The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville
My rating: 4 of 5 stars A Suspenseful Belfast Noir Western Seven years out of prison after serving a twelve-year sentence, the ex-IRA soldier/terrorist Gerry Fegan--a respected and feared Republican hero--is being haunted by twelve ghosts. Fegan's "followers" are people he killed during the Troubles. They coalesce from shadows to appear before him "big as life," looking at him and watching him pee and clamoring when he tries to sleep so that each night he has to drink himself into oblivion. The ghosts who scream the loudest are not the British soldiers or the Irish police but the civilians, like the boy he shot and the mother and infant he accidentally blew up. The prison psychologist said that the followers are manifestations of guilt, but they are so vivid and noisy that Fegan can't understand why people around him don't notice them. One of the neat things about Stuart Neville's suspenseful Belfast Noir novel, The Ghosts of Belfast (2009), is that because we spend much time in Fegan's mind, and because his followers start badgering him to kill the men who years ago made him kill them, and because he's otherwise so sane and sympathetic (wanting to do beautiful wood work rather than kill), it's easy to question whether he's crazy or actually haunted. Fegan's followers even start hinting what he should do in certain situations, as when the mother with the infant encourages him to accept a ride from the ostracized Marie McKenna after her uncle's funeral. In addition to Fegan's point of view, Neville also writes from those of different characters, like a reluctant Minister of State, a corrupt Northern Irish politician, and Fegan's double and foil Davy Campbell, a Scottish undercover agent infiltrating the IRA and post-IRA gangs for the British government. Both Campbell and Fegan were trained to violence like pit bulls (the analogy is implied at one point), and both are intelligent, alienated, and solitary--but while Fegan feels beauty and regret and yearns for a normal life, Campbell only wants to continue his dangerous double life, unable to envision anything else. There are potent moments in the novel: Fegan going for a walk with Marie and her little daughter Ellen in the botanical gardens; Fegan remembering when he met McKenna as boys about to be caned at school; Campbell reading Fegan's letter to his mother; Fegan watching Finding Nemo with Marie and Ellen; Fegan seeing moonlight on a mirror bay and wishing his followers could see it too; Campbell being surprised in Fegan's bathroom; Father Coulter taking Fegan's confession. . . There is fine writing in the novel, like "He turned his eyes to the ground where cigarette butts and old chewing gum, things people no longer wanted in their mouths, were trampled into the path." There are telling lines in the novel, like "People have long memories, especially when it's someone else's sin." Neville also writes savory Irish colloquial speech, as when Marie says, "There was this girl, a stewardess, looked like she'd been licking piss off a nettle." The book's depiction of contemporary Northern Ireland is interesting. Some of the men targeted by Fegan's ghosts are influential political figures whose deaths would jeopardize the precarious Northern Ireland peace process below which fester long hatreds between Loyalists and Republicans, Protestants and Catholics. Money is pouring into new real estate developments, and many more cars are parked on the streets and foreigners walking around than before, but even if things change, people don't, and the violence is never really over. Even as it's specific as to time and place, the novel depicts universal problems in human nature concerning history, power, money, love, violence, and collateral damage. It's a graphic and grim book but a poignant one, as when Fegan glimpses what normal life for normal people might be. Rather than a mystery (we know the killer from the start, and there's no detective to follow), the novel is a noir western. In a central idyll Fagan watches the John Wayne classic The Searchers. And later when he thinks, "Men like him no longer belonged here," it's easy to read Northern Ireland as a frontier city transitioning from the old wild time of violence, outlaws, and might makes right to the new civilized time of trains, politicians, and peace, in which the heroic man of violence has no place. Finally, Shane must leave Joey and his mother. At first the audiobook reader Gerard Doyle sounds a little monotonous, but he turns out to be fine at building intensity when necessary and excels at reading the voices of different people: Scottish, Irish, Oxbridge, male, female, adult, child, etc. (view spoiler)[ In the climax chloroform is employed too liberally and conveniently, Fegan doesn't comport himself enough like a formidable killer advised by ghosts, and--despite the "everybody pays in the end" theme repeatedly stressed in the book--he doesn't finally pay. Maybe he will in a future novel? (hide spoiler)] View all my reviews
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