The Loney is the best part of The Loney. A bleak stretch of beach between the mainland and an island, the atmosphere Hurley creates is incredibly vivid and haunting. I can think of no place more desolate to spend your Easter Holidays. The unnamed protagonist and his mute brother Hanny’s attempts to entertain themselves by pretending to be World War Two soldiers and running about aimlessly on the tide is enough for anyone to wish for even Pontin’s.
However, for all the bleak and effective imagery, The Loney suffers primarily in terms of structure and theme. It reads almost like two novels mashed together- much like American Gods last week. To The Loney’s credit, the utter disjunction only becomes apparent in retrospective, and both plots are fairly decent novels on their own anyway.
The first novel is about the death of faith, of the all-consuming desolation that comes with the knowledge that we are alone, that there is no God, that we are born and live and die all without meaning.
The second is about magic powers.
Okay, it’s not as if Harry Potter appears from beneath the waves, does a massive shit on the floor, and promptly vanishes it; the supernatural we see is both perfectly shrouded in mystery and suitably dark for the tone. But the fact remains it completely defeats the purpose of having “magic is dead” as a theme if magic is an explicit plot point. Indeed, towards the end Father Bernard essentially sits down and tries to give the vaguest of justifications as to how the two themes can be reconciled. During which, the priest looks at absolute solid evidence that someone has literally cured their life-long disability and declares that “God didn’t do it,” and everybody who believes so is deluding themselves. Any point on the nature of the religious is lost, because there legitimately aren’t any rational explanations to this and there’s no possible way Father Bernard knew what really happened.
Father Bernard in general seems to function as both the priest and as the reasonable mentor figure who always knows what’s right, which is fairly problematic when you remember “God isn’t real” is perhaps the primary theme of the book. He hardly even bothers with the pretence he believes in God anymore, which might had been an interesting angle to explore his character if anyone except the protagonist’s mother cared at all. Her role is simply the one note crazy religious person.
Everyone else feels vaguely distinct but lacks any real depth. The Belderboss couple have several deep conversations with Father Bernard about the previous priest, the brother of Mr. Belderboss, who died recently, which skirt around being interesting but ultimately go nowhere. Miss Bunce and David are somehow even more pointless, the former there only as a cheap source of conflict with the mother and the latter…I honestly can’t fathom why he’s here, to be honest. The father character is essentially just an non-entity, and there were several times when I honestly wondered if “Father” was actually referring to the priest at times.
The antagonists get the worst of this. Towards the end they terrorise Hanny and the narrator for seemingly no reason, only for them to inexplicably help them while still acting as menacingly as possible.Clement Parry, the odd farmer who eventually turned out to have depths I didn’t expect for such a minor character, is perhaps the only secondary player whose inclusion felt justified.
The atmosphere Hurley creates in The Loney is genuinely fantastic, but almost every other element of the story lets it down.
Rating: 5/10
Next Week: The Power by Naomi Alderman
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