The Ultras

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My favourite book - Rated
I am sorry to sound so breathless and overwhelmed - but I think this book is an absolute masterpiece. It is so tightly coiled and of one piecethat you feel sort of deserted when it finishes. I suppose it helps to know a little bit about the historical events it focusses on, namely the murder of Robert Nairac and the ensuing allegations that he was an agent provocateur of the British forces in Northern Ireland. What happened to the chap who made these allegations is even more poignant than Nairac's fate and gives the story its political edge. Read it! Read everything by Eoin McNamee!

If you liked Resurrection Man, more of the same milieu - Rated
I was eager to read this, a novelisation of Robert Nairac's not very successful undercover operations in South Armagh during the height (or nadir) of the Troubles. The murder of the Miami Showband and dirty tricks campaigns by British psy-ops also enter into this, as McNamee shows he has again done his research. As with Resurrection Man, he takes an actual figure and surrounds him with characters investigating him whose lives slowly unravel and decay.

McNamee's good at this genre. In the near decade since his first novel, he has lightened his epigrammatic if sometimes ponderous style here a bit to allow greater verisimilitude. The conversations and the reflections of (again) an largely omniscient narrator keep the reader (again) at quite a distance from the events being shown. The switching back and forth between Nairac's career leading up to 1977 and the later recording of Agnew's attempts to make sense of Nairac's fate from a vantage point 25 years later allow, unlike as in Resurrection Man, a chance for the incorporation of a more expansive storyline upon which McNamee can allow a greater array of secondary characters and events to emerge more leisurely.

Although the book is not much longer than his first novel, it feels more epic. Getting out of Belfast into the countryside as well as onto the bases where the Crown seeks to infiltrate the loyalist rogue gangs and sabotage the republican cause makes for intriguing reading. Where the book falls a bit flat is, as in the first novel, McNamee's insistence on once more giving us an investigator whose marriage falls apart amidst the search. But now, he has an anorexic daughter as well as an re-married wife to contend with. While the daughter's musings make for a welcome change in McNamee's linguistic register, her fate seems too pat to fit in as a parallel to that of Nairac.

This book also alludes in a sentence to "journalist John Parker." In fact, this writer penned "Death of a Hero" on Nairac in 1999. Obviously, Parker's title tells you all you need to know about the bias of that biography, but I did find it another clever way for McNamee to show he has done his swotting up on the mysterious figure, who here seems a would-be James Bond who at times plays more like Austin Powers--if less groovy, than equally insensible to how his act plays among the hoi polloi.