Review of Orchid Blue by Eoin McNamee (Faber, 2010)

January 1961 and Pearl Gamble never makes it home from a dance at the local Orange Hall in Newry, Northern Ireland. The next morning she is found beaten, stabbed and strangled. The focus of the police investigation immediate hones in on local man Robert McGladdery, even though Pearl left the dance with another man, and returned to her neighbourhood with four others. McGladdery is a local wide boy, a natty dresser having returned from cosmopolitan London, who has a ready smile and quick humour, but somewhat of an outsider because of his illegitimate upbringing. He had been drinking most of the day before the dance, and seemed to be attracted to Pearl, taking three dances with her. Inspector Eddie McCrink has also returned from London and he is immediately uncomfortable with the investigation. It seems the local team have decided McGladdery is guilty and they’re prepared to make the evidence fit their case. And the town seems determined that he will hang for the crime. As do the authorities – the Attorney General and also the trial judge, Lord Justice Curran, who lost his own nineteen year old daughter to murder nine years previously and who has his eye on promotion to Privy Counsel.

The synopsis above sounds like a pretty good premise for a story. As I detailed earlier in the week, this is not straight fiction however. Rather it is a fictionalised version of the real Gamble/McGladdery case. Ultimately McGladdery was found guilty of Gamble’s death and he was the last person hung in Northern Ireland in 1961. McNamee then is exploring some troubling elements of the case through a fictional lens. The problem for the reader is that it’s not at all clear which elements are based on fact, which elements of the case are being challenged, and which bits are entirely fictional and imagined. Somewhat disconcertingly, large portions of the story are written in the style of a true crime book, with a dispassionate, distant and timeless voice, although in a much more sophisticated prose than in most true crime. For me, this style had the effect of leaving me outside the story, instead of being immersed in it. As a result, I struggled through a good portion of the book, though I did begin to feel more hooked in in the last third. Overall, I found this quite a difficult book to get into and I found the read quite disconcerting for the reasons above. Nevertheless, the case is an interesting one.

Rewriting history? True crime meets crime fiction

I’m about two thirds of the way through Eoin McNamee’s Orchid Blue. I’ve been struggling with it a bit. The voice is kind of strange, telling the story in a somewhat detached manner from a variety of viewpoints that leaves the reader (well this reader in any case) outside the story, instead of being immersed in it. This isn’t helped by knowing from the start the final outcome or the timing which flits around the case, even moving up to the present day through an unknown narrator’s voice. The thing that I’m trying to make my mind up about, however, is the fictionalisation of a real world event. Robery McGladdery was convicted of murdering Pearl Gamble and was the last man hanged in Northern Ireland in 1961. It’s not at all clear to me as a reader how much of the story is fiction, speculation and fact, and whether the story is underpinned by research and new evidence unearthed by McNamee. His version of events seems to run counter to the story as told in official accounts and Cold Blooded Murder by Patrick Greg in which McGladdery is clearly identified as the murderer, a verdict that McNamee throws into serious doubt.

Neither true crime nor pure fiction, I am left wondering the extent to which fiction should rewrite recent history, whilst providing no documentary evidence to justify or back-up such a playing with history? And I’m not sure where the boundaries are here. I don’t really have a problem, for example, with Philip Kerr dropping real life people from history into his stories (where it is clear he is using them in an entirely fictional capacity), or fictional characters being dropped into real life events when the history of the event is little altered. McNamee seems to be doing neither however – it is a fictional rewriting of an historical event. It’s neither true crime nor fiction. I’m going to think about this a little more, but if anyone has any views on the lines between history and fiction I’d be interested to hear them.

Review of The Twelve by Stuart Neville published by Harvill Secker (2009). To be published as The Ghosts of Belfast in the US by Soho Press

Tagline: Sooner or later everybody pays

I picked up The Twelve at the weekend in a great little bookshop, The Reading Room in Carrick-on-Shannon.

McGinty smiled. ‘Well, Michael, God rest him, was getting mixed up in things that he shouldn’t have. See, times have changed. Some of us – not all, but enough of us – want Stormont to succeed. On all sides. Us, the Brits, even the Unionists. This is a different world. The bombs don’t work any more. The dissidents put an end to that with Omagh. The people don’t tolerate the violence like they used. Then 9/11 came along. The Americans don’t look at armed struggle the same way. Used to be we could sell them the romance of it, call ourselves freedom fighters, and they loved it. The money just rolled in, all those Irish-Americans digging in their pockets for the old country. They don’t buy it any more. We’ve got peace now, whether we like it or not.’

Gerry Fegan is a republican killer haunted by his murderous past. A loner by nature, since he was a child he has been able to see ghosts of the dead – first his father and then, since his release as a ‘political prisoner’, the twelve people he shot or blew up in cold blood in the name of a united Ireland. Shadowed constantly by the twelve he tries to block them out with drink, keeping his head low, drawing the monthly cheque from his phoney peace job for services rendered, as the political landscape around him changes radically; former comrades in arms reinventing themselves as democratic politicians willing to share power with past enemies. Ghosts though are only exorcised by atonement, in this case eye-for-an-eye vengeance enacted on those that participated in their untimely deaths. Teetering on the edge of insanity, Fegan seeks redemption by turning his deadly hands against those that groomed and manipulated him as a young man, thus threatening to derail Northern Ireland’s fragile peace process. All sides want Fegan’s quest stopped, not least David Campbell, a British Army undercover agent who has his own dark secrets to hide, Paul McGinty, a scheming West Belfast politician addicted to power, Bull O’Kane, the ageing leader of the republican movement, and Edward Hargreaves, the British Minister for Northern Ireland who’d sooner be in charge of any other portfolio. The only people who seemingly want him to survive are Marie McKenna and her daughter Ellen. If he can keep himself and them alive whilst releasing his ghosts then Fegan might just redeem himself.

The Twelve has attracted a lot of hyperbole in recent weeks on blogs such as Crime Always Pays and Crime Scene NI and some glowing endorsements by the likes of James Ellroy and John Connolly. The release reviews have been equally enthusiastic praising Neville for his gritty portrayal of post-conflict Northern Ireland. And the praise is well merited. The writing is taught and economical, with each chapter crafted like a toned short story and the pages just kept turning. Neville balances excellent characterization with a deep appreciation of the politics, landscape and legacy of The Troubles; how the past casts a shadow of violence and distrust that the light of democratic politics can never fully erase; how while some people and places seemingly mutate in the name of progress their real nature and the scars of personal experience are never far beneath the surface. This is helped by using real places and some of the characters and scenes echoing real life people and events. For example, Bull O’Kane is clearly a thinly veiled Slab Murphy; the riot near the start of the book is still a semi-regular occurrence often reported on the news. Despite his regrets, his inner torture, and his obvious fondness of Marie and Ellen and his desire to protect them from an unforgiving community, Fegan is an anti-hero that is difficult to have sympathy for given his murderous life. That said, his history and character are wholly believable, as is the plot, with its politician gangsters, corrupt security services, and scheming civil servants seeking to create a status quo that enables all of them to maintain their own power and covert operations. Indeed, Neville does a good job of exploring what happens after a war has all but ended, and the ongoing legacy of lies and double deals, the fear of past wrongs being exposed, and the desire to move to a new order whilst maintaining the old hegemony.

Of course, Neville is not the only novelist to portray Northern Ireland in the peace and reconciliation period, and other excellent examples include Divorcing Jack by Colin Batemen, Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson, Resurrection Man by Eoin McNamee. The Twelve is a strong addition to that set, covering the situation in the post-Good Friday Agreement/post-Omagh period and into the era of the Northern Ireland Assembly and power-sharing. It is a must read for anybody who wants to understand the complexities of maintaining peace in a post-conflict society. I’m still trying to make my mind up about the novel’s end, but it’s definitely a book I’ll be recommending to friends.


Stuart Neville’s website