Resurrection Man/Marc Evans/1998

Resurrection Man/Marc Evans/1998

Arriving amid a welter of unfavourable reviews, and running for only one week, twice daily at UCI Tallaght, it would seem Resurrection Man, directed by Welshman Marc Evans, and scripted by Eoin McNamee from his own brilliant 1994 novel, never stood a chance of gaining any kind of audience acceptance in this country. (Whither the IFC, whither The Screen?) Which is a great pity, since it is perhaps the first screen representation of relatively recent events in Northern Irish history that has been made expressly for grown-ups. This is because, paradoxically, it is not really about violence in the North at all, but recognises that that violence has very little to do with the political and socio-economic context in which it takes place, but is more an immutable trait in individual human psychology, which would seek to find circumstances anywhere, any place, any time, that would help to sponsor and legitimise it. Thus a specific instance of aberrant and deviant behaviour is universalised, showing the arbitrariness of this particular set of origins.

    It has long been accepted that paramilitary groupings on either side of the so-called sectarian divide in Northern Ireland are little more than fronts for organised crime, who profiteer from extortion and protection rackets. But if the ideology and mythology of fighting for a cause can be used to cloak Mafia-style activity, it can also provide useful camouflage for various forms of psychopathology. In a recent piece in The Irish Times on filmic treatments of Northern Ireland, Fintan O’Toole criticised the character of the female IRA terrorist in Neil Jordan’s The Crying Game, as being little more than a dominatrix figure from male fantasy. But this was to miss an essential point of Jordan’s film, which is central to Resurrection Man too. For, if there is a politics of sexuality, there is also a sexuality of politics. If the desire to right wrong can be seen as analogous to sex in a loving relationship, then killing for the sake of killing can be seen as analogous to sadism. Killing to right wrong has long since had very little to do with the Northern situation, except where it can be exploited by vested interests. And just as these vested interests manipulate misplaced idealism, they can make equally good use of aspiring psychopaths. Of course, the distinctions get blurred, and it’s rarely as simple as that. How many freedom fighters know they’re psychos, and vice versa? And if the terrorist is the transgressor in the political arena, how transgressive are squaddies, who kill with the backing of a democratically elected government, but are really just Pit Bull terrier keeping, lager swilling, low rent de Sades? And if the sadomasochist is the transgressor in the sexual arena, how transgressive are many married couples, whose bedrooms are little more than minefields of dominance and submission? And how many of these sponsored supposed transgressives know they’re psychos, and vice versa?  

    Back to Resurrection Man. Stuart Townsend is excellent as Victor Kelly, capturing the fine balance of edginess and smarminess exactly right. The product of a household classically Freudian in its recipe for an extreme outcome, Victor is the only child of a doting, indulgent Protestant mother, and a weak, marginalised Catholic father. Brenda Fricker is outstanding as the adamant, vehement mother, a study in control and controlling. Victor soon finds McClure (Sean McGinley), who with his fondness for imperialistic anthems and Nazi memorabilia, helps to channel Victor’s anti-social tendencies. Heather (Geraldine O’Rawe) is Victor’s sometime girlfriend, and Ryan (James Nesbitt) a drunken wife-beating journalist who writes up the unfolding story of the knife murders for his newspaper, his interest as voyeuristic, a RUC officer points out, as that of his audience. Granted, Victor and his mother are the only two fully fleshed out characters, but this is a morality play, so cardboard cut-out ciphers will suffice to surround them, especially since that is how they view these people anyhow.

    The perennial cliched gripe remains, that the film is not as good as the book, the repetition of the various victims’ plea “Kill me, kill me” in particular loosing some of its hypnotic force when transposed from page to screen. But, as McNamee said in a television interview about adapting his novel for the screen, “The money’s good”. He also commented, in a seminar held recently in Cork, that the difference between writing a novel and a screenplay is that with the latter, at the end of the day you’ve finished a page. The deficiencies resultant on the shift from one medium to the other are ameliorated somewhat by the dark, fluid, grubby, rainswept look captured by Pierre Aim, the lighting cameraman who shot La Haine. The movie is violent, but given the subject matter, necessarily so, and is not gratuitous or exploitative. It is far from being the splatter fest some commentators have suggested, and is certainly no more violent than your average vacuous cops and robbers Hollywood flick.

    McNamee has also said that: “We have a moral responsibility to confront our history in this society. That’s what the film does and I think it does it responsibly.” But it also confronts the nature of violence in general. That Resurrection Man has touched a raw nerve in those from a loyalist background in the North can be gauged from playwright Gary Mitchell’s farcical claim in a recent Irish Times article that: ‘...they (the Shankhill Butchers) had reasons for doing what they did. For example, they understood that guns as murder weapons are extremely traceable; butchers’ knives, hack-saws, chisels and scissors are not.’ Strange, then, that one clean cut to the throat was not sufficient to dispatch a random victim, until a thousand small cuts were first administered all over the rest of the body. Strange, too, that prolonged blood loss by multiple minor incisions did not become the most popular method of murder for all factions in the six counties. Mitchell also wrote: ‘...when this small, thin man (Victor) suffocated a very large and heavy B J Hogg, any hope of realism left the auditorium. It is clear that the makers do not understand violence any more than they understand the Protestant community from which it was generated.’ But what Mitchell misses is that Hacksaw (Hogg) wanted to die, and that violence generated for an ostensible political aim but really as an end in itself always turns back on itself, punishing its own. Complicity is everything. By problematising these issues in an intelligent fashion, Resurrection Man makes most recent ‘Northern Movies’ seem simplistic to the point of childishness, still caught up as they are in trying to explain the conflict in straightforward political terms. As for where the buck stops, who are these ‘vested interests’, that’s another day’s work, involving arguments about the circularity of power and its exercise, but a good place to start looking would be the eternal heart of darkness, embodied in Mephistopheles, and delineated by Conrad, among others, including McNamee.

First published in Film Ireland

The Blue Tango By Eoin McNamee

The Blue Tango

By Eoin McNamee

(Faber & Faber, £10.99)

For his second full-length novel, after the harrowing achievement of Resurrection Man in 1994 (and not forgetting his two earlier novellas, Love in History and The Last of Deeds), Eoin McNamee ventures even further into the realm of faction. As documented by Shirley Kelly in her interview with McNamee in the last issue, The Blue Tango revisits a notoriously murky murder, and its subsequent investigation and the conviction that followed, which took place in and around Belfast nearly fifty years ago.

    In the early hours of November 13th, 1952, 19-year-old Patricia Curran, daughter of Judge Lancelot Curran, Northern Ireland’s Attorney-General and later Lord Chief Justice, was found dead in the grounds of her home, The Glen, outside Whiteabbey, on the outskirts of Belfast. The body was discovered by her father and her brother Desmond, a solicitor and Moral Rearmament activist. She had been stabbed 37 times.  Her mother Doris waited in the house.

    The ensuing investigation was led by RUC Inspector Albert McConnell, but Chief Inspector Richard Pim, in his efforts to protect the family, made things difficult for McConnell from the start, denying him permission to interview any of the surviving Currans, or to search the house. Pim pointed McConnell in the direction of a maniac, and one was sure to be found, hopefully among one of the Polish Free Army units that were stationed nearby. Come January, with no firm leads established, Pim drafted in Chief Inspector John Capstick of Scotland Yard and his assistant Detective Sergeant Denis Hawkins. McNamee renders the briefing exchange between Pim and the adulterous Essex policeman thus:    

              ‘I rather thought that a foreigner might be involved.  Stabbing is

          rather a foreign modus operandi, is it not, Chief Superintendent?’

              ‘It’s a useful thought, sir. Plenty of stabbings in London during the

          war. Spaniards, Arabs and the like. Stab you soon as look at you,

          some of them.’

              ‘What about Poles?’

              ‘The temperament is there, sir, no shadow of a doubt about it.’

        

A Scottish RAF serviceman, Iain Hay Gordon, was eventually charged with the crime. A shy, nervous outsider, and acquaintance of Desmond’s who had been to dinner in The Glen, he was a vulnerable target to pin it on. He signed a confession on the understanding that Capstick would withhold from his schoolteacher mother the suspicion that her son was homosexual. The confession itself was extracted by the novel technique of Capstick putting each alleged event to Gordon as a hypothesis, and when the suspect answered ‘Yes’, writing it down as fact.

    Gordon pleaded guilty but insane, spent seven years in a mental hospital where he received no treatment because the Superintendent thought he was perfectly healthy, and was then released and given a job for life in Glasgow, with the proviso that he change his name and never talk about the case. When he took voluntary redundancy in 1993, he began a campaign to clear his name. Last year, the verdict against him was quashed.

    All the above personages appear as characters in McNamee’s narrative, along with various other figures like journalist Harry Fergusson and Catholic bookmaker Hughes, from whom Lancelot Curran borrowed money to pay gambling debts.

    As with Resurrection Man, some will complain that the characters are cardboard cut-outs, but as with that novel, depths are revealed through surfaces. Others will cavil at the indeterminate mix of fact and invention, particularly as Desmond is still alive and working as a Catholic priest in South Africa, but there are literary precedents, in Capote’s In Cold Blood and Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song. It is a historical novel, as distance is needed for recollection and reconciliation.

    Again, as with his previous book, the prose style is reminiscent of the lapidary Puritan discourse of a morality play, a kind of latter-day Northern Catholic John Bunyan, which is ideally suited to the Manichean societal structures up there. Also striking is McNamee’s sensitivity to language register and its betrayal of social standing, as when some of the statements in the police records by soldiers read more like the product of a well-educated, middle-class professional hand. Like all true artists, McNamee takes nothing for granted at face value, and the nuances of the social pecking order are perfectly rendered. ‘Authority’ is one of the most frequently recurring words in the text.

    The atmosphere builds with the mounting weight of suppressed evidence against the family itself. Why were Patricia’s hat and bag found neatly stacked some distance from her remains? Why, after a wet night, were they perfectly dry? Why, if the hat was pinned and difficult to take off, did she remove it? Why did Lancelot Curran phone around her friends to find out where she was three-quarters of an hour after the body had been found? Why did Pim suppress records of these conversations? When the house was sold four years later, and a huge bloodstain discovered in an upstairs bedroom after a carpet was lifted, why did the police do nothing when they were called? There is also Gordon’s part in his own accusation and prosecution, through looking for an alibi before he was even under suspicion, and getting a fellow serviceman to lie for him. Patricia herself haunts the narrative in a ghostly fashion, a 1950’s version of Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, another instance of the good girl/bad girl archetype. Some say she was promiscuous, married men and the like, and got no more than she deserved, while this is balanced by Hughes’ recounting of her voluntary charity work in the area, recipients of which included his own widowed mother.

    This reads like an x-rayed tabloid, a record of gossip, innuendo and scapegoating. It is a reminder of the bad old days when sex was dirty, and married and missionary was the only game in town, and you could be blackmailed and destroyed for doing anything else, and all was ‘family values’, and men spoke about ‘the ride’. Maybe some men can’t enjoy sex unless it is ‘dirty’: that’s why they invented sexual morality. But, as we’ve discovered, morality need not apply solely to sexuality, and this tale of ex-public schoolboy men-in-suits rallying around to cover-up for and protect one of their own is something that still goes on, and perhaps always will.         

    At the time of writing The Blue Tango is on the Booker long list. A book of this poetic intensity and precision would be a worthy contender on the short list, and it secures McNamee’s position among the most talented younger novelists on this island.

First published in Books Ireland

A White Merc With Fins By James Hawes

A White Merc With Fins

By James Hawes

(Jonathan Cape, £12.99)

James Hawes’ debut novel, A White Merc With Fins, is a hilarious account of the planning and execution of a bank robbery, set in contemporary London. The unnamed hero, pushing 30 and living in a shed in Big Sis’s back garden, is terrified of becoming A Bald Man in a Bedsit (with those horrible orange curtains bedsits always have), and so concocts The Plan to rob Michael Winner’s Private Bank of one million pounds. The other members of The Gang are Suzy the Black Widow, Brady and Chicho, and along the way we met an assortment of other deviant and eccentric characters.

Hawes is great on England’s rigid class structure. You can be underclass (UC), working class (WC), lower middle class (LMC), middle class (MC) or upper class (UC).  (Is the fact that the underclass and the upper class have the same initials a suggestion that they have more in common with each other than anyone caught in between?) The protagonist is LMC with a college education, desperate to escape to MC Heaven. He tells us: ‘There are really only three super-tribes in London: the ones who will never be able to get mortgages, the ones who live and die by the mortgage rate, and the ones who do not need mortgages. Those are the ranks of slavery and freedom, the rest is all just questions of degree.’ The book presents a vivid picture of what a hole London really is.

There’s more than a hint of the smart-arsedness of the early Martin Amis (before he got good), but Hawes is less vicious, aiming more for the belly-laugh. The novel contains the most reasonable attitudes to heroin and to the IRA I have come across in fiction. It also has a couple of really good dirty, happy sex scenes.

It’s not exactly ‘deep’, but it is a laugh a page, and well worth a read. 

First published in The Big Issues

One Day As A Tiger By Anne Haverty

One Day As A Tiger

By Anne Haverty 

(Chatto & Windus, No Price Given)

Anne Haverty’s debut novel concerns a man living in the shadow of his more kindly and well-adjusted brother, his romantic attachment to that brother’s wife, and the feelings, which he shares with this woman, for a mutant sheep, a mutual interest which helps to bring them together and cement their relationship.

Clever young historian Martin Hawkins throws over his promising career at Trinity College and returns to the family sheep farm in Tipperary to brood instead on his own past, most notably the deaths of his parents and his failed romances. At odds with his conscientious brother Pierce, and with the country folk who are more worldly-wise than he is, and perceive him as a shiftless soul with his head in the clouds who has deserted his own calling, he is also furtively in love with Pierce’s restive wife, Etti, and harbours strange convictions about the genetically engineered lamb he calls Missy.

Missy is one of a flock that has been ‘improved’ with human genes. Pitiful, infinitely touching, surely unsheep-like, maybe even half-human, Missy figures significantly in Martin’s imagination. When Etti too comes to regard Missy with the same tenderness and empathy, she and Martin embark on a reckless and terrible adventure, which involves a doomed attempt to deliver Missy to Brigitte Bardot’s animal sanctuary in Provence, where they think she will be properly looked after. But will the adulterated animal that is Missy find a place in the affections of the former sex-kitten, given her jaundiced view of humanity?

If this all sounds ridiculously far-fetched, it is, but such is Haverty’s skill that she manages to make the strangest and most surreal of situations seem almost normal and quotidian. (A few years ago this modus operandi was termed ‘magic realism’, and was much favoured by Eastern European and South American writers.) Despite the apparently whimsical storyline, all the big themes are present here: love, hate, betrayal; death, bereavement, grief. The nature/culture opposition that is united in Missy is a metamorphosis as worthy of Ovid as it is of Kafka, with a dash of science fiction (or, indeed, science fact) thrown in for good measure. Haverty is also to be congratulated on pulling off the difficult imaginative feat of writing this first-person narrative in the voice of a male character, making it believable, and exploring the motivations towards misogyny without being judgmental or prescriptive. The evocation of rural life, both Irish and French, is brilliant, with moments of great beauty and passages of deep despair, and there is a subtle humour that cuts through the tragic pull of the story, placing it in the best Irish tragicomic tradition. The only other young Irish writer I can think of capable of such inventive accomplishments is Mike McCormick, whose first collection of short stories, Getting It In The Head, published last year, should be on everybody’s reading list.   

                  

In a world of fakes, Anne Haverty is the real thing: a writer who can write, with a faultless style that matches a thought-provoking story. Her next move will be watched, by me at least, with the keenest attention.

First published in The World of Hibernia