Blue Is the Night by Eoin McNamee review – 'Haunting noirish ghost story'
"Y
our heart's desire is to be told some mystery. The mystery is that there is no mystery." So says Judge Holden, the monstrous antagonist of Cormac McCarthy's seminal anti-western Blood Meridian. As Holden has it, man is a predator, his "civilisation" a bulwark erected to conceal a nature it can never truly subdue. We divide territories and build walls to convince ourselves the enemy lies beyond our gates. But the enemy is already always inside.
Just as McCarthy's work assumed the tattered genre apparel of the western to interrogate the founding myths of modern America, so McNamee (below) mobilises the tropes and conventions of the period crime novel in order to expose the marrow-deep, age-old enmities that will bring the divided society of 1950s Northern Ireland to the threshold of its own era of extendedly bloody transformation.
As in McNamee's two previous novels in his "Blue trilogy", the narrative of Blue Is the Night is set in train by the notorious true-life murder of a woman, in this book the 1949 killing of Catholic Mary McGowan by a Protestant handyman named Robert Taylor. Attorney general Lancelot Curran is determined to see Taylor hang. Harry Ferguson, Curran's ally and backroom fixer, knows that a guilty verdict would exacerbate public unrest and immolate Curran's political career in the process. Curran, an inveterate gambler, dares Ferguson to protect him from his own impulses. And so Ferguson begins a relentless campaign of jury-rigging, intimidation and collaborating with the defence in order to ensure Curran's case fails and Taylor eludes the noose.
Along the way Ferguson strikes up a slow-burning flirtation with Curran's wilful 16-year-old-daughter, Patricia. The subsequent murder of Patricia Curran in 1952 (fictionalised by McNamee in 2001's The Blue Tango) propels the novel's second narrative strand. With Patricia dead nine years, Ferguson visits Curran's mentally unstable wife, now incarcerated in Hollywell asylum, in a belated attempt to salve his conscience. Ferguson has come to believe that the Curran family know more about Patricia's death than they are letting on.
What follows is a noirishly knotted tale set over two distinct time periods, encompassing madness, perversity, and a multitude of betrayals familial, juridical and political. Despite some frantic plot-juggling, the book never loses sight of its true grave subject: man's pathological compulsion to hide what he is from himself.
Along with a shared thematic seriousness of purpose, I invoke comparison with McCarthy because of his stylistic influence. Though as clean-lined and direct as any classic crime writer, McNamee routinely switches to a biblically cadenced, deliberately anachronistic register reminiscent of the American author. The following sentence is typical: "Harvey remained standing, looking out over the city, his face pinched and vehement, his knuckles white around the glass, as though he expected cohorts of the dead to rise out of the darksome streets and ride down innocent and guilty alike." The progression from matter-of-fact description into dread atmospherics may test some readers' patience for the portentous, but such rhetorical flourishes are essential to McNamee's method.
That sentence's supernatural note is apt, for Blue Is the Night is a ghost story, too: a "ledger of the dead", an "almanac of the damned". "There are other worlds," one character fearfully notes, her psyche beginning to splinter under the weight of an incipient madness, and even the professedly worldly, callously pragmatic men lost in their power plays cannot keep the ghosts at bay. Early in the book, Ferguson and Curran plot Curran's election to a local constituency seat. Gesturing to the nearby cemeteries of Milltown and Dundonald, Ferguson says they will register the citizens interred there in order to pad out the vote, assuring Curran: "The deceased might have finished with life but it hasn't finished with them."
He is half right. Over a decade later, Ferguson is being relentlessly pursued by ghosts of his own; as McNamee convinces us in this haunted and haunting book, the dead are never quite through with the living.
Colin Barrett's Young Skins is published by Jonathan Cape.