Review by Booklist Review
The Voids is a ghost story, of sorts, but without the obvious supernatural elements. Rather it is a tale of flesh-and-blood humans, the unnamed narrator as well as the various senior citizens, drug addicts, alcoholics, and immigrants who live in a condemned high rise in Glasgow, people who are invisible to the rest of the world, now the victims of gentrification. Specifically, the title refers to the flats themselves, but it is the kind of people who once inhabited those flats who are the focus of O'Connor's compelling and well-written story. O'Connor's Glasgow is not quite the Glasgow of Douglas Stuart or James Kelman, to mention other Glaswegians who tread similar terrain, since O'Connor's characters include journalists or lit majors, the kind of people, for example, who listen to the music of Belle and Sebastian. But they suffer from the same dysfunctional problems and the same issues of toxic masculinity and even toxic femininity: alcoholism and the scent of violence. The episodic darkness can be unrelenting at times, but what redeems the material is not only O'Connor's effortless prose but also his hope for humanity rooted in his surprising optimism. "Some of us spend our entire life trying to escape or find ourselves," he writes. "We know there's little chance we'll succeed, but we keep trying anyway."
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Scottish author O'Connor delivers a searing and passionate debut from the voice of an angsty young Glaswegian who squats in a mostly abandoned high rise he calls "the voids." The unnamed narrator is dejected after a breakup and newly unemployed, and fills his depressed days by aimlessly wandering the city's underbelly. He goes to bars, trips on LSD, meets girls, and commiserates with the broken and downtrodden. As his life devolves into chaos, one highlight is when he steals a bag of cocaine from a gangster on a rainy night that ends in disappointment and desperation. Despite the despair and depravity that suffuses the narrator's Glasgow, he exudes a fierce, glowing vitality, describing snowmelt from rooftops as "the tears of a city" and a mountain range he once saw in Italy as "lifted straight out of the mind of God." Through his suffering and the madness of his lifestyle, he accumulates a treasure-trove of dazzling, almost saintly insights into human nature, noting, for instance, that regret imbues people with "the loneliness of an empty church." Readers will be lifted by his protagonist's commitment to finding beauty in the darkness. (Aug.)
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