The Cold Cold Ground by Adrian McKinty

Young and well-educated, Officer Sean Duffy works among mature provincial colleagues for the Carrickfergus police in Northern Ireland. It's 1981, and Belfast is burning. The lone "Catholic" in a station of "Proddies" (though the cops are not religious), Sean observes the false categories and black and white thinking as his station is challenged with a rash of apparent anti-gay killings and a seeming suicide.

The funeral of Bobby Sands is over. With other hunger strikers dying in the Maze, an obdurate Thatcher cuts short a Belfast visit, reiterating her refusal to "negotiate with terrorists." Meanwhile, strict social divisions are enforced by threats and violence: Catholic or Protestant, Orange or Green, from here or from "over the water." Like Anna Burns in Milkman, McKinty uses such chillingly simple phrases to telegraph extreme social tensions.

Sean Duffy wants only to solve certain crimes and prove himself. He senses the first three deaths are connected -- to each other and to the political situation. True, homosexuality is illegal, and gays are pariahs, but he reasons ironically that Northern Ireland "doesn't do hate crimes." Anyone who wants to kill, he tells his colleagues, just joins one of the paramilitary organizations.

Along with the two murdered gay men, a young woman was found hanged, an apparent suicide. But the pathology report is ambiguous, and also reveals that she recently gave birth. She's the divorced ex of a long-jailed IRA operative. For Sean, her death smacks of political revenge rather than the standard Irish trope of guilt and depression caused by having an "illegitimate" baby.

In this tale of twists and turns, the first of the Troubles Trilogy, the author portrays his setting with an unerring voice. As well as capturing a unique time and place, this novel raises universal social questions along with tension-building story questions. Fortunately, the fascinating but deeply flawed Sean Duffy returns in future works, where the reader can see what he's learned from his first foray into Carrickfergus policing.

I found this novel far more convincing and thought-provoking than Adrian McKinty's more recent work, The Chain. I look forward to reading the sequels to follow Sean's development as a character trying to survive in a bizarrely challenging place and moment in history.

The Ruin by Dervla McTiernan

I was up till 3:30 finishing this novel. The title says a lot. A bilingual triple entendre, the word ruin has a couple of meanings in Irish, as the author explains in a note. It can mean a secret, a hidden thing, but has also long been used as a term of endearment. All three meanings are evoked in this tale of tragedy and secrets and distrust. Author Dervla McTiernan handles harsh material well, portraying the bureaucratic and personal dysfunction in police and social services, as well as the desperately hard lives of children who are or should be taken into care.

Jack's apparent suicide is really a murder: he's caught witnessing a nefarious deed. On the face of it, what ties the dead man to his killer seems to be pure chance. But the killer was also a foster child -- one whose reaction to early trauma is utterly different from Jack's.

Queensland's Green Island strewn with bits of coral

Green Island lies off the Cairns coast near the Great Barrier Reef. A cay is a large sandpile that protrudes above the sea to become an island, and eventually growing vegetation. The water is pristine, the sand sugar soft and littered with bits of coral from the nearby reef.
 

The Dry by Jane Harper

This debut mystery by Jane Harper introduces a city police officer with a rural past. When the story opens, Aaron Falk is back in his home town of Kiewarra for the funeral of someone who was once a close friend. Yet all he wants is to get away from the people he grew up with, both the nasty bullies and those who were kind. In a few short hours, he hopes to start the drive back to the office in Melbourne.

In many ways, the town is much as he remembers, but with one important difference. The river is dry. The lack of rain has frayed the nerves of the townspeople, who are also now reeling from the shock of having to bury an entire family. As the story unfolds, we intuit the reason for Aaron's sudden departure, and why he's never been back. We also meet a local woman he knew as a teen, now a single mother, and learn of a teenage friend who drowned.

This novel dramatizes the power of weather. Drought puts psychological as well as financial pressure on those whose livelihoods it threatens. The story also portrays the damage caused by fear and lies, suspicion and distrust, when compounded by small-town pressures to conform.

The book is available locally, but I bought my copy on a recent trip to Australia. Until I witnessed it with my own eyes, I was unfamiliar with the concept of rivers empty of water. After crossing many bridges over dry riverbeds, I gained some sense of Australian weather and seasons. The Dry can hit around the country, when the rivers are not overflowing their banks. In the Northern Territory, the Build-up is the name of the humid and uncomfortable season of waiting for the Wet.

Jane Harper's memorable federal policeman Aaron Kirk returns in future novels, and The Dry has been made into a film, starring Eric Bana as Kirk. Filmed in several Australian locations, the movie is still in the editing process.

Empty rivers in Australia

I took this photo from a highway bridge over the Gascoyne. The longest river in Western Australia  abuts farms and orchards. In late August, it was completely dry. For the past two years, much of Australia has been suffering from drought. Driving north, we crossed many more bridges over dry rivers; some, like the Ashburton, below, had bits of water in them.

As road signs suggest, rivers spill over in the wet season. In 2010-11, the Gascoyne rose and inundated a vast area. Government estimated soil erosion as about 9 million tonnes.

North Pacific South Pacific

In the Southern hemisphere, even the sky looks different. Its unfamiliar constellations are dominated by the Southern Cross.

White Rock on a September evening conveyed a very different mood from what we saw two evenings ago at Surfer's Paradise. After a month in Australia, the North Pacific looks chilly and grey. Queensland's Gold Coast (below) is on the cusp of summer.

Cloth of gold - pretty, tiny and very dangerous

Travelling in Australia, my daughter and I visited a small cay called Green Island enroute to the Great Barrier Reef. On the sandy beach, I picked up some bits of coral and tiny shells and and put them in Yasemin's hand.

At once, she identified the conical shell on the left. "A cloth of gold."

"Do you remember playing with Alvina's shell collection when you were little?"

"Of course. And that one nearly killed her."

True History of the Kelly Gang

According to a Sydney tour guide, a fifth of Australians are descended from convicts who arrived from England in the 19th century. Thefts of food often led to "transportation," and being Irish didn't help. This history helps explain the pride in convict ancestry today, and makes sense of the the folk hero status achieved by the bush ranger Ned Kelly, who was hanged in Melbourne Gaol in 1880, aged 26.

Peter Carey's novel about this revolutionary outlaw affords fascinating insights into colonial Australia. The novelist has researched contemporary writings by and about the real Ned Kelly to create the voice that describes "a colony made specifically to have poor men bow down to their gaolers." The fictionalized Kelly also describes his relatives as "Irish and therefore drunk with land and horses, all the old hardships soon to be forgotten."

As the story unfolds, new hardships pile up around him. With his twice-jailed father dead, twelve-year-old Ned tries hard to be be the man and protect the family. Living in a settler's hut where "the smallest flutter of a mother's eyelids are like a tin sheet rattling in the wind," he feels angry and powerless when she takes up with the outlaw Harry Power.

Looking back on his earlier self years later, Ned feels "great pity for the boy who readily believed the barefaced lie" designed to manipulate him into abetting Harry's crimes. Recalling his earlier naivete, he remembers the Harry's eyes "alive with emotion I mistook for sympathy."

Early in the book, Ned Kelly is portrayed as a sensitive and intelligent boy born into deep poverty and a troubled family and community. He saves another child from drowning without thought of danger to himself, and later, works to save his mother's land. Sadly, his honest efforts to raise and trade in cattle and horses avail him nothing. His decision to turn against the law is a conscious one, taken after many incidences of unfair accusations at the hands of the police.

Meanwhile, the new colony is poisoned by ancient tribal roles and enmities. Superstition persists, with the banshee "thriving like blackberry in the new climate." Old feuds are passed on to new generations: British against Irish, cousin against cousin, police against settlers, and "wild colonial boys" holding up trains, coaches and banks. Forced to fight another bush ranger, Ned wins, only to discover that he is now popular, which is "even worse than being hated as a traitor" although the conditions are much the same -- "every drunken fool" wants to fight him. Kelly also sympathizes with the misfit Steve Hart, whose father "filled his head with all them rebel stories."

Ned also understands "the agony of the Great Transportation that our parents would rather forget what come before so we currency lads is left alone ignorant as tadpoles spawned in puddles on the moon." He is cognizant of the sad truth that "poor people's love is cupboard love and all it took were £500 for the police to be led to the outlaw's secret door."

When his destitute mother is put in jail and her youngest baby taken, Ned resolves to get her out. The depth of the injustice around him results in a political awakening. In the doomed hope of staying on the right side of the law, he reports police corruption and misconduct to the powers that be, believing they will see justice done. The betrayal of this hope turns him into a revolutionary as well as an outlaw. Helping the disadvantaged gains him the admiration of a Robin Hood figure.

The voice Carey has created for Ned Kelly is rustic and untutored, nuanced and poetic. Reading this remarkable book is like hearing an actual voice from the past. In some respects, the history of the Kelly gang seems quaint and distant; at the same time, we see parallel conditions today. Tribalism, religious and ethnic prejudice, poverty and social disadvantage are still very much present in society, and they still lead to violence.

Below: Memorabilia of Ned Kelly are sold as souvenirs at Melbourne Gaol, now a museum.