This is excellent - a terse, tense, almost incidentally evocative piece of writing. It's told through the eyes of eleven year old John Egan, who is intelligent, opaque, and disturbed, and the narrative takes on those hues of his character with a sustainedness and a plausibility which is extremely impressive. It's difficult to get a handle on, but it's also thoroughly gripping from the first paragraph - Hyland eschews simplistic 'explanations' (both explicit and, the which is more difficult, implicit) for her characters' actions and thoughts, or for the circumstances of their subsistence, and also avoids straightforward or obvious resolutions to any of the (sometimes familiar) event-structures she throws up; she embeds in the fabric of the novel the same commitments evident in its content; the characterisations and plot strands are deliberately incomplete, and this incompleteness serves an important function in the whole.
It's odd. The book that Carry Me Down most reminds me of is The Catcher in the Rye, which I didn't particularly enjoy when I read it, and the details of which are by now very unclear in my mind. But a trace of the way it made me feel has stayed with me, evidently, and been reactivated by Hyland's novel. I'm not sure what it is, really. But it seems to me that there's something quite remarkable about Carry Me Down, in its apparent simplicity and deeper, murkier currents, and most of all (and wrapped up with all of that) in the way it completely inhabits the mind/world of its central character and pulls the reader along, almost claustrophobically, with him all the way down.
