The anatomy school /

Poor Martin Brennan has to contend with a variety of indignities: an overbearing mother who dreams of her son entering the priesthood, the pressures of passing his school exams (after an unsuccessful first attempt), and the ordinary turbulence of late adolescence. Shy and unsure of himself, Martin carefully navigates his world with the help (and sometimes hindrance) of his best friends: Kavanaugh, a smooth-talking charmer; and the rebellious Blaise Foley, who challenges Martin's precepts of authority and faith. Martin, a photographer for his school newspaper, studiously observes and absorbs his surroundings, from the impoverished lifestyle he and his mother must endure to the twittering ladies and pompous priest who frequent the Brennans' dinner table. As Martin struggles with his relationships, classes, and first foray into romance, he moves slowly into manhood, readjusting his worldview. MacLaverty, whose work has previously been short-listed for the Booker Prize, writes with an easy charm and perfectly captures life in 1960s Belfast. He invests the smallest characters with great wit and humanity, creating a moving, rueful tale. --Brendan Dowling

MacLaverty transforms the generic coming-of-age formula into a revelatory albeit lengthy read in his latest, the story of an insecure, thoughtful teenager named Martin Brennan who must survive the rigors of a pivotal year in high school while growing up in Belfast during the Troubles of the late '60s. Martin starts off in a bit of an academic quandary, having lost his scholarship to the Catholic school he attends because of subpar grades, forcing his mother to pay for the rest of the year and putting considerable pressure on the boy to boost his academic performance. Much of what follows is a low-key morality play in which Brendan and his mates go through various machinations to procure the answers to their upcoming exams, only to watch their theft backfire when the school thinks they're circulating pornographic photos and one of Martin's chums gets roughed up as a result. Brennan's sexual initiation is poignantly portrayed as he lands a job at a university anatomy lab and ends up losing his virginity there with a comely Australian minx whose departure sets Martin up to pursue the girl of his dreams. Martin is a memorable character whose unflinching compassion and capacity for self-examination provide a rock-solid foundation, and MacLaverty balances the boy's seriousness with his own wise humor. He also creates a fine cast of secondary characters to bring Martin's rites of passage to life, and the result is a book that delves deeper than usual into the vagaries of teenage emotions. MacLaverty has been down this road before (Cal), and all too often the reader can predict the next scene in the narrative, but despite the familiarity of the journey, he provides plenty of atmospheric background to make this heartfelt story worth the ride. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booker-winner MacLaverty (Grace Notes, 1997, etc.) portrays the coming of age of three Belfast boys during the early 1970s. Although it's pretty much the norm for adolescent boys the world over to feel cooped up and suffocated, in Northern Ireland this could be considered a rational understanding of the situation. Especially in the post-Beatles age, the provincial sectarianism of Belfast must have seemed rather galling to those who were just on the cusp of discovering the world for the first time. MacLaverty here takes us through the last year of high school with three Catholic boys who are all, in different ways, butting their heads against the same brick wall of complacent ignorance. Martin Brennan is the most sensitive of the three: a diligent but slow student, he is trying for the second time in two years to pass his examinations and qualify for a civil service job-but keeps coming back to the question of whether he should enter a religious order as a welcome escape from the harsh realities of life on the outside. Martin's friends Kavanagh and Foley are also products of Belfast, and they have similar frustrations seen from very different perspectives: Foley is a foul-mouthed rebel who scoffs at the Church and scorns Belfast ("A godforsaken backwater where they lock up the swings on a Sunday"), while Kavanagh has fallen in love with the Protestant Philippa Dobson, who not only refuses to sleep with him but wants him to accept Jesus as his savior. This is a leisurely old-fashioned Bildungsroman in which much of the attention is devoted to the discovery of new ideas, and the arguments that they engender among the young, and the sense of nostalgia is palpable from the start. By the end, Martin has changed as much as Belfast (and the world) has. Slow and somewhat aimless, but a nice account all the same of youth lusting after experience.