Product Description

On a promontory jutting out into the Atlantic wind stands the home run by Brother Benedict, where boys are taught a little of God and a lot of fear. To Michael Lamb, one of the Brothers, the regime is without hope, and when he inherits a small legacy he runs away, taking a 12-year-old boy with him.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #38108 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

About the Author
Bernard MacLaverty lives in Glasgow. He has written four collections of stories and four novels, including Grace Notes which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award. His most recent story collection, Matters of Life and Death, was published in 2006. He has written versions of his fiction for other media – radio plays, television plays, screenplays – and wrote and directed the short film Bye Child which recently won a BAFTA award.

Customer Reviews

Rare, and Well Done
Lamb is a great book - extremely short (you knew I was going to say that) and bitter and bleak, but full of life and humanity too. And if that's not banal enough to get on the cover of the next edition, I don't know what is. It's the story of Michael Lamb, aka Brother Sebastian at a children's home in Ireland where "boys are taught a little of God and a lot of fear." Lamb takes one of the most vulnerable boys, Owen Kane, away from the brutalising atmosphere of the Home to try to improve his start in life. The callous pragmatism of the Home, run by Brother Benedict, is exemplified in the scene where he beats Owen for painting graffiti on the wall outside, because it ends with the word "OK" - Owen's initials.

"You know and I know," says Brother Benedict, "that we could never find the real culprit. By now the boys know that punishment has been meted out. It may deter others from doing the like again, for fear their mates get it."

The Home is pretty much like that: lots of punishment and not many laughs - although the first chapter is notable for the now legendary man-polishing-glasses-looks-like-he's-masturbating, a gag most recently stolen by Peter Kay in Phoenix Nights.

So outside the Home, it is a great relief to Lamb and Owen to discover happiness of a sort, albeit tempered by money worries and the encroaching search for the "kidnapped orphan." Nowadays we would say abducted, and it's a testament to the relative naivety of the times 20 years ago that nobody (seems to) suspect Lamb of being a paedophile.

But happiness is short-lived, as you know it will be from the moment you meet Owen - as tragic as his namesake Meany, and as underdeveloped and vulnerable, with a dose of epilepsy thrown in for added tearjerking value. The end of the book, which is too strong even to hint at, is powerful and plausible, and horrifically, terrifically moving.

Haunting and beautiful
Save this book for the winter and curl up in the warm to read it.
A bleak, stark, cruel but poignant and utterly compelling read awaits you. The beautiful relationship that develops and the climax of tragedy will move and inspire. I cried solidly as I read this and if you have a heart, I will bet that you will too.

The film version is also excellent and worth a look.

Lamb
Lamb, by Bernard Mac Laverty, is, at 150 pages, a short read, but its brevity serves only to provide a perfectly told story without padding or exposition. It follows the story of a young priest, Michael Lamb (or Brother Sebastian), who runs away from the Irish Borstal that he works in, takes a deprived boy named Owen Kane with him. But, as his money dwindles, news of the kidnapping closes in on them, and Lamb finds himself running out of ideas on how to save the boy's life, leading to a dark climax borne of both necessity and love.

Beginning in the Borstal, aptly referred as "a finishing school for the sons of the Idle Poor" by its head, Brother Benedict, Lamb observes this to be an accurate statement as he believes it finishes their lives, providing them with little hope for the future. Upon inheriting money from his father's death Lamb resolves to rescue Owen, a misunderstood - and epileptic - boy, often made an example of due his stubborn nature, and give him the life he deserves. They break for London, and spend their time exploring the city and discovering each other, until the time comes when they have so few options that Lamb is required to make the decision that will affect their lives, but he believes to be right.

The characters, throughout, are developed sufficiently to create your own impression of them; although Owen's character could have done with further expansion with regards to his life before Borstal. Lamb, especially, as you would expect a title character, is well conceived and his decisions, at all times, appear believable. Brother Benedict, a sadist at heart, claims that he "was belted black and blue myself what harm did it do me?" without realising that it turned him into the one now administering beatings. Even the fringe characters: conmen, housekeepers, and perverts have enough splashes of colour to make them plausible.

The writing, while not being flowery, is engaging enough to spin the narrative on, making it a book you are not likely to put down until completion. It's a thrill to read as the escapes bond with each other, but watching as their world of opportunity caves in around them. The underlying meanings and symbols that make the book special, the many inferences of the book's title, for example, raise the scope of the novel, adding further richness to it.

Lamb, for its length, covers a number of topics, but the theme that stands out, for me, is love; that, and the things you would do for it. Sometimes, you don't even know you are doing it, Lamb discovers while trying to understand the fugues of Owen's epilepsy. But it's the grim denouement of the novel that questions how far one would really go, and it's this that adds the pièce de résistance to a wonderful and haunting tale.