[spoilers throughout]

Gay Irishman narrates his life in seven-year increments. Begins in utero with his unwed mother being literally kicked out of her village by a sadistic priest (and a secret fornicator!¡!¡!); ends with his teenage grandson smooching his boyfriend before mother/great-grandmother finally gets married in old age while ancestral ghosts look on. Detours through cruising, cottaging, down-low adultery, priestly sex-abuse, filicide, parricide, incestuous pimping, the Anne Frank House, 9/11, dementia and Mt Sinai Hospital during the AIDS crisis. You look for respite from the relentless miseryporn and you get queasy, death-of-Little-Nell sentimentality.

I used to live in Ireland so some of the Hiberno-English dialogue was pleasing, but mostly I wished this book was more of its supposed place. There is no sense at all of Ireland's sexual politics change over the novel’s seventy-year span; they just do. There's no sense of Ireland was longer to secularise than the rest of western Europe. (No Catholic character, lay or clerical, is shown to get anything out of his religion except self-satisfaction.) There's a fine social novel to be written about being a gay Irish Catholic in the 20th century; this is a few of the author's pet likes and dislikes propped up against fashionable backdrops.