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Tag Archives: IRA

Civil War in Ireland: The Winter Guest

15 Monday May 2023

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1921, assassination, betrayal, book review, Britain, Civil War, full-fledged villains, historical fiction, IRA, Ireland, literary fiction, mystery, no and furthermore, politics, superb characterizations, thriller, W. C. Ryan

Review: The Winter Guest, by W. C. Ryan
Arcade, 2022. 321 pp. $27

A dangerous, painful task brings Tom Harkin from Dublin to Kilcogan House, a now-crumbling country manse, in winter 1921. An IRA ambush has attacked a car near the house, killing a high-ranking British officer; an innocent bystander along for the ride; and Maud Prendeville, eldest daughter of the house, who wasn’t meant to be traveling that night.

However, the IRA insists that the volley that riddled the car didn’t kill Maud—minutes later, witnesses say, they heard a single shot, presumably from a different hand. The distinction matters politically, because Maud was a heroine of the ill-fated Easter Rebellion of 1916, and such honors are not forgotten. If the IRA were responsible for her death, the crime would embarrass them and provide propaganda for the British forces attempting to suppress Irish nationalism.

National Army troops aboard ship during Irish Civil War, 1922 (courtesy National Library of Ireland on The Commons via Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

As an IRA intelligence officer, Tom’s well placed to understand the considerations implicitly and knows what few other do—that Maud, among others, was trying to arrange an arms purchase for the IRA in the United States. What’s more, she was Tom’s erstwhile fiancée, back when they were university students before the Great War. While he was an officer in the Dublin Fusiliers serving in France, she broke off their engagement, by mail. Consequently, he has more than one reason to investigate, and her death feels deeply personal.

But in this civil war between Irish nationalists and those who oppose independence from Britain, neither side shows quarter or much regret for innocents caught in the crossfire. For the most part, Tom can count on people not to care to know about his connection to the IRA, and to keep their suspicions to themselves, if they have any.

That’s for the most part. A betrayal from any source will see him tortured and killed, and he can never rule out the possibility that one or more of his acquaintances are playing a double game. Nobody, no matter what their loyalties, believes his cover story that he’s working for an insurance company that holds a policy on Maud, even though he has papers to show.

Not surprisingly, more than one person warns him that no good can come of his investigation, only more murders, yet Tom persists, an old trope. But in a twist, he suffers what would today be called PTSD, as ordinary sensory perceptions remind him of his wartime trauma and of Maud, the latter appearing as a ghost or in troubled dreams. I’m not much for gothic, but the PTSD makes perfect sense, and Ryan conveys the tactile First World War experience as well as any writer I’ve read.

This brilliant, gripping mystery/thriller (the novel has elements of both) offers many pleasures, including atmosphere:

If anything, the fog becomes thicker as they make their way slowly through the town—the horse’s hooves sounding like a muffled echo of themselves. The few shops and pubs glow like islands in the mist, while somewhere a church bell rings, its mournful sound seeming to come from behind them one moment, and from up ahead the next. A donkey cart loaded down with milk churns looms towards them from the other side of the street. The flat-capped farmer holding the traces looks in their direction with such a blank expression that Harkin is not even sure that he has seen them.

As with the sterling prose, the characterizations are spot-on. Ryan takes pains with every figure on stage for more than a minute, including the villains, which I always like to see. The bad guys are truly bad, but they believe in what they’re doing. As for the majority, who fall in neither the nationalist nor pro-British camp (at least not obviously), they each have particularities and, often, something to hide that one side or other will object to, if not both.

The storytelling feels entirely sure-handed. Early on, Tom corroborates the single-shot theory, but that’s less helpful than it might be, not least because he has to discover who could have known Maud was riding in the car. Several suspects emerge, but as soon as he settles on them as possibilities, facts turn up that challenge his assumptions. Such “no—and furthermore” is constant in The Winter Guest, and Tom, though an observant detective, makes mistakes through false assumptions.

Meanwhile, the ever-present chance that he’ll be unmasked as IRA ratchets up the tension. Much of his investigation hinges on delicate diplomacy, as he decides how much to reveal, and to whom, to obtain the information he seeks. He also has to cut deals with people who might suspect who he is, but, for their own reasons, wish to see justice done for Maud.

I would have liked a hint as to why Maud broke off her engagement to Tom, and for him to struggle more with that rejection, particularly the way she handled it. I also find the obligatory confrontation between Tom and the bad guys not entirely credible, with a hint of melodrama. But those are small complaints about an exceptional novel.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

Across Generations: The World of Tomorrow

30 Monday Oct 2017

Posted by Novelhistorian in Reviews and Columns

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1930s, book review, Brendan Mathews, historical fiction, IRA, Ireland, literary fiction, New York, picaresque, violence, William Butler Yeats, World's Fair

Review: The World of Tomorrow, by Brendan Matthews
Little, Brown, 2017. 549 pp. $28

When we first meet Francis Dempsey, he’s passing himself off as Sir Angus MacFarquhar and doing his best to charm society girl Anisette Bingham and her mother on the Britannic, bound for New York. It’s disconcerting for Francis to pretend to be a Scottish peer when he’s Irish, he’s never been to Scotland, and he doesn’t even know which spoon to use.

But he’s having the time of his life, remarkable since he was in an Irish prison only days before. Using his father’s funeral as a cover, the IRA sprang him and his brother Michael, a seminarian, then unwittingly provided them with a strongbox of cash when a safe house blew up. However, Michael lost both eardrums and his senses in the blast, so in Francis’s scheme, Michael becomes Sir Malcolm, his invalid brother commended to his care. But Michael, in his post-traumatic state, has a companion, the recently deceased William Butler Yeats, who seems to vanish and reappear and lecture Michael about what to do next.

Are you getting all this? Throw in that the Dempseys have another brother in New York, Martin, a jazz musician hoping to make a splash, and that the king and queen of England are visiting the World’s Fair, and — oh, by the way, it’s June 1939.

Frank Buck’s Jungleland, souvenir of the World’s Fair (courtesy Wikimedia Commons; public domain)

Then there are bad guys, and this is where both Francis and The World of Tomorrow get into real trouble. John Gavigan, once a big-time New York hood, has been funneling guns and cash to the IRA for years. Gavigan drags in a former IRA assassin, Tom Cronin, who knew the Dempseys in Ireland, to deal with Francis’s theft of IRA funds.

At its best, The World of Tomorrow is a hilarious romp about fulfilling dreams, the dicey nature of love, and what people have to learn to accept if they wish to be happy. It’s also a love song to the importance of family, and the Dempseys’ tortured, tangled roots make a fine narrative. I also like how Matthews portrays the jazz musician Martin and his long-suffering but devoted wife, Rosemary, the rock of the crazy family she married into.

But it’s hard balancing the deadly serious with the madcap, and though Matthews is a terrific storyteller, pushing his characters to the limit at every turn, the killers don’t fit. The violence that frees Francis and Michael and sets up their escapade feels faceless and comically absurd, like the Binghams’ fascination with the allegedly titled suitor for Anisette. (Who would name their daughter after a liqueur?) But the violence that Tom Cronin’s ordered to execute is neither funny nor absurd, and Tom’s agony over it is real and painful, for he thought he was done with that life years ago, and now he has too much to lose. Then too, unlike those of the other characters, Tom’s reflections travel in circles, as though Matthews’s conception of him runs a little thin.

Matthews means to point out how past deaths condemn the current generation to take up a struggle that shouldn’t be theirs. That’s what happens to the Dempseys, and it’s what Matthews thinks of the IRA: “Some histories you washed off quickly. Others you wallowed in like a sty.” In giving Michael the ghost of Yeats to push against, the author introduces an intellectual version of that Irish ideal, and that this Yeats is selfish, blind to family ties, and no help to Michael tells you all you need to know.

I like this generational theme, but I think Mathews could have achieved it without Cronin or Gavigan, and including them overburdens the novel. I don’t just mean the jarring difference in tone, or the less-than-full villains who drive this subplot, of which there are too many, and their attendant contrivances. The World of Tomorrow is chock-full.

Otherwise, it’s got something. One pleasure is the prose, descriptive, discursive, and rich, as you’d expect in a fizzy, vivacious story. For instance, here’s what Martin feels about his adopted city:

As much as he loved the electric charge that came from moving in a sea of bodies surging from one place to another — crossing a street in the moment the traffic signal changed, a swell of suit-and-tied men and sway-hipped women, each of them racing to get somewhere that seemed so important — there were times when he wanted to call a stop to it, to slow it all down and not be carried along anyone’s tide. This was why the early-morning hours were his favorite. Walking a nearly vacant street, with only a couple slouched against each other in the distance, steam drifting lazily from a manhole, a splash of neon thrown into a puddle, an after hours bar whose last diligent drinkers hunched over their highball glasses — this was the New York he had come seeking. The city in a country hour. A time of deserted lanes and privacy amid the millions.

The World of Tomorrow, though it plays a few jarring notes, is good music for the mind and the heart.

Disclaimer: I obtained my reading copy of this book from the public library.

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