Book Review: The Voids by Ryan O’Connor

Honestly I thought this was written by the author of Just By Looking At Him, a book that’s been recommended to me but I haven’t yet read, but it turns out that author is Ryan O’Connell…

Despite that, this is a brilliant book and one that I knew nothing about so it was a nice surprise.

This book is about a derelict block of flats in Glasgow which is scheduled for demolition. We follow an unnamed young man who is struggling with alcoholism and drug abuse and is living within the condemned tower block.

The story is largely plotless, so it’s hard to give you much more of a sense of what happens other than that we follow our protagonist through his life, reflecting on his childhood, how he ended up where he is, and culminating in the demolition of the flats.

I think I need to provide my rating first to give some context for the comments I am going to make. I’m giving this 4 out of 5 stars.

It is an amazing book, beautifully written and there were even scenes which had me laughing out loud. That is practically unheard of for me because I rarely outwardly display emotions when reading. I found it so funny that I even read the scene out loud to my husband. For anyone that’s read the story or who goes on to read it, it’s the scene in the Chinese restaurant!

However, I felt that you can tell this is a debut novel. There were elements to the writing where I felt unsure about whether we were in the present or the past or quite what was going on. As this is literary fiction, you could chalk that up to being an expansion of the themes being looked at, after all our main character is almost always drunk or high and doesn’t really know what’s going on himself. But from a reading experience this left me feeling uncertain about what was happening. It felt to me like it needed a slightly more experienced writer to make this a 5 star read.

This isn’t a bad thing, my favourite author Naomi Booth, has a debut which doesn’t live up to her subsequent novels but I could tell in that debut novel that I was going to love her future work. And so I’ll be keeping my eye out for anything else that O’Connor writes.

4 out of 5 stars means this is one of my favourite reads this year, it’s not a bad rating! If you are interested in fever dream style writing, plotless novels, and novels which look at aspects of society that don’t often get written about, then this is a book for you.