"Country" by Michael Hughes

 A 2018 Book of the Year in the New Statesman, the Guardian, and the Times Literary Supplement.

The story is the story of the Iliad but transposed to Northern Ireland at the time of the Troubles, just before the ceasefire. The Greeks become Republican gunmen seeking to disrupt the fragile ceasefire; Achilles is their famous sniper Achill (aka Liam O'Brien), Agamemnon is Pig, their commanding officer, his brither Dog is Menelaus, Sid is Odysseus, and old Ned is Nestor. The Trojans are the British, holed up in an army base (called Castle William but some vandals have torn down the W so it had become Illiam), with their various allies including the police and the local Orangemen, Hector is Henry, married to Anna, father of baby Max. Helen is Nellie, married to Dog, but now, having become an informer, she is living with Alex, nicknamed Paris. The Olympian Gods are the Higher-Ups, the untouchable politicians, who make decisions and dispose of men's lives.

It is remarkably faithful to the plot, even including the necessary long speeches and some of the Iliad's hideous descriptions of the effects of violence on the human body. But it works! Written using the contemporary Irish slang, translating meals into fry-ups, chariots into cars and even the funeral games of Patroclus into competitions held between men at a wake. This is a clever and even insightful version of a classic epic.

In fact it is better than that. Yes, part of the pleasure of reading lies in the ability to decrypt it. But its immersion in Irishness and Irishisms give it an utterly authentic feel. 

Selected quotes:

• "Fury. Pure fury. The blood was up. Lost the head completely." (Ch 1; first lines)
• "Told her if she couldn't decide, to just give each of them a number and roll a dice. ... He said you didn't have to do what the dice said, but how you felt when the number came up would show you what you really wanted." (Ch 10) I've advised students to do this in multiple-choice exam papers but not as a way of choosing a boyfriend.
• "She couldn't believe they had a bottle of wine on the table while they were eating. Not that they opened it." (Ch 16)
• "He gave her a wee smiley frown that said, You really don't need to call me sir. And she gave him a wee smiley frown back that said, Och I know, but sure old habits die hard after eight hundred years of oppression. Sir." (Ch 29)
• "Dog hated being wounded. All that sitting around. Fuck all to do. He always ended up thinking. And he really hated thinking." (Ch 34)
• "Thinking gets you nowhere in this game. ... Crack on with the job, and leave the brain-work to the higher-ups." (Ch 35)
• "But like any man who got to be the best at what he did, they promoted him off that job, and sat him in a wee office directing others who weren't half as good." (Ch 37)
• "Death looks like glory to a young man. Get a few more years on you, and glory starts looking a lot like death." (Ch 47)
• "Back at the Ships, Ned was in full flow. He'd seen the like before, many's and many's the time. He'd heard all the pros and cons for and the pros and cons against." (Ch 49)
• "Of all the operations you set in motion, you were lucky if one out of fifty made the news. Most people never appreciated it was hard fucking work. Tedious. Frustrating. Soul-destroying." (Ch 50)
• "You don't listen to what a man says. You watch what he does, and you know who he is." (Ch 58)

Not only is it clever, not only is it well-written, but its transposition  into such a visceral context provides a fresh perspective on the original. Spell-binding.

December 2023; 314 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God