“[In the Catholic Falls Road area], the IRA had shot out every streetlight, and the British army had painted walls black to hide their counter-ambush teams. Here was pure night, fog and fear, a place where Jack the Ripper could be expected in any doorway. Jack was long gone, but his heirs were about the streets, zipping by in cars without headlights, guns out windows…No one wanted to stray too far in Belfast these damp and cozy nights, none but the sons of Jack.”
In this impressionistic novel about the on-going conflicts between Irish Loyalists and the Irish Republican Army and its militias in Belfast, author Tom Molloy’s dramatic scenes bring the full horrors of this long civil war to life, though for some partisans death is preferable to life as they have known it in their impoverished and violent neighborhoods. As the father of one Catholic from the Falls Road area of Belfast tells his son, “I am your father but they treat me like a child. I am a man and they will not acknowledge my manhood. See this, understand it, stand up to it when you can. This is our country. Often we can only fight them with our humor. Resist.”
A former freelance journalist who accompanied the IRA during some of its bloodiest street battles, author Tom Molloy’s descriptions of Belfast and its battles bear the heavy truth of what he has seen and felt, and few readers will leave this novel without absorbing the full impact of the long enmity between those Catholics who still support turning the entire island into one Irish republic and those Protestants who believe that Northern Ireland should remain just as it is, part of the United Kingdom, supported by British troops. Those readers who believe that the Good Friday Accords of 1998, approved by voters from both parts of Ireland, effectively ended the hostilities which have torn apart the island for almost a hundred years, will be surprised to discover that bloodshed is still endemic to life in Belfast. As can 
be seen in the YouTube video I have attached at the end of this review (recorded on October 3, 2012), some hard-liners from both sides still refuse to give an inch, despite the agreements made and accepted by both the IRA and most Loyalists fifteen years ago. Youthful gang violence and long-held resentments on both sides among under-educated and under-employed youth still explode into fires and fireworks, their personal frustrations fueling the long-lived undercurrent of resentment between the haves and have nots, and magnified by the long-held conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, and Irish vs. British.
Though this novel depicts the era before the Good Friday Accords, it is as pertinent today as it would have been then. The novel feels like a play, its scenes sometimes self-contained. As the novel opens, Jimmy Fitzgerald, a Catholic, has been captured by the Ulster police and is being subjected to torture, as his interrogators try to break him. Being “handled” by Chief Detective Ian MacDonald, age thirty-seven, who appears to be kind during Jimmy’s interrogation, Jimmy finally breaks and agrees to inform on his fellow Catholics who still resist the local government.
Depicting the lives of ordinary people trying to handle this level of conflict within their lives, author Molloy introduces numerous other characters – a sniper who kills a man at random, based on what he sees at night through a night-scope; a Viet Nam veteran who remembers watching a man being thrown out of a helicopter, his sandal left behind; an officer who sees through a “starscope” a group of “little green men” in Viet Nam, three of whom he kills; and a visitor to Ireland who discovers upon his return to Boston that integration in Boston and white flight are not all that different from what he is seeing in Belfast. Who this sniper is and whether he is one man or several is up to the reader to decide. Belfast, to this man, is “Tet without the Viet Cong.”
Main character Jimmy Fitzgerald eventually falls in love and sees life anew, and a woman, upon her torture by the British, loses her reticence and shyness to become a militant who stands up for herself and what she believes is right. The two “sides” become more human as characters Det. Ian MacDonald and Louis Duffy show their family lives – their wives and children and their genuine feeling for them. While Jimmy begins to look forward to a future with his love, the many political elements involved in Belfast life also become clear. The IRA and its offshoots, the British soldiers assigned to Belfast to 
protect the local status quo, The SAS (the British Strategic Air Services), the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and various guerilla and paramilitary groups on both sides all complicate the issues of just who has the final word. On occasion, both sides are looking for the same person in order to discover just where that person’s loyalties really lie.
The characters, though thin, are well described within the circumstances in which they live, and their behavior is natural (assuming that the reader can identify with the extreme points of view which some of them have). Occasionally, the author tells the reader what s/he should believe – “A certainty came to [a woman]…that she was fully capable of real love,” instead of letting the reader discover this on his/her own – but that is more than compensated for by other insights. The action moves quickly from scene to scene, often without transitions, and keeps the reader engaged as points of view change back and forth among different characters. And when the sniper from Viet Nam returns to Boston and visits Fenway Park (a place near and dear to my heart), the imagery is particularly vivid: As the breeze from Fenway “blew into the fac
es of the fielders, washed over the crowd in the bleachers and down to the streets of Boston, it pressed the city, brushing South Boston, its lace-curtained windows where shy red-headed girls dreamed of love, and touched their hardened brother on street corners….Then the air hit the chill Atlantic ….and on over the open waters to Ireland’s fields.”
The conclusion is not a surprise – the author has set it up from the outset – and it is expected. Its joy, if the ending can be considered joyful, is in its appropriateness within the thematic development. The novel is relatively short, and at times I wished that it had allowed for more development, especially with the ending, but overall, Rebel Streets successfully conveys the horrors of the civil war still being waged in Belfast.
Note: A YouTube video of recent Belfast rioting, from Sept. 4, 2012, shows how little things have changed:
Photos, in order: The author’s photo is from http://www.rebelstreetsthenovel.com.
The mural of Bobby Sands still overlooks Falls Road. Sands, an IRA Provisional, died in 1981 after a sixty-six day hunger strike in the prison known as The Maze. http://www.zimbio.com/pictures/lzY2V0yiNXX
This riot by Catholic militants took place in July, 2012, following a march by the Orange Order Brotherhood through their neighborhood. http://www.cathnewsusa.com
A Loyalist neighborhood, Sandy Row, is seen here: http://boldlygosolo.typepad.com
ARC: Nortia
Author John Banville has always specialized in short, dense novels in which his narrators are unreliable, even dishonest, often pretending to be different from what they really are as they deal with turning points in their lives. The Book Evidence (1989) is a monologue by a man confessing to a murder, though the reader does not know how much of the confession, which focuses on his life, rather than his crime of the moment, is really true. In The 
, is not the person he says he is: “Mendacity is second, no, is first nature to me,” he says. In every case, these characters see themselves differently from what they really are, and as they remember and talk about the past, it is at least as much invented as it is real, leading the reader to contemplate how, in fact, we all interpret reality: once an event occurs, our only way of revisiting it is through memory, and we often have subconscious reasons for remaking our memories into stories which may differ from actual reality.
A former stage actor whose career is in decline, Cleave spends much of his time in an “attic aerie” musing about the past while writing a memoir about an affair he had fifty years ago with Celia Gray, the mother of his best friend, when he was only fifteen and she, thirty-five. “There was no moment of blinding illumination when Mrs. Gray herself stepped forth from the toils and trammels of domesticity and came skimming towards me on her half-shell, wafted by the full-cheeked zephyrs of spring. Even after we had been going to bed together for some time I would have been hard put to give a fair description of her…when I looked at her it was me that I saw first, reflected in the glorious mirror that I made of her.” His memories of Mrs. Gray, still so vivid and so exciting, dominate much of Cleave’s inner life, and as he describes this affair, his life as a teenager becomes vibrant and understandable within the context of the 1950s in which it took place. He is often convinced of the accuracy of these memories, though the reader may be unsure: Cleave is constantly getting confused about the seasons in which certain events have taken place, and he himself recognizes and admits that some of his memories could be false.
ult is thrilling, with the reader willingly assuming the roles of both detective and psychologist, analyzing the details, and finding the answers all related thematically, all part of a trilogy, every detail on every level connected to every other detail. In a sense, too, Banville also capitalizes on his readers’ own memories of the events of the previous novels in the trilogy, 
fear, these are the fuels that drive me, mixed in equal measure: fury at being what I am not, fear of being found out for what I am. If, one day, one or other of these forces should run out, the violent equilibrium sustaining me will fail and I shall collapse, or fly off helplessly–like a slipped balloon.”–Axel Vander
Firmly connected to the cold, often bleak landscapes they inhabit, Per Petterson’s characters are never frivolous, however impulsive and even violent their actions might be. Often shackled by circumstances over which they have little control, they respond in the only ways they can, sometimes self-destructively. The parents of the younger characters can sometimes offer little guidance, even by way of example, and growing up becomes a question of actions followed either by reward or, more likely, by harsh punishment. In the ironically entitled It’s Fine By Me, an early Petterson novel from 1992, Audun Sletten shares his life from his teen years to age twenty, always honest in his feelings, sometimes to his own detriment, and always sensitive to his personal standards of behavior, though he often imposes these standards by force.
Some of his growth is the result of his fast friendship with Arvid Jansen (who becomes the main character in Petterson’s I Curse the River of Time). Though Ardun must get up early to deliver newspapers before he goes to school, while Arvid leads a more fortunate life, they respect each other, and Arvid’s father becomes a kind of role model, the first person who guides him to read books that he finds appealing – especially the novel Martin Eden by Jack London. “There is something about this book, and about [Eden’s] struggle …that made me want to be a writer, and if I didn’t make it, I would be an unhappy person,” he says. Ardun’s own father, a violent drunkard who thinks nothing of beating his wife, smashing Ardun in the mouth, and hurling his younger brother against the wall, has been gone for five years during most of the novel, his actions revealed through flashbacks, but when he does show up to lurk about, his appearance terrifies Ardun. By contrast, his friend Arvid’s father is hurt coming home from work one night, and Arvid is almost inconsolable as he describes what happened. Ardun “pull[s] him close… and holds him tight…[Arvid] goes as stiff as a fence post and gasps for air, and only then do I realize that Arvid loves his father. It has never occurred to me.”
en with the help of those who care about him – and readers who see themselves (at least in some aspect) within the character of Ardun will celebrate his coming of age, all the while knowing that Ardun is a work in progress and that he’ll never be able to take life or his own responses to threats for granted.
From the first pages to the last, this refreshing, original, imaginative, thoughtful – and often humorous – debut novel kept me glued to the chair, reading as fast as I could while trying to force myself to read more slowly to savor the fun to the utmost. I confess that I have never been a fan of fantasy, and my knowledge of computer science would fit into a URL line, but I was completely charmed by the style of this novel, an unusual mix of ephemera and cutting edge computer science, and I became totally caught up in it – not just for the excitement of the story itself, but for the ideas it presents and the hints it gives of the future of writing itself. On my (short) list of Favorites for the year, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore may be every serious reader’s fantasy, a novel in which an innocent and unsuspecting person takes a night job at a bookstore where he inhabits the world of ancient manuscripts and ancient typefaces – only to discover that his seemingly innocuous, middle-of-the-night customers may be part of an exotic cult.
te book, actually a trilogy called The Dragon-Song Chronicles. Hired on the spot, he finds himself working nights next door to a strip joint in a tiny, but very tall building which displays a few used contemporary books in the front, on the first floor, while every available inch behind that display, and rising for three stories, is packed with what Clay calls “the Waybacklist,” ancient, esoteric books, most of them hand-made. He quickly learns that his few customers always arrive carrying one old book which they want to exchange for a different book from the Waybacklist.
cklist” in Penumbra’s store, in libraries, and in archives around the world may be interpreted in completely new ways, with new insights for the future, when the awe-inspiring magic of computer programming is applied to them, an interesting take on an old theme. Some of the biggest questions they ask are: Who owns this bookstore and who is in charge of the whole operation? What is its goal and how does it survive, since sales are not important? Why was Clay’s favorite book, Clark Moffat’s Dragon-Song Chronicles, instrumental in his hiring? What, exactly, is the cult looking for? And how have they been able to exist as a highly motivated group for over six hundred years?