Book review: Dying days of men who kill

In his latest novel, 'Cross', Austin Duffy presents another gutful of fear

Austin Duffy: Oncologist’s new novel focuses not on medicine but on the last killings of the Troubles before the Good Friday Agreement.

• Cross 
• Austin Duffy 
• Granta, pb €21.75 

Austin Duffy’s novel Cross is for those with strong stomachs. 

In his previous book, The Night Interns, the writer, who is a practising oncologist, stated that he “wanted to immerse his reader in terror”. 

In his new novel, Duffy presents another gutful of fear.

Instead of drawing on his professional life, Duffy focusses on the locations close to his childhood home of Dundalk. 

The fictional town of Cross is not the real one in Co Clare, but on the eastern shores, between the Republic and the North, and its name references a border crossing, a place for crucifixions and, also, a crossroad in time.

Duffy chronicles the dying days, so to speak, of sectarian volunteers as they carry out their final, politically approved killings in the year of the ceasefire, 1994.

He gets inside the heads of a wide range of characters, from “the young one, Cathy Murphy”, to Francie, the Newry man, whose job it is to “know”, Handy Byrnes, “hardcore local republican legend”, and Nailer, so-called for his penchant for driving nails through victims’ hands.

The content of these characters’ heads is grim. 

It is a dog-eat-dog situation for everyone, and it comes down to a choice of whether to receive violence or mete it out. 

The Widow Donnelly’s son Darren — the pup — is “a pure stain on The Cause”, because he has been dealing in drugs and there’s a decision to be made between kneecapping him or employing him as a driver on the Warrenpoint post office robbery.

When the larceny goes arse-up, suspicion points even more fiercely at the boy, although there are also whispers about Handy, whose only sustained injury at the lash-up was to his infamous hand, and who was, strangely, the only one to get away with his life.

The fact that Darren was not selected to drive the get-away car is neither here nor there, and he is detained and tortured by Internal Security.

In the background, a gang of gossips, like les tricoteuses, gathers together to outline the possible —“He’s a tout” — and turn it in to the probable after which it evolves to gospel. Then an execution is essential.

All this dastardly activity is portrayed against the background of the peace process. 

The hierarchies within the Republican movement are jostling for position and sworn proofs of credentials and loyalties seem pathetic in the truest sense of that word. 

It is pathos leaning towards bathos. Should these struggling men be viewed with feelings of compassion or ridicule?

The older men, who have survived years of combat, are educated in military and political history. 

Francie “bangs on” about Marx and Lenin, mourning the inadequacy of Utopianism and Trotsky, extolling the qualities of the Viet Cong, the Sandinistas and the FARC, not to mention Baader-Meinhof, the Red Brigade and, of course, ETA. 

Nailer, going further back, compares himself to “Commodus, who succeeded Marcus Aurelius” and who used to shoot stolen babies full of crossbow arrows.

This erudition is lost on their younger comrades. On hearing the order for the ceasefire, instead of feeling betrayed by the top brass, the new generation turn their attention to alternative operations. 

Ironically, the Donnelly pup, execrated for his possible treachery, was, with his “pills, weed, acid and powder”, leading these men of violence into a new theatre of war.