Summary: the extraordinary nature of ordinary lives

Sam Thompson’s first novel, Nights in Armour, a fine account of the lives of peelers during the Troubles, had something of the seminal 1980s cop show Hill Street Blues about it. The Birthday Boys brings to mind a rather different television series, thirtysomething … though the Birthday Boys of the title are now closer to sixty than thirty.

Marine Boy, Fred, Carp and Dougie were friends at school in Belfast and have kept in touch over the decades, making a point of meeting for birthdays. Their lives have meanwhile diverged, sometimes wildly. Through them Thompson explores everything from marriage and bringing up teenagers to homophobia to war. The opening chapter’s visceral account of combat on Las Malvinas during the 1982 Falklands War put me in mind of some of Norman Mailer’s descriptions of battle in The Naked and the Dead.

Inevitably, lives spanning nearly sixty years accumulate their share of tragedy. But even at its bleakest, The Birthday Boys holds to a hopeful idea: that apparently ordinary people can rise to moments of heroism, and even the most despairing life can be redeemed.