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A teenager escapes the drudgery of 80s Dublin through a relationship with an older woman in this auspicious fiction debut

Montpelier Parade is the debut novel by Karl Geary (right), a Dubliner who emigrated to New York in the late 80s at the age of 16, where he went on to live a life that was the antithesis of the one available to him back home – co-running the bar Sin-é, at which Jeff Buckley performed and Rufus Wainwright laments he didn’t, appearing in Madonna’s Sex book, becoming an actor and screenwriter. One might think he would never look back. Montpelier Parade indicates otherwise.

Sonny Knolls is a 16-year-old schoolboy with a beautiful face. He works part time in the local butcher’s and does “nixers” – work on the side – with his dad, a labourer, on the weekends. He drinks himself oblivious when he can afford to, and punches walls to dull the “howl of feeling” inside him. His only friend is Sharon, a school dropout who will do anything for male attention. Sonny does his best not to take advantage of her desperation: “You’d come close a few times, but you’d left off, not wanting to be one of those boys who made her cry.”

The novel opens with Sonny witnessing the drunk man they have just served in the butcher’s being mown down by a van, his plastic bag of livers “burst, empty” – Geary has a flair for visceral details. While peering at the corpse’s face, Sonny finds himself pinching his packet of Sweet Afton. Emotional responses are furtive and stunted in this tough working-class environment. Sonny gives the cigarettes to his gambler father, whom he feels sorry for; he then regrets that he didn’t give them to his mother, who works herself to the bone trying to keep the household together.

The title hints at a sunny, southern French escape from the damp oppressiveness of Dublin, but Montpelier Parade, the street where much of the action takes place, is missing that crucial second L. L for love, it seems. There is love in Sonny, but it is thwarted at every turn. He loves his parents, and he especially loves his mother. “Not so many years ago you would race home to her after school, just to know she was alive and hadn’t left you in that house of men, without a soft thing in the world.” But in such a large family, there simply isn’t time to nurture this relationship. His mother is almost permanently stationed at the kitchen sink, “peeling, always peeling” to feed her seven sons, six of whom are now gruff men. Sonny is her youngest. “The small and silent space you shared with your mother, before the first brother appeared in the kitchen, was still a comfort.”

Having no one else to confide in, Sonny talks to himself in the second person throughout, highlighting how lost and lonely he is. Love finds an outlet in the figure of Vera. Sonny encounters her while helping his father to fix her wall on Montpelier Parade, a Georgian terrace in an affluent part of the city. Vera is different. She is English, educated, wealthy. She is also old enough to be Sonny’s mother. In some ways, she takes over his mother’s role – bathing him, attending to his injuries, listening, advising. The affair that ensues is delicately handled and entirely convincing. Vera opens windows into other worlds – art, literature, travel, sexual bliss. What Sonny offers her in return isn’t revealed until the closing pages. Such last-minute revelations can sometimes feel cheap. Not this one.

Geary’s evocation of the harshness of Dublin in the 80s is pitch-perfect – inadequate central heating, outdoor drinking, and the awful lack of opportunity. When Sonny declares, under Vera’s influence, that he wants to be a painter, his careers counsellor assumes he means a house-painter. When he clarifies that he wants to be an artist, she laughs in his face. At one point, Geary flashes forward to a time when Sonny’s father is dead, but otherwise he keeps the voice in the head of a schoolboy who is not yet equipped to reflect on the events that are happening to him. It is evident to the reader that these events will form the adult he will become. It is evident to Vera too. “I think years from now you’ll understand this and hate me for it,” she tells him. That “years from now” remark seems a portentous one. The novel reads as though it might become the first in a series charting Sonny’s life. He is a sufficiently intriguing character to carry them and Geary is a sufficiently intriguing writer. Montpelier Parade is an auspicious debut.

Claire Kilroy’s The Devil I Know is published by Faber. Montpelier Parade is published by Harvill Secker. To order a copy for £10.65 (RRP £12.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.

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