Wartime myths are odd, ambivalent things. Heroism is so easily corrupted; brutality becomes mixed up with courage. The complexities of tribal hatreds masquerading as war fought out over generations in Northern Ireland under maverick rules defy understanding.
Eoin McNamee evokes much of the horror, all of the hate and a terrifying amount of the vicious mindlessness in his strange, unsettling, somewhat disconnected and ultimately dissatisfying new book, The Ultras.
At the heart of the complicated, layered narrative (though "heart" is the wrong word) festers the unsolved mystery of the fate of Capt Robert Nairac. This man is no fictional creation, at least not of McNamee's. Nairac recreated himself many times: he was a Special Forces operative, selected apparently as a youth for the job of gathering intelligence and perhaps also recruited for tasks of dispassionate killing.
As in his previous novel, The Blue Tango (2001), McNamee looks to the past. But as a novel, The Ultras never achieves the sinister allure of the earlier work, which admittedly triumphs through the enigmatic characterisation of the murdered Patricia Curran.
The son of a surgeon, Nairac was an English public school boy enamoured of the business of fighting, killing, hiding and dissembling. Obsessed with guns, birds of prey and notions of death, he is, in McNamee's version, a loner who fancies himself as a whiz on regional accents, is happy to sing in a pub and reckons he has figured out the Northern mind. For all the theatrics and the sense of his being the nasty, somewhat menacing oddball who never quite grew up, McNamee's Nairac is a liar and a bit of a fake who may or may not have ended up in a meat factory, minced into dog food.
Exactly why he is seen as a mythic figure is strange and unsettling as is much else in this overly stylised, relentlessly theatrical, even rhetorical novel. "Relentless" is a useful word here, and accurate. There is a pounding beat to The Ultras; it seems far, far longer than its 256 pages. It is as if reality and fiction are battling it out. Details of Nairac's past, his personal history, and the self with which he arrives to take up duty in the North are pieced together amidst the various impressions he left upon other people. At best he emerges as eccentric; at worst, he seems frightening. Tall, possibly good-looking, complete with the boxer's regulation broken nose, he moves in an unpleasant circle of other misfits, men who enjoy terror and pain - even sex for them needs to have a bit of both.
On the edges of McNamee's reconstruction of the 1970s, during which outsiders such as Nairac came to the North for dangerous adventure while the ordinary citizens battled to survive, is Blair Agnew a disgraced ex-policeman, who some 25 years on tries to figure out what really happened to Nairac. Divorced from his still bitter wife, the ill and aging Agnew is the father of Lorna, a girl intent on self-destruction. Any sympathy such as there is sprinkled across this cold narrative centres on Agnew as a bewildered loser still possessed of humanity:
Sometimes he thought he knew why he was drawn to Nairac's story. It was the rumour that Robert had been taken to the meat factory. It was the rumoured use of the factory mincer. It meant that there was a newness to the crime, a modernity to it. The amorality and existential vacancy of it. It prefigured the subculture drifters, the loners, the basement dismemberers. There was a sense of cognitive dysfunction which was missing from the other border killings. The culvert bomb, the multiple victims, the historical carnage.
Throughout the novel McNamee calls upon the hypnotic prose that served him so brilliantly in The Blue Tango, yet this time it sounds overstated, less incantatory and more repetitive. It is a narrative continually striving for the eerie choreography that elevated McNamee's reshaping of the life and death of an ambivalent, elusive and utterly doomed young woman to a seductive level of mystery. That book marked a fascinating step on from his outstanding first novel, Resurrection Man (1994).
This time the formula and particularly the prose - lyric and intense, quasi- religious in its deliberation - appears unduly inflated. There is an essential flatness to the narrative, and Nairac is insufficiently interesting to merit the refined treatment of McNamee's magisterial language. There is no enigma, only a stereotype of the mercenary without a cause and devoid of belief. Late in the novel, when one of the characters imagines "that he could actually feel Robert becoming a legend, moving at that very moment in a border location, map- referenced, alone, with a sense of deadly mission", it all seem bogus, inflated. "People believed anything they heard about Robert. They yearned after him. They sought the lonely perfection of the conspirator," McNamee writes.
Why should Nairac be seen to excite such rhetoric?
The figure standing slightly apart at events of military and historic import. The fomenter of havoc. The plotter. The hatcher of villainy, of murderous schemes, alone in the prowled-through locale of his own mythology.
McNamee the novelist, a writer of undoubted flair, is working within the always dangerous area of truth, fiction, history and opinion. If this novel appears to move beyond politics it is because the characters, most of whom are flatly two-dimensional and theatrically damaged, are too concerned with their own agendas. The narrative ends up being neither a thriller nor a variation on an historical theme.
Throughout, McNamee is continually caught up in meditations of the moment. Each observation is pursued and becomes a narrative within the narrative. Musing, half-remembered memories, impressions dictate the tone. Most of the exchanges are harsh, snappy. It is a narrative of scant love, even fellow feeling.
Daft as its sounds, while reading it I kept thinking of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia, although Nairac is no hero, not even an insane one. The Ultras is the first of McNamee's books to fail to evoke the geography of the North that undercuts his writing and sustains its unique nuance. This novel of rhetorical prose and fragmented talk is dense without texture, chaotic rather than atmospheric. The ambiguity which proved one of the enforcing strengths of The Blue Tango, his finest work to date, here becomes a barrier between the fact and the fiction. Yet for all these misgivings, he again demonstrates he is a novelist of daring and almost ritualistic sophistication.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
The Ultras By Eoin McNamee Faber, 256pp, £10.99
