The First Day

August 21, 2017
Harrison’s deeply disturbing, morally challenging first novel opens as Samuel Orr, a married Belfast preacher, falls headlong into a love affair with Anna, a young poet and student of Samuel Beckett. Orr is a man of profound faith and Anna is a thoughtful scholar. Each makes a worthy partner for the other, and together they contemplate the absurd, mysterious world around them. The first pages track the beginning of their affair and are an elegiac tribute to love, to “that brief moment of continuity between two lovers.” But their transgressive love has tragic consequences. After Anna becomes pregnant, and Orr confesses to his wife and later to his congregation, knowledge of the affair will irrevocably change everyone involved. The book concentrates in particular on the suffering of Orr’s oldest son, Philip, and of his half-brother, Samuel, the love child, “visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children.” A calculated and violent vengeance is meted out by Philip in the first half of the book, and terrifying, creepy aftershocks continue to reverberate in the lives of the grown-up Samuel and his enfeebled father, living together in New York City decades later. Harrison’s remarkable writing elevates a story that is all the more powerful for its eschewing of easy answers and resolution.

August 15, 2017
Irish filmmaker Harrison's cerebral yet emotional first novel shows how a "brief moment of continuity between two lovers" can have stark and long-lasting consequences.In 2012 Belfast, deeply religious 38-year-old car mechanic-turned-preacher Samuel Orr, a happily married father of three young sons, falls into a passionate if unlikely affair with 26-year-old Anna Stuart, a Beckett scholar at Queen's University. Their sexual attraction burns with fervor, but Harrison also wants his readers to view the affair in philosophical terms with his references to Beckett and transgressive literary philosopher Georges Bataille. An academic intellectual with poetic leanings, Anna is drawn to the way Orr sees "no line between the sacred and the profane." When she becomes pregnant, Orr tells his wife straightforwardly about the affair while acknowledging that he doesn't know what he plans to do. He continues to see Anna yet remains stalwart in his faith in God and himself. Then Orr's wife dies--whether accidentally or on purpose is left unclear--when struck by a train. Orr's oldest son, 12-year-old Philip, begins to demonstrate a quiet fury against his father; Anna senses the boy embodies his father's sense of guilt. When Anna's baby, named Samuel after both Beckett and Orr, is almost a year old, Orr breaks off their relationship. Philip's rage against his father becomes psychological warfare that culminates in violence. Cut ahead 35 years to a near, non-science-fiction future. Philip has disappeared. Anna has become an accomplished poet and married an artist. Sam Orr works at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and has brought his father, Samuel, now a blind old man, from Ireland to live with him. One day Philip shows up at the museum, and the careful world Sam, a repressed gay man, has erected shatters. The three Orrs must face their capacity for faith, vengeance, and forgiveness as well as their bonds of family love. Despite the borderline pretentious discussions of philosophy and theology, Harrison's elegant prose and deeply felt characters create a novel with a fiercely beating heart.

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September 1, 2017

Belfast preacher Samuel Orr seems to embody the Gospels, with his honesty about his own failings and struggles with faith. But he shatters his family and upends his community when he has an affair and then a child with teacher Anna Stuart. The unexpected death of Samuel's wife devastates Philip, his eldest son, whose despair feeds into resentment toward his father. Affection for his half-brother Sam and a fragile friendship with Anna seem to afford Philip solace, but when he deliberately disfigures Sam, he slashes the veneer of equilibrium achieved between Anna and his family. Though Philip disappears, his crime defines Sam's life. Thirty-five years after the incident, Sam lives in New York and runs into Philip. Their encounter sets in motion a suspenseful and ultimately violent series of events that change both men and their father forever. VERDICT Screenwriter Harrison's absorbing debut will surprise readers with its ingenious plot twists and nuanced characters. Though compared with the work of Albert Camus and D.H. Lawrence, Harrison's cinematic first novel stands on its own.--John G. Matthews, Washington State Univ. Libs., Pullman

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