Book Review: Laura McVeigh - Lenny

Northern Irish writer McVeigh follows the success of 2017’s Under The Almond Tree with this marvellous novel about the lonely and the hurt attempting to heal themselves and each other. Told in parallel timelines, the story centres around Lenny, a ten-year old boy who’s already seen a lifetime or trouble. Abandoned by a mother for whom life just became too heavy to carry, he’s homeless in the dying town of Roseville, Louisiana. The burg is in imminent danger of being swallowed by a sink hole, in much the same way that we can all so easily be engulfed by life's troubles, through no fault of our own.

Everyone around Lenny is broken in some way. His father Jim had an itch he couldn’t scratch even before he went off to war and came back with a busted leg and PTSD, next door neighbour Ms Julie never got over or even accepted the loss of her husband, and local librarian Lucy might just expire from loneliness. In the second narrative a pilot – the fallen sky king - crashes in the Libyan desert and is saved, and then adopted, by a Bedouin family. The connection between the two stories soon becomes apparent.

McVeigh, rather brilliantly, uses the myth of Fionn Mac Cumhail and, more importantly, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, to address her themes of the pain that living brings, loneliness, and its cures – friendship and love - as her main characters unite around Lenny. To give the author due credit, it would take a heart as black as pitch not to want to do something for the boy, who is masterfully drawn. He's guileless and innocent, despite his circumstances, as every child deserves to be. You'll notice a dampness around your ocular region on a few occasions, as when the Da goes drinking instead of coming back for his son and Lenny breaks into his old home for the night. You'll also marvel at the depths of human kindness when Lucy then takes the father in for coffee despite the inebriated state of him.

On top of all the heart-string-pulling, which is just a natural part of the story being told and at no point do you feel like you're being hit over the head with a mallet marked 'Hallmark movie of the week', McVeigh also adds a bit of environmentalism and pacifism to the mix. Then, displaying admirable bravura, she takes the stabilisers off altogether and throws a spanner in the works of time, space and reality itself, allowing the ending that this lovely book has earned.

I have to admit that I didn't particularly like the sound of this when it arrived and had to be strong-armed into reading it at all by a rep who earned their pay a few times over. I'm glad I succumbed and you will be too. Go and buy it, but be prepared to cancel your plans for the rest of the evening.