Shade : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Jordan proves himself gifted at more than one art
Review: "I know exactly when I died," says Nina Hardy, and she is not speaking metaphorically. Decapitated by her gardener, and shoved into a septic tank, she is emphatically deceased.

Luckily for her, she has had a rich life. And fortunately for the reader, Neil Jordan has decided to tell her haunting tale.

Jordan, the acclaimed film director, is no slouch as a writer, having won Ireland's Guardian Fiction Prize for his story collection Night in Tunisia in 1979. After a ten-year break from publication, concentrating on a film career highlighted by his Oscar-winning movie The Crying Game, among others, he has returned to the page with Shade, an altogether exceptional novel swollen with dreamlike mystery and dread.

Nina is the shade of the title, "a shade of what I was . . . A rumour, a shade within a shadow, a remembrance of a memory, my own." A ghost without purpose other than observation, she traipses back and forth through time, watching her life unfold from childhood, filtering even the most minor of occurrences through the spectre of tragedy.

Rural turn-of-the-century Ireland sets the stage, as Nina and her friends Janie and the hapless George pass the time, playing themselves as characters from Great Expectations, and later, from Shakespeare's As You Like It. Nina's ghost plays a part, a mournful presence seen only by Nina's younger self but adopted by them all as "the symbol, the embodiment of their uniqueness, their fraternity and sorority, their secret language."

Life intrudes, as it must, as George and Nina's half-brother Gregory find relentless terror on the battlefields of WWI, and Nina begins her adulthood through the sorts of horrors only women can ever experience.

As Shade progresses, travelling from the bloody trenches at Dardanelles to the theatrical stages of England and back again, there are echoes of Canadian author Robert Hilles' wonderful recent novel A Gradual Ruin. But where Hilles finds a prospect of redemption after senseless brutality, Jordan finds only sadness that infects the soul and alters the consciousness in irreversible ways.

Unlike Alice Sebold's best-selling, thematically similar novel The Lovely Bones, Jordan has little time for the considerations of an afterlife from the deceased's point of view. Instead, like his most personal films, Jordan uses the awareness of Nina's imminent death to examine the undercurrent of conflict that permeates his characters' lives, the constant possibility of violence that accompanies every gesture.

Justly praised for his sterling cinematic dialogue, it is a joy to discover Jordan wields a poet's ear for literary description and atmosphere as well. Shade's lyrical storytelling, with its references to "endless mackerel sky" and rivers of "alluvial flow," is suffused in brooding melancholy; the pages themselves seem submerged in deep shadow.

When the shadow is finally lifted, Jordan's tale reveals itself to be an exquisitely crafted drama, a flowing Irish ode to impossible loves and the destructive conditions of adulthood. Tragic, moving, surprising, and unforgettable, Shade is a masterful lament to the fragility, and strength, of the self.

Rating:
Summary: "Two halves, she said, trying to make a whole."
Review: Shade is a strange, and beguiling novel. Beautifully written, with a mysterious, disparate undertone, the story combines timeless images of Hardyesque rural Irish landscapes with the horrors of the Great War. Oblique and multi-layered, Shade is part gruesome murder mystery, part mysterious fable, and part evocative love story that effortlessly brings the world of early twentieth century Ireland vividly to life. The viewer will certainly be challenged when reading this novel, as the structure is unconventional and the writing is often dense and heavily descriptive. Author, Neil Jordan - who has made a career out of making provocative movies - writes with such love, and affection for his daunting landscapes that the novel is impossible not to admire.

Shade is about four young friends whose lives are inevitably shaped by the devastating effects of World War 1 and by the beauty of their home in Drogheda, a rural town in Ireland, next to the Boyne River. The novel effectively contrasts the horrors of the conflict in the Dardanelles with the ever-restless motions of the river as it "cuts new meadows" on its way to the sea.

The novel begins with the spirit of the fifty-year-old Nina Hardy, describing how her gardener and best friend George, has brutally, and clumsily murdered her. The murder seems inexplicable, and the motivation remains unclear as George, a survivor of the Great War, was happily living and working for Nina. Nina, who grew up in the enormous, Anglo-Irish Baltray House on the Boyne River's northern bank, has just returned to the house after forty years of achieving fame as an actress.

Nina is determined, with the help of George, to rebuild the family home in which she was once happy. But George has a history of mental problems and has previously been an inmate of the psychiatric hospital of St Ita's in Portrane. There's obviously a connection between Nina and George, but the relationship remains vague and somewhat indistinct. Switching to the early 1900's, the narrative then focuses on idyllic childhood of the two as they are growing up along the mudflats of the river Boyne, with Gregory, Nina's half-brother, and Janie, George's sister.

George and Janie have both grown up in near poverty, but they find their friendship with Nina and Gregory exhilarating, and the fun and games of childhood soon lead to adult love. A fall from a large Tower leaves Nina and George somehow connected by their mutual injuries, and when George awakes from a six week coma, he seems disparate and detached, and somewhat jealous of the "ideal" relationship that Nina shares with her half-brother.

Shade is all about the shades that history plays in life. Themes of love and art are symbolically woven into the story through the lives of the main characters. Growth, birth and death, are things frozen in the moments we perceive them, like a perfect picture, understandable and interchangeable. Nina is like a ghost of the past filling the narrative with almost stream of consciousness-like images as the pieces of the puzzle are steadily put together for the reader. Shade is a fascinating portrait of history where the hidden threads linking childhood and adulthood are forever linked and are perpetually influential. Mike Leonard December 04


Rating:
Summary: Consummate storytelling
Review: This is a comfortable-chair, rain-pelting-windows, curled-up-til-you-can-finish kind of book. You'll find yourself immersed, unable to get up to retrieve that next cup of coffee, resentful that you have to eventually get up to go into work or the john or anywhere that makes you exit this sensual world that Jordan has created. His imagery is evocative, haunting. One passage refers to rain as "the sound of a thousand watery hands drumming off the car's metal roof," and that quality of imagery is consistent throughout.