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The hero is John Egan, 11 years old but already as tall as a man. He’s the only child of handsome, unstable parents who think they are too special to get to grips with ordinary living. John’s size, his loneliness and his precocious intelligence make him a borderline freak; indeed, the novel is all about borderlines, between sanity and madness, intimacy and cruelty, disaster and salvation. John’s favourite reading matter is The Guinness Book of Records; he pores over statistics about giants and midgets. He believes that his own special gift will qualify him for a place in the book; he can detect lies.
This isn’t some irritating magic-realism device. John can detect lies, because he is hypersensitive to subtle changes in body language. But the interest lies in his failure to interpret what he detects. The obvious comparison is with Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, in which autistic Christopher’s talent is to record absolutely everything he sees; the reader’s job is to make sense of the information. John Egan isn’t autistic but he is a misfit. He’s stuck in a classic Oedipal triangle which makes it impossible for him to form equal relationships with anyone and which leads the family to the brink of tragedy.
Carry Me Down is all about love, but it’s love hampered and distorted by suspicion, possessiveness and selfish blindness. John can tell when his parents are lying, but he can’t understand the truth — that his very existence damages their relationship with each other and with the outside world. As in The Curious Incident, resolution only becomes possible when the adults stop trying to change John, and learn to accept his awkward, intrusive presence.
M. J. Hyland explores the frighten- ing and unsavoury frontier land be- tween childhood and adulthood with unswerving sympathy and clear-sightedness.
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