The Ghosts of Belfast [ペーパーバック]

THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST, the first novel by young master wordsmith Stuart Neville, is by turns bleak, gut wrenching and tense. Haunted by the spectres of the twelve victims whose blood he has on his mortal soul, ex-IRA hitman Gerry Fegan must appease them by murdering the men who ordered their deaths. Nothing less will suffice. The fallout from Fegan's bloody expiations threaten to disrupt a fragile country barely on the mend.

THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST breathes with you - it's unnervingly vivid and merciless, sparing you nothing of ex-IRA hitman Gerry Fegan's burden of pain, guilt and weariness. Page by page, you feel Fegan's struggle with his past colleagues and his own heart strain his very sanity.

Neville has an instinctive sense-of-place in his writing that hearkens back not only to Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man but also to the writings of legendary Texas writers Rolando Hinojosa-Smith and Cormac McCarthy. Having never spent any time in Ireland, I not only saw and heard Armagh and Belfast, I felt, deep in the marrow of my bones, those cities' war-fatigue, wariness and fear of plunging back towards the black abyss of loathing and violence; I chafed at the hot hate festering within those for whom the past is an ever-present and unending prison of the mind and heart, even while the younger generations move past them towards hopeful futures, seemingly oblivious to past bloodshed, knowing nothing of the shudders of sudden bomb blasts.

Make no mistake, THE GHOSTS OF BELFAST surpasses its genre. It is a truly stunning debut wrought by a young master of rare talent, insight and truth. No one gets away clean here, including Fegan. I've cut my teeth on the best published works of writers like James Ellroy and Don DeLillo. I have every confidence that young Mr. Neville is superbly capable of joining their ranks in due time. This books'dénouement and ending left me stunned, surprised and nearly in tears.

Most highly recommended.

A lot of what the author, Neville, writes in "Ghosts of Belfast" rings very true to me. I'm not a native of Northern Ireland (or the "North of Ireland," "Ulster," "the Six Counties," or "the Province") but I have read a lot about the violence there that seems to have mostly wound down. I've also been there multiple times, and while I certainly didn't hobnob with paramilitaries, I met at least one former one and I suspect met a few others whose status I didn't know. I've also visited the Maze Prison --to interview someone for a book I wrote about an incident that took place a looong time ago.

So I'm not a naif when it comes to Belfast and the IRA. A lot of this book is brilliant...the notion of an IRA man being haunted by the ghosts of those he killed has almost Shakespearian overtones to it. The plot crackles with energy and the dialogue rings true (at least to this American).

But the book has one flaw that I found myself getting increasingly annoyed about as it approached its conclusion. It depicts all of the IRA men (or shall we say "former IRA men") as weak, cowardly, corrupt, psychotic, or sell-outs. One threatens to kill a woman and a little girl to save his life. Another favors the brutal "sport" of dog-fighting.

I'm not a fan of the IRA. I know full well that that organization committed some appalling crimes and killed a lot of innocent civilians. Moreover, it's undeniable that the IRA --pretty much like any clandestine organization that engages in violence-- had its fair share of corrupt, weak, cowardly, psychotic, or treacherous members.

But let's face it...if the IRA had nothing but people like the ones in "Ghosts of Belfast," it wouldn't have lasted --in its most recent incarnation-- for thirty years despite massive British and Unionist/Loyalist efforts to squash it. It wouldn't have survived and reinvented itself into a political movement with large-scale influence in Northern Ireland and elected former members into the British Parliament.

So I'd say read and enjoy "Ghosts of Belfast," but for a more nuanced depiction of the IRA in a series of books that I think are without peer, try these three by Gerald Seymour.

HARRY'S GAME

Field of Blood

Journeyman Tailor

"All I wanted was some peace. I just wanted to sleep." - Gerry Fegan

Set in Belfast in the aftermath of Northern Ireland's Troubles, The Ghosts of Belfast introduces us to ex-con Gerry Fegan. Treated by the locals as a hero for his activities as a "hard man" during the Troubles, activities that got him sent to prison for twelve years, Fegan just wants to leave his past in the past and live out his life in peace. That, unfortunately, isn't going to happen.

The guilt of his own conscience weighs heavily enough upon him, but that is not the only burden Fegan has to bear. Shortly before his release from prison Fegan began getting visits. Not from friends or family, but from the ghosts of the twelve people he killed during the Troubles. Sometimes only one or two at a time, other times all twelve at once, when we meet Fegan it has been seven long years since his "followers," as he calls them, first came calling.

Tormented to the very edge of sanity, Fegan barely manages to do more each day than wander down to the pub, get drunk, go home and pass out, then get up and do it all over again. One night a friend Fegan used to run with before his time in prison comes to visit him in the pub. Now a smooth talking politician, Fegan's friend, McKenna, was once one of the men Fegan took orders from during the Troubles. Orders that led to deaths including one of Fegan's followers, the one he calls "The Boy."

As The Boy circles McKenna in the pub, miming putting a gun to his head and pulling the trigger, Fegan comes to believe that what his followers want - no, demand - is justice. The followers want him to put to death those responsible for ordering theirs. Ignoring the potential consequences of killing a politician crucial to the fledgling peace process, not to mention one still very much "connected," Fegan tests his theory by killing McKenna. Sure enough, The Boy disappears. And with that, all in the first fifteen pages, we are off and running. One down, eleven to go.

As Fegan systematically seeks to balance the scales, and hopefully save his sanity, the reader is given glimpses back in time to the circumstances under which each of his followers was killed. It's not pretty, as author Stuart Neville provides graphic descriptions of Fegan's past brutality as a hard man. And yet, one never gets the feeling that the depictions of violence are being used gratuitously. Rather, they are necessary to illustrate the events which gave birth to Fegan's extreme guilt, and which justify in his mind the extreme measures he's willing to take to rid himself of that guilt... and of his followers.

Part noir, part ghost story, The Ghosts of Belfast is unflinchingly brutal, completely original, and absolutely brilliant. Stuart Neville has most definitely announced his presence with authority.