The Thriller and Northern Ireland Since 1969: Utterly Resigned Terror (review)

The hundreds of thrillers discussed in The Thriller in Northern Ireland Since 1969 testify to the scope and comprehensiveness of Aaron Kelly's scholarship. Published between his co-editing effort, Critical Ireland: New Essays in Literature and Culture (2001), and his single-author study, Irvine Welsh (2005), The Thriller in Northern Ireland is a version of Kelly's dissertation, and as such, sometimes suffers from the awkwardness of dissertation prose style. But there is no doubt that Kelly makes a valuable contribution, not only to the study of thrillers set in or concerning Northern Ireland, but also more broadly to the study of the thriller genre itself. No close textual analysis is at work here; rather, Kelly employs an impressive understanding of a vast repertoire of thriller texts to argue that the thriller genre disrupts any attempt to represent the Northern conflict as a violent—and yet excisable—"tumour" from a landscape that is otherwise ordered and whole.

Informed by the literary and political theories of all the big daddies of Cultural Studies (Benjamin, Althusser, Jameson, Bhabha, Barthes, Freud, to name a few), Kelly's book is divided into five thematically organized chapters, plus an introduction, and includes two juicy plums for crime novel enthusiasts and scholars: English translations of Walter Benjamin's "Travelling With Crime Novels" and Bertolt Brecht's "On the Popularity of the Crime Novel." The introduction clearly outlines—some would say, overstates—Kelly's threefold intent in the book: to explore the utopian aspect of the thriller genre, which many have dismissed as pessimistic about Ireland; to refute the idea that the thriller functions as a "unitary national allegory"; and to present the thriller, the most "throwaway of literatures," as a monumental form of social complexity. Kelly is most interesting and compelling when he concentrates on the complexities and complications of his subject's ideology and production.

Chapter One, titled "'The Green Unpleasant Land': the Political Unconscious of the British "'Troubles' Thriller," re-emphasizes Kelly's refusal to read the thrillers, and particularly those that are British-made, as mere propaganda or mass deception. The observation that many British "Troubles" thrillers seem to remove Irish figures through death, imprisonment, or disappearance leads to the keen conclusion that the elimination of such figures "demonstrates that the representation of Northern Ireland as a desiring place in which to construct a stable English identity . . . entails the writing of the people of Northern Ireland out of their own historical moment." Chapter Two focuses on the "problematics of home," but picks up on and further substantiates the author's interest in the contradictions of this vast group of texts: "The thriller offers a modality, through which mediations between custom and community and state and society redefine and transpose their legitimacy, sending ultimately contradictory ideological signals in addressing different sets of social relationships and state formations." The thriller offers a locus for ideological conflict between utopian and repressive ideals.

Chapters Three and Four, dealing with urban space and gender respectively, look to the ways in which the thrillers articulate, encounter, and negotiate such difficult group dynamics as Unionist and nationalist, or male and female. Chapter Three introduces two significant ways in which to read such difficulties in terms of urban space, chiefly Belfast: a tribalism that is ascribed to both Unionism and Irish nationalism and interpreted to mean that both ideologies create a myth for themselves of organic, essential, and filiative organization and identification; and a "terror-torial mechanism" that seeks to impose a prohibitive representational paradigm atop the complex social dynamic of the cityscape. In his discussion of gender, Kelly claims (following on his earlier presentation of a destabilized subject, and the necessity of an Other against which to substantiate a coherent identity) that representations of women in the thriller as solely the object of sexual energy, or as the object of rescue signal a fracture in the masculine subject, not "the ability of a secure male subject...