Donal Ryan is one of my favourite contemporary writers so I’m delighted to be squeezing this post in on the final day of Reading Ireland Month, hosted by Cathy at 746 Books.

It’s been seven years since I read his polyphonic debut, The Spinning Heart, so I came to the follow up, Heart, Be At Peace, with only a hazy recollection of the characters and plot. Like its predecessor, Heart, Be At Peace has twenty-one chapters, each narrated by a different inhabitant of a County Tipperary town.

While the first novel considered the fallout of the economic crash on a cross-section of the town, Heart, Be at Peace looks at how illegal drugs and associated money, violence and desperation impact so many.

Both books are centred on, and begin with, Bobby Mahon. He is struggling, and there is a sense of it only being a matter of time before he either explodes or implodes:

“There’s this thing that happens me now nearly every day. It feels like a stab of something in my middle, not pain exactly, just a kind of force that takes the air out of me so that I have to stop what I’m doing for a few seconds until it passes. It only comes on me when I let my thoughts drift.”

This is the uniting thread that pulls the various narratives together. Gradually a picture builds of Bobby becoming more and more enraged at the audacity shown by the shameless drug dealers. Despite the different narrators and their varying concerns, bubbling in the background is Bobby and his Achilles’ heel, observed by older man Jim:

“Bobby Mahon Is one of these rare men who measures himself against the well-being of the people around him.”

I was glad to see Lily the witch/sex worker return, this time worrying about her granddaughter Millicent who is caught up with abusive dealer Augie Penrose. It’s not just Lily who has a sixth sense though – I thought this had more supernatural beliefs and encounters than its predecessor, but maybe my memory is failing!

Although this novel included one chapter narrated by a ghost, if you’re not keen on the supernatural in books, rest assured there are many grounding elements. Lily herself observes “belief itself is a kind of magic.”

While later in the novel Brian realises: “I always work off impressions, and my impressions, it turns out, are mostly shite.”

There’s a lot of sadness in Heart, Be at Peace as is to be expected given the themes, but Ryan leaves it to the reader to piece some events together and draw their own conclusions, which stops it being sanctimonious or sentimental. A reported death is truly sad, and to the reader seems suspicious, but is accepted as a heart attack by the characters.

There’s also the endurance of Pokey Burke, instrumental in the in local desolation caused by the building crash and now finding ways to make money off the poorest people again. His is a cynical presence but an entirely believable one.

There is resilience too. Rory, one of Bobby’s young workers, is madly in love and expecting his first child:

“all things tend towards chaos. I close my eyes against the mad torrent of panic. This is okay, I think. This is life, this is life, this is how it’s meant to be.”

And also humour. A standout voice for me was Trevor, self-aggrandizing and clinically delusional but with an interesting turn of phrase:

“the bus stopped and he was gone, and I was left to writhe beneath the gaze of some kind of a working-class Medusa.”

And there is kindness, experienced by Vasya, an immigrant camping on land at the edge of town. His observation suggests Bobby may not be wrong in seeing himself inextricably bound to his community:

“I was reminded of how small this world is, how closed-in this country is, like a bowl containing berries that you can pick up and swirl so that each berry touches another berry in the space of an instant.”

By the end I felt there was a possibility Ryan may revisit this town and the people again. I hope so.