde Nast Publications, Inc.
http://www.newyorker.com/
Full Text:
Briefly Noted
Red Famine, by Anne Applebaum (Doubleday). In the early nineteen-thirties, at least five million people
died of hunger in the Soviet Union. Some eighty per cent of the deaths occurred in Ukraine, and Applebaum
draws on new archival research to show that food scarcity was not simply a tragic consequence of
misguided state planning but, rather, a state-orchestrated program "specifically targeted at Ukraine and
Ukrainians." The Soviet leadership, driven by "paranoia about the counter-revolutionary potential of
Ukraine," ordered the confiscation of food from homes and imposed severe restrictions on travel and trade,
while also carrying out a purge of scholars, writers, artists, and others. The Holodomor, as the result came to
be known, was a "political famine."
Kierkegaard's Muse, by Joakim Garff, translated from the Danish by Alastair Hannay (Princeton). Garff, the
author of a masterly Kierkegaard biography, here narrates the mysterious love affair that shaped the writer's
later life. Not much is known about Regine Olsen, who was engaged to Kierkegaard for a year before he
broke it off and she married someone else. He often wrote of her in his journals, and left everything to her
in his will. For more than a decade after their break, he scheduled his daily walks to coincide with hers, yet
they spoke only once in that time. Working from previously unseen letters provided by Olsen's family, Garff
fleshes out the sensitive, pragmatic Regine, illuminating her perspective on the affair and her influence on
Kierkegaard's work.
Little Fires Everywhere, by Celeste Ng (Penguin). The little fires of the title refer primarily to tiny pyres
that Izzy, the youngest of the four Richardson children, sets alight on the beds of her family members,
causing the conflagration that opens this novel of suburban mores. But, before then, little fires are ignited
within the Richardson children, when two new arrivals-Mia Warren, an artist, and her daughter-befriend
them and widen their horizons. Mia challenges the community in many ways, and, during a trial resulting
from her actions, Izzy's mother feels an urge for justice burst into flame like a "hot speck of fury that had
been carefully banked within her."
Montpelier Parade, by Karl Geary (Catapult). Sonny Knolls, the protagonist of this accomplished debut, is a
working-class Dublin teen-ager-unhappy at school, friendless, and bored in his part-time job at a butcher
shop-who steals bits of classmates' bicycles to build his own. His yearning to transcend the limits of his
bleak life finds an outlet in Vera Hatton, an attractive but troubled Englishwoman who lives alone in a big
house near the sea. "You were the hero in your dream of saving her, even with everything you didn't know
about her," Geary writes. The novel is narrated entirely in the second person, a stylistic choice that produces
moments of intense intimacy but also means that Vera remains as elusive for the reader as she ultimately is
for Sonny.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Kortava, David. "Briefly Noted." The New Yorker, 13 Nov. 2017, p. 77. General OneFile,
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Montpelier Parade by Karl Geary review – an affair to remember
A teenager escapes the drudgery of 80s Dublin through a relationship with an older woman in this auspicious fiction debut
Claire Kilroy
Thu 29 Dec 2016 07.00 EST Last modified on Thu 8 Mar 2018 07.07 EST
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Pitch-perfect evocation of Dublin in the 80s … Karl Geary.
Pitch-perfect evocation of Dublin in the 80s … Karl Geary. Photograph: Curtis Brown
Montpelier Parade is the debut novel by Karl Geary (right), a Dubliner who emigrated to New York in the late 80s at the age of 16, where he went on to live a life that was the antithesis of the one available to him back home – co-running the bar Sin-é, at which Jeff Buckley performed and Rufus Wainwright laments he didn’t, appearing in Madonna’s Sex book, becoming an actor and screenwriter. One might think he would never look back. Montpelier Parade indicates otherwise.
Sonny Knolls is a 16-year-old schoolboy with a beautiful face. He works part time in the local butcher’s and does “nixers” – work on the side – with his dad, a labourer, on the weekends. He drinks himself oblivious when he can afford to, and punches walls to dull the “howl of feeling” inside him. His only friend is Sharon, a school dropout who will do anything for male attention. Sonny does his best not to take advantage of her desperation: “You’d come close a few times, but you’d left off, not wanting to be one of those boys who made her cry.”
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The novel opens with Sonny witnessing the drunk man they have just served in the butcher’s being mown down by a van, his plastic bag of livers “burst, empty” – Geary has a flair for visceral details. While peering at the corpse’s face, Sonny finds himself pinching his packet of Sweet Afton. Emotional responses are furtive and stunted in this tough working-class environment. Sonny gives the cigarettes to his gambler father, whom he feels sorry for; he then regrets that he didn’t give them to his mother, who works herself to the bone trying to keep the household together.
The title hints at a sunny, southern French escape from the damp oppressiveness of Dublin, but Montpelier Parade, the street where much of the action takes place, is missing that crucial second L. L for love, it seems. There is love in Sonny, but it is thwarted at every turn. He loves his parents, and he especially loves his mother. “Not so many years ago you would race home to her after school, just to know she was alive and hadn’t left you in that house of men, without a soft thing in the world.” But in such a large family, there simply isn’t time to nurture this relationship. His mother is almost permanently stationed at the kitchen sink, “peeling, always peeling” to feed her seven sons, six of whom are now gruff men. Sonny is her youngest. “The small and silent space you shared with your mother, before the first brother appeared in the kitchen, was still a comfort.”
The evocation of Dublin in the 80s is pitch-perfect – inadequate central heating and the awful lack of opportunity
Having no one else to confide in, Sonny talks to himself in the second person throughout, highlighting how lost and lonely he is. Love finds an outlet in the figure of Vera. Sonny encounters her while helping his father to fix her wall on Montpelier Parade, a Georgian terrace in an affluent part of the city. Vera is different. She is English, educated, wealthy. She is also old enough to be Sonny’s mother. In some ways, she takes over his mother’s role – bathing him, attending to his injuries, listening, advising. The affair that ensues is delicately handled and entirely convincing. Vera opens windows into other worlds – art, literature, travel, sexual bliss. What Sonny offers her in return isn’t revealed until the closing pages. Such last-minute revelations can sometimes feel cheap. Not this one.
Geary’s evocation of the harshness of Dublin in the 80s is pitch-perfect – inadequate central heating, outdoor drinking, and the awful lack of opportunity. When Sonny declares, under Vera’s influence, that he wants to be a painter, his careers counsellor assumes he means a house-painter. When he clarifies that he wants to be an artist, she laughs in his face. At one point, Geary flashes forward to a time when Sonny’s father is dead, but otherwise he keeps the voice in the head of a schoolboy who is not yet equipped to reflect on the events that are happening to him. It is evident to the reader that these events will form the adult he will become. It is evident to Vera too. “I think years from now you’ll understand this and hate me for it,” she tells him. That “years from now” remark seems a portentous one. The novel reads as though it might become the first in a series charting Sonny’s life. He is a sufficiently intriguing character to carry them and Geary is a sufficiently intriguing writer. Montpelier Parade is an auspicious debut.
• Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know is published by Faber. Montpelier Parade is published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £10.65 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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Review | Montpelier Parade By Karl Geary
Eoin MadiganBy Eoin Madigan Last updated Jan 22, 2018
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Montpelier Parade, the debut novel by Irish-born American author Karl Geary, was published by Harvill Secker just over a year ago, in January 2017. Its name is now quietly bubbling to the top of many ‘best books of the year’ lists, making the shortlists for the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year and the Costa First Novel Awards.
The story takes place in 1980s Dublin, following adolescent Sonny Knolls through his work at a butcher’s shop and weekend labour with his gruff father, all the while trying to keep his head above water at school. His world is predictably thrown into chaos when he meets Vera, a beautiful older woman from a wealthy part of town, on a job with his father. It’s a typical doomed romance story with a few nice little twists and turns thrown in.
The narrative is written in the second person, so Sonny is the ‘you’ through which the story unfolds. We’re strapped straight into his head and shown the world through his eyes, and whereas this can be jarring and downright horrible to read if not done well, Geary manages it with such a light and adept touch that it’s difficult to imagine it working better any other way. The only other novel I’ve come across to manage it so well in recent times is Ablutions by Patrick deWitt (HarperCollins 2009).
Montpelier Parade Karl Geary - HeadStuff.orgIf Geary’s writing style were a person, you’d say they haven’t a pick on them. It is clear, direct, and slim – not unlike Sonny’s characterisation – all of which leads to an excellent pacing and a relatively short, enjoyable read. It feels like an older man sitting down to write a story from his youth, to convince himself it all actually happened, and he didn’t just dream it up. The book is quite tender as a result. Not tears running down your cheeks tender, more of the melancholy sigh variety, but what a lovely sigh it is.
There were times where I found myself crying out for some love handles to grab onto, so to speak; for a bit of meaty indulgence. While this does come through in some parts, I would have liked more visceral passages like the schoolyard fight that crescendos: “You smashed his face and felt nothing for the pain he felt, even when he dropped to the ground […] as if you yourself had never felt pain in your whole life.”
If Montpelier Parade is a little light on action, it is heavy on emotion, especially the unspoken Irish variety, and it’s to the author’s credit that there’s so much to read between the lines. I find that an Irish book of any quality has at its heart a mastery of this form of understated communication, of which Anne Enright is currently the paragon. That Sonny is the battleground through which his parents converse – his brothers literally ignoring their father’s existence – will be familiar to most people whose mother and father talk to each other through their children. Geary manages this delicate waltz brilliantly, and his portrait of a working class Irish home is painfully accurate.
While this is one of the finest things about the book, and about modern Irish literature generally, it is also the reason why I find myself able to read an Irish novel only every now and again. As an avid reader, I’m convinced no one does misery quite like the Irish. I once asked a secondary school English teacher if he could suggest any horror books for me, to which he replied, “I don’t need to read horror, I work in an Irish public school.” Similarly, I’m too familiar with quotidian Irish misery to seek it out as regular escapism, which was why I studied French literature to explore a sunnier form of sadness and maladjustment.
Geary writes with an almost disturbing insight into family dynamics and sexually-charged relationships.
None of this is to detract from Geary’s novel, of course. He creates a world that is tearfully real yet somehow ethereal; it often feels as if Vera’s house on the eponymous Montpelier Parade will go the way of the House of Usher. The author threads some lovely themes through the narrative, such as what the class divide might mean if taken to extremes, with Sisyphean manual labour on the one hand, and sedentary hedonism on the other. Even suicide, in this context, can be seen as a luxury for the upper classes.
The most fully realised motif is that of the bike that Sonny is building in his shed from spare and stolen parts. We know he’s saved up some money and could probably just buy one, yet he persists in stealing parts in order to build the bike. It’s a little difficult to penetrate the logic at work here, but perhaps it’s that stealing a part is better than stealing the whole thing. Doubtful, perhaps, but then we’re not imprisoned in Sonny’s world, one where he must hide books from his family lest they think he’s getting notions.
Geary writes with an almost disturbing insight into family dynamics and sexually-charged relationships. The characters are at their most vivid precisely in their interactions with each other, which I find to be a major feat and one of the book’s most admirable aspects. While we’re inside Sonny’s head throughout, the other characters feel just as real to us as he does, as he tries, often in vain, to penetrate their thoughts and motivations.
All in all, Montpelier Parade is an excellent read and well worth picking up, and Karl Geary is an author to watch out for. You’ll be enchanted with his wonderful writing but be warned, you’ll likely find your misery meter reaching critical before the end.
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Eoin Madigan
Eoin Madigan
Eoin Madigan is a tall, bald, bearded Limerickman. He’s been writing poetry and short stories since he woke up one morning years ago convinced this was a good idea. When not reading he can be found, pint in hand, shouting at his beloved Munster Rugby in the flesh or on a screen. He speaks fluent French and holds an MA in French & Comparative Literature from the University of Kent. He shamelessly pounces on any opportunity to mention either of these things.
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Montpelier Parade by Karl Geary — across the divides
A Dublin-set story of tragic love marks the arrival of an impressive talent
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Peter Carty JANUARY 13, 2017 0
The poor may always be with us but, in developed countries at least, that is not always apparent. Mostly poverty hides well out of sight. Suppose you met Sonny, the teenage protagonist of Karl Geary’s debut novel, in a rainy spring in the Dublin of the late 1980s. You would not see anything much amiss with him, despite his parlous circumstances.
Sonny’s father is addicted to gambling and money is scarce in the family home, an overcrowded house on a council estate. Sonny has managed to get into a good school, but he does not fit in there and his studies are faltering.
One Saturday Sonny is helping his father to mend a garden wall on Montpelier Parade, a genteel Georgian terrace. The house is occupied by Vera, who is adult, educated and affluent: she is everything that Sonny is not. Nevertheless, each is struck by the other. Soon Vera visits the butcher’s shop where Sonny works after school. An affair begins, but its progress is fraught. As well as the barriers of age and class, Sonny has been caught thieving and Vera is seriously ill.
Geary is the latest player in a recent resurgence of Irish literary talent, which also includes Jess Kidd (Himself) and Lisa McInerney (The Glorious Heresies). In Montpelier Parade, he delivers an unforgettable love story in writing that is often exceptional.
Unusually, the entire tale is presented in the second person. When used for more than short passages this narrative approach can become strained. Yet here any potential over-intensity is offset by the measured pace of Sonny’s thoughts and insights, and the combination works wonderfully well.
Geary’s flair for visual description helps. Near the start of the novel Sonny observes the other staff in the butcher’s shop. “They stood in silence, Joe and Mick, side by side like bookends, suddenly still, as if their last thought was important, something they didn’t want to forget.”
Elsewhere there are some flaws. Occasionally there is unnecessary telling when showing has sufficed, with pathos intruding into Geary’s beautifully wrought scenes. Sonny is hesitant about borrowing books from Vera. “Books were not for boys who cut meat,” he thinks. And some of the portraits of secondary characters, notably of Sonny’s narrow-minded brothers, are overly schematic.
Even so, Geary captures time and place startlingly well. More important, he lays out the inexorable dynamic of this tragic relationship with masterly economy. At the story’s core is a drama of role reversal. It is clear that Sonny is being shoved into adult life prematurely, yet the question dangles of whether he can summon the capability needed to rescue Vera.
Montpelier Parade is reminiscent of Barry Hines’ novel A Kestrel for a Knave — that 1960s classic of social realism — in its depiction of a youngster trapped by deprivation. But what is Geary’s, and Geary’s alone, is the desperately moving romantic entanglement at its heart.
Montpelier Parade, by Karl Geary, Harvill Secker, RRP£12.99, 234 pages
Montpelier Parade by Karl Geary
★★★★★
Book Review by Galen O'Hanlon | 04 Jan 2017
3 0 0
Montpellier Parade by Karl Geary
Montpellier Parade
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Book title: Montpelier Parade
Author: Karl Geary
A cold, wet spring in Dublin. Sonny sees Vera for the first time while he’s working in her garden with his da. She walks down the path towards him and he’s transfixed. Soon he’s in love, filled with curiosity and desire for this woman from a different world.
It’s a coming of age story without gloss. Geary puts you right in the action with the raw closeness of the second person narrator. So you’re right there with Sonny as he keeps fucking up without meaning to. You think and feel as he does, you remember the adolescent awkwardness that once conspired against you. You see again how unfair it is that childish actions have such adult consequences.
The novel draws its intensity from the gap between emotions and words. No one can express how they feel: we witness Sonny’s mum in a state of hopeless frustration; then Sharon, lost and hurting beneath the teenage bravado; and Vera, all but sinking into the black depths of her mind. Try as he might, Sonny can’t save any of them.
This is Geary’s first novel, but you can tell he’s no first-timer. The precision in his prose belies his training as a scriptwriter; the plot unfolds with self-assured ease, and the dialogue lives on the page. There’s no rush, no over-explanation, no showing off. He trusts his reader, and the novel has compulsive power because of it. An astonishing debut.
Out 5 January, published by Harvill Secker, RRP £12.99
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Montpelier Parade.
Geary, Karl (author).
Aug. 2017. 240p. Catapult, paperback, $16.95 (9781936787555).
REVIEW.
First published June 26, 2017 (Booklist Online).
Between bloody shifts at the butcher shop and oily chip sandwiches, 16-year-old Sonny Knolls is driven by boredom to steal bike parts and drink himself into a stupor. Sonny’s Irish adolescence is as bleak as the ever-pissing Dublin skies, until one night when he asks an older woman, Vera, to buy him a bottle of wine. A kinship is born. When Sonny comes over one afternoon, he finds Vera swallowing handfuls of pills in a serious attempt to die. Sonny calls an ambulance, and, after many subsequent hospital visits, Sonny and Vera enter a deeply complicated sexual relationship. Sonny’s home life spirals out of control and he is expelled from school. All he has is Vera, until one day she confides in Sonny that she has a terminal illness, the reason for her suicide attempt. Despite his efforts, Sonny cannot save Vera from herself, nor from her sickness, and knows he will be left with nothing when she is gone. Fast paced and highly engrossing, Geary’s debut perfectly balances dreary romance and sharp teen angst. — Courtney Eathorne
This title has been recommended for young adult readers:
YA/General Interest: Teen readers, particularly those with an interest in Europe or the U.K., will relate to Sonny’s deathly boredom and enjoy following him to the Irish cliffside. —Courtney Eathorne
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Montpelier Parade by Karl Geary
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Review published on November 1, 2017.
Wow, for a debut book, this blew me away.
It is a beautiful, lyrical, almost poetic story of first love, the passion and heartbreak of loss and finding out who you are.
Sonny is a teenager who has an evening job in a butchers, just for pocket money. He also helps his father at weekends working on houses, painting and doing odd jobs. It while helping his father that he meets Vera and at once he is smitten, in the only way teenagers can be. So begins an affair, and although it is wrong, neither Vera or Sonny can stop.
It reminded me of The Reader and Notes on a Scandal. The writing just made me sigh (in a good way) and I cannot wait to read Karl’s next book. As this is only a slim book, it will haunt the reader, and for me, it will always have a place in my heart. It is a book to treasure and to tell your friends and family about. It’s one to keep and one to reread, just because.
Angie Rhodes 5/5
Montpelier Parade by Karl Geary
Vintage 9781784705664 pbk Sep 2017