Brits Out my arse

Austin Duffy has produced three increasingly accomplished novels in a relatively short period, and his readers might be forgiven for thinking they now know exactly what to expect from him. This Living and Immortal Thing (2016) offered the perspective of an urbane scientist so absorbed in his own concerns that he risked missing the human truths obvious to others. Ten Days (2021) – which featured a photographer on a journey with his daughter to scatter his estranged wife’s ashes – developed a skill for plotting that built tremendous emotional power from tiny increments, bolstered by scrupulous attention to material and cultural detail. Most recently, The Night Interns (2022) marshalled these virtues into a superb workplace procedural that laid bare the appalling everyday toll of life as a newly qualified hospital doctor. All three, to a greater or lesser extent, drew on Duffy’s medical expertise as a consultant oncologist in Dublin.

More than once while reading Cross I had to check to make sure the writer was the same Austin Duffy. This fourth novel represents a significant departure in tone and subject matter, bringing the author back to the country around his native Dundalk, the close-knit Republican heartland that straddles the Irish border, and back in time to the final months of the Northern Ireland conflict. In place of the author’s usual restrained realism, the freewheeling style and heightened suspense of Cross suggest a ferocious fever dream of the Troubles, a nightmare vision of a rebel community where principled resistance to oppression might tip over at any moment into bloodthirsty madness.

The plotting is that of a violent thriller, and rather than his usual laconic, ironic first-person narrator, Duffy attempts the gossipy circumlocution familiar from Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season (2020) – an omniscient vernacular voice that seems to belong to the place itself: “O everyone knew all about her poor wee Darren all right. An antisocial menace is what he was right from the get-go, a bad article, pure lowlife scum”. This same Darren has absconded after an IRA operation has been intercepted by the authorities, but his mother rejects the suggestion that he must be an informer and begins a one-woman hunger strike in the town square to demand his safe passage home. As media attention grows, Sinn Féin tasks the local IRA with cleaning up the embarrassing mess before it threatens the peace talks.

But this plot, for all that it strains to include every key trope of the conflict, is not the point. Duffy’s real task is to interrogate the integrity of the IRA’s dwindling campaign in those years, and of the ceasefire that followed. On the ground, gung-ho optimists believed twenty-five years of attrition had shifted the British position consider­ably, and a ceasefire would look like surrender. For a disillusioned realist, however, the conflict had reached a corrosive political stalemate. The movement was riddled with informers and increasingly prone to tactical misjudgements and horrific operational errors, while, on the ground, the impunity of revolution often served only as a fig leaf for the usual thugs and drug smugglers. That position is given voice here by Francie, an old-fashioned Marxist IRA lieutenant, and the best the novel can offer as a moral centre: “Brits Out my arse. If we wanted that it would have been done by now. We didn’t have the stomach for it. That’s the truth of it so it is. Settled instead for the chance of being the Big Man”.

There are glimmers of hope in Cross. The post-ceasefire chapters propose a future illuminated by the voices of traumatized women who publicly call out the abusive cruelty and closed-ranks double standards of local kingpins. But in the real world such a vision remains a comforting fantasy. In spite of high-profile campaigns by victims’ families and the emergence of female leaders in the main parties, there seems little appetite to move beyond macho sectarian tribalism as the organ­izing principle of local politics, even as the years of ceasefire look set to surpass in total the years of conflict.

The archetypes and rhetoric on display here can feel excessively stylized, even to the point of absurdity, and it is fair to predict that Cross will come to be seen as a transitional work for Austin Duffy as he lights out for new territory. But on its own terms it stands as a potent fable of failed insurgency. A revolutionary movement can persuade itself that the savage violence of asymmetric warfare is the painful cost of political struggle. But in the absence of any better vision of the future, a generation born and bred inside perpetual civil conflict might come to believe that same violence is the essence and nature of the struggle itself.

Michael Hughes teaches at Queen Mary, University of London. His most recent novel is Country, 2018

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