The Last Crossing, by Brian McGilloway.

 

          Brian McGilloway divides the action of his superb story into chapters alternating between the present day, and terrible events of thirty years before, when The Troubles dominated the whole of Ireland.  No-one could ever be neutral in those times;  you were either a staunch Republican and ready to die for the cause and/or kill for it, or Northern Irish, who felt the same.                       

            Now, a Peace Agreement has been signed, and fanatical enemies of thirty years ago have supposedly jettisoned their innate hatreds and are jockeying for positions in the new government.  It’s the dawn of a new peaceful  era!

            Oh, really? 

            Thirty years ago, lovers Karen and Tony are inveigled into supporting and facilitating clandestine acts of sabotage controlled by Duggan, an acquaintance who appeals to their sad history of having family members murdered by the Military and Derry Police:  ‘It’s the least yez can do to avenge their memory!’  And that’s alright, as far as it goes, until they are party to a cold-blooded assassination performed by Duggan on his best friend, who has been unmasked as a tout, a snitch, a betrayer.  This was not what they signed up for, especially as Tony, a teacher, finds that one of his pupils, a child he knows and cares about, will become collateral damage:  he can’t let that happen.

            Thirty years later, he, Duggan and Karen are summoned by political hopeful Sean Mullan;  he’s running for office and wants to exhume the Snitch’s body from its secret hiding-place, returning the remains to the family so that they will have ‘closure’, and Mullan will be seen to be magnanimous in letting Bygones be Bygones.  The cynicism of his reasoning is breathtaking, but is so outrageous that it will be successful, as the tout’s family have been searching for him fruitlessly for many years:  they truly do want ‘closure’, and as Tony, Duggan and Karen are the only ones who know where they buried him, they are the ones who must find him again.  Except that their world has changed;  life has gotten in the way and nothing - and nobody – is the same:  Duggan is still full of hatred – ‘the war is never over’;  Tony is a solitary, childless widower, and Karen has a family but has been marked forever by the events of their youth.

            And the revelations keep coming, in Mr McGilloway’s spare, beautiful prose.  Each sentence does the work of ten and his protagonists speak to us eloquently of the dreams we all have but are seldom realised.  Superlative.  SIX STARS.     

 

 

Deacon King Kong, by James McBride.

           

            It is 1969 and Cuffy ‘Sportcoat’ Lambkin is a Deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church , but he has been a sinner for many years, being a slave to the Demon Drink called King Kong, a lethal home brew made by his friend Rufus, janitor in one of the enormous New York slum housing projects in which they both live.  That Badass King Kong makes him do awful things and then forget completely that he did them, so he reacts in shocked disbelief when he hears that he shot off the ear of the local drug dealer:  Sportcoat needs to go on the run – immediately:  when Deems Clements gets out of hospital, his revenge will be terrible.  And permanent.

James McBride’s latest novel brings to life superbly the New York of 50 years ago;  the migration of black people from other states into the already ramshackle housing projects vacated by the Jews, Irish and Italians, none of whom want to mix with Coloureds or Hispanics, and the hardscrabble life those outcasts made for themselves – even establishing their own church – until hard drugs appeared, and even worse, sold by their own people.  And sold by Deems Clements, who had been coached as a very young teenager by Sportcoat to be a baseball pitcher of enormous potential – a youngster who had a chance to leave his lowly origins through sheer talent, and what does he do?  Peddle Heroin in his neighbourhood, that’s what, selling poison for The Man.  No wonder the Deacon (heavily influenced by King Kong) shot him.  And he aimed for his head, too, but because he was so drunk he got Deems’s ear instead.

Mr McBride’s novel teems with wonderful characters, all full of life, including Potts, a sympathetic Irish policeman who is wistfully attracted to the noble and statuesque wife of the Church Pastor.  Sister Gee works as a cleaner:  ‘You an’ me, Officer.  We both clean up the dirt’. And Italian Tom Elefante (known as The Elephant – now there’s a surprise!), one of the few Italians still living in the area and working at his late father’s business of smuggling, but hugely respected because he won’t touch drugs.  But he’s 40 years old, and so lonely.  Will he ever find someone to care for?

A great veneer of exuberant humour has been employed to temper the horror and sadness of the characters’ existences, but it doesn’t disguise the fact that black lives have always mattered – and always will.  SIX STARS.

        

             

The Dickens Boy, by Tom Keneally.

         In 1868, the author Charles Dickens is beloved by the world.  His books hold the English-speaking world in thrall, and each new publication, many of which started  life in episode form, is awaited with breathless anticipation:  he is a sorely-needed literary god, not least in Australia, that raw, new colony peopled by gentlemen, remittance men – and convicts, sent there for ‘The Term of their Natural Lives’.  Imagine the delight, the honour that people feel to know that the Great Man has decided to send two of his sons to New South Wales, ostensibly to Make Men of Them. 

            Fair enough.  Twenty-five year old Alfred is the first to be sent to make his mark as a gentleman drover, but Edward, youngest of the ten Dickens children (nicknamed Plorn, and as a child baptised by his father as ‘the jolliest boy in the world) is just sixteen when he makes the three-month ocean journey.  He is sent to work in the Outback because his illustrious Pa doesn’t think Plorn is ‘applying himself’ – which may be true:  Plorn is not known for academic brilliance, nor has he read a single one of his father’s novels, a secret he keeps with utmost guilt.  His only talent is cricket:  he’s a very useful all-rounder!

            Revered Australian author Tom Keneally tells Plorn’s story with great empathy of the completely different lifestyle he must accustom himself to, from food (mutton, damper and black tea for most meals) rough-and-ready colleagues (some of them shifty indeed) to the utter vastness of the landscape and the varieties of sheep that the drovers manage.  Words like ‘flock’ don’t apply here where sheep number in the hundreds of thousands – a ‘mob’ of sheep is more appropriate;  likewise the incongruity of calling boundary fences ‘paddocks’, which must be patrolled even though each paddock may stretch for fifty miles.  She’s a Big Country alright, but even more exotic and alien to Plorn are the Aborigines, some of whom work with him and are protected by his Boss.  He is fascinated by them, intrigued by their customs and agog at their equestrian skills – yes, Plorn, that homesick boy longing for England and his beloved family, believes he has truly found his niche:  he is ‘applying himself’, and hopes Pa will approve.

            Mr Keneally has recreated brilliantly Charles Dickens’s literary and family life, including his cruel treatment of Catherine, mother of his ten children, and his continuing affair with actress Ellen Ternan :  only a  master novelist could reimagine Plorn and Alfred’s  consternation at the liaison, revealed publicly at Dickens’s tragic death in 1870, but Tom Keneally has recounted Plorn’s small triumphs  and great tragedies most fittingly:  Plorn the Dickens Boy has applied himself well!  FIVE STARS.