If you think there are a lot of novels published, imagine how many novels there would be in existence if every British journalist “thinking about writing a novel” actually got on and wrote the tale they had been wanging on about in the pub for years. Your local book store would need to be the size of the Shard to accommodate the output. As it is, most hack bar talk comes to nothing and it’s all forgotten in the morning when it’s time for work and morning conference with the editor.
The typical London journalist bar pitch might run as follows: “Yeah, I’ll have a gin and tonic. How about, against the backdrop of the miners strike three young political advisers from the north of England meet and forge a bond at Oxford, but only one can become Prime Minister. Yeah. The good-looking one. And then thirty years later they have a terrible fight at a party and the most clever but not quite so good-looking one gets revenge by backing Brexit. No-one is murdered but there is a lot of drinking and arguing. It’s very much influenced by Amis. Kingsley, not Martin.”
Jenny McCartney, a London-based columnist of Northern Ireland extraction, has got on and written a novel rather than just talking about it. The result is The Ghost Factory, her debut, published last month.
I declare a remote connection. More than a decade ago we were colleagues on the old Sunday Telegraph. We used to say on the comment desk that we hoped she would write novels, because they would be funny, spiky and poignant. Jenny McCartney’s copy was – is – the editor’s equivalent of liquid gold. In the old Fleet Street phrase, you’ll read her stuff “until the print falls off.”
Knowing that, I was startled to read a snooty review in the Irish Times recently of The Ghost Factory. I had no idea Jenny McCartney had a novel out and the reviewer made it sound terrible. My heart sank.
“A book lives or dies in its sentences,” the reviewer wrote. “To paraphrase Anne Enright, in an interview to the New Yorker some years ago, a good sentence does many things at once – it is like a three-dimensional crossword”.
Oh dear. Like a three-dimensional crossword? If you are going to open by criticising sentence structure, please construct clear sentences. And don’t be so pretentious.
Happily, having just finished The Ghost Factory, I can report that the snooty Irish Times reviewer is wrong. One of the virtues of this outstanding novel is the economy of its construction and the lyrical, rolling manner in which the storytelling reflects the speech patterns of Northern Ireland’s people.
This is a poignant and at times darkly funny novel rooted in the horrors of the Troubles and the attempt at resolution that followed. The author has long been a rare voice prepared to question the public relations hype about a peace process that reduced the killing while elevating former terrorists and their associates into positions of political power.
“Sure I like peace,” says the main character at one point. “Peace is is the absence of killing. You would be an eejit not to want it. The real question is who do you pay for it, how much, and for how long? You get it on hire purchase. It doesn’t float down from the sky”.
This tale centres on Jacky, and the fate of his innocent childhood friend Titch. The Troubles are coming to an end (this is the 1990s) but the loyalist and provo gangs still exert control via organised crime syndicates and punishment beatings. Jacky is forced to flee to London, where he meets Eve, but he is drawn back to Belfast partly to avenge a wrong, and partly because he loves the place.
The final section is a meditation on questions of violence and revenge. Our contemporary culture is a grievance machine, but sometimes processing the past and getting on with what comes next is better. Or is it? There is ambiguity in The Ghost Machine and no hectoring about the lessons of the civil war in Northern Ireland. It contains one timely but subtle warning about what happens when political argument turns ugly, as it has turned ugly in Brexit Britain today.
I’m forever reading about the the arrival of supposed “brave new voices” and young writers playing with form, exploring the complexity of contemporary identity while they noodle away in hipster fashion. In The Ghost Factory an experienced non-fiction writer has channeled her experiences and observations into a haunting novel. She has delivered something powerful and true, a proper story rooted in recent British history.
If Jenny McCartney can write more novels of this quality – exploring different locales and similar themes – then British fiction will have found a major new voice.
The Ghost Factory, by Jenny McCartney is published by Fourth Estate.
