Neil Jordan: Shade

Reviewed by MARGIE THOMSON




Although he has written two previous novels, and won the Guardian Fiction Prize for his short story collection Night in Tunisia when he was just 25, Irish writer Neil Jordan is better known as a director and scriptwriter of movies such as Mona Lisa, Interview with the Vampire and The Crying Game, for which he won an Oscar in 1993.

His third novel is a painful, nostalgic, lyrical story of four children growing up through the innocence and optimism of the first years of the 20th century. Their childish interdependence becomes a game of desire "more complicated than [they] had ever imagined".

It opens and closes on the same frosty January morning in 1950, with the grisly murder of actress Nina Hardy, recently returned from a 30-year career to her childhood home on the estuary of Ireland's River Boyne.

As her body lies in its "excremental grave" in the estate's septic tank, she is free to roam, omniscient, through her own past and never-ending present, sensed as a presence by her younger self. Readers will be reminded of such recent books as Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones, and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife, although this is a more complex treatment of metaphysical ideas about time, life and death.

Those familiar with Jordan's earlier work will recognise recurring themes: a person's essential aloneness; a strong, detailed interest in history and its various, distinctive moods; betrayal; and a sort of tragic presumption about even loving relationships ("a unit unbreakable, unshakable, uncomfortable, unsound" as he describes the relationship between Nina and her half-brother Gregory, around which much of the plot revolves).


Nina, born three years before the 20th century into a bourgeois Irish/Anglo household, is an only child who peoples her world with imaginary friends until she finds two real ones, a brother and sister from across the river, George and Janie.

From the first page, we know that half a century later George kills Nina. The book's purpose is to unpeel the tragedy behind the final act.

When Nina is 9, the fourth child appears, her hitherto unknown half-brother Gregory, and the emotional tenor cranks up as eroticism and jealousy sneak in. "My brother came to me too late for me to see him as my brother," Nina-the-shade remarks.

The last third of the novel is the best. We follow George and Gregory to the travesty of World War I in the Dardanelles.

Jordan's pacing is superb as he shifts back and forth between these wartime experiences and Nina's pregnancy, abortion and departure from Ireland for the English theatre and burgeoning film industry.

Jordan's writing is a thing in itself: every sentence is crafted with poetic precision and passionate restraint. However, while beautiful, it is overladen with obvious metaphor and has too heavyhanded a sense of its own meaning and importance.

If you can forgive that, there is much delight to be had here, in a heartbreaking, Irish kind of way.

John Murray, $24.99