Customer Reviews

Resurrection Man: A Novel

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Politics and crime blur in this evocative novel that explores the Irish underground. Somehow managing to be both brutal and musical, McNamee follows a violent gang leader, his followers, and his enemies as their intersecting lives inevitably degnerate in a hopeless environment. This book is not for the squeamish, by the way.

Eoin McNamee has conjured, from beyond the grave, the doomed characters of his novel. Soulless death squad members who stalk Belfast in the wee hours. Abducting, mutilating, butchering dozens of innocent Catholic boys and men. Resurrection Man, is full of intelligence operatives, homosexual blackmail, too much amphetamine, the smell of stale whiskey, and ghoulish murder.

This book was a great read. THough it did not go into detail about many of the historical facts and figures of the Troubles, it centered on the emotional turmoil that people experience when facing death. It was also interesting because it was written from the perspective of a Ulster Protestant, showing that people on both sides of the conflict are affected deeply by the death and destruction cause by the fighting. The book is very violent, with violent images and harsh words, but those characteristics add a very human dimension to the book, bringing it down to a level at which people can relate to. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the Northern Ireland conflict. It is a quick read because you don't want to put it down.

Re-reading this novel about a decade after it appeared, it holds up well. My earlier impression after my initial reading was one of grisliness, but on re-examining McNamee's debut (hard to believe, that), I realise that what truly makes the narrative so powerful is the withholding of such gory details from the reader. The omniscient voice does shadow in and out of various characters (to more or less similar effect--this the novel's main drawback in its monotone, if also its noirish strength), but since the characters keep the horror at a distance, so then do we, as spectators.

This detachment differentiates McNamee's take on Belfast from the farce of Colin Bateman, the humanity of Glenn Patterson, or the tragi-comedy of Robert MacLiam Wilson, to name his peers. Atmospheric in a manner that conjures up a sodden city as grim as Dickensian London, this fits a period that now has been obliterated under new skylines, regentrified waterside developments, and tenuous ceasefires. Based on Lenny Murphy and his Shankill Butchers, the crimes they commit are not so much the focus as the aura they create, and live haunted within, as the Ulster rhetoric they pay lip service to is, as the perpetrators know, no cover for the deeper violence to which they pledge their true allegiance, even if they cannot fully articulate it.

The subplot of the journalist Ryan, his estranged wife Margaret, his contact Coppinger, and the "moll" Heather gets a bit murky, as if McNamee did not want to fully explore the supporting characters circling about Victor Kelly. It's a little disappointing, and feels incomplete. The lack of range of registers in many of the indirect narratives of the main characters makes for a sameness in tone that works well in smaller doses, but over a couple hundred pages gets a bit wearying. This may be McNamee's intent, as the style--suffused with homiletic cadences and half-remembered biblical starkness--recalls both Joyce's Dubliners ("scrupulous meanness") and Beckett's street denizens in its carefully modulated detachment.

[P.S.The author has published (only in Britain as of now) a novel based on Robert Nairac, an undercover James Bondish figure, Oxford student, Sandhurst grad, and SAS recruit who submerged himself inot the Provo stronghold of South Armagh--"The Ultras." It'll be interesting to see if McNamee's historical re-visiting of the Troubles through another enigmatic --if more romanticised and articulate--figure will play out this time.]

I am adding this to my wishlist although I remember the sense of discovery very vividly from first reading more than 2 years ago. One of the few authors, along with Brian Moore, to present a vision of life in the North, again Belfast here too. And his style is bril -- absolutely groundbreaking. Remember being mesmerized by the hypnotic pace, the phrasing, and complete innovation in style. I would be eager to read more of his work.

One reviewer here called this book `poetic' and I wonder why. There is certainly nothing very poetic about this book: the prose is very stark and detached. Obviously McNamee is trying to capture the dark passages of a land torn by civil unrest and ridden in human bondage. I must admit, however, that the novel is certainly well written, almost brutal in its gripping descriptions of the murderous minds and violent manifestations that pervade the novel. One cannot come across a better book on serial killings, internecene war and human fragmentation than the `Resurrection Man.'

McNamee's Resurrection Man is a dark, poetic novel, the prose of which conveys emotions, and mental images of the people, places and deeds it describes, with a clarity unlike any other novel I have read. I found myself often rereading passages two and three times to fully immerse myself in their precise and poetic imagery. While I have never been to Belfast, and do not have intimate knowledge of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, this book gave me a vivid sense of both, while capturing my attention and anticipation until the very last page. It is an important novel by an author who demonstrates a command of a unique and penetrating style of writing; a style I shall not soon forget. Well worth the read!

Set in Belfast during the early 1980s, Resurrection Man is a disturbing view of people whose lives have been hijacked by conditions not of their making. The main character, Victor Kelly morphs into a serial killer after a childhood marred by sectarian bigotry. The writing is darkly lyrical and riveting. Definitely a page turner that conveys a somber story of a violent subculture in Northern Ireland.