Is this the worst novel ever written about the Troubles?
I’m beginning to worry that the strong “Irish literature” brand may have unwelcome side-effects. One might be to lend books of deeply suspect quality an undeserved aura of sophistication, whether moral or literary. Or, in the case of Cross, both.
Austin Duffy’s fourth novel, set in 1994, follows the Catholic inhabitants of a fictional town, Cross, on the Irish border near Newry. Among the cast are a number of IRA stereotypes. Here, we have Francie, sombre and jaded, and Nailer, who’s catching up with education in middle age and quotes from encyclopaedias. There, we have younger “psychopaths”, such as Handy and Kaja.
We also have a 14-year-old girl named Cathy, the daughter of a man who married an English Protestant. Her father was murdered for suspected “touting”: informing, either to the RUC or the British security services. Suspected touts, in fact, are everywhere in Cross, as are accusations of touting made for cynical reasons. (“Touts my hole,” shouts a character at one point.) The Widow Donnelly’s son Darren, yet another alleged tout, is on the run from the IRA; his mother has started a protest in the town square to have him allowed home. It’s a hunger strike of sorts, although she drinks every evening. Much of Duffy’s action unfolds in the local pub, known as (what else?) The Arms.
Cathy, being a tout’s daughter, is an outcast at school. Her brother, known as Rehab, faced worse bullying still, and has been left disabled by a confusing incident in which he was chased by a group of boys and fell into a bed of nettles. It’s impossible to quote in full the sentence describing that event, because it runs to more than 200 words, but it contains such clichés and curious images as nettles being like “a nest of vipers”, skin “swelling up like the Michelin Man”, and Rehab first “whining like a puppy being boiled alive” then being left “as mute as a cat”. This unconsidered quality is representative of Duffy’s prose throughout.
Cross’s jacket copy describes it as “a moving, powerful and empathetic lament for a community that has lost its way in the battle for the nation”. While reading, I mostly found myself wondering: empathetic towards whom? Nobody from this community is portrayed with sensitivity or curiosity. They are uniformly brutish. When a girl is raped outside The Arms, and left lying on the ground, the “whole parish” walks past her, and “despite seeing with their own eyes the sad and obvious state of what had happened to her, proceeded to go on their way”.
Their wickedness is matched only by their oafishness. At one point, a flamingo turns up in a local swamp. Nailer breaks the news to Francie and offers the closest thing we get to an explanation: “A bucken flamingo! In The Town! There was an expert there on the radio, he reckons she must have gone askew on her migration path.” Cathy’s Spanish teacher, known as The Spaniard, arranges a flamenco dance in The Arms to celebrate. She delivers a short speech about the flamingo as a symbol of balance and harmony, but the locals just sit still, “either not following what The Spaniard was saying or bored and impatient for her to just get on with it”. Why would adults not be able to follow that speech? How stupid does Duffy want us to think they are?
The minor characters are portrayed as relentlessly loutish and violent, unless they happen to be visiting from elsewhere. One local, a 15-year-old girl known as Wheelie Bin, attacks an unsuspecting student from the regional college, and pulls a clump of his hair out while a crowd cheers on. A teacher shops the Widow Donnelly to a group of thugs because of a petty argument over golf. My note in the margins here read: “Catholics playing golf?” Various details throughout the book, in fact, underscore Duffy’s lack of research. Heroin is apparently easy to come across in Co Armagh in the early 1990s. Cathy is even versed in pilates.
Cathy herself is rendered clumsily and incoherently. Her internal monologue is much too childlike for a 14-year-old: “Cathy thought the [flamenco] dresses were stunning and the dancers were fierce and magical.” Yet at the same time, she susses out that Handy is a tout after seeing him “at Calmor’s Rock meeting that man she’d swear blind on her mother and brother’s life was with The Branch” – meaning the RUC’s Special Branch; how she knows this, we never find out.
As for the IRA, they’re all craven, self-interested and oddly free of convictions. Some seem to barely even know what the IRA is: there are several unconvincing scenes of Francie explaining basic information to his subordinates Kaja and Mickey when it seems inconceivable they wouldn’t have discussed such topics before. The exceptions are Nailer and Francie, yet Duffy makes fun not only of Nailer’s reading habits – “No, it’s all from pictures I’ve seen this type of thing Francie. Books” – but also Francie’s politics, as when we’re told he has “barely dwelt on the subsequent and entirely predictable betrayal of the movement by the forces of Stalinism, mainly Stalin himself of course”. It’s unclear, too, who’s telling us this. Are we to believe that one of Duffy’s townspeople, the same ones who can’t be bothered to hear the flamingo speech, is knowledgeable about the fall of Stalinism?
Examining the hypocrisies of the IRA is, at this point, well-worn literary territory. A fresher Troubles novel might apply such a lens to one of the several loyalist paramilitary groups, or at least include an interaction with them as a sub-plot, if only for a sense of realism. (Such interactions happened constantly.) Not Cross: it mentions the UVF twice as an aside, and the UDA not at all. I imagine readers with no knowledge of the Troubles will come away wondering why the IRA existed.
Duffy’s choice to ignore this context – just as he provides no details about police brutality, say, or the history of Catholic housing and job discrimination – seems odd. The world of loyalist paramilitaries would have provided ample storylines about touting. Several high-profile legal actions since the Troubles, some of them recent, have laid bare the extent of the collusion between security forces and loyalist groups. Silly caricatures never have a place in good fiction, but by leaning so heavily on them here, Cross just ends up perpetuating one-sided views that have long been out-of-date.
That flamingo meets a gory end. A group of men caper out onto the swamp to catch it, and – despite the presence of the world’s press, who’ve by now arrived in Cross – they barbecue it, and leave its mangled body on the square. Of course they do: sure, how would they know to do anything else with it? You can have nothing beautiful or interesting or strange around people like this, Duffy suggests. You might try, but all you’ll end up with is a bucken barbecued flamingo. Just be grateful that no-one sticks it up their, or anyone else’s, hole.
Rachel Connolly is the author of Lazy City: A Novel. Cross is published by Granta at £14.99. To order call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
