How to Murder a Man by Carlo Gebler Little, Brown 373pp, £16.99 in UK
Plotted and paced as a thriller, this absorbing novel vividly evokes mid-19thcentury Ireland while deftly suggesting chilling contemporary parallels. Thomas French is an Irish-born, well-educated land agent who agrees to sort out tenant problems on the Beatonboro' estate in Co Monaghan. His plan, as he sees it, is both simple and humane - he'll offer defaulting tenants five times their annual rent (which in most cases will enable them to pay off their existing debts) if they agree to pack up and go, and he'll also provide their passage to America, after which he'll rent their land to new tenants.
Nothing, he thinks, could be fairer, but he hasn't reckoned with the local Ribbonmen, a secret society of fanatical and violent agrarian activists, who see French's plan as a scheme to do away with the unofficial custom of tenant right, whereby the tenant could sell on his land to a new tenant for fifteen times the annual rent. If this is allowed to happen, control of the land will revert to the landlord. French, the Ribbon men decide, must be done away with.
The repeatedly botched attempts to assassinate him take their inspiration from the similar attempts to assassinate the real-life land agent, Steuart C. Trench, who in the same period (the 1850s) looked after the Marquis of Bath's Monaghan estate and who wrote about his experiences in his 1868 book, Realities of Irish Life.
Using French's memoir as his starting point, Gebler creates a work of fiction in which every detail of period, landscape and custom seems unobtrusively right, and in which the plot's twists and jolts are so expertly manipulated that the reader feels constantly unsettled.
This is a book in which considerable violence occurs, a violence made all the more unnerving by the matter-of-factness of the author's clean, spare prose. And the characters are so vividly realised - especially the self-doubting French, his loyal bailiff Micky, the troubled young lovers Tim and Kitty, and the detestable chief Ribbonman, Isaac - that as the book reaches its halfway mark you read on in a kind of dread at what seems all too likely to happen.
What does happen is sometimes terrifyingly unpredictable, and the author is very good at convincing you of the coincidences and mischances (a blunderbuss that doesn't fire, someone being on the wrong road at the wrong time) that can either redeem or seal someone's fate. Yet a cloud of doom necessarily hangs over a society "where the people loved nothing better than to hurt their own people".
In the same passage the same character muses: "But how could this neighbour harm his neighbour? It was a mystery." That's as close as the author comes to making a direct link between his nightmarish story of 1850s Monaghan and the real nightmare visited on too many people in this island over the past thirty years. However, Gebler is such a good writer that he can confidently leave the rest to the reader. This is a disturbing and exceptional novel.
John Boland is an Irish Times columnist