Product Description

This is the story of the Resurrection Man, a violent and ruthless sectarian killer who roams the streets of 1970s Belfast. McNamee's novel illuminates the political map of Belfast and the dark ring-roads of collective memory.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1148626 in Books
• Published on: 2004-05-06
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 233 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The publisher burdens this first novel by a young Irish writer with comparisons to such high stylists as Don DeLillo and Cormac McCarthy. Luckily, McNamee (first name pronounced 'Owen') belongs in such heady company, for, like them, his intense mastery of rhythm and image can sustain the complexity of a world at the level of sentence even as he holds together the larger dynamic of the novel as a whole. Resurrection Man is remarkable for its poetic evocations of violence, human foibles, human suffering. The setting is Belfast in the 1980s; the Resurrection Men are a gang of four led by Victor Kelly, a Protestant drawn into the sectarian violence because his preternaturally silent father is rumored by some to be a secret Catholic, and because he himself is enamored of the gangster movies he used to watch with his mother. Victor is a ruthless killer; his M.O. is the knife across the throat. And it is McNamee's ingenious stroke to link this harsh silencing to blasted Belfast and the broken, inadequate state of words in a place where death and inevitability are etched everywhere in a much more immediate kind of language: he describes the night as a "vernacular darkness"; Victor strips away layers of skin "to arrive at valid words"; a dead man's head is "bent to his chest as though there were something written there he could read." And at nearly every turn, McNamee describes natural events with quirky, sparkling precision that conveys the enormous depth of his engagement with his material and the reach of his imagination: a gang member's mother looks upon him "in a narrow-eyed calculating manner as if he was being measured for some fitted garment of disapproval that she was preparing in another room." That is indeed McCarthy territory, but McNamee lays claim to his own turf in this charging narrative, which keeps the reader on the edge of his seat and is filled with deft overlapping, as one after another Belfast man is "lifted" by Victor and his boys and as Victor becomes a minor celebrity whose arc is finally projected and brought to a close by a mysterious double agent named McClure. The romance here-a woman named Heather is lover to both Victor and a journalist named Ryan covering the case-is sad, real and intelligently underplayed. Victor Kelly is a scarred thug, a mother's son, a creature of enormous complexity and mystery; and though some supporting characters remain slightly overshadowed by the narrative, this book is a chilling masterpiece and a brilliant debut.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

About the Author

Customer Reviews

Evocative novel of violence in Ireland.
Politics and crime blur in this evocative novel that explores the Irish underground. Somehow managing to be both brutal and musical, McNamee follows a violent gang leader, his followers, and his enemies as their intersecting lives inevitably degnerate in a hopeless environment. This book is not for the squeamish, by the way.

Resurrection Man brings human emotion to the Troubles
This book was a great read. THough it did not go into detail about many of the historical facts and figures of the Troubles, it centered on the emotional turmoil that people experience when facing death. It was also interesting because it was written from the perspective of a Ulster Protestant, showing that people on both sides of the conflict are affected deeply by the death and destruction cause by the fighting. The book is very violent, with violent images and harsh words, but those characteristics add a very human dimension to the book, bringing it down to a level at which people can relate to. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone interested in the Northern Ireland conflict. It is a quick read because you don't want to put it down.

Unbearable heaviness of being
Re-reading this novel about a decade after it appeared, it holds up well. My earlier impression after my initial reading was one of grisliness, but on re-examining McNamee's debut (hard to believe, that), I realise that what truly makes the narrative so powerful is the withholding of such gory details from the reader. The omniscient voice does shadow in and out of various characters (to more or less similar effect--this the novel's main drawback in its monotone, if also its noirish strength), but since the characters keep the horror at a distance, so then do we, as spectators.

This detachment differentiates McNamee's take on Belfast from the farce of Colin Bateman, the humanity of Glenn Patterson, or the tragi-comedy of Robert MacLiam Wilson, to name his peers. Atmospheric in a manner that conjures up a sodden city as grim as Dickensian London, this fits a period that now has been obliterated under new skylines, regentrified waterside developments, and tenuous ceasefires. Based on Lenny Murphy and his Shankill Butchers, the crimes they commit are not so much the focus as the aura they create, and live haunted within, as the Ulster rhetoric they pay lip service to is, as the perpetrators know, no cover for the deeper violence to which they pledge their true allegiance, even if they cannot fully articulate it.

The subplot of the journalist Ryan, his estranged wife Margaret, his contact Coppinger, and the "moll" Heather gets a bit murky, as if McNamee did not want to fully explore the supporting characters circling about Victor Kelly. It's a little disappointing, and feels incomplete. The lack of range of registers in many of the indirect narratives of the main characters makes for a sameness in tone that works well in smaller doses, but over a couple hundred pages gets a bit wearying. This may be McNamee's intent, as the style--suffused with homiletic cadences and half-remembered biblical starkness--recalls both Joyce's Dubliners ("scrupulous meanness") and Beckett's street denizens in its carefully modulated detachment.

[P.S.The author has published (only in Britain as of now) a novel based on Robert Nairac, an undercover James Bondish figure, Oxford student, Sandhurst grad, and SAS recruit who submerged himself inot the Provo stronghold of South Armagh--"The Ultras." It'll be interesting to see if McNamee's historical re-visiting of the Troubles through another enigmatic --if more romanticised and articulate--figure will play out this time.]