"Belfast Noir": Book Review

The Noir series from Akashic Books proliferates, as cities around the world inspire writers to set tales of crime in them. Long into the selection process now, it's Belfast's turn. As co-editors Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville introduce this short story collection: "You can see Belfast's bloodstains up close and personal. This is the city that gave the world its worst ever maritime disaster, and turned it into a tourist attraction; similarly, we are perversely proud of our thousands of murders, our wounds constantly on display." So, these fourteen contributors, many who live in the city or nearby in the province, display their fictional characters, full of wounds and eager in many cases to keep inflicting more wounds, despite two decades of (relative) peace. No matter what, death beckons.

Part One, "City of Ghosts," opens with Brian McGilloway's story of undertakers, a logical cover for nefarious goings-on as certain men driving hearse and a coffin try to cross the border and back again. Lucy Caldwell's "Poison" refreshingly avoids death or corpses, and her account of daring schoolgirls fascinated by their language teacher and their former classmate, a few years ahead, who he left his wife for, turns awry in convincingly matter-of-fact fashion. Lee Child's "Wet With Rain" captures the haunted quality around Great Victoria Street. Ruth Dudley Edwards' "Taking It Serious" sidles around dissident republicanism, and its appeal to those who look to the generation of executed rebels in 1916 and after as their heroes, to the discomfort of the established republicans who have largely accepted the status quo in spite of their regular parades and graveside rhetoric to the contrary. While many stories here seem as if the speakers could have lived anywhere in the English-speaking world, her story feels despite its contemporary setting as if from an earlier time that Sean O'Faolain might have conveyed.

"City Of Walls" looks at divisions within Belfast. Gerard Brennan's "Ligature" squints around the city through the disoriented eyes of an unsteady young woman who winds up incarcerated after a series of desperate actions throughout a city half-gentrifying, half-divided. In this realm which his novels have long detailed in impressive fashion, Glenn Patterson's "Belfast Punk REP" typifies his ability to capture the fractured psyche of some in Belfast, through the career of a disreputable ugly fellow nicknamed Milky, who also winds up behind bars. Ian McDonald, known for his fantasy and science fiction, here offers in "The Reservoir" a story of revenge, inflicted after a rival's daughter's wedding.

In the third part, "City of Commerce," Steve Cavanagh's "The Grey" roams the court system, a setting otherwise if tellingly largely skirted by his fellow contributors. Claire McGowan in young P.I. Aloysius Carson may have a protagonist who can outlast the foes arrayed against him; the winningly plucky and self-deprecating hero draws the reader into his adventure to track down the owner of "Rosie Grant's Finger." Another enduring if fictional hero outside these pages, Karl Kane, in Sam Millar's "Out of Time" returns to inflict mayhem and utter hard-boiled dialogue in reliably pulp fashion. Garbhan Downey's "To Die Like a Rat" compares a testy rodent's fate with a human victim.

Finally, entries in "Brave New City" feature fresh takes on the drama of dead bodies. Known for his "Resurrection Man" (1988) novel dramatizing some of the most brutal of the thousands of contenders for murder in Belfast, Eoin McNamee's "Corpse Flowers" uses the ubiquity of CCTV and surveillance installed in the city to set up a haunting, elliptical story. Arlene Hunt's "The Game" turns the tables on some who make sport out of the torment inflicted on those unable to bear it, and like all three stories in this concluding section, it ends suddenly and effectively. Last of all, Alex Barclay's "The Reveller" starts with comeuppance of Paddy the Publican and ends in an unsettled state of mind.

Not every story hooked me all the way through, for a few dragged, whatever they may have tallied in pages. Still, while some did not capitalize on the Belfast setting or its complex heritage as much as I'd have expected, the mix of those troubled by the sectarian past and present for their actions and those who were more disturbed by the conventional motives for revenge and retribution that crime fiction and fact thrive on in any city make for a generally satisfying contribution to this ongoing Noir series.
(11-3-14 to Amazon US)

"Where the Body is Buried": Jean McConville's case

My friends Anthony and Carrie McIntyre have been interviewed, among many others, in the current issue (dated today) of The New Yorker. Patrick Radden Keefe delivers, in an article lengthy even by that magazine's standards, them in a feature about the death of Jean McConville. "Where the Bodies Are Buried" examines what is known--or revealed, a key distinction--about the abduction and execution of this widowed mother of ten. In December 1972, living in the formidable stronghold at the start of West Belfast, Divis Flats, she was accused of having succored a wounded British soldier at her doorstep, and of having harbored--twice according to some testimony which is disputed in this piece--a transmitter to aid the enemy, the forces of the Crown. Of course, by then they were engaged in a street struggle against Republican operatives. Some are asked about this mission, the treatment of McConville, and two now deceased, Dolours Price and Brendan "the Dark" Hughes, have had their testimony (or its partial lack, in the former case), scrutinized by scholars and activists and operatives.

Gerry Adams and Billy McKee as PIRA insiders, journalists Suzanne Breen and Ed Moloney, son Michael McConville have their say. Keefe, near the conclusion of what is still an open-ended subject, cites one who knows: "'It’s not over,' Anthony McIntyre told me. 'It’s still a very dangerous society.”'
Caption to photo: "Archie and Susan McConville tending to Jean McConville’s grave, at Holy Trinity Cemetery, outside Belfast." See more context on this case at McIntyre's project The Pensive Quill.

Éamon Carr's "Deirdre Unforgiven": Book Review

As a musician and poet, Éamon Carr came to prominence in the Irish counterculture in the late 1960s, and as drummer for Horslips, he memorably created lyrics blending the Ulster Cycle and other Celtic tales into hard-charging or softly lilting music. Now, he returns to these inspirations, but, in the intervening decades, the impacts of Northern violence, itself recapitulated, mythologised, and raw, darken this play, subtitled "a journal of sorrows".  For, during the 1990s, Carr as a journalist revisited places he had toured as a musician, and he heard new stories of strife, vengeance and suffering again.

In a spare but eloquent style, Deirdre Unforgiven by its title conflates the tragic protagonist, enslaved and compelled to wed lusting, selfish usurping King of Ulster Conor, with what I sense as an echo of Clint Eastwood's compellingly and similarly haunted anti-hero, himself unhinged by lost love and simmering sorrow. As Professor Shannon McRae's preface and Carr's introduction explain, these verses adapt Yeats' Japanese Noh ritual to drama. Enhanced by John Devlin's drawings, this is a pairing well suited for Carr (see his 2008 poetry collection and homage to Basho, The Origami Crow [my review]); here he conveys through the stripped-down incantatory recitals of ancient Greek tragedy the structure for his bleak ritual scenario.

Taking place in the "uncertain time" just before dawn (itself redolent of suggestion in charged Irish rhetoric) a triple Chorus precedes a Young Man, a reporter, fresh from an eerie conversation with a crow-like figure on the Shankill. The Chorus and the Old Woman, the Celtic goddess of war the Morrigan, fill out Deirdre's backstory "of yesterday's news that is heard too soon". Meanwhile, the reporter recalls as of 1999 yet "another bad day at Drumcree" between marchers and protesters.

The ghosts of Deirdre and of the unforgiving ruler over Ulster, Conor, masked as is the Old Woman, tell their side of the saga. They reveal Conor's thwarted frustration and Deirdre's desperate elopement with Naoise. Deirdre arises to warn: "There will not be enough mourners to lament/ those who fall" but as the Chorus speaks for so many witnesses: "They listened/ and dismissed her concerns".

Opening the second scene, the Young Man recounts more victims: footballers caught in a blast, a grave for one who died too young, three boys at home as they slept blown up by a petrol bomb. Deirdre bewails her passion for Naoise, for it blinded the pair: "we didn't see the blight".  She tells of her doom after that of Naoise and his brothers, and as she collapses, the Old Woman continues her tale. The Chorus repeats the triple spiral of lore: "Pure black banner/ Pure blue sky/ Pure red blood". Conor's desolation and the reporter's despair combine, for both lack words to assuage their torment.

The Young Man, in a very Yeatsian image of how the off-kilter past whirls into the present, sums up their predicament: "Somewhere, whip in hand, a laughing child/ sets a wooden-top spinning./ Now ask,/ for this world to keep turning/ must we all,/ each one,/ hear the lash sing?" Silence follows.

Deirdre chose to fling herself on a rock, to dash out her life rather than submit to Conor. Her defiance, commemorated by a memorial tree "that when the wind blows/ sings of infinite sadness", represents the capitulation of the female to the male, the injustice perpetuated by the cocky and headstrong over those perceived or outfoxed to remain weak. The Old Woman, no stranger to this anguish for she herself embodies its mythic atavistic force, concludes: "For wherever there are dead men/ that's where you'll find me./ My wings forever wrap the fallen/ who so wanted to be free".

Carr's play invites no easy resolution. As Yeats did, so does he. Deirdre Unforgiven presents a stark reminder of the brutality behind the cant, and the cost incurred by too glib a chant or rousing ballad.
(Slugger O'Toole 11-15-13. British Amazon 11-15-13 and Amazon US 11-14-13 all without OC link)

Colin Broderick's "That's That: A Memoir": Review

While the phrase popularized by Seamus Heaney "whatever you say, say nothing" endures as a code for Northern Irish character toughened by the Troubles, Colin Broderick's telling of his childhood reveals the language unspoken. He gives us a glimpse at those in the IRA who were never by necessity singled out by their supporters, but who carried themselves with an air of entitlement, entrusted as they were by the Catholic community with their protection and their idealism in a time when those with whom they shared a village's main road or shops or those in a market town kept a distance, Protestant petrol stations and pubs for some, Catholic ones for others, and outside of a terse greeting, no acknowledgment or admission that could betray confidences to the occupying enemy and the long-settled watchful neighbor both.

Broderick, born in 1968, raised when virginity still was expected and when the Church still dominated, tells in many instances a familiar tale. He details cutting turf and picking potatoes memorably; he comes of age into sex and brawling the way many have in his rural circumstances in County Tyrone; he emigrates only to return to the hard choices that push him off the island for good.

While some of this for all his cautious balance of intimacy and tact moves his story along as expected in respectable but not astonishing form, he intersperses the device of having his family react to the BBC news reports of atrocities to convey the span of time and the intransigence of the war in his native land. This efficiently tells the reader when the chapters are occurring in a roundabout manner, freeing the narrative from chronology. However, a spirited first ten pages of Irish history in revisionist fashion surprises--Patrick comes full of "retribution" for the humiliation endured as a slave, and overthrows the comparatively preferable Celtic way of life for what soon is suffered as "a good dose of Christian shame, humiliation, and fear." (3) The collusion of the papacy with the English Crown weakens the native resistance long before the Reformation forces the natives to remain loyal to Catholicism as a badge of defiance against those who plunder, inflict, and subdue. Their own form of terror, by Broderick's infancy, sparks a violent and determined reaction from his fellow friends and cousins.

The tension grows as the war surrounds him, and while he never overplays this, or pumps up his own attitude, he demonstrates convincingly his resentment of the British and the local people--often part-time paramilitaries--who collude to control the IRA in its burrowed-in, subversive rural heartland. He lets us witness how year by year, those who become victims in the attacks and reprisals circle closer to his hamlet. Finally, the Loughgall ambush (or SAS set-up?) kills among the eight IRA operatives the two youngest, whom he knew well. This will lead him to make a deeply moral choice.

Earlier, after a harrowing incident not unfamiliar to any farm lad, he reflects on the costs of death. "We lose our childhoods by degrees. Inch by inch, time and circumstance steal the last of our innocence. Some of it will fall away unnoticed; some will be ripped forcefully from our fingers, other morsels of it we will bury in shallow graves, until only the shadow of youth exists, drifting in our wake like an abandoned ghost." (114-115)

"Perhaps that was the real mark of maturity, I thought, finally deciding which mask suits you best, and wearing it." (165) The beat between "best" and the final phrase shows Broderick's timing and pacing, He prefers to reflect, pause, and continue, sifting his memories to study and analyze them after he narrates a passage from his past.

"You just acted and spoke accordingly, never betraying an iota of your interior dialogue, even in a whisper to your closest friend, and then you had nothing at all to worry about." (348) His sangfroid after a harrowing examination by British army at a border checkpoint, in the company of an IRA higher-up who takes into his own wary confidence the trusted local youth Broderick, remains his studied pose. After a well-described chapter detailing his selling hash, working as an apprentice electrician on construction sites in London, and squatting there along with the "Tyrone clan," one prepares for his prequel-as-sequel, Orangutan, which details his stint indulging himself and working the similar trade in Manhattan, after he emigrates.

The reason he does ends his follow-up memoir, which he had to tell. "I was living in a society that demanded my silence, but I needed to talk this childhood through. I needed to scream it at the top of my lungs if I was ever going to get to the bottom of this noise. And if I survived long enough to get to the bottom of it all, to understand myself more clearly, perhaps I would not have to raise my voice at all." At nineteen, already drinking, already made the hard man by necessity in Tyrone among his McClean clan and on the sites and in the pubs of North London, Broderick leaves for America. I will certainly seek out the second half of his life, previously published, and I welcome this writer's voice.
(Amazon US 6-4-13; Slugger O'Toole 8-6-13)

Tony Bailie's "A Verse for Murder": e-Book Review

This cover merits study--it's well chosen and ties into the mystery elaborated by an informant. The title, a play off of the "murder of crows," echoes in the name of Barry Crowe, a Belfast journalist (or is it "sleazy tabloid hack"?) pursuing the backstory behind the sudden demise, apparently by auto-asphyxiation, of Northern Ireland's leading poet. The compromising circumstances unfold neatly in this e-book novella.

Bailie, whose novels The Lost Chord and Ecopunks delved into respectively gnosticism and New Age quests, continues his application of Celtic and esoteric themes into his fiction. As a Belfast-based journalist (and a poet), he enjoys sending up his profession(s) and their shared pretensions. His short story "The Druid's Dance" in the anthology Requiems for the Departed by Irish mystery writers incorporating Celtic myth and archetypes anticipates the mood and tone of this new tale.

Reviewing a mystery, one cannot give much away. The blurb at Amazon sums up the premise enticingly. It's not betraying the story to admit that the set-up elaborates into, over 74 quick pages, an entry into the symbol of the spiral and the Triple Goddess of Celtic lore. Drawing on, in my "guesstimation," theories of spacetime and the earlier attempts of Irish writers Denis Johnston (The Brazen Horn) and Francis Stuart (The Abandoned Snail Shell) to plunge into the liminal, the results for Barry recall those of the warp-spasm of Cú Chulainn, and the cosmic terror that seems to cross generations and centuries as Bríd, Andrea, and Alma enter the lives of Barry and his cop pal Dervla.

Phrasing sharpens: "curtains all along the street begin twitching in a semaphore of suburban noisiness" updates Brinsley McNamara's once-famous novel about a gossiping lot, in the "valley of squinting windows."  Rowan Tree "looked like a poet should do, elongated body, gaunt face, exploding hair and eyes that suggested insanity." Another, once-promising, poet's eyes "retained the primal urgency of someone who wanted to say something but had no idea of how to say it."

Futurist couplings of poetry as violence, "sexual electricity," a jealous bard Rowan Tree's curse in verse, hallucinogens, nods to Robert Graves and pagan rituals still alive today in the heart of the city: these exemplify the details Tony Bailie adds to enrich his narrative. If you find this enticing, you will find this efficiently conveyed but pleasingly allusive tale a pleasure. I'd like to hear more from Barry.
(Amazon US 10-31-12 and British Amazon; slightly edited and expanded for Slugger O'Toole 10-22-13. P.S. See also my brief review the same day of his electronically delivered short story "Sacred Santa" on Amazon US and British Amazon)

Andrew Wilson's "Swingeing London 67(f)": Book Review

When you listen to "We Love You" by The Rolling Stones, it opens with a jail door slamming. When you look at the cover of Sgt. Pepper, the Beatles included, at the suggestion of Mick Jagger's art dealer, Robert Fraser, a sweater with "welcome" for the "good guys" the beleaguered Stones, knitted across the chest of a Shirley Temple doll. The jail was where Fraser was sentenced in the summer of 1967 for cannabis possession, to six months. Keith Richards faced the same term; neither he nor Mick Jagger, also charged with Fraser, would serve time as they appealed. Meanwhile, Jagger's looming three-month sentence (reduced to a "conditional discharge") earned more attention, sympathy, and opprobrium.

William Rees-Mogg's famous editorial on Mick in the London Times ran with the leader "Who Breaks a Butterfly on the Wheel?" Fraser merited, Judge Black reasoned, a stiffer penalty as the Eton-educated, King's African Rifles veteran came from a good family, and the court sought to make him an example of "swinging" London. The pun, obscure to non-British eyes and ears, depends on "swinge": to beat or scourge. The media martyrdom of Fraser, and by extension the flamboyant Jagger, compelled their "friend and collaborator" Richard Hamilton to make the pair's gesture--hands flung before faces as the camera intrudes on their mobile incarceration, uneasy speed shuddering to a flashbulb's halt-- into Pop Art.


On June 27, Fraser and Jagger had both been found guilty in court. After a night in Lewes Prison, the pair, handcuffed together (Jagger also being shackled to a policeman), were photographed by John Twine for the Daily Mail. This snapshot became the basis for a dozen images manufactured by Hamilton over the next five years. 

Andrew Wilson, a curator at the Tate Museum, places Hamilton's series in the context of "history paintings" created out of photography and collage. As a noun and verb, collage centers Hamilton's work. The titular painting's "source is a reproduction of a photograph from a newspaper, and the painting describes a passage from photographic emulsion to screen-printed half-tone, and then to authorial marks using paint." Wilson locates in the result "a collage made up of the associated shifting codes, intentions, meanings, and readings-in of different materials, and it demonstrates the ways in which these materials can be manipulated and presented." 


Hamilton in the 1950s had pioneered Pop Art: the "expression of popular culture in fine art terms." His definition, for Wilson, expands into political critique and ethical assertion. The outrage by those in the conservative sector at drug use compelled the court to crack down and repress the stimulants that fueled sexual license and immoral indulgence. The outrage by those in the counterculture contingent sparked the media and celebrities to speak out and acclaim these same stimulants, in the Summer of Love. The police raid at Redlands, the Sussex country estate of Richards, involved twenty officers in an early morning bust that revealed "Miss X," Marianne Faithfull, clad in only a fur coat. Lurid tabloid headlines followed. News of the World had campaigned to take the Stones down, and after the home invasion in February 1967, it appeared their publicity might have worked--only to backfire as sympathy spread for Mick and Keith.


These tabloids, cut and pasted, entered Hamilton's collages. Wilson documents Hamilton's career before and after the Fraser-Jagger images, and his work for The Beatles (aka The White Album) represents well his insight into the fragmentation of that band rooted in the recording of that double LP, and how the remote, austere cover and title played off against the accessible poster inside, framing four separate individuals rather than the Pepperland band (and wax figures) of the previous year. This contrast of distance and familiarity continues throughout Hamilton's painting. While the Stones did not fall apart under their own pressures, they courted excess and danced with their own devils. As a sympathizer, Hamilton supports their stance, and Wilson sustains it as an art historian of the period.


While most of the book attends to the context of the painting series itself, peering into the larger display reveals telling details. Wilson makes asides that deserve study; he compares Swingeing London 67(f) to historical paintings of tormented Renaissance figures and religious works of persecution. Conflating martyrdom with a drug bust may seem at a critical distance to conjure up its own overheated rhetoric, even as Wilson places the works within an "ethical purpose"--but for this curator, the serious nature of Hamilton's ideological mission overrides the satire or mockery in the Stones, the counterculture, or for that matter, any assault by those seeking liberation against the state.


Wilson presents a scene of entrapment as he reads Hamilton's photo-painting collages. Emulsion breaks down and the images melt into instability even as they are frozen on the canvas. Fraser and Jagger in the police van suggest the speed beloved by rock music, by Pop Art, by the Sixties sounds and looks and attitude. The courthouse nears. The van slows, and the policeman beside the pair overshadows them. Behind the van, one window shows a tree and a glimpse of nature. The other, a wall. Freedom contrasts with detention. Those who celebrate celebrity as part of the sex and drugs culture must be captured. As the decade intensifies, the dream of liberation meets its waking moment.

Later works explore similar clashes. Wilson includes and comments on two political paintings of particular note. In 1983, The citizen depicts Hugh Rooney, an I.R.A. prisoner at Long Kesh (aka The Maze) in Northern Ireland, during the "no-wash blanket" protests demanding that the British grant Irish republican inmates political status. The feces smeared by such prisoners on their cell walls, as they refused to wear uniforms for criminals or to leave their cells due to beatings by guards, work themselves into grimy, textured swirls, recalling patterns in the medieval Book of Kells or the ancient Newgrange spirals etched into neolithic stone.

Treatment room, in the next Orwellian year, shows a television with intransigent Margaret Thatcher's face beamed on a television, perched and glowering over an empty hospital bed in a mixed-media installation modeled on a radiography room. An orange blanket, half-folded, half-discarded, drapes one corner of a cheerless cot. Wilson does not mention this, but I envision a veiled reference to the prison protests by the blanketmen, and the deaths of hunger strikers a few years before, echoed in this desolate display. 


Similarly, although Wilson ends his short study with a quick look at the Joycean epiphanies (as the Cubist depiction of the "Oxen in the Sun" chapter shows deftly in the artist's etching-engraving In Horne's house) within Hamilton's works, he does not address the understated, suggestive title of the more politicized Northern Irish-themed painting. If, as Wilson asserts, this artist seeks to capture how "the ephemeral has become eternal" then the ambiguity of naming a painting about a rebellious, perhaps quixotic, struggle against Thatcher's state and the British crown fifteen years after the drug case of Fraser and Jagger appears evident. Wilson looks back at the angry anti-nuclear protests which roused Hamilton to work earlier in the 1960s, and his artistic incorporation of the "later consciousness of a depressed society" after the end of the hippie dream. But the Tate's interpreter blurs the bonds between Hamilton's work preceding and following the images that cohere in Fraser and Jagger as the foundation for his analysis of this Pop Art provocateur.

An I.R.A detainee who stands up defiantly in a filthy cell invites a defiant reaction from a British audience. James Joyce in Ulysses distrusted Irish nationalism and its republican extremists; his portrait of a rabid Irish-Ireland predecessor to the bearded rebels and shackled convicts who filled Her Majesty's prisons earlier and later last century in that modernist epic did not give the parochial rabble-rouser any name but "The Citizen". Placed alongside the titular sequence from the Swinging Sixties, the aftermath of revolution not confined to the mind or body but against the state appears to demand more connections drawn, within Hamilton's works over his career, beyond those centered in 1967. Hamilton took on Kent State's shootings a few years later; one is left wondering about the man behind the works depicted to, alluded to, or noted in passing. This book attempts to cover Hamilton's career, yet its editorial adherence to analyzing one work draws an uneven perspective upon its 111 pages.

While you learn nearly nothing of the artist as a young man, and you are left wondering about his roots and earliest influences or later life, the concentration of focus on an iconic work is intended as part of a series designed to single out an artist's signature creation as shaping history. End notes and a sample of Hamilton's oeuvre may entice readers to learn more about this culture clash embodied in his series on another version of jailhouse rock. This title should remind viewers of popular culture how much contemporary musicians and artists owe to the marriage of these two genres in documentation made representation by such keen-eyed participant-observers as Richard Hamilton.(Amazon US 4-24-12; published with the illustrations of the "Citizen" and "Treatment Room" at PopMatters 4-20-12)