The Greeks, in creating their dramatic universe, strove for the mimetic; an accurate portrayal of the world, (or indeed the underworld), something that felt true to life (and death). This impulse, however, sometimes risked leaving the audience out in the cold, bereft of exposition and wondering what happened. A solution to this dilemma was often the chorus—a group of players existing someplace between the invited world of the stage and the lived world of the audience: interpreting, analyzing, guiding, commentating. August Wilhem Schlegel’s “ideal spectator,” the chorus most often mediated the action without explicating it; acting as something of a voice in the audience member’s head, an intuition given form, a hey did you notice that? Pretty strange… If contemporary fiction has largely evolved towards helping the reader to a suffocating extent, this is not (yet) an absolute requirement, especially for work coming from across the Atlantic. Austin Duffy’s Cross, a meditation on the last days of The Troubles, is a fine inheritor of the choral tradition, told through a collective narration that suggests more than it dictates, simmering just below and just above the surface of a steady, contemplative, unhurried novel that brings the Greek tradition to a Northern Ireland synonymous with tragedy.
Cross follows a group of IRA operatives set amongst a wider cast of a Northern Irish Catholic community living in the titular town. From the opening pages, we are introduced to a plural first-person narration that is something of a mélange of Antigone and The Virgin Suicides: “It was his job to know things and boy did Our Francie know things, flying around in that Datsun Cherry of his. Francie knows, we’d say, Francie knows. Sure he’d practically know your business before you knew it yourself.” The first chapter, leading from this collective beginning, covers the killing of a Royal Police officer by the IRA, overseen by the ever-prepared Francie. The efficacy of his narrational choice is borne out through the novel, in which suspicion and paranoia coexist with friendship and loyalty, imparting unto the reader the sense of permanent surveillance—by both the Crown authorities and the local IRA leadership—which suffuses the community.
The book is set in the summer of 1994, a tumultuous year on either side of the Atlantic; the British Isles saw a major IRA ceasefire that eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement four years later. For many in the book’s cast of characters, this development—a gradual cessation of hostilities that readers, particularly an American audience, might assume would have been met with celebration—is at turns dubious, nefarious, and dissecting. As Cross deftly explores, for those living in a small town on the Northern Irish border, deeply immersed in IRA activity and committed to the cause, the looming ceasefire is seen not only as a softening trick by Perfidious Albion but also, should it be genuine, an implosion to their entire way—and reason—of life. This combination, then, of narration and temporal setting gives the book its own raison d’être, and Duffy makes good use of his sensible design.
For as inventive as the narration is, Cross is at its strongest when the plural voice moves in close enough to a specific character to allow a greater depth of interiority; an approach, it might be said, that appears perhaps a bit too infrequently in a novel that prioritizes encounters between its characters over extended moments with them. The quieter moments the reader does get, however, are largely effective and well-drawn:
Nailer winced, irritated at the interruption. Christ in heaven why was it so hard to get a moment’s peace? Taking deep, slow breaths just as he’d been advised to do, he stayed where he was, trying as best he could to ignore the wholly unnecessary stir his crew were making as they barged into the house, getting the dogs all agitated, ignorantly slamming doors and roaring his name, Christ broadcast it why don’t you?…before turning back to contemplate the dregs of the evening from this elevated vantage, this fine view he had of the silver-backed sea not too far off, the lights of Forkhill and beyond them the Cooley peninsula, it was some sight, and it would be good for the soul to just linger for a while longer looking at it, but chance would be a fine fucking thing around here. Surrounding Nailer’s complex on all sides, the thick hedgerow was like a rampart and, to his left, volcanic black against the still-light sky, the sulking loin of Gullion absolutely towered out of the earth. It had been raining solid for a week and this was the first bit of let-up in it, the sky and the mist with the failing light manufacturing some serious bit of drama up there, and he wouldn’t have minded savouring it a bit more. Chance indeed. There were moments when Nailer was more aware than usual that there was no let-up with this thing and no rest, but anyway, such was the way he’d chosen and there was sure as hell no going back on it now.
Nailer, the head of the local IRA outfit, is a complex figure, a human actor at the heart of an epicenter of sectarian brutality that, in its metonym regularity, shocks. This moment, while he admires the splendor of the countryside just before meeting with his operatives to plan their next major move, works to illustrate both those introspective passages and the paean to Ireland that Cross vividly presents: these are complicated times, shaping complicated people. The depth works well, as does the idiomatic voice bringing to light Nailer’s mind-style (and keeping in the long tradition of choral omniscience) Much as with Anna Burns’ smoldering Milkman, likewise a recent novel set in the latter days of The Troubles that succeeds by immersing its audience in the quotidian fact of violence rather than carefully explaining it to them, Duffy captures the natural beauty of Ireland alongside the intricacies—for better and for worse—of its inhabitants, portraying with depth and verisimilitude a close-knit island alive to its own history, one which leaves the casus belli for both sides eminently clear.
The choral narration further allows Duffy a darkly comedic tonal register that flirts with the ironic; the realities of life in a border town during The Troubles is one that juxtaposes passionate arguments about the paramilitary campaigns amidst frolicking nights at the pub. At one point, towards the middle of the novel, IRA leadership begins to enforce an eventual commitment to the ceasefire, something that is met with vituperative recrimination at first, especially among the hardline supporters of the cause:
And with that, he [M.O.C., the regional boss who had just been telling a bar filled with locals about the new approach] bade the room a good evening and in a somewhat abrupt fashion went upon his way. After he’d gone there was at first a heavy quiet in the air. Turning around to the bar, each person swam in their own thoughts. It took a while for the tension to dissipate and the different groups to mingle. People weren’t happy, that’s for sure…But bit by bit the hubbub rose and the topic of conversation changed to other things, mundane things admittedly, relating to farming matters for the most part, the awful bother created by some of these new EEC regulations, the lack of rain, the foot and mouth outbreak in Wales. Pat switched on the sound system and soon you had to shout to get your point across. It ended up being a good night actually. A bit of trouble broke out between the Tyrone and the Cooley boys but other than that it was all relatively good natured.
The choral effect lingers here in the idiosyncratic reportage—“ended up”—while enjoying a range of knowledge to a third-person extent. It is the community, the chorus, that tells this story, one of tragedy and violence, humor and comradeship. Through its narration, Cross succeeds in its central task: rendering with fidelity and strength the collective perpetuation and price of The Troubles, implicating its audience in the long tradition of dramatic form.
FICTION
by Austin Duffy
Melville House Publishing
Published on November 12, 2024
