I went to see "The Agreement" at The Gate in Dublin recently, Owen McCafferty’s valiant attempt at dramatizing the historical sausage-making that brought about The Good Friday Agreement.
Worth seeing, if only for the scene where Tony Blair hallucinates his imminent beach holiday, dancing to tropical music, pina coladas and sunglasses, being held aloft by the swaying figures of Gerry Adams, Mo Mowlam and David Trimble. Ian Paisley appears in the play too but only off-stage, as a kind of ogre trying to cast as long a shadow as possible from his vantage at the gates of Stormont.
It made me marvel again at his subsequent "chuckles brothers" routine with Martin McGuinness, after the deal was done and, as often seems to happen with these things, when the extremes of either side deign to swan in, the moderates banished, to take centre stage. I was as bemused as anyone when this was happening for real, but angry too. I mean, what took them so long?
For me growing up, the day to day of The Troubles was the dour rhythm of the local Northern Irish news that came on after the main British news, and which we got in our house thanks to living near the border in the South. The Troubles were the grim drone of the newscaster calling out that day’s deaths like the shipping news.
Plenty of the horror punctured this constant bass thrum though, even making the main British news, and everyone will have in their memory banks their own special zone of revulsion: Enniskillen. La Mon. The Shankill Butchers. Jean McConville. Loughinisland. Kingsmill.
For me it was the abduction and killing of those two British army corporals in 1988 who accidentally drove into a republican funeral procession and in a panic tried to reverse out of it only for the cortege to transform into a mob climbing over the car to get at them, beating them up half to death, stripping them, stabbing them, before taking them to a wasteland and killing them.
What sticks still is the full-page photograph carried on The Sunday Independent that weekend, taken from on high, the mob engulfing the car as they tried to get at the men, inflamed with rage and bloodlust, the scene as dramatic as a Caravaggio. I was thirteen and remember staring long at the photograph, not understanding the look on the mob’s faces, whatever political argument was being expressed, dead sure only that I was on the other side of it.
My novel "CROSS" is the view from that other side, but the book, I would argue, waves no flag. True, it is set in a republican community in the summer of 1994 in a fictional-ish border town at the time of the IRA ceasefire. And true, it is centered around the all-too familiar story of a disappeared young person who may or may not have been an informer.
But it’s the group-think that I wanted to get at, rather than the particulars of what the group were thinking. The book is told partially in a first-person plural narrative voice ("We") which is intended to bestow an all-knowingness to the narration that is as a result gossipy and opinionated—and hopefully funny as well.
Rather than the more conventional omniscient third person narrator that, God-like, even knows what people are thinking, my narrator (or narrators) though not given that type of access, still see and hear everything, and what they don’t know for certain they feel no qualms about making up.
The "we" places the reader at the community eye-level, attuned to its judgmentalism and innuendo and maybe implicates them while showing them also to be victims, laboring under the cloud of ideology which suffocates them all.
I say that the book waves no flag because, while I have my fun at the expense of republicanism, its tropes and cant— and certainly some people don’t and won’t like this—it’s not intended personally and was only done out of familiarity with that way of going on. I could have easily picked on loyalists or communists, Christian nationalists or Basque separatists— or, for that matter, right-wing Israelis or Palestinians.
For me it’s not the color of the ideology that counts but its shape and consistency, as rigid as a baseball bat, one of the familiar props of The Troubles, which, as someone pointed out to me recently, sold extremely well in Belfast throughout that period of time, even though not a soul in Ireland ever played the game.
Austin Duffy is a Dundalk native. "CROSS" is his fourth novel and is published in the United States by Melville House publishers in New York, mhpbooks.com. The book is available on Amazon and the Barnes & Noble website.
