A man finds his stepdaughter in her bedroom upstairs. She is crouched on the floor, her lover lying in bed, both shot. An undertaker confirms that the young woman has recently paid £200 for a burial plot. She also purchased a firearm.
You could be forgiven for thinking that this, the opening of Eoin McNamee’s eighth novel The Bureau, is the bookend beginning of some classic noir thriller. Think Double Indemnity. Much of McNamee’s considerable art does owe its timbre and chiaroscuro to that genre. But this is not LA of the 1940s. It is a housing estate in Drogheda in the late 1990s. And the story is true.
McNamee has established himself as one of the leading anatomists of the Troubles and the Border’s crepuscular hinterland, most notably in Resurrection Man (1994) about the Shankill Butchers, and the brilliant Blue is the Night (2014) awarded the Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award. He takes real events in all their horror and beauty, and doesn’t so much fictionalise as mythologise them.
The Bureau, however, represents a significant development to this mode. Yes, the story once occupied the tabloids’ front pages: cross-Border drug lord Paddy Farrell shot by mistress Lorraine who then turned the gun on herself. But the author’s own father, Brendan, is also a central character, the disbarred solicitor who props up the lounges of El Paso and launders mob money via a backstreet bureau-de-change in Newry. And so too eventually, albeit more peripherally, is the author himself, Brendan’s son “Owen”. It is an exhilarating turn, not remotely confessional, but nonetheless bringing the routine minutiae of violence ever closer to home.
The real border is the nebulous terrain between fiction and truth. The Bureau loosely falls into the modish category of “auto-fiction”, whereby experienced events from an author’s life are presented with the detachment of story. McNamee is not remotely coy about this element of the work: the first sentence of the prologue, quoting a letter from Farrell to Brendan, references the latter as “my father”. It is the first and last moment when the hand that is writing, the speaking self, references its presence.
Thereafter, the story is Lorraine’s, her attraction to Paddy, the five-sevenths of his week given to her. And the wayward company kept: Brendan and his own mistress Jean who had “something of death about her, a cold and damaged erotics which could take a man like a craving”; “Mad Dog” McGlinchey, no less, and his pious missus; and even disgraced detective Owen Corrigan, who got his start in the force and his nickname “the corduroy kid” from my own detective grandfather.
McNamee has to be, on a sentence-by-sentence level, the author of some of the most beautiful prose being written in Ireland today. And that’s saying something. In moments, the narration apes Capote-esque “true novel” reportage, paraphrasing newspaper articles and inquest citations. In others, the omniscient narration takes on a sort of low-church biblical oratory reminiscent of McCarthy or Proulx.
Every page has a phrase or whole passages to take away the breath of any attentive reader. Paddy is “a man out alone in the bleak ranges of his calling”. Brendan ultimately is portrayed as someone who was not themselves bad but rather who “liked to concern himself with badness, badness in people and badness in things, and if you fly with the crows you get shot”.
[ Eoin McNamee: ‘The ghosts of airmen have always been with me’Opens in new window ]
Lorraine is some creation, so three-dimensional and credible and ultimately deeply sympathetic. To inhabit her vision this thoroughly is a remarkable achievement. Strangely, it is only when we shift into Owen’s perspective that the impact is arguably less convincing. This is especially strange since it is the author’s experience, the fiction’s most auto part. In one chapter, Owen is kidnapped as punishment for his father’s financial misadventures. There is even a bogus staged execution. And yet, what should be most harrowing gets glossed over and scarcely inhabited. Does experience become imaginatively alien to us for having been experienced? Is there a greater intimacy to make-believe?
[ The North Road: A short story by Eoin McNameeOpens in new window ]
The post-Brexit era has seen countless pronouncements pertaining to the Border, mostly from characters with zero grasp of that upon which they are pronouncing, eggheads who’d get a nosebleed if they ever came near. To be blunt.
McNamee is, by contrast, one of its greatest laureates. If you’re interested in what the Border truly means, read this exceptional novel and all its author’s back catalogue. The Bureau’s action happens in a porous stateless gloaming, in Ravensdale or Jonesborough, without needing to reference the invisible line crossed from one to the other. The Border is not a place. It is a felt thing, a force field, a state of mind.
It isn’t a map location. There are no co-ordinates. It is a razor wire on forest margins. It is a beach where the drowned are washed up ... It is guard posts spaced at regular intervals with minefields between ... It is a sentry lighting a cigarette. It is a dog barking in the night.
Conor O’Callaghan was born in Newry and grew up in Dundalk. He is a poet and the author of Nothing on Earth and We Are Not in the World
