Iron Annie is set in Dundalk, where there is honour of a sort among thieves (drug-dealers, mostly, but also hitmen and street-robbers, although that’s often incidental to the drug-dealing). “The town’s a bitofa hole – but there’s people from everywhere. Not juss Polish an Chinese like, but French and Australians and even people from Sligo n’all sorts a places.”
The narrator is Aoife from Mullaghbawn, who began dealing at school and is now part of Dundalk’s drug network, a participant in the meetings at Smokey Quigley’s bar where off-duty gardaí, local IRA men and approximately organised criminals meet to see to business.
Aoife is in love with Annie, a posh Glasgow arts graduate sowing her wild oats but probably bound for eventual bourgeois respectability and therefore not as careful as those with no fallback plan. Annie and Aoife share a sharp analysis of gender, class and capitalism but express it differently: watching middle-aged men displaying camera drones and paddle-boards on a beach, “Annie calls this sorta carry-on with drones an shite like that commodity fetishism. Meself I juss call it actin the prick”.
Some readers will find the phonetically rendered voice off-putting. But even for a reader who is not Irish and has never knowingly heard a Dundalk accent, it’s no harder to read than William Faulkner or Irvine Welsh. I enjoyed the rhythm and phrasing; Cassidy is good at teaching as he goes along and it doesn’t take long to work out what “beor” and “feen” mean or how you might translate “haigh”.
Aoife works mostly with or for the Rat King, a Traveller, graduate in French and economics, so named because he keeps a “proper rat, off the streets like” in his pocket. Everyone in the underworld knows or quickly learns his or her place; ideas above your station can be fatal, and the Rat King also has his limits.
When he steals 10 kilos of cocaine from “some other crowd he had a bone to pick with below in Meath”, he asks Aoife to help him sell it on. They both know it’s too much and too conspicuous for the Irish market, so Aoife, hoping to have promiscuous Annie to herself for a few weeks, suggests that she and Annie take a road trip to England. “I didn’t know you had a substantial network of contacts in the UK,” the Rat King says, sharing his “batter burger” with the rat in the back room of a chip shop where a children’s party is going on.
Aoife doesn’t have the contacts and has never been to England, but Annie “went to some posh boarding school there . . . An she’s pals with loads’ a dealers an coke heads over there, fairly small time, but we can still get rid’a half a kilo at’a time I reckon.”
So begins the novel’s picaresque, a queer underworld Thelma & Louise with better jokes and about the same chance of a happy ending. Aoife hates the ferry crossing, “Knowin all them sharks an fish an weird watery things are flowin and slidin around ye”, and continues to find most of England vaguely nauseating.
But there are new worlds to learn: a Jewish undertaker at a Manchester party who turns out to be almost as good as a woman in bed (if slightly stagey in explaining his family’s national identity); the network of dealers in Birmingham where Annie shows what she’s learned in Dundalk (“someone looking for a leg-up is less likely to break yours”); good crack in Cardiff, at least until Annie meets a Scotsman called Hamish who claims that he only wants to help.
Aoife begins to compare new places to familiar ones, London to “th’economy’a clickbait that runs Dublin, turnin the place to a wasteland a’ tech companies and chain coffee shops. Sure Irish economic policy is nathin more than us bein the cheapest hooker on the street as far as I can see”.
The first-person voice means that socioeconomic commentary can be offered only in monologue. Often these moments are very funny, though sometimes they feel forced. Nevertheless, Cassidy keeps tight control of a story that’s simultaneously state of the nation, romance and crime. Aoife’s love for Annie overrides her judgment and the consequences fall, as they do, on the (relatively) innocent. Tragedy, in the end, but there’s good craic along the way.
Sarah Moss’s latest novel, The Fell, will be published by Picador in November
