AHMM, March 2010
Page 14
Stuart Neville's the ghosts of belfast (Soho Crime, $25) offers a grim look at the rocky road the Irish are traveling from civil war to peaceful coexistence. Gerry Fegan, a fighter for Irish independence, is a hero to some and an anathema to others. While the previous novelists offered heroes whose difficulties seemed to stem from accidents outside their control, Neville introduces a man harder to sympathize with. Gerry has killed at least a dozen victims in the IRA's fight to gain independence. He served twelve years in the notorious Maze prison as a “political prisoner."
Now Fegan is haunted and literally stalked by those victims—he sees them, talks to them, and tries desperately to drink enough to blot them out of his consciousness. Some of his victims were soldiers; one was a cop; others were loyalist freedom fighters. And four were everyday civilians, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, and slain for it.
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Fegan's behavior becomes strange enough to worry friends and comrades: those who share his secrets, those who share his guilt, and those who selected his targets. They have reason to fret; the ghosts of Fegan's victims demand that he make restitution by murdering his former allies.
Fegan begins his task with a cunning born of years of violence. Gradually, Neville evokes an understanding and even sympathy for Fegan, based on the forces that turned him into a killer and his tender burgeoning relationship with Marie McKenna, the niece of one of the men he must kill. But as Fegan proceeds, it becomes clear to his former comrades what he is doing, and they set him in their murderous sights.
Neville paints a compellingly ugly picture of the brutal crimes committed by both sides in Ireland's internecine strife. The Ghosts of Belfast makes clear that the peace process that lead to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 ended neither the bitterness nor the violence. Neville's debut is dark and full of violence, but it has the ring of true brass through and through, and fully deserves to share shelf space with the works of Ken Bruen.
Copyright © 2010 Robert C. Hahn
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Mystery Classic: THE SHAPE OF THE SWORD by Jorge Luis Borges, Selected and Introduced by Robert Lopresti
When I was in the eighth grade, English class was a strange combination of pain and pleasure. We would read some wonderful piece and then Mr. Malthus would spoil it by asking, “What does this story mean? What is the author's message?"
This is no way to introduce a love of literature, I suspect. And let's face it, you can enjoy every story in this magazine without ever worrying about what one of them means. Maybe the author's message is simply, “Here's an interesting tale,” and that's fine.
But Borges is something else.
It has been said that Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) wrote fiction for people who don't like fiction. This is partly because he thought a writer should create his own universe, so his “stories” included biographical sketches of people who never lived, reviews of nonexistent books, and detailed descriptions of buildings which could never be built.
In essence these stories have no plots (which is not to say that many of them aren't terrific), and that forces us back to Mr. Malthus's question: What do they mean? If he doesn't have a story to tell, why is the author bothering to talk to us at all?
Around the time Borges turned forty (a mid-life crisis?), he began planning a series of bizarre detective stories with his friend, the novelist Adolfo Bioy Casares, which were eventually published as Six Problems for Don Isidro Parodi. The hero, wrongfully imprisoned, passes his time solving impossible crimes that are described by visitors to his jail.
The Parodi stories are lightweight fun, but their main importance is that they inspired Borges to pour out his first three plotted stories in a matter of months. And each of those was related to the field of crime fiction.
First came “The Garden of Forking Paths,” a spy story unlike any other. The tale involves one of Borges’ favorite themes, the Labyrinth, with the spy discovering an endless novel in which the reader can get lost forever. (But yes, this story does have a plot, and a lovely twist ending.)
Next was “Death and the Compass,” which can be read as a plain old detective story, if you don't stop to wonder why Borges describes a city in such detail but never tells you its name, or even what continent it's on. This story illustrates his other great theme, the Double, concerning two enemies (in this case, the detective and the criminal) who may actually be aspects of the same person.
Those stories have been endlessly reprinted in mystery anthologies, but less attention has been paid to the third tale, “The Shape of the Sword.” This one, set mostly during the Irish War of Independence, is about courage and cowardice, loyalty and betrayal. I assure you that you can enjoy it without sparing a thought to meaning or message, but if you want to make Mr. Malthus happy, you will find plenty to analyze.
One final note. A biography of Borges says that he didn't achieve fame outside of South America until the 1960s. Nonetheless, he first appeared in English in 1948 in, of all places, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine. Thirty years later, the Mystery Writers of America gave him a special Edgar Award for his contribution to the field.
So even though Mr. Malthus's crowd may claim him, Borges is also one of ours.
Salud.
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THE SHAPE OF THE SWORD
Jorge Luis Borges
A spiteful scar crossed his face: an ash-colored and nearly perfect arc that creased his temple at one tip and his cheek at the other. His real name is of no importance, everyone in Tacuarembo called him the “Englishman from La Colorada.” Cardoso, the owner of those fields refused to sell them: I understand that the Englishman resorted to an unexpected argument: he confided to Cardoso the secret of the scar. The Englishman came from the border, from Rio Grande del Sur; there are many who say that in Brazil he had been a smuggler. The fields were overgrown with grass, the waterholes brackish; the Englishman, in order to correct those deficiencies, worked fully as hard as his laborers. They say that he was severe to the point of cruelty, but scrupulously just. They say also that he drank: a few times a year he locked himself into an upper room, not to emerge until two or three days later as if from a battle or from vertigo, pale, trembling, confused and as authoritarian as ever. I remember the glacial eyes, the energetic leanness, the gray mustache. He had no dealings with anyone; it is a fact that his Spanish was rudimentary and cluttered with Brazilian. Aside from a business letter or some pamphlet he received no mail.
The last time I passed through the northern provinces, a sudden overflowing of the Caraguata stream compelled me to spend the night at La Colorada. Within a few moments, I seemed to sense that my appearance was inopportune; I tried to ingratiate myself with the Englishman; I resorted to the least discerning of passions: patriotism. I claimed as invincible a country with such spirit as England's. My companion agreed, but added with a smile that he was not English. He was Irish from Dungarvan. Having said this, he stopped short, as if he had revealed a secret.
After dinner we went outside to look at the sky. It had cleared up, but beyond the low hills the southern sky, streaked and gashed by lightning, was conceiving another storm. Into the cleared up dining room the boy who had served dinner brought a bottle of rum. We drank for some time, in silence.
I don't know what time it must have been when I observed that I was drunk; I don't know what inspiration or what exultation or tedium made me mention the scar. The Englishman's face changed its expression; for a few seconds I thought he was going to throw me out of the house. At length he said in his normal voice:
"I'll tell you the history of my scar under one condition: that of not mitigating one bit of the opprobrium, of the infamous circumstances."
I agreed. This is the story that he told me, mixing his English with Spanish, and even with Portuguese:
"Around 1922, in one of the cities of Connaught, I was one of the many who were conspiring for the independence of Ireland. Of my comrades, some are still li
ving, dedicated to peaceful pursuits; others, paradoxically, are fighting on desert and sea under the English flag; another, the most worthy, died in the courtyard of a barracks, at dawn, shot by men filled with sleep; still others (not the most unfortunate) met their destiny in the anonymous and almost secret battles of the civil war. We were Republicans, Catholics; we were, I suspect, Romantics. Ireland was for us not only the utopian future and the intolerable present; it was a bitter and cherished mythology, it was the circular towers and the red marshes, it was the repudiation of Parnell and the enormous epic poems which sang of the robbing of bulls which in another incarnation were heroes and in others fish and mountains ... One afternoon I will never forget, an affiliate from Munster joined us: one John Vincent Moon.
"He was scarcely twenty years old. He was slender and flaccid at the same time; he gave the uncomfortable impression of being invertebrate. He had studied with fervor and with vanity nearly every page of Lord knows what Communist manual; he made use of dialectical materialism to put an end to any discussion whatever. The reasons one can have for hating another man, or for loving him, are infinite: Moon reduced the history of the universe to a sordid economic conflict. He affirmed that the revolution was predestined to succeed. I told him that for a gentleman only lost causes should be attractive ... Night had already fallen; we continued our disagreement in the hall, on the stairs, then along the vague streets. The judgments Moon emitted impressed me less than his irrefutable, apodictic note. The new comrade did not discuss: he dictated opinions with scorn and with a certain anger.
"As we were arriving at the outlying houses, a sudden burst of gunfire stunned us. (Either before or afterwards we skirted the blank wall of a factory or barracks.) We moved into an unpaved street; a soldier, huge in the firelight, came out of a burning hut. Crying out, he ordered us to stop. I quickened my pace; my companion did not follow. I turned around: John Vincent Moon was motionless, fascinated, as if eternized by fear. I then ran back and knocked the soldier to the ground with one blow, shook Vincent Moon, insulted him and ordered him to follow. I had to take him by the arm; the passion of fear had rendered him helpless. We fled, into the night pierced by flames. A rifle volley reached out for us, and a bullet nicked Moon's right shoulder; as we were fleeing amid pines, he broke out in weak sobbing.
"In that fall of 1923 I had taken shelter in General Berkeley's country house. The general (whom I had never seen) was carrying out some administrative assignment or other in Bengal; the house was less than a century old, but it was decayed and shadowy and flourished in puzzling corridors and in pointless antechambers. The museum and the huge library usurped the first floor: controversial and uncongenial books which in some manner are the history of the nineteenth century; scimitars from Nishapur, along whose captured arcs there seemed to persist still the wind and violence of battle. We entered (I seem to recall) through the rear. Moon, trembling, his mouth parched, murmured that the events of the night were interesting; I dressed his wound and brought him a cup of tea; I was able to determine that his ‘wound’ was superficial. Suddenly he stammered in bewilderment:
"'You know, you ran a terrible risk.'
"I told him not to worry about it. (The habit of the civil war had incited me to act is I did; besides, the capture of a single member could endanger our cause.)
"By the following day Moon had recovered his poise. He accepted a cigarette and subjected me to a severe interrogation on the ‘economic resources of our revolutionary party.’ His questions were very lucid; I told him (truthfully) that the situation was serious. Deep bursts of rifle fire agitated the south. I told Moon our comrades were waiting for us. My overcoat and my revolver were in my room; when I returned, I found Moon stretched out on the sofa, his eyes closed. He imagined he had a fever; he invoked a painful spasm in his shoulder.
"At that moment I understood that his cowardice was irreparable. I clumsily entreated him to take care of himself and went out. This frightened man mortified me, as if I were the coward, not Vincent Moon. Whatever one man does, it is as if all men did it. For that reason it is not unfair that one disobedience in a garden should contaminate all humanity; for that reason it is not unjust that the crucifixion of a single Jew should be sufficient to save it. Perhaps Schopenhauer was right. I am all other men, any man is all men, Shakespeare is in some manner the miserable John Vincent Moon.
"Nine days we spent in the general's enormous house. Of the agonies and the successes of the war I shall not speak: I propose to relate the history of the scar that insults me. In my memory, those nine days form only a single day, save for the next to the last, when our men broke into a barracks and we were able to avenge precisely the sixteen comrades who had been machine-gunned in Elphin. I slipped out of the house towards dawn, in the confusion of daybreak. At nightfall I was back. My companion was waiting for me upstairs: his wound did not permit him to descend to the ground floor. I recall him having some volume of strategy in his hand, F. N. Maude or Clausewitz. ‘The weapon I prefer is the artillery,’ he confessed to me one night. He inquired into our plans; he liked to censure them or revise them. He also was accustomed to denouncing ‘our deplorable economic basis'; dogmatic and gloomy, he predicted the disastrous end. 'C'est une affaire flambée,' he murmured. In order to show that he was indifferent to being a physical coward, he magnified his mental arrogance. In this way, for good or for bad, nine days elapsed.
"On the tenth day the city fell definitely to the Black and Tans. Tall, silent horsemen patrolled the roads; ashes and smoke rode on the wind; on the corner I saw a corpse thrown to the ground, an impression less firm in my memory than that of a dummy on which the soldiers endlessly practiced their marksmanship, in the middle of the square ... I had left when dawn was in the sky; before noon I returned. Moon, in the library, was speaking with someone; the tone of his voice told me he was talking on the telephone. Then I heard my name; then, that I would return at seven; then, the suggestion that they should arrest me as I was crossing the garden. My reasonable friend was reasonably selling me out. I heard him demand guarantees of personal safety.
"Here my story is confused and becomes lost. I know that I pursued the informer along the black, nightmarish halls and along deep stairways of dizziness. Moon knew the house very well, much better than I. One or two times I lost him. I cornered him before the soldiers stopped me. From one of the general's collections of arms I tore a cutlass: with that half moon I carved into his face forever a half moon of blood. Borges, to you, a stranger I have made this confession. Your contempt does not grieve me so much.''
Here the narrator stopped. I noticed that his hands were shaking.
"And Moon?” I asked him.
"He collected his Judas money and fled to Brazil. That afternoon, in the square, he saw a dummy shot up by some drunken men."
I waited in vain for the rest of the story. Finally I told him to go on.
Then a sob went through his body; and with a weak gentleness he pointed to the whitish curved scar.
"You don't believe me?” he stammered. “Don't you see that I carry written on my face the mark of my infamy? I have told you the story thus so that you would hear me to the end. I denounced the man who protected me. I am Vincent Moon. Now despise me."
* * * *
Translated by Donald A. Yates, from Labyrinths, copyright © 1962, 1964 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
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Department: SOLUTION TO THE MYSTERIOUS CIPHER
If the mob hadn't found me and taken me under its wing, I'd have been bait for predators. This is not merely philosophy.
—David Edgerley Gates
From “Skin and Bones” (AHMM, October 2008)
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Department: COMING IN APRIL 2010
Thief in the House by Brendan DuBois
Get Sinatr
a by Loren D. Estleman
Between Minkhe and Mayrev by Kenneth Wishnia
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