You make a very good point concerning the two novels that I have read that there are “anchoring” events which touch all the characters and everything else (for all of them) revolves around those events or other that evolve from them as a consequence (even if that takes decades to play out). That is where I find your sculpting metaphor appropriate — for the characters, the process is not so much painting a picture of what those events represent but “unlocking” what is inside them. And, of course, each one finds something different to unlock.

I am also interested in the observation you make about Sextus. While I found both The Bishop’s Man and this one to stand just fine on their own, I think you have to have read the first novel to appreciate Sextus given your observation. He hasn’t left as much of an impression on me as he has on you but then I haven’t read the first novel.

I had the same issue about the present day hopping around that you did (and as I recall felt the same way with The Bishop’s Man). When there are so many flashbacks to different time periods in the novel, I thought it would be helpful if the framing present could at least be kept straightforward to supply some structure. For McIntyre to succeed, the reader really needs to be able to maintain focus on each of the characters (that’s where the similar/dissimilar observaton comes into play) — when you get distracted by wondering “what time are we in now” the whole thing gets a bit messy.

At 35 I suspect I am too young to get the most out of this novel: a lot of it is about being middle-aged and concerns about potency/impotency of one kind or another so is outside my experience, but there is still plenty in it that I did enjoy.
I especially like the way MacIntyre deals with truth throughout all three novels. Conor, in ‘Why Men Lie’ says that there is knowing something and then there is what you remember and that the two are not the same thing. That is certainly borne out by reading these novels. MacIntyre comes back again and again to three key events – the incident with Sandy and Angus in the barn in Holland; Angus’s implied abuse of Effie; and Sandy’s suicide on “The Day They Killed Kennedy” (the title of Sextus’s novel) – you read about these events so often in the books that you feel you know them backwards and yet with each new perspective you discover that there are actually lots of different truths rather than one big Truth and that it is impossible to definitively know what happened. But it isn’t even as simple as that: in ‘The Long Stretch’ John Gillis makes an observation about “how we hide from the truth, or let other things get in the way of the truth” and that is as relevant I think to ‘Why Men Lie’ – it’s not just about the lies we tell others, but the lies we tell ourselves.

Another thing I enjoyed about this novel and like about MacIntyre’s writing in general is his approach to his characters – some writers seem to work like painters in that they build up their characters layer by layer from nothing, adding more detail and light and shade as they go, whereas MacIntyre is one of those writers who works more like a sculptor (or an archaeologist maybe). Which is to say that it feels like his characters already exist entire but obscured and he has to chip away and chip away until bit by bit more of them is exposed, though of course he never reveals everything – there was still much left unsaid about all of them, not least JC and his violent streak and what he had or hadn’t done.

Kevin, you mention that for you the male characters tend to blur into one – I agree and disagree, though for me one voice sings out from all three novels and that is Sextus – for me he just springs to life off the page and is consistent throughout. Otherwise, it is not so much that the male characters blurred into one (I actually found them fairly distinct from each other), but more that MacIntyre only seems to know or write about one type of man. Maybe that is because his characters all come from pretty much the same background but for me there is a lack of diversity to his male characters which means that when he starts making sweeping generalisations about half of the human race (that men don’t change, that they all lie) it irritates me a bit.

I do also wish MacIntyre would write in a slightly more linear fashion. I’m happy for him to have flashbacks to the War or to the 1970s (and thank goodness he has started using italics, which he didn’t in ‘The Long Stretch’), but he has his main narrative go from Easter 1998 to Christmas Day 1998 to New Year’s Day 1999 and then hop back to three days after Christmas 1998 and then back to the summer of 1998, for no apparent reason. It wasn’t that I found it particularly confusing, I just don’t see how it added anything to the story.

Still, I liked this book, though I think I probably preferred ‘The Bishop’s Man’.