Following on the footsteps of his widely-acclaimed second novel, 2016’s Booker-longlisted The North Water, Ian McGuire has pulled off another gripping tale of violence, betrayal and vice. The Abstainer is set in the months following the infamous hanging of the “Manchester Martyrs” in 1867, condemned for killing a police officer in a successful effort to liberate two leaders of the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
Our protagonist, Head Constable James O’Connor, a widower and recovering alcoholic, has been transferred from Dublin to make a fresh start and to cultivate contacts in Manchester’s Irish community, who in the late 19th century made up a 10th of the city’s population. But the careful balance of information and power between the police and “the Fenians” is upset by the arrival of Stephen Doyle, a veteran of the American civil war sent from Philadelphia to avenge the martyrs’ deaths.
So many of McGuire's characters, heroes and villains alike, are unable to shake the suspicion that there is only 'chaos at the heart of things'
O’Connor’s position is made yet more precarious when a long-lost nephew arrives on his doorstep claiming to have befriended Doyle on the steamship from America – an agent with a ready-made cover story, it seems. This increasingly deadly game of cat and mouse stretches from the canal sides of Manchester across the seas to New York and beyond.
TV adaptation
The North Water, with its compellingly gruesome set-pieces, its cast of idiosyncratic characters, and its spectacular arctic scenes, has already been adapted for television, with an all-star cast production led by Colin Farrell and Jack O’Connell set to air on the BBC later this year. The Abstainer’s equally explosive plot and more extensive use of razor-sharp dialogue make it, if anything, even more suited to adaptation.
At the same time, McGuire’s style in The Abstainer is comparatively pared back – leaner, more sculpted – leaving us with what in many ways feels like a less elevated, more conventional novel. The North Water’s virtuosic displays of sensually glutted prose, revelling in the bodily nature of human experience, are relatively muted here, though no less precious for all that. It is telling that one of The Abstainer’s most poetic sections details the fever that racks O’Connor’s body and mind. There is a similar uptick in lyricism in the description of his nephew, after a heavy drinking session, “spattering the pavement with the mud-coloured lees of his debauch” amidst “green globs of horse dung scattered across the cobbles and the usual midden stench of wet ash and urine”. One hopes that in future works McGuire will give freer rein to his vividly corporeal prose.
The Abstainer is nevertheless recognisably a novel by the author of The North Water, something most evident in the collection of radically nihilistic protagonists. So many of McGuire’s characters, heroes and villains alike, are unable to shake the suspicion that there is only “chaos at the heart of things – dark, unfathomable – and the best a man can do is give that chaos human form”. This might make the novel sound unduly cynical, even bleak. The Abstainer’s countervailing believer, a counterpart to the Swedenborg-spouting sailor in The North Water, is a young man who appears late in the novel, who sleeps “amidst filth, beside drunkards and criminals” and prostitutes his body, but who knows that “his purity and holiness remain undiminished because the angels are watching over him”.
McGuire seems to take a wry delight in having his characters engage in profound philosophical reflections when stone drunk or wired on drugs
And there are scenes of tenderness in this novel, most obviously in O’Connor’s unconscious decision to protect a child for whom he has no duty of care nor even any real feelings of affection. No less moving or subtly done is the depiction of O’Connor’s grief for his dead wife, his struggle to overcome the waves of betrayal and guilt that visit him when a desire for other women begins to stir.
Calamity
The novel’s evocation of the reek and bustle of Victorian Manchester is never less than atmospherically convincing, but The Abstainer is at its most powerful when probing the human need, no doubt timeless but felt particularly keenly at moments of impending calamity, to believe in some kind of ultimate arbiter of truth and morality in a seemingly chaotic and cruelly arbitrary world. McGuire seems to take a wry delight in having his characters engage in profound philosophical reflections when stone drunk or wired on drugs. No less current is the novel’s subtle scrutiny of the ways that a sense of belonging to two national cultures can, under conditions of crisis, quickly become a test of divided loyalties – an exploration that will doubtless be central to its interest for a good number of readers in Ireland and indeed elsewhere.
If The Abstainer seems less stylistically innovative and aesthetically ambitious than The North Water, it is, nevertheless, a superbly written novel; McGuire is undoubtedly a master of his medium and never puts a foot wrong. With its engrossing historical setting, frenzied plot, and impeccable prose, The Abstainer may well earn McGuire his widest readership yet.
