Day 1,402, Quasi-Quarantine: "Blood-Dark Track" Documents Paranoia & Tribalism From Ireland To Turkey

 

"The truth is, I don't want the unionists to suffer like nationalists have done; I don't want to force them. What I meant to say was that there is a foreign army in my country, and I think I have the right to take on that army and to seek to repel it. I claim a right to do that. It's that basic."

In "Blood-Dark Track," a lawyer and novelist seeks to reconstruct a family memoir by overcoming the reticence of his family by piecing together murky details. Joseph O'Neill's grandfathers -- one Turkish and one Irish -- were both incarcerated during World War II and spent the remainder of their lives living in suspicion and paranoia.

"Of course, a capacity for amnesty may be indistinguishable from a capacity for forgetfulness."

Writing very much like a lawyer, O'Neill goes into intricate detail, exposing the reader to a whirlwind of names, dates, and locations. The painstaking research is clear, but the author also goes into really dense description for not-so-clear reasons quite a bit. 

"It took anomalous forces -- a writer's professional curiosity turned into something like an obsession -- to push me, reluctant and red-eyed and stumbling, into the past and, it turned out, its dream-bright horrors."

The approach can forestall momentum, but does eventually reveal that O'Neill himself is trying to figure out what he stands for along the way. The effect is perhaps not quite what I was expecting, but the realization that the author is less interested in the Troubles, subterfuge, and revolutions than he is about piecing together his own identity brings a new light to "Blood-Dark Track."

"I, meanwhile, had followed the self-serving, morally unvigorous paths of the business lawyer and novelist; I had enacted no change, done no good, made no effort on behalf of others."