Title: The Ghosts of Belfast
Rating: 5 Stars
Gerry Fegan is a hard man. Living during the worse of the Troubles when the Irish were at war with each other and the British, he became a stone cold murderer for the IRA. He ended up murdering twelve people. Caught and convicted, he did twelve years in The Maze, the infamous prison used to house IRA prisoners. Paroled as a result of the Good Friday agreement that brought peace, he has now been out of prison for seven years. His reputation is so fierce that even to his old IRA brethren he is equal parts respected and feared.
Fegan is also deeply troubled. Consumed with guilt, the ghosts of the twelve that he murdered follow him around in the shadows. Usually they just quietly follow him. However, whenever he tries to sleep, they start screaming. Desperate to get rid of them, he drinks himself into oblivion every night. He’s even taken to talking to them. His old comrades now keep an even wider berth from him as they think him insane.
One night Fegan meets up with one of his old comrades, Michael McKenna. Now a respected politician, he conceals a dark past. One of Fegan’s murders was the result of McKenna’s brutal torture of a very young man that McKenna falsely accused of being an informant. When the young man’s ghost sees McKenna, he walks up to him and points his fingers like a gun at McKenna’s head. Fegan, understanding that the ghost wants his vengeance, executes McKenna. The young ghost then leaves. Fegan now understands that if he wants to purge himself of all of the ghosts, he must execute the person that each of the ghosts holds responsible for their murder.
From this plot device, we see the dark underbelly of The Troubles. Among the people that Fegan must execute includes (as just described) the man that falsely accused a boy of being a tout, a man that specialized in the torture of captured combatants, a priest that used his position to sanctify the struggle, a policeman that sold out one of his own, an undercover agent for the British that gave up innocent men to save his own skin, and a politician that orchestrated and benefited from all of the carnage from that time.
I really enjoyed reading this. As a history geek, I enjoyed how Neville integrated the history of The Troubles into the structure of an action adventure revenge ghost story. If you come into this novel with a limited knowledge of the subject, you will leave with a deeper understanding of this time. If you know something about it, this knowledge will make reading the novel an even richer experience.
Gerry Fegan is a great character. Once an implacable, remorseless murderer, he is now tortured by guilt and is nearly wrecked by it. He is trying to atone for his past sins, even if in so doing he commits further murders.
I’ve read several of Neville’s novels and they seem to all have a similar flaw. The protagonist of all action genre novels such as these always takes a certain amount of damage. This goes all of the way back to the pulp detective novels even in the 1930s. The protagonist gets hit on the head and knocked unconscious. Later, he comes to with a headache but proceeds as if nothing happened. For whatever reason, Neville seems to do this to a fault. His protagonists are beaten within an inch of death, usually several times, but always pop back up and win the day. Here, Fegan endures, among other things, a brutal beating, a brick to the head, and a gunshot wound.
Even with that flaw, this is a brilliant read. I believe that this is the third time that I’ve read this novel and have enjoyed it every time.
dorkenstein 