‘Would you die for me?’ asks Marcella from Cal after they’ve spent the night together, just the two of them, in a remote farm where Marcella lives with her children and her late husband’s parents.
In flashbacks we learn that Cal had been the driver of an execution squad that has killed Marcella’s police officer husband in their doorsteps and gravely injured Marcella’s father-in-law. He hasn’t told Marcella any of this, of course.
The novel tells the story of Cal McCluskey who is a young man born in the wrong time and place; a young man not fitting in; a young man torn apart by quilt. It’s a tale of Eros and Thanatos during the Troubles.
In the beginning we are at an abattoir where the protagonist Cal used to work and where his father still does. Cal could not stomach the smell and he had to quit even though the jobs are scarce and his father had to pull a lot of strings to get Cal the more-than-decent job.
Waiting alongside Cal is a person called Preacher who roams the land with his bike nailing tracts to trees and telegraph poles:
‘The Wages of Sin is Death, Romans 8:5’
‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, John 11:25’
Preacher is anemic and waiting with a glass in his hand an injection or a spout of blood of a slaughtered cow. It’s not the blood of Christ but those tracts don’t get nailed up by themselves.
Dad arrives. Like father like son. Cal asks for a smoke. They bond over smoking, quietly.
Cal is idling and goes to library. The widow Marcella is working as a librarian. Cal borrows some random books in order to get close to her. At some point he spots her in a checkpoint and offers to help with the grocery bags. Despite this feat Cal is ridden with quilt, suffering from low self-esteem and feeling trapped. He and his father live as the only remaining Catholic family in an otherwise Protestant area, Harrassment is constant. Moreover, the posse that recruited him to the cause do not want to let him go.
Father comes to rescue. He has bought some felled trees. He and Cal chop them to logs and Cal is tasked to sell them. Not accidentally, he finds himself on the very same doorsteps where Marcella’s husband was executed. He is able to sell the logs to Marcella’s mother-in-law who also asks him to come help in the chores. Hard work, pay’s not good. It is a farm, after all. Barely beats being on a dole.
Thus, Cal’s career as farm hand commences. The Protestant foreman thinks Cal’s a good Catholic (unlike the bloody rest of them). Cal also learns that Marcella is Catholic herself and has Italian background. She, too, is an outsider in a harsh land of The Six Counties.
My interest in Cal stems from the movie adaptation from 1983. Starring John Lynch as a picture perfect copy of Cal, with his lank body and perennially tormented face accented by his saddest eyebrows. Helen Mirren plays Marcella. Enough said. I love that movie.
Marcella offers a brief respite from his guilt trip. When the book ends rather abruptly — yet aptly —, we do realise that Cal is ready to face his guilt, to enter the Purgatory.