The Ghosts of Belfast by Stuart Neville review

2009 has been a stunner of a year for debut novels. I’ve been solidly blown away by such first-time novelists as Dennis Tafoya, Seth Harwood, Roger Smith, Sophie Littlefield, and Nate Flexer. The one debut I’ve—for a lack of a better word—been pining for has been Stuart Neville’s The Ghosts of Belfast. The prepublication buzz for Belfast has been huge; it’s been receiving heaps of praise for months from such Irish literary luminaries as John Connolly and Ken Bruen; even the normally blurb-shy Demon Dawg of American letters James Ellroy called Belfast the best first novel he’d read in years. Well, when any novel receives this kind of early praise, it means either one of two things to me:

1. The book is an amazing, tension-filled read from start to finish without a single false move to slow down the story’s progress.

OR

2. The book is a steaming pile of dogshit.

Luckily, The Ghosts of Belfast falls into category A, and it does so in spades. As a matter of fact, Belfast not only qualifies as the best debut novel of the year, but it may very well be the best novel of the year.

Period.

The Ghosts of Belfast is the story of Gerry Fegan, a former IRA assassin who is ruthlessly haunted by the ghosts of his twelve victims. Fegan is being driven to the brink of sanity by the manifestations of his past sins, and he spends his waking hours drunk and riddled with guilt, at least until Fegan’s ghosts start creeping from out of the shadows demanding vengeance be paid out against the depraved, power-hungry men who guided Fegan down the path of terrorism and murder. As Fegan mercilessly dispatches one former compatriot after the next, his actions begin to send vicious shockwaves throughout Northern Ireland’s precarious peacetime government and threatens to reveal not only dirty wartime secrets, but the filthy peace time wheeling’s and dealing’s, as well.

I hate it when reviewers use phrases like “breakneck pacing,” but to describe Belfast in any other way would be a disservice to the novel. Neville literally grabs you from the first page and forces you to read as quickly as possible. His characters are living, breathing creations; you can’t help but feel Fegan’s grim loneliness and his need for redemption. But what truly struck me about the novel is Neville’s portrait of post-war troubles in Belfast; a city that seems to desperately want to move forward into a peaceful future, but is so mired in its past history of constant conflict that it can erupt into violence at the drop of a hat.

To sum up, this is a bugshit crazy good read, and one can only hope that Neville has a long, outstanding career in front of him and that all of his future output will not just measure up to this fine debut, but surpass it.