The Thing About December

We’ve come to see our world as increasingly complex. We often turn to literature or non-fiction to help understand how to avoid the most common pitfalls and increase our chances for success.

Donal Ryan invites us to consider a very different reality in his moving “The Thing About December”. He suggests that maybe the essence of life is pretty simple, basic, straight-forward. Our lives follow cycles. Each month and season offers recurring challenges and opportunities. Every living creature has a role. The events within lifecycles often form a pattern. Sometimes that pattern is broken by natural events that can only be explained through your faith. Friendship and loyalty matter.

This is Johnsey Cunliffe’s world. Johnsey knows that he is not like everyone else. There are things that others know that he cannot quite understand nor replicate. But he has grown up with loving, salt-of-the-earth parents who have taught him right from wrong.

A bucolic setting can be disrupted by outside forces: war, disease, famine. In “The Thing About December”, the outside disruption is greed. Avarice creeps into the most unlikely of places. Johnsey finds himself right in the middle of a artificially complex situation. Sadly, his parents have prematurely passed away. His few friends, family and acquaintances are acting in strange ways. New people are entering his life, even though they are often uninvited. Fortunately, Johnsey remembers some of the most basic facts of life that his parents passed on. Do not trust a liar. Be faithful to the land.

Ryan is a superb writer and story teller. He captures the essence of rural Ireland through a unique use of dialogue and depiction of place. Even though the setting and plot will be highly foreign to most readers, it is easy to feel totally engaged in the drama that unfolds. There were times I felt a need to shout out a warning to Johnsey, share a piece of advice. I was rooting for him throughout. Ryan challenges our core beliefs in the way the best writers always do.

Thank you Steerforth Press and NetGalley for the opportunity to read and review “The Thing About December” in advance of its U.S. publication. Much appreciated

Donal Ryan has become an author I plan to watch. He has a unique and powerful voice. In this, his second book, he tells the story of one year in the life of Johnsey Cunliffe. The novel is broken into sections by month, loosely organized by those tasks Johnsey recalls his father performing on the family farm when he was small. But now his father has died and his world has changed and Johnsey, a young man who lacks social graces and is considered somewhat simple by locals, is trying to figure out what his life is to become.

There are givers and takers in his world. It's the time of things actually going well for Ireland but that doesn't always mean well for everyone.Johnsey is caught in the wheelings and dealings and his simplicity is not a help.

As in The Spinning Heart, Ryan uses some lyrical prose in his descriptions of the land and also provides wonderful portraits of various characters who surround Johnsey.

The morning sun was fairly beaming down and all the trees were heavy with green and there was a haze of flies and bugs and butterflies about the land and all he could do was think about how some lives are full to bursting with people and work and sport and children and fun and his own was all empty spaces where those things ought rightly to be, were he the kind of man that could close his fist around opportunity and keep a tight howlt of it rather than shrinking from it and hiding inside his parents' house nearly too scared to even peep out for fear of failure and ridicule. (loc 1409)

This selection reveals a few things---a near stream of consciousness approach and the use of Irish vernacular which wash through the book and which I allowed to flow over me. Something not present here is the often earthy tone of Johnsey's thoughts and speech. While I would assume it is a fairly normal pattern for the young Irish male character Ryan has created, at times it seemed a bit excessive. But I can't allow that to interfere with my overall praise of this novel though some readers might be put off.

This is, ultimately, a very powerful novel and, while I like The Spinning Heart fractionally better, I rate this one at 4 to 4.5*

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for providing an ecopy of this book for review.

This is a beautifully written book but full of sadness and grief, bullying and sometimes violence. I found it difficult to read at times but yet I just had to stay there with Johnsey. He's an innocent and naive man who has lost both parents and is trying to manage on his own but has never had to. The outside world seems to move in and prey on him.

Johnsey will steal your heart and then his story will break it as you follow his narrative month by month during the year he is first alone. He remembers times from his childhood and it's apparent that he had never really fit in.

It's sometimes hard to know if he is really mentally deficient or just an innocent soul. Although it was difficult at times to follow the Irish vernacular, I got used to it. This is a moving story that will give you pause about how people treat each other.

“While the Celtic Tiger rages, and greed becomes the norm, Johnsey Cunliffe desperately tries to hold on to the familiar, even as he loses those who all his life have protected him from a harsh world. Following the deaths first of his father and then his mother, Johnsey inherits the family farm, and a healthy bank account, both of which he proves incapable of managing on his own. Village bullies and scheming land-grabbers stand in his way, no matter where he turns. Though companionship, and the promise of love, enter his life as a result of a hospital stay following a brutal beating, Johnsey remains a lonely man struggling to keep up with a world that moves faster than he does.
Set over the course of one year of Johnsey Cunliffe's life, The Thing About December breathes with Johnsey's bewilderment, humor and agonizing self-doubt. Readers will fall in love with Johnsey in a bittersweet tale that serves as a poignant reminder that we are surrounded in life by simple souls who are nonetheless more insightful and wise than we realize, or can even imagine.” – Publisher Summary

I was introduced to Donal Ryan and his particular brand of genius earlier this year when I read his debut novel, The Spinning Heart. Imagine my enthusiasm, then, when I received a copy of his newest work: The Thing About December, published in the U.S. on August 12, 2014. This book (at 208 pages, it is hard-pressed to call it a novel) is the tender and heartbreaking tale of a young man alone and confused in the world today.

The book summary above tells you the whole story, so I won’t repeatedly summarize things for you here. What it does not convey is the beauty of Ryan’s writing – the way he captures Johnsey Cunliffe’s life and lays it open for all to see. It is a heart-wrenching ride indeed to follow Johnsey’s journey from depression and loneliness, to having companionship and hope for the future, to the bitter, bitter end.

Interestingly enough, although this is Donal Ryan’s second book to be released, word is he actually wrote it before The Spinning Heart, which was released in 2012. Both novels are works of true art, in my opinion, and you would be at a loss if you were to pass either of them up.
The Thing About December by Donal Ryan. Buy it, read it, love it.

4 of 5 stars

Source: Steerforth Press {via NetGalley}