The Rage, by Gene Kerrigan
(CWA
Gold Dagger 2012)
The noir novel is a product of media
culture. It is thus fitting, that in Ireland as elsewhere, some of its first
and most celebrated practitioners are, or were, journalists. Although Irish noir appeared only much later than
say its counterparts in the US, France or Italy, in an era already dominated by
multimedia, it is worth noting that it retains such a link with the printed
press. Colin Bateman, one of the genre's pioneers with his 1994 Divorcing Jack, was a journalist in Northern
Ireland, working for the County Down
Spectator. His subsequent novel, Belfast
Confidential, examines the life and scandals of a local newspaper. His recurring
character, Dan Starkey, is a journalist in Belfast, and seems to be an alter ego of the author. In Dublin, John
Connolly, now the most internationally successful Irish noir author wrote his first novel All the Dead Things (1999) while working as a journalist for the Irish Times.
Gene Kerrigan, who
received the most recent CWA Gold Dagger for the best crime novel (2012) has been
known for decades in Ireland as a political journalist, writing for the now defunct
political magazine Magill, and
chronicling in the Sunday Independent.
He published true crime and court cases books (Hard Cases: True Stories of Crime and Punishment, Virgin, 1995)
before embracing the noir genre
towards the end of the boom years of the Celtic Tiger. Little Criminals was published in 2005 and Kerrigan has published three
more noir novels since, forming a "Dublin tetralogy ", each of them being
located in the Irish capital. There is no unifying first person narrator or
recurring detective. Certainly sporadic references are made to some members of
the police hierarchy (such as "Detective Chief Superintendent Hogg"),
but their presence is remote. Whilst they contribute to strengthening the
consistency of the novels' referential universe, they do not create any familiarity,
or empathy with such individuals.
Greater
continuity seems to be granted to the criminals. While police officers are presented
as interchangeable and fallible, criminals in this cycle of novels enjoy more stability,
and a more complex characterisation. The story of the brothers Jo-Jo and Lar
Mackendrick stretching over several books strengthens their ominous presence,
and gives a disturbing sense of their grip over the city. Disorder appears thus
as the cohesive factor of the cycle. Another is the representation of the city,
throughout the four novels. Yet another resides in the obsessive recurrence of
the same moral, legal and ethical conflicts, affecting different characters. Both
The Midnight Choir (Vintage, 2006)
and The Rage (Harvill
Secker, 2011) show characters of detectives plagued with the temptation
of swearing a false oath, showing their flawed belief in a possibility to give justice while
undermining the judiciary process.
An important
part of the interest of this last novel revolves around moral choices. Each of
the main protagonists, the policeman, the thug, and the nun has dark secrets.
Their choice may or not re-open a can of worms. There are worms, too, nibbling their
way through the very stage they are standing on: Irish post-boom society is
depicted in all its putrefaction; crooked speculators and bankers, and developers
blinded by greed and hubris. The corrupt and the wasteful meet in a place where
credit and illusions have run out. In the midst of this disaster, the greatest
bankruptcy resides, as Kerrigan shows persuasively, in the lack of education, principle
and backbone of the profiteers and their privileged and naively materialistic
offspring. Certainly, their arrogance and stupidity lands these children of
capitalist accumulation into trouble. But in this great market place that is a
neo-liberal society, the law, of course, is a commodity and sentences look
negotiable, with the best professionals, those with the highest market value, seemingly
able to command beyond extortionate fees, desired outcomes in the court. The
real problem is therefore not justice, but predictably, finance. What happens,
after corruption and free cash have so comprehensively oiled the social
machinery, when credit suddenly runs out?
The Rage, following the
previous novels, represents the divisions of a society fragmented not only by
the triumph of market ideology, but broken into a thousand pieces by the
resulting crisis:
At first it seemed almost a technical hitch, like someone needed to
sort out a knotty little arithmetic problem. Then, house prices went through
the floor, jobs evaporated, factories and businesses that had been around for
decades folded overnight. There were hundreds of thousands of houses and flats
empty, hundreds of unfinished estates in which no one lived or would ever want
to live, all built with borrowed money to take advantage of tax breaks. The
knowledge that all the backslapping and arrogance of the previous decade was
nurtured in bullshit made the country blush like a teenager caught posing in
front of a mirror. (p. 9)
The
uncompromising statement made by Kerrigan, showing that the economic crisis
reflects a moral and intellectual one, stretches over different layers of
society and encompasses all the microcosms represented in the novel. South
Dublin Lawyers are no smarter or more intact than Northside gangsters. Nuns and
the Church have certainly lost their pretence of holiness in the wake of the scandals
and infamies committed under the guise of religion. But in fact, the entire
population of the Island, at least the one called active, shares the
responsibility in this debacle. As noted by one character:
Trade Unions are out of fashion now, but everything we ever got, we
had to fight for it - money, hours, conditions. Today, it's like everyone's
grateful to be a unit of labour, to be plugged in or pulled out according to
their master's will (p.69)
The Rage shows that
contrary to the various catechisms, indoctrination and apologies for
self-regulating markets which became the official faith during the decades of
economic growth in Ireland, it is not class struggles that destroyed Irish
society. It is, on the contrary, the fear of conflict, the desire for consensus
and the lack of political mobilization which led citizens to turn a blind eye to
and ultimately be fooled by, the prevarications of those who claimed to guide Ireland
towards modernity. The narrative suggests parallelisms between traditions,
represented by the nun, and new elites. It points at the replacement of one
system of domination with another, just as obscure, deceptive and coercive
discourse, that of the banks, has merely replaced, and updated, a more
traditionally oppressive one, that of the church.
Factors of real social danger do not just lurk
in the margins, they
are at the very heart of institutions. Thus, organizations supposed to safeguard credit are the most discredited, no public body has failed more
appallingly the most innocents than the church, and nothing is further removed from the idea of justice that the
judiciary. The greatest
achievement of The Rage, beyond the quality of the plot and the energy
of the pace, is its depiction of a
society in which masks have fallen.
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