“Everyone knew Francie and Francie knew everyone. He was at the centre of everything and he knew everything.” So the long-serving IRA man Francie Begley is described by slippery politician Máirtín O’Cuilleanáin in Austin Duffy’s riveting and gritty Troubles novel, Cross. Set in 1994, in the months before the provisional ceasefire, the book takes its title from the fictional northern Irish border town of Cross, an outpost in “so-called bandit country ... this hotbed of republicanism”. Duffy dramatises the tortuous shift from violence to real political change in the front rooms and pubs of Cross, with the two wings of the republican cause embodied by Francie and O’Cuilleanáin. It’s no accident that O’Cuilleanáin is known as MOC by the paramilitaries, with its echo of “master of ceremonies”; he’s the one pulling the strings in Westminster and Stormont.
With most recent Troubles novels, such as David Keenan’s For the Good Times, Anna Burns’s Milkman and Louise Kennedy’s Trespasses, set in the dark days of 1970s Belfast, it’s refreshing and instructive to read one that plays out during the peace process. In Milkman, nothing and no one is named. In Cross, everyone is named and reputations are crucial. There’s no escaping the town’s whisper network, a grapevine that Francie manipulates with virtuosic precision: “He’d practically know your business before you knew it yourself.”
