Review of Ratlines by Stuart Neville (Harvill Secker, 2013)

It’s 1963 and Otto Skorzeny, the legendary leader of the German commando raid to liberate Mussolini from an Italian mountain top in the Second World War, is living in Ireland, using it as a base to coordinate a series of ratlines to aid his former Nazi colleagues escape to new lives.  About hundred or so ex-Nazis or their collaborators are thought to reside on the island and someone has started to pick them off, one-by-one, leaving messages for Skorzeny.  The German, however, is very well connected politically and he convinces Charles Haughey, the Justice Minister, to investigate the cases and protect him.  With President Kennedy about to arrive in the country, the last thing Haughey wants is Ireland’s sheltering of war criminals becoming public.  Haughey orders Lieutenant Albert Ryan of the Directorate of Intelligence to undertake the task.  Ryan is a former commando himself, having served with the British army.  He reluctantly takes the case, seeking to protect a man he has little empathy for and as the case unfolds he finds himself not only battling the forces ranged against Skorzeny but his own conscience and government.

The strengths of Ratlines are the characterisation, plot, contextualisation, and pacing and prose.  Neville revels in tales of conflicted, outsider characters placed in difficult circumstances.  The lead character in Ratlines is Albert Ryan, an Irishman, but also protestant who has served in the British army fighting the Germans, who has some sympathies with those administering justice to Nazis on the run.  He thoroughly dislikes his mission of protecting Skorzeny and the politics underpinning it, but he’s prepared to do his duty.  However, when all around are using you as a pawn with little regard for your well-being or justice, fulfilling that duty stretches resolve and loyalties, and Neville very nicely explores such tensions.  Moreover, by using real events and characters, such as Haughey and Skorzeny, and capturing some of the social constrictors of 1960s Ireland, Neville firmly embeds Ryan and the story in the political landscape of Ireland of the time.  The result is a thriller that is not simply framed as good versus evil, but is much more textured, nuanced and ambiguous.  The prose is tight and expressive, and the story rattles along at a fair clip.  Overall, a thoroughly enjoyable read. 

Review of Collusion by Stuart Neville (Harvill Secker, 2010)

Bull O’Kane, paramilitary leader and master criminal on both sides of the Irish border, has been reduced to a bitter old man living in a convalescence home run by his daughter due to an entanglement with Gerry Fegan, a former IRA man who turned on his former comrades. His pride seriously dented, O’Kane wants Fegan and everyone who witnessed his demise to be wiped from the face of the Earth. To that end he hires The Traveller, a compassionless assassin, to kill everyone present on his farm the day Fegan wreaked his deadly havoc. Killing O’Kane’s former employees is relatively straightforward, but Fegan, Maria and her daughter, Ellen, have disappeared. Only Maria’s father is dying after a stroke, meaning she’s likely to break cover to travel back to Belfast to see him before he dies. And if they travel back, then Fegan will inevitably be drawn back to protect them. The troubled Inspector Lennon has his own reasons for wanting to see them, as Maria is his former partner and Ellen the daughter he barely knows. Aware that his daughter might be in danger, Lennon is desperately trying to track them down, his own colleagues trying to divert and slow his progress.

At one level, Collusion is a fairly straightforward thriller – The Traveller hunts down O’Kane’s victims and Fegan and Lennon try to stop him. It rises above average fare though by being a multilayered tale with noir sensibilities – no real heroes or neat resolutions, just people with complex, troubled and intertwined histories. The writing is excellent, with well constructed prose and scenes. The characterisation is strong and the plotting sound, with pages flying by as the end nears. I would have liked a bit more backstory and time with some of the characters, and a little more plot elaboration in places, but that’s just personal taste. And, although it’s not essential to read The Twelve, Neville’s previous novel first, it would certainly help as just about all the characters in Collusion first appear there and this is very much a sequel. Overall, an entertaining read, with the best opening scene I’ve read for a while. Whilst there are a pack of Irish crime writers flourishing at the minute, it’s not clear if one is going to break free and join John Connolly in the mega-sales league. Stuart Neville may well be that writer on the strength of his first two novels.

The Lazy Sunday Service

My head is still reeling a bit from attending the Kildare Readers Festival yesterday. I thoroughly enjoyed the event, learnt a massive amount, and met a bunch of very interesting people. I’m still trying to decide whether it’s better to talk before or after a really great speaker. I followed John MacKenna, who writes well crafted prose and can orate it beautifully. I write functional prose and am going to have work on the reading. I went too fast and perhaps naively chose to read from the very start of the book, rather than selecting a particular passage. I also went on too long. Tricia Groves had picked three short, really strong passages to read that worked very well to give a sense of the characters and the book in general. Dermot Bolger, who hosted the panel, did a superb job of keeping things light, finding connections, throwing in amusing anecdotes, and asking good questions.

In the early evening I got to spend a bit of time chatting with John Connolly and Stuart Neville, who were both good company. And their session was great entertainment. John Connolly really knows how to work an audience, providing well thought out answers inter-dispersed with anecdotes and funny asides, and if you have the opportunity to go to one of his signings I thoroughly recommend it. He doesn’t so much present a reading as give a performance. Stuart asked some interesting questions to open things out and they had a grand old natter about ... stuff (I’m not even going to try and summarize – stuff covers it). John is probably exhausted at this stage; due to the ash cloud instead of flying to Scotland, he got a taxi at gone ten o’clock to Larne (about 3 hours drive north) for a ferry leaving at 7.15 this morning to make a lunch time gig. To my surprise I got mentioned twice, John saying that he thought that The Rule Book was a ‘fantastic read’, which really made my day – one, that he’d read it, and two, that he’d enjoyed it. After the signings, John set off and I sat in the bar until nearly one o’clock chatting to Stuart and his partner, swapping yarns. Great stuff all together.

My posts this week:
Review of The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death by Charlie Huston
Academic blogging event
Stakeout: Short Story
Dezoning disputes
Review of The People's Manifesto by Mark Thomas
Kildare Readers Festival
Promo trailer for The White Gallows
300,000 reasons to wonder about the world

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