Norn Iron In The Soul

Over at the ever-illuminating Detectives Beyond Borders, Peter Rozovsky hosts a debate on ‘the great post-Troubles Northern Irish novel’, which I unfortunately missed out on because I was away from the desk all day yesterday and on the proverbial batter last night. It’s a dirty job, etc. The general gist of the conversation is that said novel has yet to be written, with Adrian McKinty observing that, when it is, it’s more likely to be written by a woman than a man on the basis that they’re more pragmatic and clear-sighted when it comes to de-romanticizing. Koff. Anyhoos, no one mentioned David Park’s THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, which is a very brave stab at writing ‘the great post-Troubles Northern Irish novel’, using as it does the model of the South African truth and reconciliation forum in a Northern Irish context. Lamented last week by Boyd Tonkin in The Independent on the basis that it didn’t make the Booker Prize long-list, THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER takes a look at the Troubles from a variety of perspectives, including that of the British establishment, and is well worth reading if it’s a fictional take on the post-Troubles landscape you’re after.

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER by David Park

THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER is neither a thriller nor a whodunit, a detective novel nor a policier, and yet at its heart lies the abduction, torture and murder of a teenage boy, a series of events that still has the power, many years later in the present day, to destroy the lives of four men. Beginning with a taut prologue describing the hours leading up to the boy’s death (“He’s never been anywhere he has never been,” runs the opening line), David Park immediately sets the scene of the post-Troubles landscape in Northern Ireland, an uncharted territory observed with an unflinching eye as the fictional Truth Commission, a conceit borrowed from the South African experience of Truth and Reconciliation, prepares to rake over the coals of 30 years of atrocity and counter-atrocity. Northern Ireland, claims Henry Stanfield, the truth commissioner, is “an old manged, flea-infested dog returning to inspect its own sick,” a place of tawdry but necessary self-delusions: “Hard to lift your head above it in a godforsaken land, he tells himself, where a ship that sank and an alcoholic footballer are considered holy icons.”
  Of the four main characters – Stanfield; Fenton, an ex-RUC officer; Gilroy, once an IRA activist and now a Sinn Fein minister in the Stormont Assembly; and Danny, an Irishman with a shadowy past now living in America – it is Stanfield, as an Englishman drafted in to the reconciliation process and ostensibly an unbiased outsider, who sets the tone. Innocent of any taint accruing from the boy’s disappearance and death, he is nonetheless guilty of the one quality Northern Ireland cannot afford as it considers the possibilities of its future, that of unremitting cynicism. “For a second he thinks of trying to explain that the truth is rarely a case of what will be gained, so much as a case of what might be lost …” [ …] “ … but what he wants to tell her is that the truth can’t be deserved, that if it exists at all, it exists outside the constraints of need or personal desire. That truth rarely makes anything better and often makes it worse.”
  Told in the present tense, the novel should be a more visceral affair than it is, particularly given its subject matter, but Park is a self-consciously literary writer and his formal and occasionally florid delivery has a distancing effect that is too consistent to be anything other than deliberate. Park, himself a native of Northern Ireland, appears to be suggesting that when it comes to the outworkings of the Troubles, in the course of which former terrorists become government ministers, and paramilitary organisations shorn of political respectability descend into a more prosaic criminality, we are all helpless to do anything but observe and hope for the best.
  Someone once observed that anyone who thinks they know the answer to Northern Ireland doesn’t understand the question, and thus Park ends on a hopeful but pragmatic note, which is pleasing in that it is a realistic, unsentimental appraisal of how far Northern Ireland still has to travel before its normality becomes so unremarkable that there is no need of ‘the great post-Troubles novel’. THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER is not that novel, but David Park has done the statelet some service by setting a high standard for those who will follow. – Declan Burke

Nobody Move, This Is A Review: THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER by David Park

Who’d be a publisher? Having to shout equally loud about all the books you publish, it becomes impossible for browsers to tell the good from the bad. Maybe there should be a key - a winking eye on the spine, say - to tell us what’s not really worth bothering with. The thought occurred as I was reading David Park’s new novel THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER, a book worthy of the highest praise; and yet I know I would never have heard of it, let alone bought it, if I hadn’t noticed that the book launch was taking place in my home city of Belfast, Park being a fellow Northern Irishman - and that in optimistic preparation, my local Waterstone’s had a couple of hundred copies stacked high everywhere I looked. I don’t know whether this is cheering, because I did discover it, or depressing, because of all the others I haven’t.
  I don’t know whether THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER is cheering or depressing either: it’s solemn of outlook all right, but such a rare pleasure to read that it sent shivers of delight right up through me from the pages. It takes a situation ripe with emotional possibilities and does it every justice.
  The setting is Northern Ireland, home of long memories and extended news bulletins, where at present there is momentum for a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to help draw a line under decades of conflict. Where other writers might feel that the move from violence to politics robs the subject of power, Park’s stroke of brilliance is to recognise that it is these moments of change - where attention has moved on but the story is not yet over - which offer the most dramatic potential, and in the book the Commission has been established. Some people want to forgive and forget, perhaps because their status now is one they don’t want to lose; others want to remember and still demand justice. Overlooking them all are the British and Irish politicians who most of all want to feel the hand of history on their shoulder, and will permit principles to erode in order to keep the process on track.
  The first two-thirds of the book moves unhurriedly, with 60-page portraits of four men: Henry Stanfield, the Truth Commissioner; Francis Gilroy, former IRA man and now Minister in the Northern Ireland Assembly; James Fenton, retired detective who will be able to provide some unwelcome facts to the Commission; and Danny, a young Irishman in America who is about to make a commitment to his girlfriend. Where these scenes excel is in filling in the truth of the men: Stanfield’s adulterous past, estranged daughter and weakness for younger women; Gilroy’s embarrassment at his lack of cultural knowledge which leads him to surreptitiously read Philip Larkin poems, and his new understanding of the fear of sudden murder which he himself once instilled in others; Fenton’s need to drive across Europe “where he’s unknown and no more visible than a grain of sand on the world’s shore” to atone for his past; Danny’s mistaken belief that his only worries are for the future. Stanfield in particular is a fascinating character, a perfect example of the type of person who comes to hate their old homeland after being away - Belfast is a place of “self-consoling mythology” - and who has some unwelcome observations to make about the political process:

Now the world doesn’t care any more because there are bigger wars and better terrors and all that remains is this final tidying up … He has even met a few individuals already who clearly have become emotionally dependent on their grief, who have jerry-built a kind of lop-sided, self-pitying life out of it and are unwilling to risk having even that taken from them, in exchange for their day in the sun.

  These sections are written with beautiful poise and elegance, and although the sinuous style seemed a little similar from character to character, it can only be to Park’s credit that I found myself each time unwilling to leave the man whose life had been laid out before me, and keen to hear more of his story. The characters are fully fleshed, struggling to maintain their sense of self even as they understand that their place is ultimately in someone else’s story, with their “inability to resist or stop the flow.”
  Although urgently political in background, the stories at the heart of THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER are human ones, stories of exertion of and submission to power, and of “the curse of memory.” In the last third the pace picks up and the story becomes almost a thriller - well, I was pretty thrilled anyway - without sacrificing its grounded sincerity. All this is surrounded by a linked introduction and coda which opens the book on a note of high drama and ends it with something approaching serenity.
  Truth is a relative concept, and personal, and perhaps I am swayed by my knowledge of the places and processes described in the book, like an excited local pointing out his street on a TV drama. For me, nonetheless, the truth is that David Park has written what looks like the first essential novel of 2008. – John Self

This review is republished with the kind permission of Asylum

Sins Of Commission

Set in Northern Ireland, and focusing on the post-Peace Process landscape, David Park’s latest novel, THE TRUTH COMMISSIONERS, has been garnering some tasty reviews, to wit:

“Once the four different perspectives are fully initiated the novel’s pace quickens, increasing the suspense as the danger in the plot grows too … the final chapter of THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER re-establishes the perfect nuance between personal and political landscapes that shapes Park’s honest, and at times bleak, view of [Northern Ireland] in the present day.” – Sara Keating, Sunday Business Post

“A terrible beauty, but a powerful one for that, this is a magnificent and important book.” – Joseph O’Connor, The Guardian

“As David Park’s thoughtful and humane new novel makes clear, truth and loyalty are not easy bedfellows.” – Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph

So wot’s it all about, then? Quoth the Bloomsbury blurb elves:

Henry Stanfield, the newly arrived Truth Commissioner, is troubled by his estrangement from his daughter, and struggling with the consequences of his infidelities. Francis Gilroy, veteran Republican and recently appointed government minister, risks losing what feels tantalisingly close to his grasp. In America, Danny and his partner plan for the arrival of their first child, happily oblivious to what is about to pull him back to Belfast and rupture the life they have started together. Retired detective James Fenton, on his way to an orphanage in Romania with a van full of supplies, will soon be forced to confront what he has come to think of as his betrayal, years before, of a teenage boy. In a society trying to heal the scars of the past with the salve of truth and reconciliation, four men’s lives become linked in a way they could never have imagined. In a community where truth is often tribal and partial, the secret they share threatens to destroy what they have each built in the present. David Park pieces together these individual stories to create a powerful tale that transcends both time and place. Moving, insightful and utterly involving, THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER is an important novel from one of Ireland’s greatest writers.

Hmmmm ... Anyone else get the feeling the Bloomsbury elves would rather be reviewing novels than blurbing them?