Stuart Neville has a lock on dread. In his depiction of Belfast, he nails the color grey, painting an unforgettable picture of a city dotted with bars, its sodden populace occupying cramped dwellings befitting ambitionless lives. But Neville also writes of that city in Northern Ireland in such a way that one can see, if not hope, the possibility of redemption.
If Neville's 2009 debut, The Ghosts of Belfast was Greek tragedy, Collusion, its sequel, is more Shakespearean. The stunning Ghosts is a noir dramatization of the aftermath of Ireland's Troubles that showed, in stark fashion, that that period may have passed but troubles always continue. Collusion is no less haunting a book, and easily as dramatic, though less schematic. It, too, stars Gerry Fegan, a former Irish Republican Army hit man who balances murderous impulses with a strange kind of conscience.
Fegan battled turncoat Davy Campbell and corrupt politician Paul McGinty in Ghosts, but let warlord Bull O'Kane go. Fegan lost his moorings though he exorcised his ghosts. He also fell in love. In Collusion, Fegan aims to take down a crippled O'Kane, see his interests converge with those of policeman John “Jack” Lennon, and battles the Traveler, a professional executioner handpicked by O'Kane's daughter, Ola, to snuff out Fegan and any other threat to her father. Like Ghosts, Collusion pivots on revenge. Two key characters survive, suggesting the possibility of yet another sequel.
Neville has rich material to draw upon, and most of his characterizations, though at times predictable, are full-bodied and credible. His constructions of the tortured Fegan, the equally complex Lennon and the horrific Traveler are sturdier than his female creations. Marie McKenna and her “wee” daughter Ellen, who represent what of Ireland Fegan and Lennon want to preserve and honor, function symbolically above all.
At the core of Collusion is the idea that even though Northern Ireland makes do with a restive peace, the necessary compromises various factions had to make continue to roil the area, particularly characters like Fegan, Lennon, the monstrous O'Kane, and the Traveler, an evil golem to Fegan's more kindly counterpart. Minor players like lawyer/tout Patsy Toner add color and dimension and move the narrative forward. Here, Toner explains collusion for Lennon:
Everybody knows it all, but no one says anything. Look, collusion worked all ways, all directions. Between the Brits and the Loyalists, between the Irish government and the Republicans, between the Republicans and the Brits, between the loyalists and the Republicans.” Toner ran out of breath and his face reddened. He pulled hard on his cigarette and coughed. “All ways, all directions. We'll never know how far it went.
Neville's books remind me of Tony Richardson movies of the early '60s, particularly the coruscating Look Back in Anger and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Like those black-and-white flicks, they conjure a world in which honor and loyalty are strangers and love is the remotest of possibilities. As it lurches toward its bloody conclusion (Neville's also a master in descriptions of pain, of wounds that cruelly don't quite kill), the chapters of Collusion shrink, the world contracts, and ultimately, all that remains is survival. The question Neville raises with singularly artful drama is whether survival is enough to keep one going. We'll see.
