Modern Ireland and modern Irish crime writers: A St. Patrick's Day post

For St. Patrick's Day, here's a post from a couple of years ago about Irish history and what you can learn about it from Irish crime writers.

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 A passage in Adrian McKinty's novel The Bloomsday Dead alerted me to a certain tendency in Belfast to romanticize the present and the past (though McKinty states the case more pungently), and I may first have heard the term irregulars, for the anti-treaty military forces in the Irish Civil War, through Kevin McCarthy.

The dicey subject of Irish-German relations in the middle of the twentieth century? Stuart Neville deals with one strand of its aftermath in his novel Ratlines. (And it appears that Declan Burke may do so as well, in his latest.)  And Eoin McNamee wrote about the chilling sectarian hatred at the heart of one of Belfast's most notorious murder gangs in his novel Resurrection Man.

The strange, orphaned position of Northern Ireland, unloved by both the United Kingdom and Eire (or is that Ireland? Or the South? Or the Republic?) cannot have been portrayed more directly and more touchingly than in the passage of Garbhan Downey's (I forget in which book) where a politician from the North tells a counterpart from the South something like: "I know you regard us as the unwanted child you'd rather tie up in a sack and toss into the river." And my first inkling that Irish history was more complicated than the Manichean pieties we get in America came when Gerard Brennan took me to the Irish Republican History Museum off the Falls Road in Belfast.

I've just finished reading Part IV of R.F. "Roy" Foster's Modern Ireland 1600-1972, and I was periodically surprised and delighted when his entertaining, opinionated, analytical, non-ax-grinding history would touch upon subjects dealt with in some depth by each of the above-mentioned Irish crime writers. Foster's declaration, for example, that

"For all the rhetoric of anti-Partitionism, opinion in the Republic was covertly realistic about this point, too: the predominant note of modern Ireland in 1972 was that of looking after its own."

says in historical terms what Downey does in fictional ones, and induces a similar twinge of sympathy for Northern Ireland's people, if not its leaders.

So thanks, Irish crime writers, for writing entertaining popular fiction while casting an intelligent eye on the problematic present and past of your problematic country.

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Foster's bibliographic essay at the end of Modern Ireland mentions one Irish crime writer by name, though not for her crime fiction:

"There are few first-rate biographies for the period, one glowing exception being R. Dudley Edwards' Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure, which illuminates far more than its subject."

Looking for more? Edwards, Downey, McNamee, and Brennan contributed stories to Akashic Books' Belfast Noir collection, edited by McKinty and Neville.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

The partition of Ireland, ca. 999,997,987 BC

I have just begun reading The Origins of the Irish, which uses archaeology, geology, and linguistics to trace the beginnings of the people who would one day give the world Luke Kelly and Ronnie Drew.

The author (J.P. Mallory) and publisher (Thames & Hudson) begin their narrative in the deepest geological past, but the editing displays a delightful awareness of recent politics and history. The sub-section on the billion-year-old split of the earth's then single land mass is headed "Partition," for instance.

The next subsection, about the coming together of the two land masses that now form roughly the island's northwestern and southeastern halves is headed "The unification of Ireland."

No other headings that I can find display similar cheek, though I suspect that some observers of the Ireland of recent decades could have fun with "Age of dinosaurs."

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The permeable borders between crime fiction and history

The latest frisson of crime-fiction recognition I got while reading Irish history comes thanks to Ronan Fanning's Fatal Path, specifically its discussion of the controversy and violence that attended establishment of the border between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland.

That lends even greater historical resonance to, say, the title of Brian McGilloway's first novel, Borderlands. And that, in turn, is all the more poignant because McGilloway never set out to write a political  novel:

"As for the Troubles — I wanted to write a non-Troubles book but, around the Border, it would be unrealistic to assume that they're not there somewhere — thus the only representation of the Troubles in Borderlands is the disembodied voice, talking about the past. It's there, but increasingly insubstantial. Or that was my intention, at least."

And now I'll take a break and read some crime fiction, though the author shares a last name with an important figure in modern Irish history.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

You know I've been reading Roy Foster; here's why

Tell someone you like crime fiction, and odds are you’ll get asked “Oh, yeah? Who do you like to read?” Tell someone you like history (god knows, that word can mean so many things), and you’re likelier to be asked not who your favorite historian is, but rather what historical period you like best. Why should this be? Historians are writers, too; the just-the-facts school of history went out of fashion once Herodotus came on the scene.

And that brings up (again) Roy Foster, this time his book of essays called The Irish Story: Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland. Are you fed up with theoretical gobbledygook? You might like this bit:

“As a general rule, the more hermeneutic and convoluted the post-colonial theorizing in the text, the more reductionist, naive and reactionary the political views expressed in the footnotes.”

Tired of the sentimentalization of victims? You might like

“One of the fundamental stories of the Irish diaspora is of Irish emigrants choosing to do unto others what others had already done to them. In neither case was that a matter of kind and tender mercies.”

but only not if you’re an unreconstructed Irish nationalist.

Wary of touchy-feely microhistory but wish your unease had an empirical basis? How about

“The dangers of new, deconstructed history, with its stress on the personal and the unmediated, include complacent anti-empiricism and aggressive sentimentalism, often reinforcing each other, and often relying on assumptions that actually contradict recorded experience.”

or

“The process has also led to some well-qualified scholars endorsing (intentionally or not) an odd view of the historians' task: redefined as a duty to reinforce the self-understanding of a `people', no matter how it relates to the historical record (or the self-understanding of other people).” 

or

"But the effect of the [Famine] commemoration year (or years) was to highlight the issues of guilt and pain, driven by the idea that some sort of empathy could be achieved, and a therapeutic catharsis brought about. The language of popular psychotherapy replaced that of historical analysis. This was popularized by a strange alliance of populist journalists, local political wheeler-dealers, erratic rock stars and those born-again newly Irish Eng. Lit. academics again. Performance artists staged presentations where they wept for hours in public to demonstrate what they felt about the Famine."

Looking for thrill of new light cast on an intractable problem you'd taken for granted (I could use more of that every day)? You can't do better than

"It was not simply a `Protestant' versus `Catholic' tradition: varieties of identification certainly took religious labels, but as often as not the religious identification was simply a flag for a whole range of attitudes and values."

I know little to assess the validity of Foster's judgments about Irish history. (Read Terry Eagleton's review of The Irish Story for a dissenting judgment.) But my first experience with that history predisposes me toward Foster's approach. Like many in America, especially those who had not thought carefully about Ireland or its history, I had a vague idea that Irish = Catholic = Republican = good, and English = Protestant = Unionist = bad. I knew nothing of the Irish Civil War, nor did I know there had ever been such thing as Irish-speaking Protestant nationalists.  Then a friend took me to the Irish Republican Museum off the Falls Road in Belfast, where I saw mentions of Wolfe Tone but nothing about Michael Collins, and I thought, "Aha! This is an interesting country."  I think the same when I read Foster.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

More from Roy Foster, or Irish history can be fun, especially when Charles Haughey is part of it

Roy Foster’s Luck and the Irish: A Brief History of Change Since 1970 picks up where his Modern Ireland: 1600-1972 leaves off. It grew out of a series of lectures, and its more informal tone brings Foster’s delight in wordplay and verbal zest, his own and others', to the fore. Here are some of my favorite examples:

“Gerry Adams, his gaze at this point still firmly fixed on the past, liked to claim that Irish profits were being sucked away by `England', but in fact it was America that predominated.”

“(I) one looks at the Republic of Ireland over the last thirty years in religious terms, it is hard not to think of that standard exam question for students of Irish history: `Why did the Reformation not succeed in Ireland?' And answer: `It did, but it took four hundred and fifty years.'”

“…that other power struggle going on south of the border, down Merrion way: the battles within Fianna Fail.”

“To catch a vote, the playwright Hugh Leonard wrote, [Charles Haughey] would unhesitatingly `roller-skate backwards into a nunnery, naked from the waist down, singing "Kevin Barry" in Swahili'.”

“As power was assumed by a figure variously compared by his opponents to Salazar, Nixon and Dracula, the shape of a new kind of New Ireland came into view.”

“[Conor] Cruise O'Brien once remarked that he would not believe Haughey's political career was over until he saw him buried at a crossroads with his mouth full of garlic and a stake through his heart. Politically speaking, that point had finally been reached.”

“O'Neill's clipped, pragmatic, patrician tone … owed far more to the style of metropolitan Conservative Party cabals than to the sclerotic huddles of Ulster village politics.” 

Charles Haughey

Foster is no mere comedian, though, and the book is no mere cartoonish collection, like those slim volumes one finds at the cash register of bookstores full of zany things said by or about Sarah Palin or George Bush or Bill Clinton.  Foster’s good jokes are always in service of his theme, as when he quotes an outrageous eulogy to Haughey’s sympathies to Northern Ireland, which extended to running guns to the IRA, and contrasts this with the later noticeable cooling of Haughey’s zeal for the North. Rather than merely cite this as one more instance of opportunism by a political crook on a scale unimaginable in most countries, Foster ties his antics and his shifting sympathies to a changing mood in Ireland, and thereby makes him more than an adorable, venal rogue. Thirty-six years after the 1970 trial precipitated by Haughey’s gun smuggling, Foster writes:

“what seemed much clearer was how quickly he had distanced himself from the `problem of the North'. This strategy had enabled him to return to the forefront of politics by 1979 – and, once in power, his Northern policies diverged more and more from traditional pieties. Haughey's own story reflected events and movements in the nation at large.”

© Peter Rozovsky 2014