I’m beginning to worry that the strong “Irish literature” brand may have unwelcome side-effects. One might be to lend books of deeply suspect quality an undeserved aura of sophistication, whether moral or literary. Or, in the case of Cross, both.
Austin Duffy’s fourth novel, set in 1994, follows the Catholic inhabitants of a fictional town, Cross, on the Irish border near Newry. Among the cast are a number of IRA stereotypes. Here, we have Francie, sombre and jaded, and Nailer, who’s catching up with education in middle age and quotes from encyclopaedias. There, we have younger “psychopaths”, such as Handy and Kaja.
We also have a 14-year-old girl named Cathy, the daughter of a man who married an English Protestant. Her father was murdered for suspected “touting”: informing, either to the RUC or the British security services. Suspected touts, in fact, are everywhere in Cross, as are accusations of touting made for cynical reasons. (“Touts my hole,” shouts a character at one point.) The Widow Donnelly’s son Darren, yet another alleged tout, is on the run from the IRA; his mother has started a protest in the town square to have him allowed home. It’s a hunger strike of sorts, although she drinks every evening. Much of Duffy’s action unfolds in the local pub, known as (what else?) The Arms.
Cathy, being a tout’s daughter, is an outcast at school. Her brother, known as Rehab, faced worse bullying still, and has been left disabled by a confusing incident in which he was chased by a group of boys and fell into a bed of nettles. It’s impossible to quote in full the sentence describing that event, because it runs to more than 200 words, but it contains such clichés and curious images as nettles being like “a nest of vipers”, skin “swelling up like the Michelin Man”, and Rehab first “whining like a puppy being boiled alive” then being left “as mute as a cat”. This unconsidered quality is representative of Duffy’s prose throughout.
Cross’s jacket copy describes it as “a moving, powerful and empathetic lament for a community that has lost its way in the battle for the nation”. While reading, I mostly found myself wondering: empathetic towards whom? Nobody from this community is portrayed with sensitivity or curiosity. They are uniformly brutish. When a girl is raped outside The Arms, and left lying on the ground, the “whole parish” walks past her, and “despite seeing with their own eyes the sad and obvious state of what had happened to her, proceeded to go on their way”.