The Irish & Their Discontents

There’s a lovely line in Thomas Perry’s new book, Eddie’s Boy – and I’m unreasonably envious – “The sky was the color of disappointment.”

Here’s one from Ed Dee, not so recent.  I think it’s in Bronx Angel. An old New York harness bull is retiring after thirty years, and the boys are sending him off.  Two cops are leaving the party.  One cop asks the other one what he thinks of the guy, and the second cop says, “He’s got Irish Alzheimer’s, he’s forgotten everything but his grievances.” Dennis Lehane wouldn’t kill for that? Or me, or George Higgins?

And then, of course, the inimitable John Gregory Dunne, in True Confessions. The set-up is two brothers, one a cop and the other a priest: Tom, the homicide dick, is on the pad; Des, rising fast in the church, is consigliere to the cardinal. Tom and his partner catch a murder, a dead woman dismembered in a vacant lot, and the victim has a votive candle in her vagina.  Tom’s partner remarks, “Looks like a job for your brother the monsignor.”

These would be, of course, Irish-American tropes, going back to Finley Peter Dunne and his Mr. Dooley sketches, and up to Edwin O’Connor and The Last Hurrah, with a little Studs Lonigan thrown in along the way.  It’s a rich vein, if it sometimes veers into caricature.  You could make the case that John Ford did as much to compromise the immigrant experience as he did to celebrate it.  All that blarney, along with an unhappy nostalgia for the Ould Sod that wraps violence in sentiment.  Then again, Jimmy Breslin’s World Without End, Amen turns that delusion inside out, and makes the politics of denial an engine of despair.

Which is by way of saying that we look at the Irish of the Troubles through an American lens, one sort of tribalism translated by another, provincials both.  It’s altogether bracing to discover that contemporary Irish thriller writers aren’t wearing those leaden shoes.  Irish noir may not be getting quite the rouse of the Tartan variety, but it’s coming up strong on the turn.  Stuart Neville, for one, who I first encountered with Ratlines, and Ken Bruen – his first Jack Taylor novel, The Guards, won the Shamus, and was nominated for both the Edgar and the Macavity.  Not by coincidence, Jack Taylor got his own TV series.

This all to introduce a more recent Irish cop show.  My pal Carolyn, who’s a fan of Jack Taylor, turned me on to the series Single-Handed, which ran for four seasons – the Brits call them series, meaning not the full run of the show, but a single year – and is now gone.  The first three are ninety-minute features, made-for-TV movies.  The last season is three two-hour episodes.  It has something of the flavor of Shetland, in that it’s a dour, damp landscape, but with sudden, striking shafts of light breaking through, that show off its extraordinary beauty.

The Quiet Man it ain’t, though.  This isn’t the Ireland of Sodom and Begorrah, it feels very genuine.  The thing Carolyn liked about it, and why she recommended it to me, and why I’m recommending it to you, is that it has a depth.  You sense a life, and a community, off-camera.

It’s not ground-breaking.  The guy leaves Dublin, under a cloud, and comes back to the west of Ireland, the town where he grew up, where his own Da is the Garda constable, a sitch-ee-ay-shun, as Victor McLaglen might say, rife with conflict. Not as light as The Coroner, not quite as dark as Justified. But close. The kid takes over from his dad, and the storm clouds gather.

I’m sorry, but you gotta watch it.  I can’t describe why I find it so compelling.  The cast and the characters are engaging (some you know to trust, some you know are suspect); the landscape is there, but not a character in itself, as with Shetland; the plots are involving, but not contrived, they seem organic, they rise up out of the yeast and ferment of the place.  Wow, some metaphor.

One other thing.  Thinking about it, it might be the most Irish quality of the show.  The rhythm.  The way the beats are placed.  It really isn’t Law & Order, and I mean no disrespect, but you have to get used to a different ebb and flow. You’re listening to some other instrument.