The Truth Commissioner by David Park
The novel opens on a murky night in Troubles era Northern Ireland. Briefly, we meet a boy who “never strays from” the familiar boundaries of “a meshed grid of streets and a couple of roads that only rarely has he followed into the city’s centre.” This child, the product of poverty, ignorance and violence, nurtures a single ambition: “The desire to be someone.”
We jump forward the time after the Good Friday Agreement. The newly established Truth and Reconciliation Commission is ready to start work, led by Henry Stanfield. An aging career diplomat with no skin in the game beyond his own advancement, Henry is vain and self-absorbed. He’s also estranged from his wife and daughter. Even so, the reader develops a grudging respect for Henry’s imagination and his clarity of vision.
On a diving expedition on the last day of the commission’s visit to South Africa, he wonders “how the sharks feel having had a close experience with the human representatives of the law, of truth and reconciliation.” Visiting the site of the former shipyards, he finds it “freakishly attractive, like some windswept tundra of history where each year leeches off another little bit…leaving only the silted dry docks and the swathes of concrete from which sprouts every type of wild flower. The “lurid yellow of the enormous cranes”…”look like giant hurdles waiting for a Finn McCool to jump them.”
Henry views the Troubles as “a rather pathetic and primitive tribal war where only the replacement of traditional weapons by Semtex and the rest succeeded in bringing to temporary attention on a bigger stage.” Now “the world doesn’t care any more because there are bigger wars and better terrors.”
He’s aware from the outset that not every bereaved family will take part in the reconciliation efforts. Some are unwilling to relive their terrible memories and some have past history they want kept from public view. Some denounce the work of the commission as “a whitewash, a conspiracy.” Among these, Henry recognizes certain people who are “emotionally dependent on their grief, who have jerry-built a kind of lop-sided self-pitying life” and cling to it “in exchange for their day in the sun.”
Francis Gilroy is the newly appointed Minister for Chidren and Culture. Battle-weary, he sometimes feels like “an old boat, his keel barnacled and coated with the debris of the sea.” On the day of his daughter’s wedding, we glimpse his past and his emotional fragility as he interacts with his wife and worries about the headstrong Christine’s future life in London with Justin, whom he barely knows. Try as he might to deny and suppress his symptoms, it is clear that Francis’s health is failing. After living a life fuelled by adrenalin, he’s convinced of “the permanent possibility of a hit.” Constantly on the lookout for attackers, he peers from behind his bedroom curtain to check the street for “some maverick…high as a kite on his own ego; one of the dissidents—the fanatics with hurt in their eyes who stand at the back of meetings and shout at him about sell-outs and betrayals.”
Trying to plan the speech he will give on Christine’s wedding day, Francis is troubled by intrusive thoughts. Ashamed of accidentally pocketing a colleague’s gold pen, he wonders how he can replace it without being seen. He knows he’s raised a daughter who makes a point of never doing what is expected of her. Guilt kicks in as he recalls that “this is the child lived on the edge of fear, sat in her her pyjamas at the top of the stairs as the Brits kicked in the door.” It shames him to realize he “was never the provider of safety but rather the person who put her at risk, the father who always put her needs second to what he saw as the bigger needs of the cause.” Now, when she comes into the room, he suddenly feels she’s wearing too much makeup.
James Fenton is a former police officer with the Royal Ulster Constabulary. Along with his RUC colleagues, he was paid and pensioned off early when the RUC was replaced by the PSNI, the Police Service of Northern Ireland. Childless and feeling adrift, James is burdened by disappointed that he and his wife have been unable to have children. When he’s not out walking in the mountains, he throws his energy into his church’s efforts to help the children in a Romanian orphanage, even to the extent of driving there to deliver supplies himself. Like Gilroy, he is constantly shadowed by doubt and fear. As he follows an orphanage boy into the forest, the touch of branches drags him backwards into moments when he felt such terror that he feels as if he “wears the traces of it like a tattoo.” Aware that surviving those moments of danger “brought no sense of relief but only a sense of fragility,” he feels helpless in the face of “things hanging by a thread; the randomness of fate.”
The long drive to the Romanian orphanage is one thing that soothes him. Yet after arriving, he has to fight the impulse to get in the van and leave then and there. Unable to sleep, he’s troubled by a “night speckled with sound.” Insect noises and children’s cries “are sharp pinpricks in the unsettled silence.” Driving back toward Ireland, he half-fears “the frayed and ragged encroachment of trees to the road’s edge.” Ambushed by memory, James is transported back to a meeting with a boy he ran as an informer. “The wind blows strongly off the Lough and engulfs them with the sour-breathed smell of the sea and the sulphurous of the landfill sites.”
For Danny, the reckoning with the past begins after a decade living and working in Florida. Though he fantasizes about cleansing himself of his troubled past by telling his beloved Ramona about it, he knows he dare not consider “letting loose the spores…casting them to the wind with no way to predict or control where they would land.” As things turn out, it’s not his decision to make. Men arrive from Northern Ireland to deliver papers requiring him to attend the commission and give his testimony. They make it clear he cannot refuse. After they leave, he “feels again that he is being followed, that at every moment malevolent and unseen eyes fix their gaze upon him.” The moment he tells his pregnant girlfriend, “My name is not Danny,” the new life he’s tried so hard to build starts to crumble
The commission begins its work. “Stanfield presides wearily…and feels he is drowning in words…as if the dam is breached and out pours a torrent of rising levels of hurt that have been stored over long winters of grief. They come to the chamber to finally let it burst its banks and their breathless flood threatens to engulf him.” As the families of the victims begin to claim their dead, “there is no elegy played out in the increasingly elaborate rituals that grief has created, only a fractious, bitter stirring of the water to which people rush with earnest hope of healing.”
Park’s imagery is painted with a sure deftness that underlines the tale itself. Stanfield suffers from the “curse of memory…scabs on the soul.” A “pockmarked moon scowls sourly” over two nervous policemen in a car waiting for their informant to arrive at the rendezvous. The men who adjust Gilroy’s rented wedding suit resemble “card sharps dealing waxen decks.” The wind blows “irritably” on Christine’s wedding day, and her father’s conversation with his prospective son-in-law is “an interrogation.”
Gilroy tells a former RUC officer he hasn’t attended confession since he joined up, and the friend jokes, “must be a backlog piled up by now.” Gilroy responds, “Nice to be able to press a delete button.” When Mrs. Gilroy asks after the driver’s wife and child, he tells her cheerfully that he saw them last week and they’re “dead on.”
In exquisite elegiac prose, David Park draws us into the fragile and damaged lives left behind by tribal warfare. From Hillsborough Castle to the ramshackle orphanage in rural Romania, secrets lie hidden, and behind them, corrosion continues. Some lies are told to the Truth Commission, and some truths can be never be revealed. Yet though full redemption is impossible, the novel offers a few luminous moments of hope.