Last week’s shooting of the journalist Lyra McKee once again exposed the fragility of peace in Northern Ireland, already a dark leitmotif of the Brexit debates. The violence that has always co-existed with that peace is the theme for Jenny McCartney’s gripping debut novel. The killings may have declined since the Good Friday Agreement, but the various “punishments” meted out by paramilitary vigilantes have never really stopped. Indeed, they reached a particular spike around the ceasefires in the mid-90s – the period in which the novel is mainly set. According to modest estimates, 220 received a beating in 1995, 326 were maimed in 1996. It is hard to know if last year’s modest figure of 87 should be seen as good news.
The reasons for the punishments vary – joy-riding, drug-dealing, sexual offences, antisocial behaviour – but they can also have the most innocuous causes. In McCartney’s novel, the theft of some Jaffa Cakes triggers disastrous results. “How smashable we all are.” McCartney captures the brutality of “punishment” and its gruesome effects. We encounter the deep loneliness of victimhood and the peculiar shame: “One of violence’s slyest tricks is to make you feel dirty for having being on the wrong end of it.”
For all its dark materials, the writing is funny and the similes fall like a whip (“She was like a sofa that too many people had sat on”; “I would try to exude a mild, friendly laddishness, the way a cuttlefish squirts out ink to blind its adversaries”). The narrator, Jacky, can sometimes overexplain, but he is also a finely perceptive moralist. He inevitably turns his satirical eye on the theatre of peace: solemn talk on the radio about the “two traditions”, with Loyalist hard men “using too-complicated words in slightly the wrong places” and a much slicker operator from Sinn Féin sounding like “a thoughtful social worker issuing case reports”.
McCartney has a troubled fondness for her native city – its dark hills and sodden beauty (“Nowhere does drizzle like Belfast”); its affection for “glittering wrecks” such as George Best and Alex Higgins, figures who mirror the city’s mix of sentimentality and explosiveness. But it is also a ghost factory, consuming life in the pursuit of ghosts: old wrongs and phantasmal futures, where all the political kitsch surrounding Irishness or Britishness will finally seem real.
Several recent novels have taken the Troubles as their theme – Anna Burns’s Milkman, Michael Hughes’s Country, David Keenan’s For the Good Times. Whether this is because the conflict can now be judged to be over or because that confidence is in question is difficult to decide, but The Ghost Factory ranks among the best of these fictions. It is a wonderfully large-souled book, even if its efforts to accommodate victims from both sides of the divide can feel a tad contrived. The plot creaks in the search for redemption, but there is a nobility in this too. As Jacky declares: “You have to get your own back just by living.” Not everyone can be saved; yet McCartney works hard to let her characters live.
• The Ghost Factory is published by 4th Estate (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
