The next gangland murder will send a shiver down our spines. That’s the power of Love/hate
AFTER the blood-soaked finale of Love/Hate last Sunday, a woman rang a radio station to thank God that the series was over and that we could all get back to reality. But my detective friends were unanimous – this IS the reality and it has been that way for a very long time.
I know detectives who won’t watch Love/Hate because it’s simply too close to the day job, and others who say it’s brilliant because it’s as near to what’s happening on the streets as you can get.
I’ve lived in Dublin all my life. I’ve seen many things that don’t sit easy with me. Violence, fear, drug addiction… these aren’t new. The devastating impact crime has on families, especially children, gets to you. It’s partly why I write crime fiction. It’s an attempt to somehow get a handle on the madness.
The day I heard about young Anthony Campbell’s murder – an innocent young man working as an apprentice plumber, caught in a gangland assassination – I felt utterly shocked. All I could think of were the faces of young lads I’d known over the years starting work as apprentices – a little nervous, a little apprehensive, but excited about what lay ahead.
Taking another person’s life isn’t entertaining. We all know that – and the police dealing with it every day know it better than most. So what is it about Love/Hate that pulls us in? What had nice teenage girls declaring their love for Nidge and middle-class fans watching it in their droves?
For a start, it is raw and real, with quality acting, great storylines, a rich tapestry of engaging characters and a pervasive sense of utter menace. It is top-class entertainment. But arguably, it is more – and it’s the more that pushed this series into the stratosphere.
PEOPLE often forget the significance of art in social and cultural discourse. By getting things spot-on in the entertainment department, built on a bedrock of factual data, the programme-makers broke through the shoulder-shrugging apathy with which we normally greet news of the latest gangland killing. In the comfort of our living rooms, as the violence escalated towards its inevitable end, our impassivity was tested and stretched until stark reality dawned: this is not a million miles from any of us.
The reason I’m drawn to psychological crime fiction is its ability not only to reflect the world we live in, to propel ordinary people into extraordinary situations but to explore why other people don’t follow the same rules as we do. The genre goes far beyond a perceived guilty pleasure. True, it won’t teach you how to protect yourself if you meet a thug with a knife in a dark alley, or equip a middle-class girl infatuated with Nidge’s character to deal with the reallife version of him.
But it opens a window on these dangerous worlds from the safety of your own home and in some way allows us to make sense of it all. When I wrote my novel Red Ribbon, I was facing my own worst fear as a parent – the dread of something bad happening to your children at the hands of another. Living in the Dublin Mountains, I know the thrill of being perched above a pulsating city but I also know it can be a dark and desolate place. After completing the first draft of Red Ribbons, I remember hearing about the discovery of a body off Military Road in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains – exactly where my fictional victim had been found.
Both were discovered because a storm had caused the uprooted a tree, exposing the shallow-grave. A great many victims are believed to be buried in the remoteness of the mountains, only a few minutes’ drive from the city. Some of them might never be found. I know that body parts taken by hungry animals in the depth of winter can cause police crime scenes to expand with obvious logistical pressures and, certainly, good fiction will often use real life as its foundation.
But it’s the portrayal of the story that will pull you in, engage and entertain you, unravelling human fragility, goals and desires, forming part of our conscious thinking, whether we are in agreement with elements of it or not. Lovers of Love/Hate won’t doubt that it achieved all this.
As the series grew, did it offer a better understanding and a dawning in some people’s minds that criminal gangs might be running the show? I think in some quarters, it did. Were marginal communities examined, for example the Travel- ling community, in a way that no current affairs programme could explore, expand our understanding of them, partly eroding our societal bias? Again, in my opinion, the answer is Yes.
Was the depiction of the violence inflicted against women accurate? Many knowledgeable sources say it was, including the ex-governor of Mountjoy, John Lonergan, who said: ‘The savagery, especially to women, the way women are treated, that is the reality for many women living in those environments.’ Through that exposition, were wider questions asked about our treatment of women in society? I doubt the producers of the series set out with any sociocultural agenda. Their job was to entertain, to get viewers to tune in – but nothing can ever be seen in complete isolation.
Controversy was part and parcel of the show and some elements, like the killing of the cat, broke fictional taboos. Most recently, the rape of Fran in prison, and the extreme violence with which it was depicted, risked people turning away. It certainly repulsed me – and I know detectives who’ve seen people shot in the head and worse who were shocked too.
WAS it a step too far? I don’t know but the tsunami of attention to it, even the humour applied, in some way reflects our inability to cope with it. But good fiction has to take risks or what you get is a rehash of what went before.
I wondered whether Love/Hate broke the formula of the ‘ good-bad’ guy – the Michael Corleone or Tony Soprano, the doting family man who is also a ruthless killer. Was it too uncritical of the ‘honour among thieves’, the perverted loyalties, too concerned to establish a rationale for the characters’ brutal actions, making it harder to dismiss them as monsters?
Fans I spoke to said they would have found the rape scene more difficult to watch if it had been Nidge. So was he on some level the good-bad guy? He certainly had qualities that went beyond the attraction of power or charisma.
Undoubtedly, the cycle of violence that drew him in, formed part of his decision-making process. And although the series pushed the boundaries, he displayed humanity, particularly in his relationship with Janet, despite her killing. The selfharming scene with the cigarette, for one, made it harder for us to view him as absolute evil.
Now there’s talk of thugs on the street modelling themselves on the characters from the series. It’s too early to say whether Love/Hate changed our thinking on a societal level but it brought home the reality that the subversive element exists within a cycle of violence, control, ego and paranoia and that gangland power is all too real and all too close to home.
Louise Phillips is the bestselling author of three psychological crime thrillers. Her second novel, The Doll’s House, won the Ireland AM Best Crime Novel of the Year at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards. Last Kiss, her latest novel, is nominated in this year’s awards.