To answer a question posed in the Daily Telegraph, Austin Duffy’s fourth novel, Cross, is not “the worst novel ever written about the Troubles”. In a field crowded with contenders for such a dubious accolade, the tale of Francie battling against an emergent reactionary strain within the republican movement in south Armagh does not even come close. It is, in fact, quite good.
“Our Francie” is introduced almost from the get-go; the familiar address of the unnamed narrator betraying a kind of affection for the man who, despite the evident pride he takes in his grisly work as Brigade OC, is sensible and stoic; occasionally even likable. We come to understand Francie as a man of habit and discipline – one who doesn’t drink, works hard to preserve his double life as a customs officer, and who pays attention to the various idiosyncrasies that define the inhabitants of his local community with the same meticulous attention to detail others might give a game of football. He takes a perverse enjoyment in the fact that he and his enemies share a silent, unreciprocated intimacy, at one point even attending the funeral of a man he set up for murder.
Duffy is at pains to make us understand the sociopathy of this, careful though he is not to paint Francie as indulging too publicly in his perversion. Rather, he prefers the quiet touch. “Triumphalism was simply not his thing,” we are told, and it’s this restraint that makes him both feared and respected among the other combatants. A Michael Corleone figure not given to extravagant shows of emotion one way or the other; just a quiet acknowledgment that the job has been finished. That it has been well done.
The pervasive atmosphere of Border-town lawlessness is rendered astutely – putting one in mind of Michael Hughes’s excellent Country or Luke Cassidy’s debut novel Iron Annie – but like Francie, Duffy’s writing engenders subtlety above all else. This is because he knows that to overcook his scenes would be to detract from their essential believability. This is no easy thing. For every Eugene McCabe or Eoin McNamee, who have captured something beautiful about the Border region’s unique psychogeography, there are a hundred other hackneyed profiles filled with snickering insinuations about backward locals and sheep-shagging reprobates. Which is to say that Duffy’s Cross could only have been written by someone familiar with the area. Someone with a stake in its portrayal, who observes with closeness and empathises at a distance.
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The flipside is that this striving for grit occasionally aims wide of the mark, and certain types of lawlessness are portrayed in a way that does not reflect the period accurately. Having grown up in south Armagh during the 1990s, I can say with confidence that the dealing of hard drugs was not only not tolerated; its prohibition was rigidly enforced by the threat of kneecapping or even assassination. Therefore, that a “f*ck-up” like Darren Donnelly – who is suspected of having turned informer – could operate a low-level drugs operation with the effective sanction, or at least tolerance, of the IRA almost borders on the fantastical.
I would also say that the lack of empathy inherent in most of the book’s characters could be mistaken for a kind of pessimism about not only the Border but Irish rural communities in general. Whilst it is true that certain communities in the North were under the thumb of paramilitaries for many decades, the way we encounter that fear and paranoia in Cross seems to indict civilian locals almost as much as it does the combatants themselves. Duffy’s novel seems to fail, at times, to address the fact that compliance often had as much to do with self-preservation and resilience against British state oppression as it did with small-town gossip and localised cruelty.
Nevertheless, these are quibbles; certainly not enough to condemn the book wholesale or ignore its many merits. It quickly became clear when reading Cross that Duffy is not going for sober realism; preferring instead the kind of hyperrealism so successfully deployed by Lisa McInerney in her Cork-set Glorious Heresies trilogy. The overall effect is one of tension and excitement, crackling dialogue and jet-black humour; a high-wire act Duffy pulls off over almost the entirety of the novel’s 300 pages. This doesn’t make it a classic by any means, though it is certainly deserving of being read and enjoyed, discussed for its attention to local detail and giving us a cast of characters who are not only memorable, but complex.
