Two washed-up Irish drug smugglers, Maurice and Charlie, are
hanging out in a Spanish port’s seedy ferry terminal, hoping to catch up with
Maurice’s long lost daughter, Dilly. The
book ends in the same place that it begins, but the pages in between tell us
the long history between these two men, which has not always been
amicable. In fact, despite their having
been partners in crime, their lives intersect unexpectedly a couple of times
and accordion back and forth between betrayal and reconnection, depression and
jubilation, and lucidity and hallucination.
This is definitely noir fiction, which I would normally love, but the
structure, for me, is off-putting.
Without quotation marks, the dialog is hard to distinguish from
descriptive prose, and I found it difficult at times to identify the
speaker. There is also a fair amount of
what appears to be Irish slang, although even my kindle could not define every
word. On the plus side, I think the
author does an exceptional job of creating a dark, desolate, and threatening
mood, despite the fact that I could not always follow the action. This is a challenging book to read and not one
I can recommend, but it is relatively short and set in a darkly exotic part of
the world. Prior to reading this novel,
it had never occurred to me that on a clear night one might be able to see
Africa from Spain. If only this book
were just as easy to decipher.
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