Estelle Birdy’s debut is a sprawling social novel, entirely devoted to capturing the lives of a group of boys coming of age in working-class Dublin. Ravelling traces the year in which Deano, Karl, Oisín, Benit and Hamza prepare to take ‘the Leaving’, as they all call their Leaving Certificate, in a wealth of beautifully poetic dialectical observations that Birdy crams into her story. Her work has been compared to that of Roddy Doyle, who shares her delight in documenting Dublin dialect; but the artist who springs most strongly to mind is Richard Linklater, whose films depict similar moments in young people’s lives through multiple protagonists and are also interested in time as the engine of a story. Successive seasons set the rhythm of Birdy’s novel, the tension of this passing time always heightened by the knowledge that it is finite – that the Leaving is imminent.
The novel’s most successful feature is Birdy’s portrayal of an instantly recognisable young man who will be familiar to readers far beyond the Dublin district of Liberties, where Ravelling is set. Birdy has a fantastic ear and portrays with great care the deeply articulated inability of young people to understand the idiolects in which their lives are managed. The casual, intrusive way in which young men talk to each other is brilliantly rendered – “He’s all man-shed, helping the junkies”; “Take all the freebies you can get, for mental illness, disease, postcode”. She writes with candour, clarity and humour about the way these young men interpret the world.
Birdy is also gifted at evoking the buried past. Throughout the book there is a strong sense of life taking place at the sites of ancient battles whose legacies still shape the characters today. It is striking how many of the lives depicted are scarred by past events that are quickly introduced as fact rather than explored as dramatic material – dead siblings, lives disfigured by poverty. Even if we never fully immerse ourselves in the suffering of the past, it is present in the margins of these young men’s stories, most extensively in Deano, whose mother is a recovering heroin addict and whose father died a gruesome death in the same part of Dublin where Deano now lives. Some of the people in Deano’s life were present at his father’s death, and others were responsible for it: the sense of buried bodies beneath the surface of the present is powerfully rendered. There is a battle afoot to prevent Deano from entering the same world that took his parents’ lives; all these young men are really fighting to avoid being drawn into Dublin’s underworld of drug dealing, brothels and funerals, where the heads of victims end up in the canals.
There are weaknesses that mark this novel as a first. Birdy’s reliance on the passage of time rather than character choices or dramatic events to drive the story forward makes the book seem slightly episodic, without its own internal logic and rhythm. There are moments – an early funeral, a house party in a rented Airbnb – when Birdy seems to lose control of her multitude of protagonists, making it difficult to follow what is happening to each. This is a natural byproduct of the Dickensian scale of her ambition – alongside the five young male protagonists, she portrays a wealth of minor characters, lovers, parents, gardaí, dealers and pimps and drinkers whose stories intertwine throughout the book. These are not always perfectly timed. Ravelling presents a combative, compelling social world with deep empathy and introduces an exciting new voice as a portrait of five young men trying to keep their heads above water.
