The Thriller and Northern Ireland since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror by Aaron Kelly

Abstract

MLR, I 03. I, 2oo8 2 I 5 life.Stouck thoroughly assesses the reception of each ofRoss's books, and his tone is sympathetic but fair.This book is thus not only a thorough and carefully researched biography, but also a significant social and literaryhistory. UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA ALISON CALDER The Thriller and Northern Ireland since I969: Utterly Resigned Terror. By AARON KELLY. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. Viii+2I3 pp. /45. ISBN 978-o-7546 3839-I. Northern Ireland has just claim to the titleofmost over-narrativized region on earth. According toAaron Kelly, the 'Troubles' have spawned almost 400 thrillers since 1970,most of themmale-authored. A fewhave attempted to register thepolitical and social injustices that gave rise to and sustained the conflict, even as they gothicize theNorth as a carceral topos.Most, however, deal in sensationalist fantasy and crass stereotypes thatmerely perpetuate ignorance and misunderstanding. Confronted by such one-dimensional, cliche-ridden texts,critics have tended to arraign rather than interrogate theirnarrative modes. Kelly's monograph is to be welcomed, therefore, forsubjecting the formaland ideological dimensions of thisvariegated literarycorpus to systematic, theorized investigation. This absorbing, ifjargon-heavy, study of the 'Troubles' thrillergenre significantly expands the critical frameworkswithin which contemporary Northern Irish fiction can be read. The book's central aim is 'to redeem not only the thriller as a formbut also the historical dynamics present in theNorth of Ireland, to affirma potential ity that disrupts what inmany of these books appears most fated, contemptuously dismissed, statically stereotyped and without hope' (p. i). To this end, Kelly blends Jamesonian, Benjaminian, and Brechtian theory in order to challenge the idea that 'the supposed crudity of popular fiction and Northern Irish society reciprocally re inforce each other' (p. 3). In the process, he contests the prevailing perception of thriller fiction as apolitical 'trash' by exposing thegenre's reactionary collusion with a view of theNorthern conflict as insoluble. The study as awhole isunderpinned by a conception of popular fiction as a complex dialectic between ideology and utopia, between 'the repressiveand redemptive modalities of its imaginary' (p. 9). Kelly elaborates his thesis over fivechapters. The firstexamines how theNorth functions ideologically in thework ofmany British thrillerwriters as a historically voided space within which English subjects simultaneously address and repress their own historical problematics. This leads him to consider inChapter 2 the extent to which Northern Irishwriters acquiesce in thisdominant representational paradigm. Kelly's focus here is on the dialectics of home and belonging inNorthern fiction, which, he astutely observes, 'is not reducible to a colonial afflictionor binarized na tional collision, but also invokes a complex totalityof displacements such as class and gender' (p. 57). Chapter 3 examines thedifficultiesposed by the social complexity ofurban space to thedominant ideologies of Irish nationalism and unionism, both ofwhich disclose a 'rusticative imperative' (p. 84) that figuresBelfast as a cityof 'infernal symbolic death' (p. 87). The chapter isenergized by a perceptive analysis ofMcNamee's Resurrection Man, throughwhich Kelly substantiates his claim that the thriller'smapping of the city as a network of crime reveals itspotential to repoliticize the closed binarisms of thenational imaginary. The fourthchapter skilfullymaps the aesthetic and ideological implications of the 'Troubles' thriller's portrayal of roguemasculinity and fetishized femininity, tropes thatoften coalesce around the representation ofBelfast as femme fatale.Here, Kelly 2I6 Reviews offersbrief but critically alert readings of a handful of the few 'Troubles' thrillers written by feminists,which, he suggests, do not necessarily espouse an emancipatory politics. The thriller's emplotment of transgressivemasculinities and femininities is further interrogated in the concluding chapter, wherein Kelly persuasively argues that 'theutopian mode of the thrillerhas a politically vital role toplay inunmasking the shadowy mechanics of contemporary capitalism and undermining the legitimacy of the state formation' (p. I64). LIAM HARTE Trailing Clouds: Immigrant Fiction inContemporary America. By DAVID COWART. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2006. Xii+249 pp. $55; 31.-50. ISBN 978-o-80o4-4469-2. David Cowart brings a quite winning assurance to this critique, highly attentive, an American literarymap towelcome and not least for its lovely run of style. In taking on contemporary immigrant as against second-generation authorship, he looks to the refractionsof departure, journey, and arrival, for what inher 1926 narrative Gertrude Stein notably called...