Estelle Birdy’s debut is a sprawling social novel that aims squarely at capturing the lives of a group of boys becoming men in working-class Dublin. Ravelling charts the year when Deano, Karl, Oisín, Benit and Hamza prepare to take “the Leaving”, as they all refer to their Leaving Certificate, in one of a profusion of beautifully poetic dialectical noticings Birdy crams into her story. Her work has been compared to Roddy Doyle, who shares her pleasure in documenting the Dublin dialect; but the artist who comes most strongly to mind is Richard Linklater, whose films showcase similar moments in young lives through multiple protagonist narratives, and also take an interest in time as the engine of a story. Succeeding seasons provide the rhythm of Birdy’s novel, the tension of this passing time always heightened by the knowledge that it is limited – that the Leaving is coming.
What is most successful in the novel is Birdy’s depiction of an immediately recognisable young manhood that will be familiar to readers far beyond the Liberties area in Dublin, where Ravelling is set. Birdy has a fantastic ear, and is meticulous in portraying the profoundly articulate inarticulacy of young people, the idiolects through which their lives are negotiated. The casually bruising way young men talk to one another is brilliantly rendered – “He’s all Men’s Sheds and helping the junkies”; “Take all the freebies you can for mentalness, sickness, postcode”. She writes with candour, clarity and humour about the way these young men interpret the world.
