THRILLER: CONOR FITZGERALDreviews The Burning SoulBy John Connolly Hodder & Stoughton, 416pp. £17.99
AS WITH the previous nine books of the Charlie Parker series, John Connolly sets The Burning Soulin the state of Maine, which immediately invites a comparison between this marvellously successful Irish author, who writes in the American vernacular, and Stephen King, a native of Maine who also sets a large number of his books in the state.
Icy, isolated, washed of colour and inhabited by shades, Maine, for both writers, offers glimpses of the underworld (which for King means pure horror but for Connolly is a more nuanced grey place, more Hades or Sheol than hell).
King objects to being pigeonholed on the grounds that a horror writer is often assumed also to be a horrible writer, capable of shocking but not engaging deeper emotions. Connolly is unlikely to be troubled by this consideration, as he is charting his own course on the genre map, moving smoothly from police procedural to horror and thriller. Like King, he includes the other-worldly in his stories, but, unlike King, he does not necessarily allow it to intrude on the essentially naturalistic unfolding of events. Connolly always keeps a firm authorial hand on realistic detail while introducing spiritual elements; he plots linear but writes lateral.
Displaying the same sort of obsessive inability to let go that he ascribes to his darker characters, Connolly returns to the grim theme of child abuse and abduction in this book, whose plot can be quickly summed up as follows.
Charlie Parker, a private investigator haunted by his murdered daughter and wife, is engaged by Aimee Price, a lawyer, to protect and assist a certain Randall Haight, released after years in prison for the murder of a little girl when he and his partner in crime, Lonny Midas, were also children. Now living a nondescript life as an accountant in the godforsaken town of Pastor’s Bay, Haight is being blackmailed with reminders of his past crime at the same time as a local girl, Anna Kore, has gone missing. It turns out that the kidnapped child is the niece of a fading Boston-Irish crime boss, Tommy Morris, who is left with just two faithful retainers, Francis Ryan and Martin Dempsey.
Parker soon intuits that the story of the abduction may be more complicated than it at first appears. Needless to say, the local law enforcers also have their own ambiguous characters and the town has secrets.
A good thriller writer will present the reader with lines of narrative that give the illusion of running in parallel before they eventually converge. When done right, as here, the convergence should come about two-thirds of the way through a book, when the mesh (or mess) should be at its most intricate. Connolly does this beautifully. He carries Parker, the FBI and the gangland killers towards a final showdown, using several minor denouements and plot twists, while holding the kidnapped girl in captivity to make sure the knot in the reader’s stomach remains tight.
When I was a boy, my elders were quite down to earth about the ephemeral beings they had encountered in their lives. Phlegmatic in their acceptance that the supernatural is no less strange or unlikely than the mystery of life, they felt no need to defend the reality of spiritual presences, visitations, voices and premonitions. Perhaps it is a particularly Irish (and Catholic) characteristic first to believe in spiritual beings and then to claim to be pretty unimpressed by them. While the Protestant and English Gothic tradition has to conjure up big castles and journeys to faraway places to justify supernatural presences, the Irish have tended to see the other world as something that exists side by side with ordinary life. Listen to an Irish person tell a ghost story and you’ll find your doubts as a listener are pre-empted by the air of weary disbelief and wry perplexity assumed by the chancer feeding you the yarn. This deadpan presentation of the supernatural or of the mad and the mythical is also used to great comic effect by writers such as Flann O’Brien or, to take a (magnificent) contemporary writer, Dermot Healy.
I see this quality also in Connolly, who introduces ghosts (or the ghastly banshee figure of the Collector) with the confidence of an Irishman who acknowledges, as a matter of course, the presence of a parallel world containing abducted children (“Come away, O human child!”), hosts of the air and ambiguous spirits.
The second notable aspect of Connolly’s prose is the way it confidently breaks the point-of-view rule. Almost all popular novels nowadays are written either in the first person or in the limited third person. It was not always so. Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Tolstoy, Hardy et al would soar into the clouds and survey the landscape below, then plunge down into the private thoughts of one character before entering the mind of another. Connolly appropriates this narrative licence with the panache of the sort of writer who recognises the presence of certain literary constraints but won’t be bothered with them if they are going to cramp his expansive style.
The Burning Soulopens with a filmic bird's-eye view of the setting, thanks to the presence of some ravens on loan from Edgar Allan Poe. Connolly confidently guides us into their malevolent little minds, then it's up into the cold air again, down into a car and then into a character's mind in a blending of first-person narration and omniscience that is reminiscent of Dickens. Indeed, as the epigraph of this book consists of an excerpt from Great Expectations, I am confident that Connolly knows exactly what he is doing and how much he is risking, which, for me, is the mark of a highly accomplished writer now beginning to explore the limits of his chosen form.
Conor Fitzgerald is the author of two crime novels, The Dogs of Romeand The Fatal Touch, both published by Bloomsbury
