In Eoin McNamee’s new novel, The Bureau, a character pores over a letter sent by her imprisoned lover to his associate: ‘This is not a document to be read as much as one to be fallen through, a crafted, allusive piece of writing, some lyric fragment from a book of lies.’ One could choose few better epigraphs for McNamee’s body of work as a whole, which invites us to reconsider the distinctions between memory, history, story, and truth. Not in the trivially true sense that some versions of history are false or misleading. McNamee’s point is a subtler one, drawing our attention to the artefacts from which any history is constructed and the inevitable narrative and political conventions imprinted on these artefacts, norms so deeply internalised by their authors they pass for axioms.
It is not difficult to see why this theme would be of interest to a writer from the north of Ireland. Pick any of the official documents published in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday and you will see the narrativisation of history at work. The Infantry Brigade’s IntSum report, published two days after the massacre, reads more like a film treatment of the event than an official document, with its tropes of ‘hooligan’ natives determined to stir unrest, grandiloquent plot descriptions of terrorists ‘determined to avenge the humiliation of Magilligan’ (the assault by British paratroopers of civil rights activists protesting internment the week prior), and vivid images of harried British soldiers showing courage under fire. When this account came under pressure, other authors adopted different styles: there is the authoritative, almost Tolstoyan narrative voice of the Widgery Report and most of the British press that rallied to support it. Counter-narratives were carefully managed or suppressed. An investigative piece for the Sunday Times drafted by war correspondent Murray Sayle went unpublished because, Sayle suspected, it did not support the official account. In a subsequent memo written by Sayle to the editor of the paper, he recalls words spoken to him by a British Army captain just two weeks after Bloody Sunday: ‘We just can’t let people at home think we shot unarmed men in the back. We just can’t have people thinking that, can we?’
The process of narrativisation we see in these documents—with their morass of individual and political agendas, interests and assumptions—is fundamentally unstable, always liable to collapse under its own contradictions or the challenge of opposing viewpoints. Sometimes, it will not be enough for the dominant political force merely to suppress the counter-narrative. Sometimes more extreme action will be needed. McNamee’s work takes us to the violent edge of this process. His novels show us how historical events are made into story in real time. In his first novel, Resurrection Man (1994), the Shankill Butchers are burnished into myth by a press that struggles to make narrative sense of their hyper-violence, their activities permitted by security forces for as long as the chaos they bring to the region is useful. His Blue trilogy shows the unionist state of the mid twentieth century rally to produce an official record of the murders of Patricia Curran, Pearl Gamble, and Mary McGowan, one that sees innocent men convicted, institutionalised, hanged. Court judgments are rendered in the omniscient narrative voice of the law. False confessions—what are these but brilliantly crafted pieces of narrative fiction?—are procured. McNamee’s books give us grainy, fading images of events. This is closer to what Foucault called ‘genealogy’ than to history. That is, we witness not only the past’s unfolding but its ongoing construction within a nexus of power relations. McNamee asks us to think about who tells us how to understand history, what personal and political motivations inform its narratives, whose voices are excluded from them, and what kinds of violence are required to keep this process running.
The Bureau extends these concerns to a new context, one based on the author’s own family history. The novel focuses on a money laundering operation run from a bureau de change on the Irish border, and the various criminal activities in its orbit. McNamee’s father, Brendan McNamee, was a disbarred solicitor who operated the real bureau. The book opens with a fragment of a real letter sent to Brendan from Paddy Farrell (a key character in the novel based on a real-life drug dealer described in a recent tabloid article as a ‘super-crook’). The words ‘CORK PRISON CENSORED’, emblazoned at the top of the letter, remind us immediately that this was a document written with its own insecurity in mind. The style is appropriately allusive and ambiguous: ‘I wonder how they got on with that business that I had arranged with your wee man.’ When the fragment ends, the author steps in with a warning: ‘The letter is the only evidence that these things had indeed happened and they happened in the way I describe them.’ Right away, we are alerted to the mixture of truth and unreliability in what is to follow.
After the letter fragment comes a prologue in which an omniscient narrator delivers a piece of pseudo-reportage on a (real) crime: the discovery of the bodies of Paddy and his lover Lorraine, who was believed to have killed both Paddy and herself. McNamee’s narrators tend to place you at the scene of a violent event, then show you the myth being made in real time. ‘The statements made to the police had a rehearsed feel about them.’ ‘The loan of the shotgun was not commented on at the inquest.’ A description of a photograph of Lorraine in the paper turns her into a kind of noir stereotype: ‘She’s shifty, a moll, some brazen outside a courtroom. You know it’s not going to end well.’ Police statements, an inquest, a media report: the official narrative machine of the state whirs into action from the opening pages. The move from the real letter fragment and fictional reportage of the opening to the more straightforwardly fictional rendering of the rest of the novel is not perfectly linear. Sometimes, the authoritative narrative voice of the prologue re-inserts itself into proceedings, interrupting what would otherwise be conventional, free-indirect renderings of characters’ thoughts: ‘Speedy was also described as one of those people that were hard to dislike but Lorraine felt there was wrongness in him. He was also described as someone who would come to a bad end, which was true.’ In the mix of Lorraine’s impressions, public consensus, and the facts of Speedy’s story, we get the sense of multiple narrators, ghost voices talking over one another.
The plot throughline of Lorraine and Paddy’s doomed romance proceeds in parallel with the gradual disintegration of Brendan McNamee as he moves closer to financial and moral ruin, all set against the backdrop of an escalating series of murders and retaliations. Populating these stories are the various denizens of the bureau: small-time crooks, diesel runners, money launderers, dirty cops and paramilitaries. This array of archetypes is par for the course in McNamee’s writing, where his characters are always aware of their own presentation and construction, always ready to invoke trope and persona. One of their most striking qualities is that they are often presented as archetypes who wish they were different archetypes. The psychotic butcher of Resurrection Man imagines himself a cowboy or frontiersman; the low-rent investigative goons trailing Diana Windsor through Paris in Twenty Twenty-Three think of themselves as ‘real spies’; Iain Hay Gordon of The Blue Tango fatally exaggerates his connection to the murdered Patricia Curran so that he can be part of the historical narrative. In this way, he points us to the instability and contradictions inherent in their process of self-narrativisation; they have internalised the political and social tropes and norms imposed on them, but not entirely. Because of this, they must be constantly managed. Security services, politicians, legal institutions, the press all exercise a disciplining effect, trying to ensure that characters play the roles they are assigned. When the State begins to lose control of the story, when characters begin to break free of their narrative confines, they are removed or eliminated, entering the realm of myth proper. If McNamee’s work is often described as somewhere ‘between’ crime writing and literary fiction, it might be more accurate to say that he self-consciously employs crime tropes to draw attention to the way in which political violence in the north is narrativised. What could pass as classic noir fare is elevated to something else, a kind of anti-myth that interrogates its own dishonesty. He depicts violent events through the lens of genre fiction because that is how these events are treated in reality; narratives of political intrigue are generated around them, digestible archetypes are employed.
The Bureau is distinct from McNamee’s earlier work, however, in its restraint around characters’ solipsistic appeals to trope and archetype. The self-narrativisation device requires a tricky balancing act, and some of McNamee’s books pull it off more effectively than others. In Resurrection Man, the effect is extraordinary. By having the killer at the centre of that book constantly think of himself through a self-mythologising lens, the reader gets a sense of the kind of detachment that makes his violence possible, perhaps even inevitable. In other works, these self-referential tropes can overpower the theme they are supposed to serve. The Ultras, for example, has its crooked ex-cop protagonist constantly call attention to his crooked ex-cop-ness, generating (for me at least) a distance between reader and story. At some moments, this can make characters read as flat spectres haunting history rather than as fully-formed individuals. In The Bureau, though, while McNamee certainly deploys this device (‘McGlinchey knew that every operation he carried out was an elaboration of his own legend and he was detailed and ruthless in everything he did’), he does so with a lighter touch. The result is that the novel’s characters are vibrant and three-dimensional; they are allowed space to be characters, rather than bundles of archetypes in service of a theme. It is much easier to connect with the worlds these characters inhabit, even with the myths that build up around them, when they are not creating quite so many layers of ironic distance between themselves and their experiences. We get a compelling sense (Goodfellas-style) of the heady excitement of the underworld—in the space of three chapters, there is line dancing, a high-speed chase, and an indoor ‘beach party’ run by diesel smugglers—before (Goodfellas-style) it all goes to hell.
The border itself emerges as a discrete force, even a character, in the novel. Where McNamee’s other works centre the direct influence of state security powers, giving a sense of a hand on the steering wheel, attempting to control the chaos, The Bureau gives the impression of total systemic breakdown. The imperial management of violence has collapsed under its own contradictions and the border itself comes to represent the disorder that has replaced it. It becomes a threshold to the underworld: ‘The border lured people into doing things that otherwise they have known to leave well alone.’ No wonder the characters cannot put narrative sense on their own lives; they operate in a space of ambiguity, of formlessness.
The metatextual aspects of The Bureau also set it apart from many of McNamee’s other works. In real life, McNamee’s brother was kidnapped and subjected to a mock-execution by some of his father’s more violent, dissatisfied clients. Within the novel, Brendan’s son seems to function as an amalgamation of (Eoin) McNamee and his brother: the author haunts his own book. The focus, though, is on, Brendan, and the sense is of a novelist using his powers to try to better understand an ultimately unknowable man: his father . Most other characters in the book benefit from free-indirect narration at some point. Never Brendan. Always he is a cypher, an empty passport, accessed only through the impressions of others. There is only one scene, towards the end of the novel, in which Brendan appears alone. Right at the moment the reader might expect some internal access to his thoughts, we are instead redirected to the hyper-specific detail of his surroundings. One might view this as a retreat, but there is an honesty to it; there would be artifice in pretending that a son could present anything like an objective interpretation of a father. If, as McNamee’s work suggests, any history of the north is inevitably ambiguous because of the power dynamics involved in its construction, why should his history of this relationship be any different?
The story is strong enough to stand on its own without knowing any of these autobiographical details. Brendan—ex-lawyer, gambler, adulterer, money launderer, thief—is a fascinating protagonist and his story is compelling. The semi-autofictional undercurrent in the novel, however, is undeniably thrilling, in large part due to the deftness with which McNamee weaves the personal and the political. Brendan stands simultaneously as a symbol of the moral catastrophe of the post-colonial northern state and as an explanation for the author’s commitment to making sense of that state in his work. (There is a whole other piece to be written about the role of law, which McNamee studied at university, in his work. If it is usually a formless symbol of state corruption, here it is made flesh in the person of a disbarred solicitor.) McNamee often lets his protagonists degrade and decline as the political situation around them degrades and declines, but there is an additional power in his casting his father in this declensionist story, of his forcing himself to (re)witness it.
In an important sense, McNamee’s interest in putting these forms of self-narrativisation on display can be read as a rejection of our rather self-satisfied national self-image as a ‘nation of storytellers’. His work presents a darker vision: perhaps we are not so much storytellers as fabricators, liars whose tenuous narratives are under constant revision. The Bureau is an extraordinary contribution to McNamee’s project of depicting the process through which violence in the north is mythologised and crystallised into history; with it, he offers his most personal novel yet, without compromising the political mission that makes him one of the most radical and important writers on the island.