I’ve always had a soft spot for those who struggle with social interactions but can perform brilliant mental arithmetic. My father, for example, was a shy man who often seemed surprised to be reminded that he had children (nine, in fact). He generally left parenting to my mother, and his instruction on the birds and the bees consisted of asking if I was “aware of the workings of the human reproductive system”. And yet, although he left school aged twelve, he would amaze me by converting complex fractions to two decimal places in his head faster than I could whip out a calculator.

So believe me when I say that I long felt an affinity with Elon Musk and his approach to solving the world’s problems by launching crazy calculations into action. My admiration hit new heights back in 2017 when as Tesla Inc boss he offered to fix the state of South Australia’s power crisis within 100 days or do it for free.  With much of the grid knocked out after an “apocalyptic storm” the government took him on. Musk won his bet, installing the world’s first mega battery bank, and getting SA back up and running. Much of the billionaire’s success stemmed from eschewing conventional approaches to apparently impossible challenges, even if the maths didn’t immediately stack up. So when he bought Twitter in 2022 for an insane $44 billion, many of us assumed there was more than just madness to his method.

Back then, Musk still came across as a truth seeker; his early decision to reverse Twitter’s deplatforming policy seemed a genuine commitment to free speech. In July 2022, shortly before taking over the platform, and after Donald Trump accused him of being a liar, Musk calmly replied that it was time for the ex-president to “hang up his hat and sail into the sunset”. Sadly, listening to his love-in with Trump on X last night, I realised that tweet was the last time I agreed with him. Musk posts on X five times more now than he did then, but these days his pronouncements are less about SpaceX and Tesla, more about showcasing his Trumpian views on immigration, Muslims and alleged election fraud. His new crusade is to rid the world of “the woke mind virus”. Little of what he tweets shows any care for fact-checking. During this week’s spat with Keir Starmer, for example, he reposted a fake news story about UK detention camps for rioters in the Falklands, before removing it without comment.

 It’s easy to see what’s in the bromance for Trump, whose campaign for re-election has stalled since Kamala Harris arrived on the scene. But it’s harder to know what turned Musk, the apparently moderate if awkward boy genius, into a bigot. Perhaps, on the basis that it takes one to know one, Trump was right about him being a liar. Or maybe crazy maths has just caught up with him: X is now worth less than half what he paid for it, and the company is suing advertisers for deserting its increasingly toxic brand (the right to free speech apparently only stretches so far). Meanwhile, Musk’s projections for SpaceX increasingly resemble science fiction and rely on us all buying Tesla robots at twenty grand a pop by next Christmas. His business bullishness seems starkly at odds with his fears that the human reproductive system my father mentioned is now faltering and civilisation under threat. It seems Musk’s real bet is on Trump winning the election. If that doesn’t pay off, he doesn’t need to worry: he can always join the millions of people his company intends on transporting to Mars.

I’m not renowned as a helicopter parent, but I still felt mild dread when my younger son departed for Boardmasters near Newquay last weekend with five schoolmates and 56,000 other festival-goers. Six sixteen-year-old boys post-GCSEs, what could go wrong? I freely admit that part of my foreboding was acute knowledge of how naughty my friends and I were at that age (some would say we never really reformed). I wrote about my qualms on Facebook and how my son had done no camping prep with just 24 hours to go (he had no sleeping bag, no mat, no decent-sized rucksack or provisions); cue hundreds of people telling me to relax and then recounting how they set off for the Isle of Wight Festival in 1979, or Glastonbury in 1984, with just an army surplus coat standing between them and the cruel fates. 

 “Yeah, chill your boots, Pelling!”, I said to myself. Although I couldn’t go so far as to turn my phone off at night, as I usually do. Perhaps it was just as well that I didn’t learn until Saturday afternoon about the unprecedented crowd surge on Friday night at the Point stage, after which seven people had required hospital treatment. Disaster expert Lucy Easthope posted on X that the organisers had “big questions” to answer. I messaged my son who took another five hours to reply: “I’m fine. Stop worrying.” The next day I got a message from a fellow mum saying someone had thrown a tent pole at her son and he’d had to have a gash on his head glued up by on-site first aiders. When I investigated social media coming out of Boardmasters I found there was a well-known phenomenon called “tent wars” at the boys’ camping site – known as “Jaws” – where people launched missiles at one another.

After my son returned home I learnt he and his mates had been a few feet away from the worst of the surge, which saw teens pressed into metal barriers and people falling on top of one another “ten at a time” and legs “snapped like twigs”. My son said most of the injured were girls with broken limbs, who had to be carried away by security. His group was right by a ten-foot speaker that toppled but, by some miracle, missed the crowd. He saved ’til last the detail that he too had been knocked down and hurt his leg, “but not badly”, even though other people landed on him. He cheerfully regaled me with these tales, while my head was churning with memories of the 2021 stampede at Travis Scott’s Houston concert that killed ten, and of the two women who died a year later at the Brixton Academy when a crowd pushed their way in without tickets. My boy was more focussed on telling me what a great time he’d had watching Stormzy on Sunday.

Perhaps we all have our youthful near-miss moments. One of mine was aged nineteen on a hillside in remote Tuscany around midnight, when my sister, two friends and I were beset by burly local men intent on getting into our tents and sexually assaulting us. We fought them off with tent poles and escaped by night into the fields, where we hid for an hour before sleeping fitfully under the stars. More recently, my older son had a guy pull a gun on him in a club in New Orleans, but managed to talk him down. In every generation, these escapes from near-doom become our seasoned travellers’ tales, more baroque with each retelling. But they have darkness and poignancy too, because of the instances, like those mentioned above, when for some tragic families there is no cheerful “happy-ever-after” outcome. Which is why I reserve my right to parental dread. 

Heart, Be At Peace is a sequel to Donal Ryan’s Booker-longlisted The Spinning Heart (2013), though it works perfectly as a gem in its own right. That said, with each chapter narrated by a cast of 21 different characters, it does require (and richly reward) an attentive reader to connect the intertwining strands of the story, involving a violent, small-town drugs gang that’s taking over a community near Limerick in Ireland.

Violence, and the attempt to wrestle with its impulses, threats or consequences, is the heated core of the narrative, starting with Bobby, a burly hero to many, if not to himself. When the book opens he’s becoming enraged by a drunk who’s disturbing his vigil by his mother-in-law’s hospital bedside and upsetting elderly visitors. Moments later, he observes, the drunk “never for a second expected my left elbow to meet his throat the way it did.” 

How to fight violence if not with violence? Bobby is a devoted husband and father and takes to carrying a rifle in his bid to break the stranglehold of the drug-pushers who park daily near the secondary school. “Every time I see Augie Penrose’s blacked-out Audi little bursts of light flash at the edges of my vision and something prickles and itches on my skin,” he notes, with a barely controlled fury that he fears makes him no better than his own abusive father.  

There’s even a literal ticking bomb waiting to go off, brought home by a captain in the Irish Volunteers, after it failed to blow up a British convoy in the 1920s. In the meantime, it’s holding up a corner of his son Mikey’s kitchen table.

Ryan’s understanding of human hopes and failings unfurls a rich tapestry of betrayal, deceit, shame and humiliation, countered by love, loyalty and friendship. Many of the characters yearn to be a better person than they are, and the uplift of this book is the way in which forgiveness and redemption sometimes break through – the heart’s peace of the title.

Stand-out characters include Lily, the white witch who pithily deplores her granddaughter’s ringleader boyfriend as “a ratty little fucker” whose family is “the sorriest pack of mangy dogs that ever pissed against a tree”. And Seanie’s wife pulls no punches when describing his one-night stand with a woman with “a face like a bulldog chewing a scorpion”, conceding that “she had a good body, I suppose. That’s all he could fucking see, boobs and arse and opportunity.”

 Ryan finds nuance and humour in his narrators, the one unrealistic note being perhaps each individual’s capacity for self-doubt; but why quibble when that soul-searching rings so deep and true? As one character confides: “Imagine being able to shuck off the weight of the past, the burden of all your sorrows, and walk the earth free, light-footed.”