Peace And Desolation: Some Service To The State By Aidan McQuade

It takes skill and an open mind to steer an even-handed course through the minefield of recent Irish history. Aidan McQuade’s politically literate and emotionally temperate new novel achieves a remarkable sleight-of-hand, in submerging any partisan affiliation – the writer is a Northern Irish catholic – in the wider margins of historical imperative, and in the checks and balances of moral ambiguity. McQuade’s assiduous research and innate sense of proportion together describe a complex problem in as compelling a manner as Koestler’s prosecution of the Lubyanka in Darkness at Noon. If not playing a game with them, McQuade’s dramatis personae become archetypes notwithstanding, figures in a cross-border landscape who derive motivation from heredity and experience, and give meaning to a narrative set in a significant time of transition. Koestler’s ability to see both sides at once, to convey the intellectual means by which the manipulators of historical truth subvert the language in which it is presented, is mirrored in McQuade’s dialectic of conversations, wherefrom a picture of a turgid past is vouchsafed in microcosm.

McQuade’s historical referencing – his characters affirm their places on the bigger temporal canvas in first-person asides and heated polemics – yields an overview in the round; the novelist’s fulsome addendum, which might have made a better preface, corroborates any fictive licence with a tranche of heavy-duty documentary evidence relating to the relationship between church and state, and the depressing spectre of the ‘Mother and Baby Homes’ and ‘Magdalene Laundries’. These last, in McQuade’s fictionalised but fascinating reading, are one over-arching symptom of partition. The obverse of the intentional British creation of a “state for the Protestant Supremacists to reign over in the North” is, by default…

“a confessional Catholic state in the South. Without substantial Protestant representation in the Dáil, there will be little brake on the excesses of the Catholic Church there”.

...McQuade’s characterisation and plot development are almost secondary to the dialogue that so persuasively illuminates the, particularly English, reader’s sense of the country’s history.

That the character of Sophia is speaking does little to disguise the inference of authorial intervention: one such excess is embodied in the Mother and Baby Homes, run exclusively by nuns with a keen nose for divine retribution and a Breughelian sense of Hell. The title of McQuade’s book, whose prima facie interest is in pursuance of a case involving neglect, murder and brutality set on an axis of Church, State and paramilitary antagonism, pays lip service to another kind of provision: that of the Church for young, newly outcast mothers whose fate was often sealed at best, by accident, and at worst, incestuously. The unforgiving figure of Mother Romana in the story embodies the arrant hypocrisy of a mandated duty of care undermined by cruelty perpetrated in the name of religion.

In many ways providing a human front for the fractious dialectic that makes up the Irish experience, McQuade’s characterisation and plot development are almost secondary to the dialogue that so persuasively illuminates the, particularly English, reader’s sense of the country’s history. We learn from the conversations and eavesdrop on words uttered in darkness, for place (beyond nomenclature), and colour (in a monochromed terrain), are necessarily weakened by what Wilfred Owen called the ‘groynings’ of the centuries. We are served the past in sometimes deeply ironic, often coherent, reminders of former betrayals: our complicity is clear - the judgment is direct, and, as is entirely fitting, without artifice. Elizabeth I, Oliver Cromwell and others precede Charles Trevelyan in time and ignominy, but the latter’s wilful neglect of a nation entire, presumably for fear of killing its inhabitants with kindness, is served in a ‘black-pudding’ of the narrator’s own corrective:

‘Trevelyan was knighted by Queen Victoria for overseeing, on behalf of the British government, the deaths of a million Irish people during the Famine, and the exile of a million more.’

The actors on McQuade’s stage are necessary purveyors of double-think, each transgressing the boundaries of their own origins, each, by turns, sympathetic and sometimes opposed, to the other’s interpretation of the past...

Such intra-textual asides are both edifying and chastening, grounding motive in context and legitimising old grievances. They also serve, as do the fulsome sections of dialogue, as disguised manifestations of the writer’s own voice, whose sympathies, or sharpened sense of iniquity, are given licence in the concluding historical note. McQuade is a former Director of Anti-Slavery International, a condition which may be deemed to extend to the character of Collette in the novel, whose fate – to bear a child by her father, thence to be consigned to the ‘shame’ of a Home and the ignominy of death by neglect – is also a condition of slavery, by the definition of McQuade’s addendum, and in relatively recent times, by governmental recognition.

But the novelist’s wider intention is to insinuate Collette’s experience into a pattern of interconnected and mutually indivisible cultural threads whose relationship is always ironic, and rifled through with equivocation. The actors on McQuade’s stage are necessary purveyors of double-think, each transgressing the boundaries of their own origins, each, by turns, sympathetic and sometimes opposed, to the other’s interpretation of the past: Mick – the ex-Republican foot soldier who is relentlessly trailed by the Ulster Constabulary and whose ‘dissident’ history condemns him to work in an abattoir; Sophia, a determined doctor in pursuit of the truth about Collette’s suffering who enlists Mick’s help to find her; Eamon, a hard-nosed Dublin Garda Inspector whose inside knowledge enables a negotiation over the rocky terrain of regional politics and ingrained hatred; and Hanby, the senior Newry policeman whose sense of ‘Romish tyranny’ aligns a one-dimensional vision, and informs his unwarranted ill-treatment of Mick.

If we were to cavil at McQuade’s occasional anachronistic lapse into modern expression – the book is set in 1925 – then the real beauty of his prose resides in its binary integrity, of the author’s awareness of nuance in the subtle architecture of collective memory. Hanby’s locked-in protestant world view (‘it was like trying to argue with South Armagh basalt’) is relieved by the knowledge, cleverly drip-fed, that he and his family were treated brutally by the Republicans in an earlier incarnation.

Indeed, McQuade’s novel, whose interchange of narrators somehow reinforces authenticity, finds hope, if not resolution, in a kind of exegesis, a counter intuition of the unexpected. The confraternity of blood in the Trenches – the British and Irish were thrown together in the Great War in a raddled facsimile of unity – encourages compromise in the mind of Eamon, whose life was saved by an English soldier at the cost of his own, suggesting that there is a sense of kindness common to all in extremis.

Aidan McQuade is at his very best when the Webley .38 is discarded for good, and one link in the chain of revenge is broken:

‘Violence is like that. Blowing out the brains of one man never changes the minds of the thousands of others who think just like him.’


Some Service to the State is published by Austin Macauley (2023)

More information here.