Novels about precarity are a precarious business. Far too many debuts of recent years claim to capture what it is like to be a young person in this age of intersecting economic and social crises, when in reality they focus on a set of experiences that are much narrower, much more class-specific and much more temporary. If you were being uncharitable, you could boil many such books down to “recent arts graduate feels emotionally, financially and erotically unsatisfied and works in the service industry while they figure their life out”. This sense of ennui simply isn’t a luxury that is available to many who are living at the sharp end, where the parlous state of things feels both systemic and permanent.
Close to Home, the taut and impressive debut by Michael Magee, has none of these limitations and, as a result, feels like that rarest of things: a genuinely necessary book. The novel depicts a period of readjustment for Sean, a reflective, slightly sullen man in his 20s who has returned to Belfast after university. He finds exactly what he left; a network of lives being shaped and misshaped by poverty, addiction, casual violence and trauma. Sean spends his days drinking and sniffing, wrestling with his masculinity, falling in and out of employment and vaguely hoping that a different way of living might eventually present itself. The structural forces that underpin his sense of stasis are ever-present and stifling; a collapsing economy, rampant landlordism and the long, complex shadow that continues to be cast by the Troubles.
