Book Review: Juno Loves Legs examines things going from bad to worse
Juno Loves Legs: a document of hard times
- Juno Loves Legs
- Karl Geary
- Harvill Secker, €16
The novel is written in the voice of a young girl, Juno, growing up on a housing estate somewhere in outer Dublin, beyond Dun Laoghaire, around 1980. This first-person text is in two sections, each introduced by a quotation. The first is an African proverb: “If the young are not initiated into the village, they will burn it down just to feel its warmth.” And the second, even more ominous, has a quote from Susan Sontag: “But the landscape of devastation is still a landscape. There is beauty in ruins.”
The quotations signal a literary intention behind the apparently guileless first-person narrative. Although it reads like a misery memoir, this is a novel. In the opening scene Juno is helping her mother, a part-time dressmaker, with a wedding dress fitting. The house is in a state of chaos and father, a habitual drunk referred to as “that layabout” is still in bed. Juno’s walk to school takes her through a short-cut behind the church, the place where her sister Derry was attacked and raped. Derry left home soon after in face of her mother’s horror at her pregnancy and is now the young mother of small children, still unreconciled.
The teacher, a nun referred to only as ‘Sister’ taunts and rebukes the children for being “horrible and sinful”. Seán, a boy with blonde hair and ‘the face of a lovely girl’, is singled out for derision. Red-haired Juno defends him against the school bullies, kicking Colin: “I rooted him up the hole, as hard as I could…" Next day she goes to school with a black eye, having been in the wrong place during an altercation between her parents.
You may think this is bad enough, but it gets worse. Their mothers will not allow her former friends to play with her, and Seán’s mother will not let Juno near the house. The priest, Father, who is preparing Juno’s class for confirmation threatens her when she cannot remember the saint’s name she is taking, and she wets herself. Seán calls out the name ‘Judas’ to distract him, and both children are caned with a specially prepared baton.
Just as I was wondering what further calamities could possibly come her way, Juno’s mother is run over by a bus and killed. Father (the priest) refuses to allow Juno to make her confirmation in the dress she had died black for her mother’s funeral. She starts to menstruate for the first time with no mother to care for her. To say things go from bad to worse for Juno would be an understatement. Even the friendly librarian, Missus H, who has kept up a steady supply of good books for print-hungry Juno, turns against her.
Suddenly I realised that nearly every incident in Juno’s life was a cliché, something I had read somewhere before. While the novel is well written and carefully edited, and would get high marks as a creative writing exercise, Juno’s story somehow lacks the spark that brings a childhood memoir to life, and makes it an unforgettable read — whether it is fictionalised, as in Elena Ferrante’s or Douglas Stuart’s , or told as straight memoir in Patti Smith’s or Hilary Mantel’s .
ends with Juno and Legs as teenagers squatting in his gran’s old flat in central Dublin, hustling and partying, while Legs’s ill health is probably AIDs, and his death is not far off.
Karl Geary is obviously a talented writer, but why, I kept asking myself, was this tired, predictable story written, and how can I possibly recommend it to anyone else?
