That’s how ex-Sunday World journalist Paul Williams described South Armagh and the border roads around it. While amusing, there is a smidgen of truth about it.
This notion of the border area as one haunted by the weight of history and the ghosts of smugglers past form the building blocks of Eoin McNamee’s new novel.
I’m on record as saying that Resurrection Man is the greatest novel ever written and an influence on my own books so a new tome from McNamee is always welcome. While there’s been the odd dud along the way, he is a singular voice in Irish fiction. Combining the weary nostalgia of hauntology, the dirt of crime fiction and the repressed horror of folklore, his best books are a portal into an Ireland always in a state of becoming but never progressing due to forces both innate and alien to us.
The period that The Bureau explores is an interesting one in modern Irish history: Veronica Guerin had been murdered after reporting on the antics of John Gilligan, Jerry McCabe was killed by the Provisionals (whose ceasefire had ended a few months beforehand) and the Criminal Assets Bureau had been set up in haste as a response. Meanwhile, according to Kevin Sheehy (former head of the RUC Dugs Squad), in order to ensure that there would be no chance of a Sinn Fein member being linked with illegal border activities, the IRA made a conscious decision to sub-contact out “franchises” along the border where others could take up the reins as long as they paid a hefty commission. The old school criminals were getting rich from the proceeds of drugs (particularly whenever the ceasefires kicked in) and newer, more hot-headed ones were coming to the forefront.
An untapped moment and one ripe for exploration.
At the centre of this book is the affair between border criminal/drug dealer Paddy Farrell and Lorraine Farrell (no relation) which ended in a bizarre murder/suicide in her parent’s home in Drogheda in September 1997. Nearly 30 years ago! Then I was an eager and naïve 11-year-old who had just started secondary school. I turn 40 next year!
Unsurprisingly, McNamee conjures up a thick, dark and brooding atmosphere throughout, where people unwittingly act out pre-designated roles in a noir tale. Take the following as an excerpt:
They drove away from the hospital, rain driven across the rear window as Owen looked back through the rain-tossed branches of the boundary trees, the hospital locked down for the night, Brendan not sleeping, the father in him awake and abroad in the corridors and hidden spaces, abroad in the vagrant dark. Picking his way through memory the way you’d pick your way through the streets and avenues of a burned-out city.
Notice how Owen and Brendan are both fighting they way forward, one through the back roads at night and one through the never-ending hospital corridors with bright white lino? Quite the contrast.
The story ticks along at a decent pace and plenty of time is given to the idea of the border being a kind of conduit for the darkness that lies in the hearts of those who would choose such a lifestyle. Images of shadowy figures, unexplained shootings and clandestine alliances haunt the pages and the effect is utter McNamee.
So far, so great.
Where the reader might feel queasy is the use of real names such as Dominic and Mary McGlinchey, Brendan ‘Speedy’ Fegan as well as the two Farrells, in fiction that draws heavily upon real life incidents and then attributes thoughts and actions to them as if they were historical fact. Of course, the likes of McNamee and David Peace have been operating in such terrain for years and, indeed, speaking at the Crescent Arts Centre in 2011, McNamee is reported to have said that he often feels himself to be divorced from any sense of social responsibility when it comes to the merging of fact and fiction. As one observer commented, this stand-off between literature and historical interrogation is depressing, and such candid views show that proponents of the ‘fict-story’ genre are generally free to duck any difficult questions about their work.
McNamee has defended himself by saying:
You question your right to suborn people’s lives to make art. You can say that it is a sin and you shouldn’t do it. Or you can say that these people can’t break the law of God and man and then dictate the consequences, whether that be prison or a bullet in the back of the head. And if one of those consequences is a young writer watching and listening, gathering material for a book unknownst to himself, then what of it?
Considering that there is now a lawsuit in relation to a particular segment in the book, it’s a reminder that dealing with recent events and people who are still alive in a fictional context brings one or two moral quandaries that the writer must grapple with.
Although certainly up to McNamee’s high standards, questions linger on.
Eoin McNamee, 2025, The Bureau: a gritty tale of love and death in Northern Ireland. riverrun. ISBN-13: 978-1529440423
⏩ Christopher Owens was a reviewer for Metal Ireland and finds time to study the history and inherent contradictions of Ireland. He is currently the TPQ Friday columnist and is the author of A Vortex of Securocrats and “dethrone god”.
According to Wilde, "Life imitates art far more than art than art imitates life". It will be interesting to see which way the law court's judgement falls on this.
ReplyDeleteTangentially: Mulgolland Law is going to have a busy schedule now representing Conor McGreggor in his appeal to the Supreme Court and also representing James Lawrence in his case against Nikita Hand.
Liam O Ruairc comments
ReplyDeleteIn his The Bureau article, Christopher Owens attributes to McWilliams the expression "Sicily without the sun".
In fact it is Henry McDonald who coined that expression in his 2004 book Colours: Ireland Bombs to Boom, see pp.183 ff