Reviews

Reviews

Hugo Hamilton

Longlines is a powerful encounter with recent Irish history. A thrilling novel of escape and redemption. An IRA man on the run from the past returns to Ireland to get involved in the peace process. In beautifully crafted prose, it tells the story of the Northern Troubles and the collective change of heart in which a country moves from its violent past into a place of hope and optimism. A fantastic read and a huge achievement. I loved the character envying the grass growing along with so many other wonderful observations.

Hugo Hamilton, author of bestseller 'The Speckled People'


Peter Sheridan

JJ is a moody, solitary figure, the sort of man you want to spend time with and figure him out.

Peter Sheridan (Irish author, playwright, director), speaking at the Dublin launch of Longlines.

Peter also talked about:

  • “Moments in there where I go 'shit, I never saw that coming…'”
  • “A lot of tension here in this book that owes much to film…”
  • “On the run: Here we have a character who doesn't know anyone in the environment that he's in…”
  • “The reader identifies with the loneliness of the central character who is in a situation of jeopardy. Hitchcock understood tension; there is a lot of Hitchcockian stuff going on which serves the book very well.”

Lelia Doolan

Longline fishing is a good metaphor in a tale that catches and brings ashore many of the arguments, prejudices, beliefs and pitfalls of romantic Ireland where indeed peace comes dropping slow.

Lelia Doolan, Irish TV producer, filmmaker, theatre director, campaigner, lecturer and environmentalist, at the Galway launch of Longlines.

Writing is a bit like embroidery - creating the image and the tale, stretching the threads to embellish and fashion the connections - over time, over continents. Emotions, villainy, benevolence - weaving and darning together the lasting effects of actions and non-actions.

Nothing you can do can stop time's unfolding. You don't ever let go of the thread.

The thing about fiction is that there is always a person who is the thread, whose entire purpose is to draw us through the thicket of events to a pleasant or a horrible outcome. That's the beauty of the teasing and the tension. What is this journey all about? Where are we going? Who is involved? Why?

So here, Caoilte weaves and debates the knotty matter of republicanism - with a small or a big R; The Movement, with a big or a small M ~ the unending Irish dilemma with maleness and militarism and nationalism. And with colonialism and the Brits. And then, most importantly, the Northern Peace process. It's a tapestry that some of Caoilte's family have been intimately involved in over the centuries until the recent past. So, it is very good that he turned his already well-made historical and folkloric writing skills and kept going all the years it took to weave this story. Weaving takes patience and endurance!

The Everyman he's chosen to carry the thread here has a number of names:

Stevie, or Michael, but most of all, JJ. A one-time young Derry Civil Rights marcher, then volunteer in the IRA, husband and father, later a jailbird, now a father and husband departed from the North, still active and on the run, still following orders from commanding officer, Garvey, but getting older, little by little. Getting tired, too. A self-effacing somewhat nebulous lone pilgrim who's been a long time on the journey.

After an intriguing opening chapter to introduce the action and the characters who will turn up later in other scenes, we find JJ in Holland with a couple of old Resistance fighters from the Second World War, one of them still on the quest for personal reprisal.

And then, suddenly, a plan from Ireland for JJ to run guns - masquerading as bananas - back to the boys in Belfast. There's a wild and dangerous scene in a seedy Dutch hotel - as graphic and bloody as any double-cross scene in 007 Daniel Craig's mad life. The action scenes are written with riveting immediacy - especially, later, when JJ's old comrade turns up in the west, seeking payback from the onetime barrister hostage from scene one. There's a top speed encounter which goes horribly and graphically wrong..

So yes, we're in the West of Ireland where JJ is supposed to be promoting the path to peace among loyal volunteers in Clare and Galway - which he does rather lazily while avoiding any chores in the rather damp cottage and overgrown garden. Very unlike Caoilte's own husbandry!

Formally, the book is in four parts, ten chapters in all. But there are also enjoyable nudges and prompts within the narrative – The Blue Note; Revelations, Importing Bananas, Boys from Home, Christened Babies. Tea with Mikey - little curlicues within the weave!

And little by little, we're moving toward the beginning of insight and a connection, at last, to the humanity of living in a community which has eluded JJ in his pain-ridden world - and a realisation of where real love and comradeship lies. Not with the younger, nubile Ashling but with [..]! In the end, all stories are love stories…

I was intrigued by the book's title - which only comes into play in the story's later life when JJ meets a grand old neighbour by the sea. It is a good metaphor in a tale that catches and brings ashore many of the arguments, prejudices, beliefs and pitfalls of romantic Ireland where indeed peace comes dropping slow.

The final scene is an action-packed denouement, splendidly achieved. Threads tied up in a scene worthy of any grand finale.


Timothy Emlyn Jones

Set in the early stages of the Northern Ireland peace process, this entertaining crime-adventure-love story offers insight into the activities and conflicted mindset of the IRA. There is self-discovery and emerging love as the protagonist finds his own inner peace process, despite himself. It reads like an inside story even though it's not an autobiography.

The author is a self-declared Irish republican and he has done his homework. That gives the book weight. It is a pleasure to recommend 'Longlines', whether you are Irish and open to self-recognition, or British and open to new perceptions of the Troubles, or just any person who loves a good read.

I found 'Longlines' engrossing. I also found myself racing through it in my spare time, and now I'm making time to go back over my favourite scenes. Give it some of your own time and you will be well rewarded. This is first class reading with depth, enlightenment and compassion under the fast-moving narrative.

Timothy Jones (Artist, Kinvara), Review on Amazon


Anthony Neeson

BOOK REVIEW: Life catches up with IRA man on the run

AN off the books IRA kidnapping of a leading Dublin barrister goes horribly wrong with leading operative JJ Hynes ferried away to Holland in its aftermath. One IRA man is dead and another arrested. Hynes tries to work out what went wrong or if there was an informer in their ranks.

And he's plenty of time to think about it in the Dutch lowlands in a quiet village where he is taken in by Erik, an old veteran of the Dutch Resistance. If JJ thought that time had the power to heal and bind wounds at the end of war, he can think again. Fifty years on from World War II and the scars of that bitter conflict are still visible just below the surface, if only one cared to scratch the dirt.

Longlines by Caoilte Breatnach is a gripping thriller but it is also a thoughtful novel. It takes place during the mid-1990s amid the uncertainty of the embryonic peace process. At various stages the British government, Dublin and loyalism are keen to frustrate and slow any appearances of progress. The IRA ceasefire is in danger of collapse and warnings are being ignored. In Holland JJ receives only flashes of life from back home through newspaper reports as the fall-out from the kidnapping sees him cast adrift, but it gives him time to ponder his own life having spent 25 years in the Movement, from a teenager on the streets in Derry, to years incarcerated in Long Kesh, to the inevitable broken marriage.

Longlines is a story of a man trying to rebuild his life after the war is over. But how can he do that when so much of his past is no longer there.

Intertwined into this story is Ashling, a student who JJ shared digs with from his time in Dublin before he had to drop all for Holland. Like JJ she is also on the move, returning home to County Clare where she reluctantly resettles, stirring up old ghosts in the process. It's a far cry from the city life she yearned and has now left behind. Here the narrative changes and we're brought back to a world where the countryside is heavy with history and folklore, the beaches are windswept but village life claustrophobic. And it is to Clare-Galway that JJ is tasked to return to help sell the peace process to sceptical local republicans; a process which he himself is not entirely sure about. Here he renews his friendship with Aishling and her older sister Nora.

Caoilte Breatnach's clever use of language – and the relationship and juxtaposition between it and landscape – gives the reader an immediate sense of someone who is familiar with the people and locations in the book, both in the Netherlands and County Clare. His family have been involved in various shades of republican and socialist causes over the years and his research and his own experience has given him a deep insight of the period in question – his sister Lucilita represented Sinn Féin in negotiations leading up to the Good Friday Agreement.

Many of us will be heading off on holiday over the coming weeks with a new clutch of paperbacks stuffed in our belongings. Longlines, which is published by Greenisland Press, is the perfect accompaniment for your summer travels.

Anthony Neeson is the Editor of the Andersonstown News. He is also the Ireland correspondent with the Irish Echo in New York.


Eoghan Mac Cormaic

Longlines, the new novel by Galway author Caoilte Breathnach, is a book which straddles several genres, telling a story which is at times gritty, realistic, and at other times speculative. Layered through it all is a shrewd eye for detail and a finely-tuned ear for language. It belongs equally to that genre which some call 'troubles fiction', fiction based around the last thirty years of the twentieth century and 'post-conflict fiction', the thirty years since the 1994 ceasefire. Read more…

Eoghan Mac Cormaic, writer and former republican prisoner.

It is incredible that the working out of the peace has taken longer than the duration of the war but Breathnach's novel shows how many levels exist and that finding peace was never going to be a simple task. As the story unfolds new genres appear: suspense, mystery, and even some pastoral writing as the plot eventually settles into a more relaxed retirement for the main protagonist, JJ, along the Galway and Clare border.

However, it is with the tense setting of a kidnapping that the story begins, not as might be suspected, in Belfast or Armagh, Tyrone or Derry, but in the northside of Dublin where a wealthy barrister is being held for ransom in an unsanctioned—or at least unadmitted—IRA operation at some point between or just prior to the ceasefires. Breathnach's IRA unit fits the de rigeur mix of northern and southern comrades. There is JJ, the main character, a veteran activist from Derry, a thinker, and doer and a steadying force. By the time we meet the hostage, some of the IRA men have unwillingly and unintentionally allowed a rapport of sorts to develop, including an open antagonism between one of the kidnappers, the erratic Finny, and Morris, his victim.

The denouement of the kidnapping results in JJ having to flee Ireland for Holland. There, he falls in with some old folk, erstwhile members of the Dutch resistance who have kept in touch in the fifty-odd years since the end of their war. No wars end in a definitive full stop, and their inability to find closure supplies a subplot for the looming IRA ceasefire. JJ is called back to help sell the ceasefire to the sceptical. Intrigue and conspiracy follow. In these South Galway scenes the descriptive writing comes in to its own and the people and landscape and the simplicity of life, despite local rivalry and a dark scandal, provide the narrative, along with a sudden and satisfying love interest which we never saw coming. The endgame is, as would be expected, complicated, with dues being paid in a zero-sum confrontation. JJ's attempts to carve out a life for himself are perhaps facilitated too easily by the authorities in comparison to many real examples of resentment, spite and harassment, especially by the Special Branch. An old friend read the book before I did and one evening at a Gaza vigil he mentioned the book saying it was 'very readable'. A succinct appraisal. My few criticisms would be the representation of speech in the vernacular (in Ireland and Holland), which only brings attention to itself, and sometimes, also, a slight drift toward stereotypes—but that's just a matter of my own taste in fiction.

Writing in The Guardian about 'troubles fiction' in 2019 David Keenan asked: 'Is it necessary for there to be a sort of cultural/historical gap before we can interrogate trauma?' Perhaps there is, but if the real protagonists are all gone then we are only left with fiction. In Longlines, Caoilte Breathnach has left a respectable gap—not too long, not too short—between re-imagining in a credible way what the transition from war to peace must have been like for some, at least, of those involved in it.

Eoghan Mac Cormaic is a writer and a former republican prisoner. His books include: Captive Columns (Greenisland Press, 2024); the pen behind the Wire (Greenisland Press, 2023); Macallaí Cillín (Coiscéim 2023); On the Blanket (An Fhuiseog 2022); and Pluid (Coiscéim 2021)

Anthony Hegarty

JJ Hynes, a veteran of the Troubles in Derry and Belfast, has sacrificed his life, marriage, family to the Cause. Now he’s on the run in Holland where he finds refuge with survivors of the Dutch Resistance who are still haunted, like himself, by past memories of war. Within a year, JJ is called back, tasked with persuading comrades in the West of Ireland to back the ‘road to peace’, a process he wants to believe in.

The title: “Longlines” is a great metaphor for the story. Long lines reaching back into the past…genealogies…threads going deep into who we are and where we come from individually and culturally. I used to set them as a teenager when my dad was unemployed in Lancashire. We called them “night-lines”…

For me, this is a kind of Odyssey…too grand a title …maybe …but it is a psycho/spiritual journey of the “hero” JJ. A journey in which he searches for a self-identity, a transcendence of a past which is both violent and unfulfilling, a failed relationship, a son he does not know and a raw sense of injustice resulting in a hatred that eats out the soul. (My dad in some of his last words to his priest were that he wished he could be released from the deep hate he felt for the Orangemen in the North).

But the hero represents, “plays out/acts out”, (as all heroes do in mythology) the cultural ambiance of the time; the attitudes, good and bad, of the cultural and national context in which the story is set. I love the way his real name is revealed by Nora at the end: John Joe. It reminds me of Jacob fighting with the angel, which after the all-night struggle renames him “Israel” …not a good example in the present political horror of the time.

So the scene is set in the failed operation in Dublin where we have JJ in his role as an active IRA man and where we get introduced to characters we will meet importantly later. We learn of his relationship with Garvey and his commitment to the “Movement”. Then he goes “on the run”. JJ’s “on the run” in the Netherlands is the start of his journey to some kind of eventual redemption and like all Vision-Quests or spiritual journeys he must arrive at a totally negative emptiness; to become “lost” in the psychological and spiritual sense. So he gets in the fake taxi and is poisoned, mugged and robbed. Having lost the important “bag” (or we might say “baggage”) he has no money, no ID, and slipping out from the hospital and the reaches of the embassy, he finds himself in a totally strange place and then he boards a train to nowhere with no ticket and no means of paying the fare. He gets off in the middle of this nowhere and stripped to this state of hopelessness, his story back can begin. Wonderful start!

I don’t really buy coincidence. I prefer the Jungian term, “Synchronicity”. A great Czech Psychologist, Stanislav Grof, says that such seeming coincidences occur during states of “spiritual emergency” and we should always see them as significant guides on the journey. So JJ befriends two old men, Eric and Frans, ex-Dutch Resistance fighters from World War Two! Then he is afflicted with an illness that virtually incapacitates him. What I like about many of the events in the writing is a kind of reluctance to pursue or develop some of them. At first I found this irritating but then I saw it as part of the atmosphere of uncertainty, distrust and cover-up. Was the fake Taxi driver a trap, a conspiracy; we do not know; it is not gone into. Is Eric genuine; and the doctor, Frans? And then he finds the ‘Luger”. Eric’s story of course is a kind of sub plot of JJ’s condition; a man revenging a violent injustice too. So significantly, we don’t lose the story’s theme in this time of JJ’s incapacity. Who identifies the hotel room in which JJ is nearly executed; is it the girl? We are not really told. And then there are the family secrets, made explicit yes, but to the family hidden for so long. Mikey’s homosexuality is a good example but also Frans’s friend is not really “outed”, as they say. These events are all partly hidden; not spoken of by the characters or implicitly by the author either; the incest is a good example, again I thought of them as longlines, cultural and personal at the same time.

For me, the Luger is almost as symbolic as the “longlines”. It represents the longline of violence in the entire story. Eric took the Luger from the Nazi captain who was responsible for the murder of his young wife. JJ takes it from the revenger Eric and of course Finny (JJ’s sidekick) is envious of its possession. The dead Nazi soldiers have their own archetypal significance in the story of violence and recrimination. Mythologically the Luger reminded me of King Arthur’s sword, which on his death had to be returned to the “lady of the lake’ whose arm comes up out of the water to catch it and draw it under; marking the end of a sequence of violence, a return to the unconscious history of the times.

There is always a kind of sexual transcendence in such journeys. The girl in Rotterdam is a dangerous error on JJ’s part, sexually motivated, and JJ’s thoughts about Ashling, who we assume will be the redemptive lover in the end, are all transcended by Nora’s noble features in spite of her physical deformity. There is a joint cultural redemption here for both of them….Nora suffering from a cultural prejudice, as well as JJ’s identification as an IRA activist.

I have to comment on the end here: I know a lot about those lines; the fishhooks are lethal and on a long line you might have fifty of them all needing baiting. The tide can be frightening too if you don’t understand its cycles. But I will say no more in case I spoil the brilliant ending. It is like Dante’s Beatrice, the archetypal female “redemptrix”, gifted to stop the loss of bloodshed and culturally a symbol of a wounded land.

The author’s conclusion is a sound and solid mythological theme really well interpreted in his rendition. Bravo!

Tony Hegarty is a writer, poet and ecopsychologist. His father and maternal grandparents hailed from County Derry. More: https://www.hugofgaia.com

© Caoilte Breatnach. Some rights reserved.

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