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.
If all of that sounds heavy, it’s because it is. There is no light relief here. Close to Home is a book of premature tiredness, emotional repression and the halting and heavy-handed ways we might try to love one another regardless. The novel is relatively short on plot – a court case following a fight at a party, a nascent romance, the present-day effects of childhood abuse – but remains gripping due to its unfaltering and deftly executed commitment to psychological empathy. Magee writes tenderness with serious skill; Sean’s older brother reaching out to him over a video game saying “you are good at this”, his mother brushing crumbs off her jumper so aggressively that we recognise it as a barely controlled act of self-harm.
Sean is close to home in both senses of the phrase; he is deeply connected to it, but he hasn’t arrived there yet. Throughout the book, he is cleaved and doubled, his interests and experiences subtly alienating him from the community he grew up in, at the same time as his class signifiers mark him as an outsider among his new friends. Magee depicts this search for identity in a series of nimble set pieces. At one point we witness a Google Street View car trundle past, capturing Sean and his sometime girlfriend Mairead in the process, fixing them for ever in pixels, as monetisable data. But later, when they check Google Maps, eager to see themselves immortalised, they are not there, a memory lost somewhere deep in the machine.
There is a particular boldness in the way the novel deals with the prickly issue of masculinity. It doesn’t lean too heavily on the easy heuristics of overdetermined toxicity and silence that so often colour literary depictions of working-class men. These aspects are present, of course, but Magee knows they are only part of the picture; his characters are also bold, loyal, hurt, audacious. They are usually drunk, or high, or both. Close to Home is the best novel I have read in years on the subject of casual substance abuse and addiction. Post-millennial Prufrocks, Magee’s characters measure out their lives not in coffee spoons, but in keys of cocaine. There are moments in the book that are genuinely hard to read, so vividly do they render the sense of mounting propulsion that can accompany a drugs binge and its aftermath. There are scenes that go beyond a hangover and show the brutality of a multi-day comedown, the slumped bodies and spasming muscles, the mountains of food consumed and then thrown up in a cold sweat, the mind flirting with paranoia and delirium.
There are occasional missteps. The first few chapters are littered with the type of self-correcting prose – “it was X, or maybe Y, or maybe something else entirely” – that so often characterises a writer in the process of finding their feet. And elsewhere, Magee sometimes reaches for slightly obvious gestures of sociocultural standing; Sean fawning over The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a middle-class crowd preferring to dance to Joni Mitchell rather than donk or happy hardcore. But these are niggles, and do little to diminish the overall effect of what is ultimately a staggeringly humane and tender evocation of class, violence and the challenge of belonging in a world that seems designed to keep you watching from the sidelines.
• Close to Home by Michael Magee is published by Hamish Hamilton (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
