Priest (Jack Taylor Novels) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Not that further proof was needed, but "Priest", Ken Bruen's latest apologies-be-damned journey into Hell, is additional evidence that if he is not the most talented writer of crime fiction today, he is certainly the most uninhibited. Not unlike Bruen's paradoxical hero Jack Taylor, who is as comfortable reading classic fiction in the library as he is bashing in an adversary's head with a hurley stick, Bruen's jagged, stripped down Irish prose, rendered with a chainsaw, contradicts its poetic appeal. Indeed, Ireland's classic warrior poets have been reinvented in Ken Bruen and the tragic, down-on-their-luck heroes that fill his pages.

This time around, Taylor is being released from a psychiatric hospital, three years of his life lost, racked in guilt by the death of a child under his care. When a priest in Galway has been decapitated, Taylor's old nemesis, the nicotine-stained Father Malachy, swallows some pride - just barely - and enlists Taylor's help. What follows is a painfully graphic tale of pederasty in the Catholic Church, a gut-ripping expose covering tainted ground where few writers dare to tread. But despite the reprehensible central theme, life actually begins to start looking up for recovering alcoholic Taylor. Mrs. Bailey, his beloved landlady, has passed away during his incarceration, leaving to Jack an apartment and small inheritance. His always-combatant relationship with "Ridge", the lesbian cop of Ireland's Ban Guarda, shows signs of softening. And then Cody, a young investigator wannabe who's been admiring Jack from afar and drops into his life and, to Jack's initial dismay, is soon more of a son than a partner. Almost enough for long time readers to fear that loaner Jack is thinking about settling down, raising a family, and trading in his hurley for knitting needles.

But soon any illusions of this unlikely honeymoon are over, and Bruen jerks the reader so abruptly back into the voids of Irish melancholy and irony that even "The Dramatist", the Bruen noir-fest that put Taylor into the loony bin in the first place, reads like a day in the amusement park. Yet through the despair and ugly twists, Bruen manages to keep the pages turning with his beautifully twisted dialogue and lyrics and his unique talent for encapsulating Ireland's melancholy in a miserly sparse allotment of words. Dark and disturbing, "Priest" has that irrespirable appeal that draws moths to flame. Don't miss it.

Ken Bruen's plots aren't why I read his Jack Taylor series. It's rather the atmosphere that Bruen has, over the Jack Taylor series, created memorably. The plot, as before, is not all that surprising, even for me. And the "Galway noir" installments are the only mysteries I read right upon their publication.

At this stage, the fifth book on, many familiar elements: ex-Garda Jack struggles not to go back to the bottle. Old friends die or despise him. He has fallen away from his brief bout of seeking inspiration in his faith, and Fr Malachy, more nicotine ravaged than ever, shows up needing Jack's assistance in solving the decapitation of a pedophile priest, apparently at the hands of one of his victims, decades later. This is the main plot. Jack also seeks out forgiveness from the parents of Serena May, Cathy and Jeff, whose family's tragic story featured in the previous book, 'The Dramatist'.

A secondary thread follows Jack's former colleague from the Guards, Ban Gharda Ní Iomaire, or Ridge as Jack insists on anglicizing her surname, as she is stalked. Cody, a young man who wants Jack to employ him as his fellow investigator into the stalking, predictably complicates Jack's efforts to get his life on track and deal with the sudden good fortune of choosing from three places to live in rapidly yuppified, gentrified, and stratified Galway city. He still buys his clothes, always with the price included by Bruen (!) from the charity shop Age Concern...an appropriate name for Jack as he battles with his fragile condition in his fifth decade of struggle physical and personal.

This aspect provides for me the most poignant part of the book. With each chapter preceded by a mordant excerpt from Blaise Pascal's "Pensees," the existential despair Jack fights against darkens. The Church has lost its power, its priests are suspected upon their appearance in public amidst youths, and as the narrator wonders at one point as he finds a small lane near Eyre Square converted to plush townhouses, he wants to shake a Euro-rich jerk (he uses another noun) by his Armani tie. 'You know what happened to the people there?' Jack's surrounded by Irish wanting to ape British accents and American slang. Bruen captures with bitter accuracy the growing loss of an Irish cultural identity as wealth widens the gap in Galway and the organic if much poorer community that he (and his protagonist) grew up within shatters.

Those in charge of Galway city care little, with nearly no exceptions in these pages, for the past of their historic and scenic city. Cranes, construction, and always more euros obliterate. Onslaughts of luxury flats within and second homes outside the city show how tenuous are the claims to tourists that this city takes pride in its cultural heritage. Investors call the shots in more ways than one. Those who knew Jack once are themselves dying off. Those who replace them may be from across the globe. In this flux, Jack roams adrift. Many celebrate the revival of the city, but Bruen, through Jack, mourns the loss of community. It's rarer to find a native now, in real-life as Bruen knows or in fiction for Jack, there.

Here's a scene that sums it up. Jack passes where as a boy he had been hoisted on his da's shoulders to see JFK in his motorcade in 1963 pass that central gathering place in the city. Now, winos haunt it. "Renovations were in full swing. The trees were gone, like civility, and workmen were already digging up the park, driving jackhammers into the green fresh soil. There's some deep metaphor there but it's too sad to draw." (170)

Jack engages with his own literary forebears, and in one instance that seems appended to rather than part of the main story (this assembly of his elements has always intrigued me in Bruen but it does frustrate me as a critic wanting to see more polish in crafting these narratives) Jack considers the weird life of a real-life writer, David Goodis. Thomas Merton does not ease Jack's pain now. Books line his shelves but in this volume Jack reads much less. Bruen likes to integrate presumably some of his own favorite singers and writers into Jack's life. This can also be rather clumsy at times as you wait for a payoff that never comes. Although the popular musical choices in this tale that takes place in 2004 are as usual up to date and reflect by their lyrics as heard by Jack his reactions to his never-peaceful condition. Jack, like his creator, reacts always against the type of yarn we expect.

I admit that the crimes often seem far less intriguing than their investigator. Perhaps Bruen likes playing with our expectations of what a gumshoe's supposed to act like. As Jack tells us: "I've read tons of crime fiction. I'm especially fond of the private-eye stuff. All alcoholics are doomed romantics and the notion of the doomed outsider pitting against the odds, it's like the line from the movie, 'You gotta love him.'" (156) We do love Jack, as he again battles the forces of hate inside his soul and around his rapidly changing and steadily dehumanizing trendy and hip city.

(A version of this review will appear in the Belfast on-line project The Blanket.)

Little did I realize when I picked up my first Ken Bruen book, The Guards, back in the middle of April that I was going to have read three others of his by the middle of July. But that's exactly what has happened. Initially I was fascinated by the way that Bruen paid homage to many of my favorite American Noir writers of the past by using a writing style so similar to theirs and by including quotes from many of them in his books. But after reading another Jack Taylor story in Bruen's Calibre I started to wonder if too much of a good thing was going to grow a bit old. As I was soon to learn, there was no need to worry about that because Bruen lightened up on all the direct references to those writers of the forties and fifties and really hit his stride with the next Taylor novel, The Dramatist. Now, with Priest, Bruen has placed himself solidly on the watch list I keep to make sure that I don't miss any new work of certain writers.

Fans of Bruen's Jack Taylor novels will probably notice that I didn't mention The Magdalen Martyrs, an earlier book in the series. I almost always read "series fiction" in the order in which it is written but I somehow missed that one when its turn came. But it is on my shelves waiting for me now.

The beginning of Priest finds Jack Taylor confined to the mental hospital he ended up in as a result of the shocking tragedy that ended The Dramatist. Having lost all will to live, and preferring to drink himself to death, Jack still somehow managed to stay away from the booze before being locked up for his own good. Now he is being released just in time to find that his old friends have not fared well during his five months in the institution and that he barely recognizes the Ireland in which he lives. Taylor realizes that things in Galway have taken a particularly nasty turn when he hears that a priest has been beheaded inside his confessional booth.

Desperately needing something to keep his mind off of the events that placed him in the mental institution, Taylor reluctantly agrees to look into this murder at the request of Father Malachy, an old friend of his mother's. What he finds out about the dead priest's history of sexual abuse going back to the sixties, and how it was covered up, does not surprise him in the least as he tries to identify the killer. But Jack's life is never that simple. Along the way, he takes on a young, eager partner who needs a father figure as badly as Jack needs someone to take care of, a match not exactly made in heaven but one which Jack comes to accept. Their new relationship is severely tested when Jack is asked by an old friend to find and stop the stalker who is threatening her.

As is always the case in his Jack Taylor novels, Ken Bruen surrounds his basic story with the devastating portrait of what it must be like to walk in the shoes of an alcoholic who is always one drink away from losing control of his life. Jack is well aware of his problem and is forced to avoid his old friends and neighborhoods because everyone he meets seems to be heading to a pub and would be happy to have Jack join them in an exchange of rounds. His struggle to remain sober takes on an almost heroic nature and is painful to watch. Despite his self-control problems and his tendency to solve problems with the use of violence, be it verbal or physical, Jack Taylor is a hard man not to like. He loves the music of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan and is a dedicated reader of relatively obscure American authors who are little appreciated even in their own country. Despite all of his troubles, his personal library somehow seems to survive and he is such a book collector that bookstore owners give him first crack at books they know he will appreciate. What's not to like about a man like that?

Readers will find that a Jack Bruen novel does not wind down in the manner of most detective or crime fiction. Bruen doesn't rely on a recap of previous events to provide him with an easy ending for his books and, in fact, some of his hardest punches to the reader's gut come just when it appears that all the story has been told. Ken Bruen has carved out a worthy spot for himself among all those authors he so admires.