A Son Called Gabriel

A Son Called Gabriel By: Damien McNicholl I had the privilege of receiving this book in the mail from Damien's publicist Joan. She had read some of my stuff here at Bella and thought that I could read and review Damien's book. Was I surprised when I did a little research on the book before it came. Damien's book, A Son Called Gabriel, was chosen as one of Advocate magazine's summer reads. So some of you may have already read it. So, after digging around a bit and talking about the book with Joan, I became very interested in reading it. Unfortunately summer classes got in the way along with some health problems and I wasn't able to read his book as quickly as I would have liked. But a black widow's bite, and Public Speaking behind me, I sat down and read this little gem of a novel. The story is obviously centered around a young bloke named Gabriel. This is his story. It is a story of coming to terms with one's self being a homosexual. Set in the wonderful distant land of England, Gabriel struggles not only with himself, but with his family. He searches for a place for himself inside of his very entertaining and somewhat dysfunctional family. Damien presents a wonderfully compassionate and endearing tale that catches you from page one. Unlike similar stories, Damien grabs your attention and hold on to it through the end of the book. He makes you want to flip the page in order to read what is next to come. He makes you fall in love with Gabriel, a boy who is very sensitive, gets bullied at school and on the playground, and is constantly tormented because he'd rather play tag or other games with the girls instead of being rough and tumble playing football with the boys. What grabbed me was the fact that I could totally understand and comprehend Gabriel because I could see myself in Gabriel. I could compare our lives and how we developed as gay men. And like myself, Gabriel achieves success in fighting off the bullies and overcoming that difficult stage in almost any sensitive child's life. But one victory does not lead to another. Damien well writes the struggle of the internal soul. The soul that fights against what it feels because the church it belongs to says it is an abomination. That being gay is like being a child molester or the most perverted of society. With the internal struggle comes the external. Through countless escapades with both genders, dealing with the ultra-catholic mother and family, and with sexual abuse of his own, Gabriel becomes the man he was intended to be. So why don't you go grab yourself a copy and join in on discovering life through the eye's of young Gabriel. This tale is sure to thrill you as it did me. You are bound to find some piece of yourself in this wonderful tale spun together by a magnificent freshman author named Damien McNicholl. The story will remind you of the best times, and remind you of the worst. But you won't be disappointed when you open the cover and loose yourself in Gabriel's tale. A definite

"A cracking good read" one of McNicholl's blurb-writers put it...and it's true! I read it in one sitting. Anyone with children or who may want to have kids should read this novel. It will prepare you to protect and raise them lovingly whatever their proclivities may be. McNicholls is an accomplished writer who makes the reader care deeply about his protagonist. Well done, sir!

Gabriel Harkin is growing up in the 1960s and '70s in a working-class Catholic family. Northern Ireland at the time is riven by political and religious differences, and the Troubles form a backdrop to Gabriel's childhood and adolescence. But the more immediate cause of Gabriel's unhappiness during these years is his homosexuality. Bullied for his effeminacy, tormented by guilt when he gives way to what the Church tells him are sinful urges, Gabriel worries too that he is a disappointment to his father, who appears to favor Gabriel's athletic and mechanically-inclined brother James. Gabriel cannot confess his desires, not even to his beloved uncle, Father Brendan, but he does come to realize that his sexual proclivity is not the only secret being harbored in the Harkin family: some disgrace which his parents refuse to discuss evidently lies behind Brendan's entrance into the priesthood. Damian McNicholl's A Son Called Gabriel is written in the first person and reads like a memoir. As such it will inevitably be compared to Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes. Remarkably, McNicholl's novel does not suffer from the comparison. It is so well written, and the author's portrayal of Gabriel is so vivid, that readers will be hard-pressed to remember they're holding a piece of fiction in their hands. A Son Called Gabriel creates a fully realistic community--Gabriel's parents and siblings and extended family of aunts and uncles and grandparents, the boys who taunt or befriend him at school--and a likable main character with whom readers cannot but sympathize as they watch him grow to manhood. It is a perfect novel. And, quiet story though it is, the book packs a wallop in its final pages when the secret of Brendan's retreat into the clergy is finally revealed. Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

In the first sentence of A Son Called Gabriel, Damian McNicholl's narrator tells us, "The choice was school or the big stick and seemed easy to make." At six, Gabriel Harkin knows a beating is painful but finite-dealing with the large and vicious bullies at school will be never-ending. To his dismay, he finds logic must bow to custom: Catholic boys in Northern Ireland must use their own fists to deal with bullies or they are "sissies" and no one in Gabriel's repressive world respects a "sissy-boy." His mother defines the accepted rules of behavior for her family based on, "what the neighbors, priests or relatives think." Gabriel's sometimes painful efforts to survive in this world are described with sage humor in this moving and witty tale by McNicholl. In a world where he is expected to shine at football and aspire to nothing more than driving a lorry as his father does, Gabriel realizes he is different. He loves books and story-telling. He is told he favors his Uncle Brendan, a missionary priest in Africa. This is ambiguous praise: in a world full of secrets and lies, a "big secret" is attached to Uncle Brendan. The harsh reality of life in deeply divided and often dangerous Northern Ireland has been captured by McNicholl as seen by a pragmatic boy who has never known anything else. Barbed wire is everywhere but just something to look through or climb over. McNicholl creates scenes and characters so vivid and memorable in both visual and emotional detail the reader has the sense of having been part of Gabriel's struggle to assert his individuality and grow into the man he is meant to be. I found myself so involved in Gabriel's world the book was hard to put down. I strongly recommend it.