Wild Houses is a 2024 novel by Colin Barrett, nominated for the Booker Prize.

Sometimes in writing a review I feel constrained by the idea of a spoiler. You mustn’t give too much of the plot away because it will interfere with someone’s reading pleasure. Every book is a production of The Mouse Trap where some post-script figure will get up on stage and implore the audience not to give away who did it.

Anyhow, this is all by way of introduction to a novel with the sort of thriller feel where you’re wondering how things will work out. Ironically, however, the setting is a world where nothing much happens, the sort of place where people lead monotonous lives, maybe repeating the experience of their parents, going round and round a daily grind without moving on.

Events unfold in the Irish town of Ballina and its surrounding countryside. Cillian English has landed himself in trouble with some drug dealers. He hid a stash in a field, but the field flooded, the drugs were destroyed, and now he owes the dealers for their value. In an effort to extract this money from Cillian, two local hard men kidnap his younger brother Doll, and hold the boy hostage in a remote house. Will Cillian get the ransom together in time? Will Doll be saved?

I won’t tell you what happens to Doll, but it is ironic that this book is structured in a series of reverses, showing what happens, and then going back and describing how we got there. So the story has internal spoilers of its own. There is also a central character who has given up on anything to do with waiting to see what happens. Dev owns the remote house where Doll is held captive. Dev is massive in stature but quiet in personality. He suffered bullying and depression at school. His mother has recently died. He likes to be alone even though loneliness is bad for him. His only contact with the outside world is through the drug dealers who have insinuated themselves into his life, using his property as a safe house.

So without giving anything away, what have we got here? We have a beautifully written book, with sentences describing a man’s face as a ‘derelict church,’ dawn skies becoming ‘blue and clean as the ring of flame from a gas stove’, and crockery in a dishwasher portrayed as ‘jangling dentition’. It is very good at picking out little details, rather than focusing on a big picture revealing itself. Maybe there is no big picture.

The biggest spoiler is perhaps finding out that despite your hopes, nothing much will happen. Cillian has a little box of sand and a few stones which he calls his Zen Garden. ‘Game changer’ he says picking up a little rake and smoothing the sand. Cillian’s Zen Garden is a silly little thing, but it does suggest something important in this book, the tension between waiting for something to happen, and giving up on it, between what you might call peace on the one hand, hopeless inertia on the other. Wild Houses is really an exploration of this conundrum. It offers the reading pleasure of anticipation, while also having a wider quality that makes a book valuable long after you find out what happens.