Northern Heist by Richard O'Rawe

First published in Ireland in 2018; published by Melville House on April 6, 2021

Northern Heist begins with the planning and execution of a bank robbery and ends with two trials. James “Ructions” O’Hare faces a criminal trial for masterminding the bank robbery. Tiny Murdoch faces an IRA court martial for misusing his position. From the robbery through the trials and at all points in between, Richard O’Rawe tells an absorbing and convincing crime story.

The robbery is conceived by Ructions and his uncle, Johnny “Panzer” O’Hare. The plan requires Ructions to have an affair with Eleanor Proctor, whose husband Frank is a Belfast banker. Ructions has a girlfriend named Maria but won’t let that stand in the way of the robbery. As Panzer notes with pride, Ructions has “a flair for handling the women.” From Eleanor, Ructions will obtain a schedule of staff rotations. Then their hired guns will kidnap two trusted bank employees who are scheduled to work together and will hold their families hostage while the employees give them access to the vault. One empty vault later and the O’Hares will be wealthy men.

The plan calls for Eleanor to be killed when she’s no longer useful, as she’s the only loose end who can identify Ructions. The plan takes a detour when Ructions falls in love with Eleanor. Another glitch arises when Murdoch suspects that Panzer is up to something. Murdoch taxes crimes on behalf of the IRA and he’s convinced that Panzer has committed crimes without paying the tax. Murdoch has long wanted to make trouble for Panzer’s son Finbarr, a suspected pedophile, and has long wanted to acquire Panzer’s farm. Using the IRA as a smokescreen, Murdoch launches a scheme to accomplish his goals.

Character motivations and dialog have an authentic feel. The crime’s intersection with the IRA gives the plot a unique twist. In contrast to most modern American crime novels, the crime that O’Rawe develops is simple and credible. The story’s credibility isn’t surprising. As a former IRA bank robber, O’Rawe understands his subject matter. At the same time, the plot unfolds with sufficient complexity to keep the reader guessing at what might happen next. This is O’Rawe’s debut novel, but it is executed with the sure hand of a master craftsman.

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That Old Country Music by Kevin Barry

First published in the UK in 2020; publsished by Doubleday on January 12, 2021

Most of the nine stories collected in That Old Country Music are set in western Ireland. They are sweet and sad, funny and tragic. Many are stories are of people in transition surrounded by an unchanging landscape. When a Roma child who speaks no English runs away from Dublin, she loses her fear after meeting an aging hermit in the Ox Mountains and adopts his contemplative life of books and solitude.

Many of the characters are ungrounded. One narrator tells us: “Sometimes I’m not sure what century I’ve mistaken this one for and I wonder would I be better off elsewhere and in other times.” Others, like the hermit, know exactly where they belong.

One story tells of a song that the narrator hears an old man sing in a nursing home — a song of heartbreak and meanness that tells a story of “erotic wickedness and greed.” Another offers a bartender’s perspective on an overheard conversation between an elderly woman and her aging son — the latest iteration of the same conversation that they have been having for years, until it comes to a bad end.

It is difficult to pick a favorite from this variety of gems, but here are a few that are memorable:

A girl of seventeen (“She was almost eighteen and aching to have a fuck before it”) seduces an English junkie who has gone “astray in the head.” Despite the fierceness of her father’s judgment when word of the scandal leaks, she feels empowered by the knowledge that the man was made to leave the town and will think of her when he “seeks again the needle’s tip and solace.”

A garda, three weeks from retirement, fears that a young nemesis who has been spreading babies across the Ox mountains, not always with the consent of the women he impregnated, will feel no constraints after being diagnosed with a cancerous tumor. The garda senses that a killing is imminent, but who will the victim be?

A man in Limerick is a “connoisseur of death,” reporting the news of every local who dies, lamenting them all as his city disappears around him. He chats about celebrity deaths, points out potentially fatal hazards, causes people who do not want to confront the inevitable to cross the street when they see him. He is “impressed by death” and by the knowledge that the only death he will be unable to report to others is his own.

The most darkly amusing story is “Roethke in the Bughouse,” set in 1960 when the American poet Theodore Roethke was committed to a psychiatric hospital in western Ireland. Roethke was troubled by the “bits of sheep everywhere” on the island where he stayed, a “mutton necropolis.” The poet was tormented by long nights filled with occult music, but perhaps he was tormented most of all by the words that demanded escape from his body.

As is often true of Irish writers, Kevin Barry has a gift for language. His sentences are those of a skilled artisan. “He had the misfortune in life to be fastidious and to own a delicacy of feelings.” “To experience a feeling as deep as this raised only a specter of losing it.” “He had the hunted look of rural poverty.” “Anxiety folds away its arbitrary music.” A wandering man tells his life story to an unkempt dog, “a dog that has seen some weather.”

I loved Barry’s novel Night Boat to Tangier. I suspect he labors long over each sentence he creates. He may not be the most prolific Irish writer, but he’s among the most exquisite prose stylists.

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Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen

First published in Great Britain in 2020; published by Algonquin Books on December 1, 2020

Majella O’Neill is the big girl in the title. Aghybogey in Northern Ireland is the small town. It’s a gossipy town that children who have means or scholarship-worthy smarts leave as soon as they reach adulthood. Having neither, Majella is still there, working the counter at a fish and chips takeaway. The novel follows her during a few days of her uneventful life — deadening days that are enlivened only by Majella’s snark and Michelle Gallen’s gift for capturing the essence of the villagers and the place and time in which they live.

Majella isn’t particularly happy but she makes a point of not being overly sad. People occasionally upset her but, after she calms down, she’s stoic. Her life is boring. She has the same conversations with the same people, listens to and repeats the same jokes, takes the same orders from the same customers, day after day. She relieves her boredom by sleeping as much as she can. On Sunday nights she goes the pub and drinks alone, accepting such offers to shag as might come along. She doesn’t get excited about birthdays but she’s happy to have turned 27 because she likes the number. She has a long list (with subdivisions) of things she doesn’t like and a much shorter list of things, including sex, that she does like. List entries serve as chapter subheadings. The text that follows each entry illustrates why she likes or dislikes the listed item.

Majella is widely regarded as a spinster. She lives with her mother, whose fondness for whiskey and pain pills makes Majella the family wage earner. Her father has disappeared and her Uncle Bobby is said to have blown himself up while planting a booby trap for the IRA. She works with a gossipy married man and occasionally has sex with him because why not? Majella’s sex partner choices are limited but after she learned how to masturbate, she didn’t have much use for men anyway.

Majella’s life might not be the life she wants, but she has learned to cope because she sees no alternative and she doesn’t want to become the people she dislikes. As best she can, she avoids interaction with most people and tries not to make eye contact with anyone. What Majella lacks in ambition she makes up for with attitude and unspoken opinions. She doesn’t like the new doctor because, unlike the old doctor, the new one tries to diagnose problems rather than dispensing pain pills. She has little use for the police or drunks or townspeople who express their sympathy for the loss of her recently deceased grandmother. She dislikes flirting, hypocrisy, telephone calls, nicknames, and a variety of other things. Her daily illustrations of the things she dislikes range from amusing to hilarious.

Gallen’s rendition of the local dialect (“What canna get chew?” “But sure it’s wild hard these days tae find steady work, y’know.”) is a joy to read. She captures the atmosphere of Northern Ireland and the tension between Catholics and Protestants without ever taking it on directly. That narrative decision is true to the story, as Majella accepts the world in which she lives — the border guards who bothered her father when she was young, the arrests that villagers don’t talk about, the revered Cause that she doesn’t really understand — without giving it much thought. The novel is ultimately a snapshot of a few days in Majella’s life. The focus is on Majella and, as one would expect from a snapshot, everything in the background is just a bit blurred.

The murder of an elderly woman lurks in the novel’s background, as do arrests of Majella’s neighbors and customers. Speculation about the whereabouts of Majella’s missing father and the contents of her grandmother’s will contribute to the plot. Still, Big Girl, Small Town is the kind of novel that doesn’t need an identifiable plot. Learning how Majella lives her life, watching her move from one dreary day to the next, tells a story of its own. While the last third of the novel brings some change to Majella’s life, it isn’t clear that Majella is ready for change. An epiphany on the final page suggests she might have learned something from all the episodes of Dallas she watched, but the story brings no firm resolution. Majella has a good bit of life yet to live and the reader will just have to wonder what she might make of it. She is such a sympathetic character that the reader can’t help but root for her to make a wise choice.

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The Dregs of the Day by Máirtin Ó Cadhain

Published in Ireland in 1970; Alan Titley translation published by Yale University Press on September 24, 2019

The scholar who translated The Dregs of the Day from the original Irish tells us that Máirtin Ó Cadhain “is recognized as the foremost author in Irish of the twentieth century.” He primarily wrote short stories, but The Dregs of the Day is long enough to qualify as a novella.

The protagonist is identified only as N. He works in the civil service, although he has taken quite a bit of time off because of his wife’s illness. Now his wife has died and N. is flummoxed. Her lifeless body awaits attention. His wife’s sisters expect N. to make arrangements for someone to prepare the body and then transport it to a church for burial, but N. isn’t sure how to go about doing that and doesn’t really want to spend the money. He needs a nurse and an undertaker and a casket and a priest, but he’s not certain of the order in which he should acquire everything he needs. He stops in a pub for advice, and after a few drinks stops in a department store where there seem to be so many items on sale that he should buy. Sadly, a robber makes off with his wallet before he has a chance.

As N. decides whether to go home and face his wife’s corpse (not to mention his sisters-in-law), he has a number of diverting encounters. He has sex with a woman while pondering his indifference to both the sex and the fact that his dead wife awaits him at home. He chats with a security guard who is charged with beating up clerical students who try to sneak through the windows of a whorehouse. By dawn, he has been kicked out of the department store, kicked out of a charity, kicked out of the property where the security guard finds him snoozing, and kicked out of a church. N. can’t quite bring himself to return home and might not get his act together in time to attend his wife’s funeral, assuming his wife’s sisters arrange it in his absence. He wonders idly whether he might be endangering his civil service position, leading to a funny description of life in the civil service.

As the novel nears its end, N. makes his way to another pub with an American sailor who extolls the virtues of America, where everything is free, particularly for the Irish population of Boston. N. considers whether the life described by the sailor might be better than the one he is living, although it seems clear that N.’s problems do not arise from his country of residence but from his own ineptitude or indifference.

The Dregs of the Day is a dark comedy. The tragedy of death lurks in the background as N. lurches from one preposterous situation to another. N. is a sympathetic character if the reader can forgive him for being appalling. N. doesn’t have an evil heart, but he might not have any heart at all. He seems to have little regard for anyone, including himself, despite being entirely self-absorbed. He could solve his immediate problems rather easily just by going home (where surely his sisters-in-law would tell him how to solve the remaining problems, or simply take over and do it all themselves), but he cannot resist his impulses, none of which lead him in a sensible direction. He is seemingly blown by the winds of chance, unable or unwilling to resist the directions in which he is blown. The reader’s sympathy derives from the sense that N. is entirely lost, not because his wife has died but because he doesn’t know what to make of the world, what to care about, what to do with his purposeless life. We all know people like that (most of them drink too much), and Máirtin Ó Cadhain captured them brilliantly in the character of N.

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Country by Michael Hughes

Published in the UK in 2018; published digitally by HarperCollins on Oct. 1, 2019

Country offers different perspectives on the Troubles, as seen by key characters on both sides of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland. It is 1994 and the generation of men who signed up to fight for a united Ireland are sick of the conflict. The IRA is splintering. Peace might finally be at hand — a ceasefire is imminent — but a determined group of Republicans want to continue the fight. Country tells the story of a small group of Provisional IRA fighters as they battle British soldiers, Protestant loyalists, informers, and each other.

A dispute between Pig (the group’s leader) and Achill (its feared sniper) concerning the ownership of the teenage girls who warm their beds at night endangers the group’s goal of unsettling the peace talks between the British and the IRA. The story then follows Nellie as she is enticed by the British to become an informer. She is dating (and eventually weds for the sake of appearances) a member of the IRA named Brian Campbell, but she spends their brief marriage scheming a way to get out of Ireland and begin a better life.

The story follows Pig’s brother Dog before it focuses on Henry Morrow, a captain in the SAS who is tasked with contacting the fighters to get a sense of their willingness to support peace negotiations. The spotlight then shifts to Pig, who feels betrayed by IRA leadership. He feel the tide turning. Locals welcome the ceasefire, yearn for an end to checkpoints. Pig won’t stand to see his years of struggle come to nothing.

The story develops the backgrounds of the IRA fighters — the hardcore few who are determined to thwart peace — in unflattering detail. If they were not killing on behalf of the IRA, they would be finding some other way to channel the violence that has been bred in their bones. One wishes he lived in the age of Braveheart so he could hack the British into pieces with his sword. Others don’t enjoy killing but are so caught up in the cause that they have lost all perspective. They kill their own for the smallest reasons — repairing cars for the police becomes a capital crime. These men have legitimate grievances, but the novel suggests that it should have been clear by 1994 that violence was only delaying the objectives they hoped to achieve.

In one of the strongest scenes, men discuss the pride that drives them. Pride in being Irish, pride in being hard men. Yet Achill knows that the English are proud to be English. Having been humiliated by Pig, Achill is too proud to continue the fight under Pig’s command. Pride causes men to fight and it causes them to stop fighting.

There are times when characters from both sides acknowledge that Catholic or Protestant, Irish or British, they are all members of the human race. They bond over football and ancestry and beer. A man who meets with Henry has grudging admiration for the soldier, while Henry feels the same. On occasion, men on both sides will decide not to kill, but when they believe that killing is necessary, no amount of admiration for the opponent will stop them, regardless of which side of the conflict they support. Violence blinds them to the possibility of no violence.

Country tells a fascinating story, but it has a couple of weaknesses. The IRA members love to give speeches to each other, and then praise each other for “a good spake, not a word out of place,” as if they were all students of rhetorical criticism. And while that may accurately reflect the Irish gift of gab, the endless speechifying becomes tedious at points. At the same time, I gather the novel is supposed to evoke Homer’s Iliad, so the dialog is likely meant to serve that purpose.

I also wonder whether the portrayal of the IRA members as hooligans who quarrel about their collections of 14-year-old girls might reflect the bias of an author who grew up in Northern Ireland. Still, while the IRA members are stereotypes of evil, Hughes does make a point of humanizing them, acknowledging that there is some justice in their cause, if not in their use of violence to thwart peace.

In the end, I tend to soak up the lyrical prose of nearly all Irish writers, and Country is no exception. The prose makes the novel compelling, speechifying notwithstanding, and a steady stream of tension and tragedy add substance to Hughes’ style.

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