Old Northern Ireland atrocity forms centrepiece of complex family saga
Nick Laird’s third novel is his most serious to date, relating how an atrocity from the past affects a Northern Ireland Protestant family two decades later, while also suggesting parallels with a similarly divided society on the far side of the world.
And if in the end these two story strands don’t really mesh, there’s no denying the author’s ambition.
After the prologue’s ferociously unnerving account of the atrocity that will loom large later in the book, we’re offered a family saga just as engrossing as the one evoked by Anne Enright in The Green Road.
The family members, though, are very different, starting with New York-based eldest daughter Liz, whose feckless boyfriend has cheated on her with another guy.
This leaves anthropologist Liz in a state as she hurries to catch a plane home, where younger sister Alison is about to marry for the second time.
Back in her home town of Ballyglass, life is no more relaxing. Estate agent father Kenneth has had a stroke and is showing signs of early Alzheimer’s; mother Judith is battling cancer; brother Spencer is having an affair with his best friend Ian’s wife; and Alison, formerly married to an abusive RUC man, is jittery about her upcoming nuptials to Stephen, a kindly but taciturn man she doesn’t know much about.
A local newspaper reveals on the day after the wedding that Alison’s new husband had belonged to the Ulster Freedom Fighters and had slaughtered five random Catholics in a pub massacre in the early 1990s, thereby bringing shame to the family and leaving Alison embarked on a honeymoon with someone she can’t bear to look in the eye.
Liz flies off to Papua New Guinea with a BBC camera crew to make a documentary about a religious sect created by a local woman called Belef on an island named New Ulster, which harbours the same kind of divisive tribal cultures from which Liz has long fled.
Towards the end, with a reluctant Stephen agreeing to give oral testimony for an academic project, the reader’s interest picks up again, but by then we’ve spent far too much time in the jungle and are left wondering why the author hadn’t focused instead on the domestic and local fallout from Stephen’s murderous past.