Shade: A Novel [Hardcover]

Neil Jordan (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 2004

Nina Hardy has been murdered. She dies in the garden of the house where she grew up, killed by George, her childhood friend. But her body is never found, and she remains a silent shade, watching-and retelling-the events of her life, and afterlife.

Nina's half-brother, Gregory, makes a pilgrimage home for her funeral, after some thirty years away. There he finds Janie, George's sister and the fourth member of their childhood gang. Together they struggle to make sense of Nina's death and the people they all became.

With Nina's shade as witness, they retrace a story of imaginary friends and hayrides, plays and school dances, a seemingly idyllic Irish childhood beside the mudflats of the River Boyne. As the children reach adolescence, however, they discover that the outside world cannot be kept at bay, and the fragile balance of their friendships is interrupted. Ultimately they will be torn apart by the outbreak of war, brought together again only to find that each has changed almost beyond recognition. And by the end the seemingly senseless crime with which the book begins is revealed in all its full and heartbreaking meaning.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

We know from the earliest pages of Neil Jordan's numinous, slow-building fourth novel, Shade that its narrator, 50-old Nina Hardy, has been murdered with a pair of gardening shears by her childhood friend George Truite. The mystery is not who has committed this crime, but why. And although George has been for some years a resident of the local insane asylum, only recently allowed to experiment again with independent living, his madness is but a small part of the answer to that question. Set in Ireland near Drogheda, at the mouth of the river Boyne, Shade casts a wistful eye on childhood desires and alliances, and its lonely-girl-in-a-big-house beginnings will call to mind William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault. But like Jordan's greatest success, the film The Crying Game, this novel is full of surprises--and the biggest shocks are not always the most telling. --Jill Harvey

From Publishers Weekly

Elegantly sober narration from beyond the grave ("George killed me with his gardening shears.... He held the shears to my neck in the glasshouse, and with quite spectacular clumsiness opened a moonlike gash on my throat") distinguishes this ghost story from novelist and Oscar-winning filmmaker (The Crying Game) Jordan. His gloomy tale, spanning the first half of the 20th century, begins where the story ends: Nina Hardy is murdered by her childhood friend, George, now the gardener on the estate where she spent her youth. The rest of the book looks backward, as Nina reflects on her life and the lives of her half-brother Gregory, George and George's sister, Janie. The familiar, theatrical plot—with its traumas of unrequited love across class lines, incestuous longings, war—is secondary to Nina's voice: "I am everywhere being nowhere, the narrative sublime...." Her ghostly omniscience leads to echoing motifs, including drowned women, pendulums, dolls and childhood accidents, in "a shifting, uncertain world, where each question could be referred to an entity that wasn't there," even as the reasons behind the murder become more unsettlingly clear. Nina's ghost sometimes takes a backseat to stretches of exposition from less engaging characters, and the novel as a whole can feel dreamily disjointed. Such lapses are forgiven, though, in this otherwise daring and well-crafted whole.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (October 7, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582344825
• ISBN-13: 978-1582344829
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.1 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,046,767 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Two halves, she said, trying to make a whole.", December 11, 2004

By 

M. J Leonard "MikeonAlpha" (Silver Lake, Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shade: A Novel (Hardcover)

Shade is a strange, and beguiling novel. Beautifully written, with a mysterious, disparate undertone, the story combines timeless images of Hardyesque rural Irish landscapes with the horrors of the Great War. Oblique and multi-layered, Shade is part gruesome murder mystery, part mysterious fable, and part evocative love story that effortlessly brings the world of early twentieth century Ireland vividly to life. The viewer will certainly be challenged when reading this novel, as the structure is unconventional and the writing is often dense and heavily descriptive. Author, Neil Jordan - who has made a career out of making provocative movies - writes with such love, and affection for his daunting landscapes that the novel is impossible not to admire.

Shade is about four young friends whose lives are inevitably shaped by the devastating effects of World War 1 and by the beauty of their home in Drogheda, a rural town in Ireland, next to the Boyne River. The novel effectively contrasts the horrors of the conflict in the Dardanelles with the ever-restless motions of the river as it "cuts new meadows" on its way to the sea.

The novel begins with the spirit of the fifty-year-old Nina Hardy, describing how her gardener and best friend George, has brutally, and clumsily murdered her. The murder seems inexplicable, and the motivation remains unclear as George, a survivor of the Great War, was happily living and working for Nina. Nina, who grew up in the enormous, Anglo-Irish Baltray House on the Boyne River's northern bank, has just returned to the house after forty years of achieving fame as an actress.

Nina is determined, with the help of George, to rebuild the family home in which she was once happy. But George has a history of mental problems and has previously been an inmate of the psychiatric hospital of St Ita's in Portrane. There's obviously a connection between Nina and George, but the relationship remains vague and somewhat indistinct. Switching to the early 1900's, the narrative then focuses on idyllic childhood of the two as they are growing up along the mudflats of the river Boyne, with Gregory, Nina's half-brother, and Janie, George's sister.

George and Janie have both grown up in near poverty, but they find their friendship with Nina and Gregory exhilarating, and the fun and games of childhood soon lead to adult love. A fall from a large Tower leaves Nina and George somehow connected by their mutual injuries, and when George awakes from a six week coma, he seems disparate and detached, and somewhat jealous of the "ideal" relationship that Nina shares with her half-brother.

Shade is all about the shades that history plays in life. Themes of love and art are symbolically woven into the story through the lives of the main characters. Growth, birth and death, are things frozen in the moments we perceive them, like a perfect picture, understandable and interchangeable. Nina is like a ghost of the past filling the narrative with almost stream of consciousness-like images as the pieces of the puzzle are steadily put together for the reader. Shade is a fascinating portrait of history where the hidden threads linking childhood and adulthood are forever linked and are perpetually influential. Mike Leonard December 04

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Consummate storytelling, November 18, 2004

By 

K. L. Cotugno (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Shade: A Novel (Hardcover)

This is a comfortable-chair, rain-pelting-windows, curled-up-til-you-can-finish kind of book. You'll find yourself immersed, unable to get up to retrieve that next cup of coffee, resentful that you have to eventually get up to go into work or the john or anywhere that makes you exit this sensual world that Jordan has created. His imagery is evocative, haunting. One passage refers to rain as "the sound of a thousand watery hands drumming off the car's metal roof," and that quality of imagery is consistent throughout.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Evocative, haunting, June 1, 2005

By 

Kristen Merritt (Memphis, TN USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Shade: A Novel (Hardcover)

Neil Jordan's Shade is the story of Nina Hardy, who, as we find out at the beginning of the book, has been murdered by her childhood friend, George. The story revolves around a group of childhood friends, their journey through childhood, adolescence and their inevitable drifting apart, and ultimately leading to the reason for the gruesome murder. The narrator is the shade of the title, the ghost of Nina Hardy.

Shade is beautifully written. Although the pace of this book is leisurely, the characters are compelling and the wonderful descriptions of the landscape around the River Boyne leave you with a real feeling of the place.

If you're looking for a fast-paced ghost story, then this book is probably going to disappoint. However, if you enjoy a haunting story of human tragedy, then I highly recommend this book.