Washington Post Book Reviews
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Friday October 29, 2010
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BLOOD-DARK TRACK: A Family History
Joseph O'Neill
Vintage
ISBN 978-0307472953
338 pages
$15.95
Reviewed by Marie Arana. Arana, a writer at large for The Washington Post, is the author of "American Chica," "Cellophane" and "Lima Nights."
A gaping rift separates memoir and history, but Joseph O'Neill negotiates it nimbly in "Blood-Dark Track," an account of two men in the fitful years before World War II. A chasm divides East and West, too, but O'Neill negotiates it just as agilely, for the men in his sights lived in disputed lands -- one in Turkey, the other, Ireland. Inhabiting distant worlds, both were victims of war and revolution. In time, as fate would have it, their bloodlines met in a man well equipped to tell their stories -- their grandson, the novelist Joseph O'Neill.
O'Neill has already proven that he understands what it means to be caught in the jaws of history. He is the author of the prize-winning novel "Netherland," in which a Dutchman finds himself in Manhattan just as two airplanes plow the skyline. For all the potential pitfalls of that 9/11 setting, the book is an astute portrait of a captive of circumstance, trammeled by political passions beyond his control.
The bedlam into which O'Neill now delivers us is the nervous world of prewar Europe. The book begins in the 1930s, when Turkey and Ireland were cauldrons of rebellion and intrigue. Before the prologue is through, we learn that the British arrested and imprisoned O'Neill's Turkish grandfather, a hotelier, as he traveled to Palestine to buy fruit. At roughly the same time, O'Neill's other grandfather was captured and jailed as a terrorist in Ireland. These were not entirely mystifying occurrences; the men's personal histories, as it turns out, were murky and suspicious. Jim O'Neill was a member of the IRA, a suspect in the murder of a prominent admiral. Joseph Dakad was an avowed Germanophile, a footloose, urbane businessman who might easily have been a spy.
The journey on which we are subsequently taken is less a swift chase than a meticulously detailed investigation. Joseph O'Neill, who was a barrister before he left his practice to write full time, peels back each layer of the past with care and deliberation. In the process, he displays considerable research skills, but he also exposes a touching tenderness for his family and a rare wisdom about the complicated world at large.
Jim O'Neill was a truck driver in Cork: a tireless worker and responsible family man, gainfully employed by the city's roads department. That was before a fateful spring evening in 1936, when Vice-Admiral Henry Boyle Somerville, a Cork resident -- thought by some to be a British sympathizer -- was gunned down in the doorway of his home. No one was ever arrested for the murder, but within three months the occupying British government declared the IRA an unlawful institution. The result, quite naturally, was that rebel sentiment became even more violent. There were few republicans who couldn't recall earlier days of panic, when "British forces ran wild" in the streets, "murdering and causing mayhem."
"Jim O'Neill," his grandson now writes, "threw himself into paramilitary life with characteristic determination." His first action after the admiral's murder was meant to be a raid on British army barracks, but the IRA never quite pulled it off. Soon after, a chilling battery of terror followed: England's electrical lines and power stations were blown up; there were bombs in London cinemas and the underground, tear gas in public spaces, a Liverpool bridge and a government post office brought to rubble. In January 1939, the IRA's governing body declared all-out war on Britain. A countrywide manhunt followed, and IRA members were hauled in by the hundreds. By the end of 1940, virtually all known republicans, including Jim O'Neill, were locked up in internment camps. Spit out by the system almost five years later, Jim O'Neill was never quite the same: Broken, taking odd jobs here and there, he went from one building site to another with his spade and bicycle. Eventually he found work as a garbage hauler.
O'Neill intersperses this striking account with a parallel story, which was raveling at the same time on the other side of the globe. In Mersin, Turkey, Joseph Dakad was the owner of a bustling hotel -- a bon vivant in the squall of war, not unlike Rick in the gathering gloom of "Casablanca." He was a "skirt-chaser," a traveling man, riding the rails of the famed Taurus Express wherever it might take him to buy supplies for his bustling business. A lively watering hole for guests from around the world (whether Allied or Nazi), the Toros Otel never felt it necessary to declare sides in the escalating war.
In March 1942, Joseph Dakad set out for Jerusalem to buy lemons. "On his way home," as O'Neill tells it, "he was arrested at the Turkish-Syrian border by the British. He was taken to Haifa and then to the British headquarters in Jerusalem." After that, he disappeared into the maw of war.
Even after an armistice was signed, even after most internees were freed, Joseph continued to be held. Four months after the close of the European war, he was finally let go -- a paranoid depressive who had attempted suicide more than once.
The grace of this story is in O'Neill's patient scrutiny and illustration. Global circumstances end up connecting these hauntingly similar yet distinct captivities, "one in the Levant heat, the other in the rainy, sporadically incandescent plains of central Ireland." The tale is further illumined by vivid portraits of two grandmothers: one, a perfumed cosmopolitan in silks who could shriek her displeasure in three languages; the other a flinty partner who stashed rebel guns in her floorboards and welcomed anyone who needed harbor.
What will surprise the reader of this dense, seemingly bifurcated story is the very simple, concrete theme at the heart of it: Wars have a way of boiling down to concentrated human dramas; and world wars can link those dramas in surprising ways. Suffice it to say that, impossible as it may seem, an intricate worldwide net was already a pulsing reality in that long-ago, faraway time.
By the end of this book, you will understand its century-old epigraph: "It was there in that land of the Arabs ... that I awoke to the echoes of guns being fired in the capital of my own country, Ireland."
Globalization has been with us for a very long time.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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John Shannon
Severn House
ISBN 978 0 7278 6903 6
278 pages
$28.95
Reviewed by Art Taylor, who regularly reviews mysteries and thrillers for The Washington Post
Since "The Concrete River" (1996), the first book in his vastly underappreciated Jack Liffey series, Los Angeles-based crime novelist John Shannon has been both blessed and dogged by comparisons to Raymond Chandler. Shannon occasionally goes down familiar mean streets and has established himself as a master of social realism, rigorously exploring various ethnic and enclave communities in Southern California.
But he is also prone to make sudden surrealistic swerves and delve more explicitly and trenchantly than his contemporaries into divisive political issues and existential quandaries: a debate on the Patriot Act, for example, in a kangaroo court rigged by rogue Homeland Security types ("The Dark Streets"); or a theological discussion amid a swirl of violence ("The Devils of Bakersfield)." Sometimes the diversions rise to Beckettian levels of absurdity and moral provocation. Far from being escapist fare, these books aim to be novels of ideas.
As "On the Nickel" opens, Liffey seems a true Beckett hero. Mute and paralyzed after injuries from a previous investigation, he uses a wheelchair, and his every attempt at speech comes out simply "Ack, ack" -- "like Daffy Duck," his daughter Maeve comments. Liffey's mind remains as sharp as ever, but his daughter's in charge these days, and when a phone call comes from Liffey's best friend, requesting help with finding his runaway son Conor, it's Maeve who takes the case.
Inquisitive, passionate, unpredictable Maeve Liffey has been a controversial aspect of previous books (just check out some vitriolic Amazon reader reviews), but to my mind she has evolved into one of the most interesting characters in contemporary crime fiction. She's not a troubled kid, but she has endured a full range of adolescent issues, and she infuriates her father with her tendency to go Nancy Drew and with the business cards she tries to hide from him: "Liffey and Liffey, Investigations." Liffey's own card says, "I Find Missing Children," and it's often Maeve whom he most fears losing.
With her dad incapacitated, Maeve goes solo with impunity, and her quest for missing Conor takes her into the darkest part of L.A.'s Skid Row -- known locally as The Nickel -- a 50-block area hosting the largest concentration of homeless people in the United States. Conor, an aspiring musician, has found himself there as part of his own quest for real-world experiences beyond his cloistered, privileged upbringing. Though Maeve locates him quickly, their troubles have only begun, and they're soon caught in the crossfire of a heated battle between rich developers intent on gentrification and the last tenants at a decaying flophouse, a trio of old Jewish men calling themselves the Resistance.
While the action is relentless -- vandalism, kidnapping, assault, robbery, arson, murder -- the main characters are also on a spiritual journey. Canvassing Skid Row with Conor's picture in hand, Maeve likens the scene to "a whole post-apocalyptic world of people who were out on their own in the hard rain, hunting for someone they had lost or a job they desperately needed or just the big lottery ticket." Even the most terrifying of the villains here -- a knife-wielding, Nietzsche-quoting psycho -- ponders "convention and morality" and the stages of his own evolution from camel to lion and back to "the infant who's going to grow up to be the superman."
Its vitality notwithstanding, "On the Nickel" may not be the best starting point for those unfamiliar with Shannon's novels. The hero's extreme predicament might prove off-putting for first-time readers, and the rich-vs.-poor discussion seems more didactic and one-sided than Shannon's earlier explorations of what he calls "L.A.'s grand comedy." But for anyone following these adventures already, "On the Nickel" will be a solid addition to a series that consistently provokes and surprises.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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