Mick Clifford: A year of remarkable writing

 Macarthur had been born into old money and had, up until that point, lived the life of what we might call today a trust fund kid. But the money was running out and then this happened. The killings were without reason and the killer was arrested in the home of the then Attorney General. The acronym GUBU, Grotesque, Unbelievable, Bizarre, Unprecedented was born.

The story has been examined every which way over the last forty years, including in fictionalised form through John Banville’s The Book of Evidence. Last March, The Murderer and The Taoiseach, an account by journalist Harry McGee, based on his excellent podcast series, was published. But Mark O’Connell came at the story from a very different perspective. His book, A Thread Of Violence, was concerned mainly with “a desire to penetrate beneath the surface of biological facts to the inner logic of his (Macarthur’s) life”.

O’Connell has gained a reputation as a non-fiction writer who likes to explore the paths less travelled, from which he generally returns with a bounty worthy of close attention. His account here is largely based on a series of meetings rather than interviews held in Macarthur’s Dublin flat. These were initiated after the author effectively stalked his subject through the bare streets of a city in lockdown under pandemic rules. Writing in sparse prose, O’Connell ruminates over his subject, skillfully maintaining a journalistic distance while probing continuously into the psyche of a man whose life was “a project of refined hedonism” up until murderous urges took over.

His rearing would today be described as privileged but emotionally it was anything but. This is an obvious clue to a psyche that seemed to have within it the capacity to murder apparently on a whim, as Macarthur did. Yet throughout the book, the killer disputes any such analysis. To suggest that, in the end, O’Connell reached definitive conclusions would be stretching it, but his writing is such that the journey alone is one of discovery, rendering the book one of the very best to appear this year.

Another which reached back forty years was Rory Carroll’s Killing Thatcher. As it says on the tin this is an account of the plan by the IRA to murder Margaret Thatcher, which they nearly succeeded in doing in 1984. The bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton at the Conservative Party Conference was an audacious act of terror. The Provos felt perfectly justified in blowing up anybody within the hotel, as all such deaths, they believed, contributed to their campaign to drive the Brits from Northern Ireland.

Five people did die, but Thatcher escaped. Surprisingly, the whole affair had not been examined in any detail until O’Carroll, Ireland correspondent for The Guardian, got stuck into it. He presents the story on a broad canvas that delves into the politics and history of the North and really takes off with the murder of Lord Mountbatten and his wife — along with two teenage boys — in 1979, followed by the 1981 hunger strike.

Much of the story is seen through the eyes of some of the principals, including Patrick Magee, the only man convicted of the bombing. He is out of central casting for the cold-blooded, intelligent fanatic that is perfect material for an organisation pursuing murder and terror. Then there is bomb disposal expert Peter Gurney, sent in often in the aftermath of carnage caused by Magee’s comrades. Following the Harrod’s bombing at Christmas 1983, he came across the body of a young woman whom he initially mistook for a shop mannequin.

“She had been blown through a plate glass window and lay broken upon gaily coloured wreckage. Her skirt had been blown off and she had underpants adorned with a heart that embraced the message ‘I love you’. Instead of seeing her as a clue to the bomb as the job demanded, he saw her as a person. Who had she been, this girl? Who had she loved, and who had loved her? That night, at home, he wept.”

Carroll’s account is absorbing and written with the verve of a thriller. It is also a factually based reminder of what really went on in those years and the futility of it all. After all, the violent attempt to unite the island as one entity, with absolutely no democratic mandate of any kind, ended in failure. At a time when some are attempting to rewrite the past and cast the IRA’s campaign as a struggle for rights, factually based accounts such as this take on a greater value.

Two other books published in the same vein during the year are Richard O’Rawe’s Stakeknife and Maria Cahill’s Rough Beast which details her abuse at the hands of an IRA member and the organisation.

On a lighter note, there was plenty of good fiction around during the year. Among the most enjoyable must surely be Aingeala Flannery’s The Amusements, which won the Listowel Writer’s Week book of the year. The book consists of a whole range of interconnecting stories based around people from Tramore, some of whom fly the coop, others who arrive from outside — and then there are the lifers, happy, or more often unhappy to stay and observe.

The writing is such that you can smell the sea and the popcorn in the tourist resort, and particularly see the whole subdued vista at the height of winter when the amusements are locked up and the crowds have returned to their normal lives. There are echoes of William Trevor, Elizabeth Strout, and even Kevin Barry but Flannery has her own voice which is often wry and always threatening to stray into mordant humour in the next paragraph. The whole thing makes reading fun and it will be interesting to observe what the author followed this debut with.

There were plenty of other good books throughout the year but there’s only so many that can be squeezed into an end-of-the-year column. Happy Christmas, enjoy it if you’re lucky enough not to be lonely this year, and hopefully, you can tolerate it if you are.