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.

Orchid Blue

We braved the arctic freeze to do a quick shopping run to town this morning on 4 miles of untreated road. It's been -12 to -15 the last four nights, with the day time temperature not getting about -3 or so. As a result, the six inches of snow that fell last weekend are still here. That might not seem so bad to people used to such weather, but it rarely drops below freezing in Ireland and we are set for our coldest December since records began. Travel over the past few days has turned into chaos. The trip into town gave me an opportunity to duck into the local bookshop and pick up a copy of Eoin McNamee's Orchid Blue, which has been picking up rave reviews (e.g., The Irish Times and The Guardian) . Looks like it might be a seasonal break reading five Irish books in a row, not four. Looking forward to this one, as the other McNamee book that I've read - Resurrection Man was very good.