THE WESTERN CODE

A group of teenagers tries to make sense of life and the future of humanity in Sparling’s debut novel.

On New Year’s Eve in 2001, the lives of several young rival gang members end in tragedy; a boy named Ger narrowly escapes a fiery cliffside inferno as the sole survivor. The story then introduces another group of teenagers: Remy, his best friend, Sid, and their friend, Liz—all Dublin-based buddies since childhood who have “evolved in thought together.” Remy is a natural philosopher and an argumentative talker—he provides the novel’s most engaging conversational volleys, holding forth on a robotic world takeover, art, and global politics while expressing extreme frustration over those from his generation who resort to suicide bombing, “blowing themselves up in an act of glory and defiance on the streets of our cities.” When Ger, known as a mobster and a pimp, is spied in Remy’s neighborhood with a sex worker named Katie, Remy does some digging and discovers Ger’s connection to the violent events on the cliff in 2001. The narrative skips ahead to follow Sid, now in his early 20s and frustrated by his career-focused girlfriend, Susan. Sid considers Ger an embodiment of “the ugly side of the Irish psyche.” They immediately butt heads and violence erupts. The concluding section examines Katie’s life as she struggles to comprehend love, sex, and identity, and to make peace with her illicit past as the war in Iraq begins to simmer. Readers will certainly be challenged when trying to piece together the myriad fragments of these tempestuous characters’ lives, which can seem like fever dreams full of frenetic details. While the characters and their melodramatic interactions are stimulating and engaging, the undercooked plot strands them within the confines of their dialogues about immortality, capitalism, and music. Readers able to overlook the lack of narrative cohesion and the erratic storytelling will enjoy Sparling’s character-driven story, which brims with scholarly, introspective digressions and entertaining, opinionated food for thought.

An enthusiastic if scattershot novel about Irish youth awash in ideas.