‘We’re the Boys Built the Empire’: National Media and Postcolonial Encounters in Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man

ABSTRACT

This paper considers Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man (1994) as a Troubles novel acutely interested in the ways violence is transcribed into text. It argues McNamee’s depictions of the media satirise their attempt to contain historical explanations of the Troubles exclusively within the inherent sectarianism of the region. Instead, McNamee creates discursive encounters between Ulster and different trouble spots around the world, summoning the spectres of British imperialism. Through a discussion of decolonisation, memory and the legacies of Empire, the paper engages with the ways the local and the international intersect to interrogate nationalisms, borders, identities and historical representation.

KEYWORDS:

• Northern Ireland
• troubles
• encounters
• Eoin McNamee
• resurrection man
• loyalism

Introduction

The Protestant people have had enough so they have. Enough talk about rights and all. There’s a question of a birthright being sold out here. Put that in your newspaper. We’re the boys built the Empire and got a kick in the arse for it. Write about that. Ulster loyal and true. That’s a thing to die for. (McNamee 2004: 151, All further references to this edition are given after quotations in the text)

Eoin McNamee’s Resurrection Man is a novel acutely interested in history as text. In the above passage, McClure – a shadowy figure connecting elements of the British government with loyalist paramilitaries – parodically recounts to a journalist the mythic loyalist structuring narratives undergirding, as Brendan O’Leary has it, the ‘distinct control system’ governing Northern Ireland (O’Leary 2019: vii). McClure’s recitation of this mythos, the shipbuilding and industrial acumen that built the empire, conforms to Ian McBride’s formulation that ‘in Ireland, as is well known, the interpretation of the past has always been at the heart of national conflict’. (McBride 2001: 1) Indeed, in the last sentence, by valorising the idea of dying for this ‘birthright’, the character not only references the sacrificial histories of Ulster Protestants in the First World War, but also implicitly gestures towards the sectarian violence of loyalist paramilitaries.

The passage, in its mention of newspapers, also demonstrates a keen awareness of the textual pathways through which mythologies, histories and competing ideologies assert themselves. In his book Utterly Resigned Terror, Aaron Kelly uses Frederic Jameson’s conceptualisation of the centrality of text in narrating the otherwise ‘absent’ history of the Northern Irish Troubles in the Thriller genre. Jameson writes that:

history is not a text, not a narrative, master or otherwise, but that, as an absent cause it is inaccessible to us except in textual form, and that our approach to it and to the Real itself necessarily passes through its prior textualization, its narrativization in the political unconscious. (Kelly 2016: 2)

This attention to the methods by which history is transmitted and communicated exclusively via its textualization necessitates a productive focus on the concept of encounters: in the process of narrativizing history in Northern Ireland, which elements are being encountered as explanations for sectarian and state violence, and which are excluded? Indeed, embedded in the concept of textualization is nestled accompanying concerns around the ideological process of textual creation. As Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg have reminded us in the context of legal texts: ‘To call a story a narrative is to emphasize the imaginative activity of a narrator’. (Binder and Weisberg 2000: 205) Likewise, in presenting the histories of Northern Ireland as a postmodern plurality of irony-laden claims to truth, Resurrection Man draws our attention to the imaginative activity involved in the textualization of Troubles violence.

In the above passage, the Protestant population’s loyal and productive history only encounters emblems of its greatness: their industriousness, their loyalty to the United Kingdom and its empire. But the subversive population – the implied disloyal Catholics / Irish Nationalists – are never mentioned beyond the prevention of their rights. They are placed outside the frame, unencountered. McClure’s textualization of history narrates power in Northern Ireland as zero sum: that Protestant ‘birthright’ and Catholic ‘rights’ are somehow incompatible, and violence, ‘dying’ for the cause, an inevitable outcome. Indeed, the irony with which the character delivers this speech – Ryan, the journalist listening to him, ‘thought there was something fraudulent in McClure’s delivery, a tone of mockery’ (151) – hints towards the use and misuse of sectarian histories as text. Northern Ireland as a polity, various imagined as a state, a statelet, a province lying at once within and without the United Kingdom – is always in contention (for larger discussion of the terminology debate see O’Leary 2019: xxxi). This contentiousness makes the lens of encounters – with its attendant focus on the momentary, the conditional, the unsettled – useful in understanding the fractured nationalisms at war in the province, echoing what the editors of this special issue describe as ‘the ways in which nations are not only imagined and constructed, but always-already-also deconstructed and fractured’ (Heiskanen and Kistnareddy 2024).

Resurrection Man is primarily a fictionalisation of the Shankill Butchers killings in the mid-1970s. The novel follows Victor Kelly, modelled on the Butchers’ leader Lenny Murphy, as the gang evolve out of a unit of loyalist paramilitary group the Ulster Volunteer Force. These grisly knife attacks on Catholic civilians are investigated by Ryan and Coppinger, two local journalists attempting to map the sectarian violence of the city. In his novel, McNamee uses a panoramic and noirish style to deconstruct and fracture the cinematic, political, legal and sectarian discourses on the conflict, revealing their very provisionality as text. But, as hinted towards in the opening passage, perhaps his central discursive interest in this novel, and in his later work The Ultras, is the modes by which the media narrativize and textualize the violence of the Troubles. Indeed, in the media of the novel, for a variety of reasons, the violence of the North only encounters itself. Paramilitary violence is represented as tautological: Northern Ireland is violent because the people are intractably violent and sectarian.

This media discourse was in sync with legal and governmental frameworks interpreting the conflict. The emergency laws instituted to curb violence in the North, both by the Stormont government and Westminster after direct rule, applied only to Northern Ireland – isolating the statelet as sui generis, while rhetorically insisting on its integrity with Britain. Like many of the emergency laws in nineteenth century Ireland that the laws attempting to curb Troubles violence drew from, the overarching narrativization of the violence in the North was an attempt to contain it within the framework of criminality – as opposed to seditious or insurrectionary characterisations – working to conceal its relation to sovereignty and interpolate it within the closed legal system of the United Kingdom (Roberts 2019: 28).

Elsewhere referred to as ‘Ulsterisation’, the British and Irish governments sought to emphasise their neutrality and downplay their own involvement in the conflict by suggesting its origins resided in the ‘intractable sectarianism’ of Northern Ireland’s two communities (Cleary 2002: 100) (Reimer 2012). More recently described as the ‘Two Tribes’ theory of the conflict, this posits that its origins can be found solely in the two ‘inherently unreasonable’ tribes and their religiously motivated bigotry (McKittrick and McVea 2012: 299). John Whyte estimated in 1990 that this framework, what he called the ‘internal conflict interpretation’, was used by 63 per cent of the social and political science literature produced since the Troubles began (Whyte 1990: 202).

But, demonstrated by McClure’s reference to empire, McNamee’s novel reveals textualizations beyond this internal conflict paradigm, and through a postmodern, diffuse style works to connect paramilitary violence with larger national and international histories. The post-GFA fiction produced retrospectively on the Troubles, particularly acclaimed works such as Anna Burns’ Milkman, have chosen to use the opportunities afforded by postmodern stylisation to defamiliarize the contentious titles, histories and grievances of the primary actors and communities of the conflict. Indeed, the seemingly intractable breakdowns over power-sharing at Stormont over the last few years, and the uncertainty of its status in a post-Brexit United Kingdom, suggest that the relationship between local, national and international politics in Northern Ireland is as contentious as ever. In this context, it may be timely to revisit Resurrection Man, a deeply stylised and postmodern text from the beginning of the peace process, to explore the ways in which it not only reveals the textualization of history and violence in Northern Ireland, but actively widens the set of referents for the novel’s moments of violence to encounter. In doing so, I will argue that McNamee opens up new and relatively unique textualizations of the Real in Northern Ireland, creating diffuse but intriguing encounters between sectarian violence and the wider contexts of decolonisation and the international history of conflict in the twentieth century.

The first section of this article will analyse the ways in which McNamee’s representations of the media in the novel work to, in Judith Butler’s words, expose the ‘active if unmarked delimitation’ of the textualization of violence (Butler 2016: 73). Rather than the text itself simply being an example of a formal structure organising the Real of Troubles violence, McNamee instead thematises the plethora of attempts to discursively scaffold the violence into a legible form, digestible for TV and newspaper audiences. The novel refuses this organisational neatness, instead constructing its text around the failure to comprehend the totality of the conflict amongst the piercing static of so many mutually incompatible interpretations. As McNamee narrates in relation to one of the gang’s first victims, the barbarity of sectarian violence refuses the possibility of producing a text adequate to the task of narrating it: ‘The root of the tongue had been severed. New languages would have to be invented’. (16)

The second section will expand on McNamee’s textualization of encounters in the novel and the ways in which he connects the violence of loyalist paramilitaries to the histories of imperialism, partition and twentieth century conflict. Using these imaginative encounters, McNamee restages the conflict not as sui generis but one amongst many in a constellation of conflicts in the twentieth century. This shift compels us as readers to consider the North’s histories beyond the ‘internal conflict’ paradigm and read the encounters as indicative of the common roots of these conflicts; in the legacies of imperialism, of ethnic conflict and the overlapping self-determinations embedded in nationalism writ large.

‘The Imagery was Passive Now’: National Media and Internal Textualization

In Frames of War, Judith Butler argues that states seek to ‘subordinate the visual field to the task of war waging’ in order to conscript the public into ‘a certain framing of reality’:

When the state issues directives on how war is to be reported, indeed on whether war is to be reported at all, it seems to be trying to regulate the understanding of violence, or the appearance of violence within a public sphere. (Butler 2016: xiv & xii)

The state regulates a domestic audience’s understanding of violence via a frame that ‘does not simply exhibit reality, but actively participates in a strategy of containment, selectively producing and enforcing what will count as reality’. (Butler 2016: xiii) In his article on the media war in Resurrection Man, J. Edward Mallot argues that this strategy of containment was imposed in a top-down manner when covering Northern Ireland in the 1970s: ‘working journalists encountered increasing limitations on what they could say about Northern Ireland violence, and how they could say it’. (Mallot 2013: 41) David Miller, in his book exploring media representations of the Troubles, suggests that the fundamental dispute in Northern Ireland is ‘around the legitimacy of the state’. (Miller 1994: 7) In official view, therefore, ‘armed opposition to the state is illegitimate’. (Miller 1994: 7) As a consequence of this framing, paramilitary violence was criminalised both in a legal sense, via Thatcher’s criminalisation policies (‘Crime is crime is crime, it is not political: it is crime’) and in discursive fields, most prominently the press. (Thatcher 1981) In this way, the primary ways in which the news media textualized the Real of Troubles violence was by actively participating in a strategy of containment, only allowing Troubles violence to encounter itself.

The British government enforced this discursive criminalisation in a variety of ways, and in the form of both oblique and overt legislative methods. There was the BBC ‘Reference-up’ system, which David Butler suggests was ‘a tacit prohibition on critical assessments of the government’s (pro-unionist) line. Analysis of the deeper causes of anti-state violence was effectively barred’. (Butler 1991: 111) This oblique method of narrative control was reinforced by the 1988 broadcasting restrictions, by which, according to Bill Rolston, ‘A deliberately vague and imprecise piece of legislative change ensured that the burden of interpretation was thrown back on the media personnel themselves’. (Rolston 1991: 4) The government further exhibited a more hegemonic pressure. In propaganda and while speaking for radio, British ministers would often compare the IRA to gangsters, and therefore cast their violence as a ‘criminal conspiracy’. (Miller 1994: 7) In doing so, they designated state violence as purely defensive: as a reaction to the depoliticised criminality of sectarian paramilitary forces, disconnected from any wider imperial history, national politics or legitimate grievance.

Butler further argues that a core strategy of resistance to the conscripting process of media textualization is the acknowledgment of the frame itself:

The operation of the frame, where state power exercises its forcible dramaturgy, is not normally representable—and when it is, it risks becoming insurrectionary and hence subject to state punishment and control. Prior to the events and actions represented within the frame, there is an active if unmarked delimitation of the field itself, and so of a set of contents and perspectives that are never shown, that it becomes impermissible to show. These constitute the non-thematized background of what is represented and are thus one of its absent organizing features. They can be approached only by thematizing the delimiting function itself, thereby exposing the forcible dramaturgy of the state in collaboration with those who deliver the visual news of the war by complying with the permissible perspectives. (Butler 2016: 73)

This is precisely the work that McNamee engages in in his depiction of the media in Resurrection Man. In the novel, the media’s textualizations of the conflict – the operation of the frame, its localising delimitation – is presented as one amongst many methods of representing the conflict, one replete with political and ideological imperatives. Coppinger, one of the journalists investigating the knife killings, notices how:

The whole thing’s changing. You see the way everything in this city is slipping down the news. Third item, fourth item. It’s like there’s a cultivated boredom out there. Another bomb, another dead UDR man. People’s learning to switch channels when they hear it. I mean there’s no good riot footage any more. The thrill you get when you see a petrol bomb hitting a Land-Rover. It gets harder and harder to make the headlines. The technology is changing too. Electronic surveillance, body-heat detectors, helicopters with nitesun searchlights. Nitesun. The confidential telephone, infra-red night ‘scopes. There’s a new vocabulary. Acceptable levels of violence, seven-day detention orders, the men of violence. It’s like the whole thing’s under control now. (156)

Throughout the text characters continually encounter and interpret paramilitary and state violence as refracted through the media. In quoting Reginal Maudling’s infamous reference to the goal of reaching ‘an acceptable level of violence’, McNamee mimics the language by which British journalism interpolated the insurrectionary violence of the Troubles, seemingly in order to create the perception that ‘the whole thing’s under control’. (Maudling 1971) McNamee’s fragmentary and diffuse depiction of British media consistently depicts both its claim to neutrality and its attempt to depoliticise and isolate Troubles violence. McNamee not only acknowledges this frame, the discursive Ulsterisation of the media, but actively opposes it within the text by consistently framing the violence within larger historical and geopolitical frameworks.

The news media are characterised by their ‘neutral haircuts and accents, the careful stresses to indicate condemnation or approval, the measured tones of reassurance’. (39) This matches the self-characterisation of organisations like the BBC, as well as Cleary’s claim that the British imagine their role in Ireland as ‘neutral arbiter[s]’. (Cleary 2002: 136) Because of this performative neutrality, characters in the novel become ‘distrustful’ of these reports. (39) McNamee creates a consistent decoupling between official, journalistic narratives and the facts on the ground: ‘At official level these meetings did not take place. Accusations of army collusion with paramilitary groups were vehemently denied but the army continued to negotiate at ground level’. (24) Deliberately narrating the denials and obfuscations of the state via the passive voice, McNamee creates a diffuse atmosphere of conspiracy replete with floating accusations and denials. Discussing their profession, Coppinger and Ryan conclude that:

They agreed that the reporting of violent incident [sic] was beginning to diverge from events. News editors had started to re-work their priorities, and government and intelligence agencies were at work. Paramilitaries escorted journalists to secret locations where they posed with general purpose machine-guns and RPG7 rocket launchers. Car bombings were carried out to synchronize with news deadlines. (58)

Butler’s provocation to her readers to think about the materiality of the frame is useful when considering Resurrection Man: ‘How do we understand the frame as itself part of the materiality of war and the efficacy of its violence?’ (Butler 2016: xiii) We find the frame through which the conflict is understood as a material part of the conflict: it begins to shape the ways the conflict is fought. Here, the process and politics of textualization begins to shape the Real. Not only does the media become a part of the fabric of the conflict, but its coverage begins to dematerialise its detail. Coppinger complains that ‘the essential details of an attack, the things which differentiated one incident from another, were missing. Points which he considered vital were being omitted from eyewitness accounts’. (58) This decontextualization reflects elements of coverage of the conflict Peter Taylor has spoken on, quoted in Mallot:

When the media did return to the subject, coverage continued to be guided by the numbing principles outlined by Philip Elliot in his UNESCO report, that the story should be simple, involving “both lack of explanation and historical perspective”; of human interest, involving “a concentration on the particular detail of incidents and the personal characteristics of those involved which results in a continual procession of unique, inexplicable events”. (Mallot 2013: 47)

Liz Curtis argues that, in decoupling these events from both their political context and immediate causes the media created the impression that violence was constructed to ‘appear as random as a natural disaster or accident’. (Curtis 1998: 107) These bizarre decouplings happen throughout Resurrection Man. For example, one UVF member is convinced that each victim of a bomb attack is the same man in different poses. The violence is also imagined in passive terms: ‘The emphasis had switched from coverage of riots and action shots of bombs exploding. The imagery was passive now. Blood-soaked pavements, booby-trapped cars covered with plastic sheeting. There were funerals, recurrent motifs of mourning’. (150) By focusing in on the tragedy of the violence, as opposed to its motivation or its political and historical context, the news media frames Troubles violence as random and therefore frames the perpetrators as criminals lacking political motivations. In this way, Northern Ireland is implicitly characterised by the media in the novel as an inexplicably violent disturbed area, a sentiment reinforced by the passive, fragmentary and diffuse ways in which this news coverage is conveyed in the novel. McNamee presents media responses to Troubles violence as both omnipresent and decoupled from facts on the ground. In the process of textualization, the violence only encounters itself.

However, Resurrection Man goes further in resisting these isolationist narratives than Butler's concept of ‘thematizing the delimiting function’ of the frame. (Butler 2016: 73) Within the text, McNamee creates an equally diffuse internationalism, contextualising Troubles violence within the scope of both British imperial history and the history of armed conflict in the twentieth century. In doing so, he repudiates the discursive Ulsterisation described throughout the novel and forms a literary intervention into the conception of Troubles violence as random and criminal.

‘The Offshore Currents of an Empire’s Memory’: International Encounters and ‘The Psychic Map of Empire’

The notion of encounters allows us to think through the allusions and connections writers create between the histories of different ethnic and national groups, particularly when these connections emerge not in concrete historical terms, but by implication: as postmodern, indeterminate and diffuse as they appear in McNamee’s text. As the editors of this special issue foreground, a focus on encounters ‘allows us to think of nations not only in processual terms, but also in a more punctuated and evental manner that disrupts and scatters unilinear understandings of time and space’ (Heiskanen and Kistnareddy 2024). In Resurrection Man, McNamee upends unilinear understandings of time and space by utilising both amorphous and specific allusions to myriad sites of conflict and decolonisation, decoupled from their context but in turn recontextualising Belfast. My contention is that he does this for two central reasons. Through imaginative encounters, McNamee both unsettles the ideological contours of loyalist paramilitarism found in McClure’s irony-laden speech quoted in the opening of this article – primarily by comparing it to Nazism and the conflict to the Second World War – and destabilises Victor’s own personal, localised ideological framework by textualizing it through encounters with a comparative history of empire, decolonisation and partition.

McNamee uses vague but notably international imagery to place the Troubles in a much wider geo-political context. There is a near constant comparison to other sites of conflict in the twentieth century. The police looked ‘like a poorly armed Balkan militia’ (121). Conversation in hotels mimic the kind ‘you would hear at embassy parties in the eastern bloc or foreign compounds in Gulf states’ (33). There are ‘foreign correspondents’ (23) documenting the conflict, for whom ‘other wars kept creeping into [their] reports’ (23). This is a useful description of the non-specificity with which twentieth century conflict is alluded to in the text: other wars consistently creep into McNamee’s depiction of Belfast. The aforementioned reporter’s memory was ‘swamped with incident. The presidential palace is surrounded. Armed gangs are roaming the commercial sector’ (23). Combatant’s voices have ‘a patina of hillside ambushes and jungle airlifts’ (20). Soldiers’ guns and uniforms ‘expelled a cold smell of lonely hillside observation posts, isolated checkpoints’. (206) Guards have ‘the universal stance of men on guard duty in watch-towers, border huts, unheated sentry-boxes. Men staring into pine forests and frozen wastes, watching the dark as though pledged to it’. (75) While indistinct and often tinged with a dreamlike quality, these allusions defamiliarize the conflict, and destabilise the notion that this is simply a local war. Belfast is recontextualised in McNamee’s novel as forming part of ‘a strange other topography’. (222) In creating a impressionistic landscape of vague references to other conflicts, McNamee suggests an intrinsic connection between the Troubles and other sites of conflict. The frequency and nonspecific nature of these textual encounters throughout the novel suggest that meaning is being created not by the implications of a single reference, but through their combined effect. Through this frequency, McNamee insists on textualizing Belfast’s violence not as isolated, but as a site of multipolar, and crucially, international, conflict.

There is therefore a clear attempt to draw parallels between the conflict in Northern Ireland and other sites of conflict around the world. Not only does this present the Troubles in a wider geopolitical context, it also has the effect of reframing the conflict’s participants as foreign and other. For example:

At eight o’clock that morning McClure turned on the radio, turning the dial wildly until he got the BBC World Service news. The newscaster’s voice was crisp and authoritative. He knew that his voice was being carried into the corners of the world. Each sentence was pronounced as if it were an edict to be imposed upon an unruly native population (138).

So: Northern Ireland is one of those ‘corners’ (138) of the world. Its inhabitants are simply another ‘unruly native population’ (138) upon which order is to be ‘imposed’ (138). The fact the radio station is ‘BBC World Service’ (138, emphasis mine), as opposed to the regular BBC, subtly suggests that Northern Ireland is not part of Britain. By presenting the region as a backwater, with clear comparisons to other failed states and sites of conflict in the Balkans and the Middle East, McNamee does away with the ambiguity of Northern Ireland’s colonial status. The novel rejects the notion that Northern Ireland is a natural part of the UK.

One of the most comprehensive comparisons in the novel is with the imagery of the Second World War. Victor is interned at Long Kesh, described by the arresting officer as ‘Detention without trial’, (105) mirroring thousands of paramilitaries and civilians detained throughout the early years of the conflict. Victor describes Long Kesh as ‘deliberately constructed along the lines of a Second World War POW camp’ (110). This thought from Victor is incisive. According to Allan Feldman, Long Kesh was ‘formerly a World War II air force base’ (Feldman 1991: 296). In addition, Victor feels as if Long Kesh is ‘a fucking refugee camp’ (112). The vague allusions to other conflicts return in this section. Approaching the internment camp ‘you felt as if this empty land went on forever, that this was the remote interior, sparsely inhabited, of a troubled continent’ (110). Likewise, the paramilitaries in the novel imagine their place in this parallel as one of soldiers in a war. Victor ‘saw himself as a general conducting pre-dawn briefings with a roomful of men with drawn faces, targets circled on a map’ (46). However, it is also clear that in this analogy the paramilitaries do not align themselves ideologically with the Allies, but with the Nazis. Again, this becomes clear through the figure of McClure. His ownership of Nazi memorabilia extends to: ‘Swastika armbands, SS cap badges, officers’ chevrons. He knew the importance of insignia, how they were invested with secret energies and possibilities of transformation. He understood the Nazis’ extension of language into power’. (30)

McNamee goes on to utilise McClure to implicitly compare loyalist and Nazi ideologies. McNamee compares loyalists, particularly members of the Orange Lodge, to the Nazis. He does this through reference to shared imagery in the same passage. It begins by explaining McClure’s ‘attraction to the Nazis’. (64):

‘People’s looking for control,’ McClure said. ‘They want somebody to take over, decide things for them, what to do with their lives. They’ll hand over their life and cry tears of fucking gratitude that somebody else’ll take it on for them. All that misery and deciding. They want to dress up and act the hero and fuck the rest. They’ll die for that’ (65).

In the very next paragraph, which forms the final images at the end of a chapter, and so can only be related to the previous conversation, McNamee describes a group of ‘Orangemen’ (65) heading home from a parade. Their ‘orange silk collarettes and black bowler hats’ (65) match McClure’s declaration that people ‘want to dress up’ (65). The ‘banner showing William of Orange on a white charger’ (65) forms the parallel to the ‘somebody to take over, decide things for them’ (65) in an implicit comparison with Hitler. The ‘doctrinal simplicity’ (64) of the Nazis is therefore compared with the corresponding simplicity of the loyalism espoused by McClure. McNamee thereby creates the suggestion that Nazism and violent loyalism share the same underlying logics. In this context, the indiscriminate murder of Catholics by the Shankill Butchers and their fictionalised counterparts becomes something closer to an attempt at ethnic cleansing than to two warring tribes. At one point Victor points to ‘enemy’ parts of the city and fantasises about their total destruction: ‘New Lodge. The Short Strand. He described how you could wipe them off the map from here. Artillery fire directed with precision’. (45–46) The UVF men calling Catholics ‘Taigs’ becomes the equivalent of an ethnic slur, intended to be reminiscent of the dehumanisation of the Jewish population in Nazi Germany. McNamee’s focus away from the IRA allows other contexts and interpretations of the Troubles to reveal themselves. The iconography of the conflict is therefore repositioned towards a more multidirectional and more sinister understanding of the underlying ideology of loyalist paramilitaries. In creating these connections, McNamee uses imaginative encounters to reveal the racism inherent in loyalism’s violence.

But, as we shall see, Victor’s violent loyalist ideology textualized in the novel relies precisely on ignoring these connections to sustain its coherence. Topography is a key theme in the text, as is naming in general. Eric Reimer suggests that this is a trend in Northern Irish literature more broadly. He claims space tends to be ‘the most dominant analytical category in contemporary Irish and Northern Irish literature’ (Reimer 2012: 65). This emphasis on topography is reproduced in Resurrection Man. The narrator describes the city as ‘withdrawn into its placenames’ (3). The attendant examples reveal McNamee’s attempt to connect the city to its history as a colony: ‘Palestine Street. Balaklava Street. The names of captured ports, lost battles, forgotten outposts held against inner darkness’ (3). The city is further described as ‘ancient and ambiguous … derelict and colonial’ (6). There is, therefore, an active attempt to depict Belfast, not as a site of modern conflict, but an ancient, dilapidated colony. In doing this, McNamee reframes the conflict away from its beginning in 1969 and towards a much broader, long-term perspective. The violence taking place within this space is therefore textualized by the narration, as Maurice Punch describes it, as ‘Britain’s last major colonial conflict’ (Punch 2012: 11).

However, references to street names are also used throughout the novel to cement Victor’s ideology, his sense of his own history. At the beginning of the novel, Victor is in control of the streets. He symbolically possesses them through intimate knowledge. He plays a game in which he ‘would sit in the back of the car with his eyes closed and tell them where they were’ (26). His knowledge of the streets in the beginning of the novel is absolute, he ‘knew the inhabitants of every house and would tell their histories’ (26). This section concludes by naming two streets in particular: ‘Baden-Powell Street, Centurion Street,’ (27) referencing a British Army general from colonial wars in India and Africa and a British Second World War era tank respectively. Nuala C. Johnson describes these references as ‘streets named in the memory of military officers, successful foot-soldiers from larger imperial realms who, like Victor, willingly fought the cause of justice’ (Johnson 1999: 728). In this sense, the knowledge of these streets, and implicit knowledge of their imperial legacy, for Victor cements his place within that legacy. This ratifies his identity as one of the boys that ‘built the Empire’ (151).

However, his knowledge of Belfast’s streets is challenged as the novel progresses. McNamee also references other sites of Partition: ‘Berlin street’, ‘Kashmir road’ and ‘India street, Palestine street’ (163). To Victor, these are ‘impervious syllables that yielded neither direction nor meaning’ (163). The same section that references India and Palestine, other sites of British decolonisation and partition, his previous knowledge fails him:

But sometimes on one of these runs he would say, where are we? He sounded surprised as if he had suddenly discovered that the streets were not the simple things he had taken them for, a network to be easily memorized and navigated. They had become untrustworthy, concerned with unfamiliar destinations, no longer adaptable to your own purposes (163).

This suggests that Victor’s sectarian bigotry is challenged by presenting the Northern Irish conflict in a wider context of decolonisation. The binary, localised framing of the conflict as between ‘two inherently unreasonable tribes’ is destabilised by the implicit parallels created by these references (McKittrick and McVea 2012: 299). In a personal correspondence, McNamee confirmed this contextualisation was purposeful: ‘If you look properly you see that the city and the troubles contextualise themselves in relation to what happens elsewhere’ (McNamee 2018: email to author). He claimed he used the street names to reveal ‘The psychic map of empire’ (McNamee 2018: email to author). When Victor is exposed to a topography marked by multipolar references to sites of decolonisation and ethnic conflict, they are ‘no longer adaptable’ to his purposes. In other words, they no longer provide for him the celebratory British military history – ‘Ulster Loyal and true’ – he can claim to be protecting by committing his own militant violence. (151) Especially in referencing ongoing sites of conflict like Kashmir and Palestine, Victor is forced to reckon with the failures of British imperialism, and the dangerous idea that Ulster is perhaps amongst those failures.

Conclusion

In recent years, Northern Ireland has reckoned with a three-year constitutional crisis arising from the breakdown of power sharing, and the uncertainty of its status in a post-Brexit United Kingdom. These developments suggest that the relationship between local and international politics in Ulster is far from a settled question. Using the lens of encounters to think beyond unilinear, localised and ghettoised interpretations of the Troubles allows us to explore representations of Belfast rooted in internationalism. Through satirically depicting the cacophony of attempts to monopolise narration of Troubles violence, particular the national media’s internal and depoliticised framings, McNamee insists on acknowledging history in the North as always already fragmented, multiple and diffuse. Through a roadmap of allusions and references, McNamee demonstrates how imaginative encounters can be used to construct a new Belfast from the rubble of the old one. However, in the closing pages McNamee restricts his references to areas of Belfast: ‘The Pound. Sailortown. The Bone’ (233). He therefore contrasts this with his earlier topographical references to other conflicts, suggesting perhaps that the perpetuation of violence in the city only serves to isolate Belfast from the rest of the country and the world: The Troubles’ victims ‘take their place among the lonely and vigilant dead’ (233).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).