Five years ago, Tony Ward went to England when a gang feud got out of hand. If he hadn’t, he would – like his old boss Philly – have been among the “fellas getting clipped all over the place”. Now back in Dublin, he immediately returns to his old ways. It’s a fateful decision; this is not a man equipped to ever take a safe path. But observing others? He shines there, and it’s captivating to watch him negotiate the players that populate Djamel White’s beautifully audacious debut All Them Dogs.
Tony’s old running mate Kenny may now be out of the game himself, and focused on raising his young daughter, but he still gives Tony a place to crash and makes an introduction to Aengus Lavelle, “the key link between all the major suppliers and the rest of the gangs in the county”. Lavelle gives Tony a job handling collections and providing muscle for Darren ‘Flute’ Walsh. In a flash, Tony’s back in the life: older, but not at all wiser about how to survive it, especially without Philly’s protection.
He struggles to figure out how he fits in among Lavelle’s gangland family, constantly second-guessing who’s on his side and who’s out to get him. His paranoia proves well-founded, reaching a fever pitch when his past catches up to him in a shooting in Phoenix Park, which jettisons him from Lavelle’s gang. One red flag after another goes up, forcing him to confront profound truths about his relationships with Philly, Flute, and, most acutely, himself: “I swallowed a thin squirt of bile. These were the obstacles Philly had tried to prepare me for, were they not? Did I no longer recall who I had been, with him around? Where had I let that fella get to? This body, these hands. This brain.” The most painful truth these questions yield is the awareness that he may never have been who he thought he was at all.
All Them Dogs is filled with a street lyricism that mines masculinity in a manner reminiscent of Jim Carroll or Robert McLiam Wilson. There’s a poetry on the pages here that tenderises even the most hardened characters, as they alternately strut and cower at the mercy of criminal impulses. That’s part of this novel’s magic. And it is a magical piece of writing.
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Elizabeth Mannion is the co-editor, with Brian Cliff, of Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction (Syracuse University Press)
