Re-reading
Resurrection Man about a decade after it
appeared, it holds up well. My earlier impression
after my initial immersion into its dark corners
was one of grisliness, but on re-examining McNamee's
debut (hard to believe, that), I realise that what
truly makes the narrative so powerful is the withholding
of such gory details from the reader. The omniscient
voice does shadow in and out of various characters
(to more or less similar effect—his the novel's
main drawback in its monotone, if also its noirish
strength), but since the characters keep the horror
at a distance, so then do we, as spectators.
This
detachment differentiates McNamee's take on Belfast
from the farce of Colin Bateman, the humanity of
Glenn Patterson, or the tragi-comedy of Robert MacLiam
Wilson, to name his able peers. Atmospheric in a
manner that conjures up a sodden city as grim as
Dickensian London, this fits a period that now has
been obliterated under new skylines, regentrified
waterside developments, and tenuous ceasefires.
Based on Lenny Murphy and his Shankill Butchers,
the crimes they commit are not so much the focus
as the aura they create, and live haunted within,
as the Ulster rhetoric they pay lip service to is,
as the perpetrators know, no cover for the deeper
violence to which they pledge their true allegiance,
even if they cannot fully articulate it.
The
subplot of the journalist Ryan, his estranged wife
Margaret, his contact Coppinger, and the "moll"
Heather gets a bit murky, as if McNamee did not
want to fully explore the supporting characters
circling about Victor Kelly. It's a little disappointing,
and feels incomplete. The lack of range of registers
in many of the indirect narratives of the main characters
makes for a sameness in tone that works well in
smaller doses, but over a couple hundred pages gets
a bit wearying. This may be McNamee's intent, as
the style—suffused with homiletic cadences
and half-remembered biblical starkness—recalls
both Joyce's Dubliners ("scrupulous
meanness") and Beckett's street denizens in
its carefully modulated detachment.
I was eager to read last year's new novel The
Ultras, a fictionalisation of Robert Nairac's
not very successful undercover operations in South
Armagh during the height (or nadir) of the Troubles.
In an excellent paragraph, a famous photo snapped
of Nairac with a sneer amidst a crowd of Ardoyne
children is examined to reveal the operative's hapless
patronisation of the 'natives' even as he boasted
of his ability to assume disguises, accents, and
false identities. The murk into which not only Nairac
but his colleagues known here as Ultras poisons
all who plunge into the grime and grit McNamee describes
with precision if not passion. The murder of the
Miami Showband and dirty tricks campaigns by British
psy-ops also darken the scenes, as McNamee shows
he has again done his research. As with Resurrection
Man, he takes an actual figure and surrounds
him with characters investigating him whose lives
slowly unravel and decay.
McNamee's
good at this genre. In the near decade since his
first novel, he has lightened his epigrammatic if
sometimes ponderous style here a bit to allow greater
verisimilitude. His sonorous pronouncements, borrowed
perhaps from the crime genre and here incorporated
into more mainstream, if still quite edgy, popular
fiction serve as both the author's strength and
crutch. The conversations and the reflections of
(again) an largely omniscient narrator keep the
reader (again) at quite a distance from the events
being shown. The switching back and forth between
Nairac's career leading up to 1977 and the later
recording of Agnew's attempts to make sense of Nairac's
fate from a vantage point 25 years later allow,
unlike as in Resurrection Man, a chance for
the incorporation of a more expansive storyline
upon which McNamee can allow a greater array of
secondary characters and events to emerge more leisurely.
Although
the book is not much longer than his first novel,
it feels more epic. Getting out of Belfast into
the countryside as well as onto the bases where
the Crown seeks to infiltrate the loyalist rogue
gangs and sabotage the republican cause makes for
intriguing reading. Where the book falls a bit flat
is, as in the first novel, McNamee's insistence
on once more giving us an investigator whose marriage
falls apart amidst the search. But now, he has an
anorexic daughter as well as an re-married wife
to contend with. While the daughter's musings make
for a welcome change in McNamee's linguistic register,
her fate seems too pat to fit in as a parallel to
that of Nairac.
This
book also alludes in a sentence to 'journalist John
Parker'. In fact, this writer penned Death of
a Hero on Nairac in 1999. Obviously, Parker's
title tells you all you need to know about the bias
of that biography, but I did find it another clever
way for McNamee to show he has done his swotting
up on the mysterious figure, who here seems a would-be
James Bond who at times plays more like Austin Powers—if
less groovy, than equally insensible to how his
act plays among the more knowing spectators.
[Both
novels have been issued 2004 in paperback by Faber]
