Beak of the Shadow- a review
*****
I was bowled over by our Medium friend Roisin McLiam’s novel, and decided to write a review. Implicitly, I am recommending it to you Medium readers with much enthusiasm.
When I review a book, I begin by giving it 5 stars, and as I go through it, when the quality falters, I allow a star to drop off, even if I sometimes re-instate it if the quality picks up again. My criteria are, not necessarily in that order, the quality of the story-telling, does it engage the reader, is the latter gnawed by the need to know what happens next? the credibility of the characters, do they behave as they would, not in a story but in real life? and then the freshness of the style of writing. On all three counts Roisin McLiam delivers with the self-assurance of a mature author on her tenth best-seller.
The prose was lyrical and concise: “she would never have seen the faded whitewashed stone building if it hadn’t been for the timely appearance of the half-moon between patchy clouds.” This critic wishes he could write like that.
Sinead is a Derry lass who had gone to England after her wedding, has two children, and when the relationship breaks down, after ten years, she takes the children and move back to a now peaceful Northern Ireland, or so she hopes. She is aware of the inevitability of the erosion of her Oirishness, and that her children say Mummy instead of Mammy, but she is hopeful of a smooth passage to the readaptation to Derry life. After all she knows and loves the people she left behind, her mammy for one, Ellie, her erstwhile bestie, her husband Joe … She is mildly shocked to find that her bestie’s welcome was rather less than whole-hearted.
At this point in my reading, I thought the lively tempo of the first 15 pages was sagging, and I allowed one whole star to drop. However, it did not take long for one of the crucial turning points of the novel to hit the trail: she is witness to what strikes her as a wanton shooting of an English soldier. She captures the contradictory feelings this produces in the breast of a decent woman. That dead soldier was most probably someone who had joined the army because there was no alternative for him, and she refuses to accept a working-class Provo killing a working-class English boy, at this stage choosing class over nationalism. If peace is to thrive, the killing has to stop, and after catching sight of the shooter, she even contemplates shopping him to the RUC. Although in the end she does not, her attempt becomes known, which is the beginning of her trouble. From that point, the tempo rises all the time, and McLiam deals with the menace and danger with Hitchcockian aplomb. I found myself picking up the star which had fallen off and putting it back to join its four companions.
Ellie introduces her to her husband Joe’s friend Ciaran, a hardened provo who had paid the price of his struggle against the British enemy, and this reader saw him as a cross between Cilian Murphy (who would play him beautifully in a film of the book) and Kenneth Branagh. The impossible love that develops between them is predictable, and welcome to the reader.
From that point, the story focuses on the hounding of Sinead by the sinister Branson, a mysterious maverick British operative with dubious practices, and Ciaran becomes involved in protecting Sinead. McLiam deals with the drama arising with sure-handed professionalism. On finishing the book I noticed that all five stars were hanging together in a nice cluster.
The reader will need to read until the last pages to discover why the book is called Beak of the Shadow.
