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THE FINAL SILENCE is the fourth in the novels involving Jack Lennon and set in contemporary Belfast. Readers of the previous three will know to expect uncompromisingly noir accounts of a city where the legacy of The Troubles refuses to go away and will be perhaps a bit surprised to find Jack still on his feet, if only barely. He has had a rough journey of it.
This time, he is on medical leave and facing suspension, having shot a fellow officer who was trying to murder him. His new supervisor, DCI Serena Flanagan, appears to be thoroughly honest and free of any dubious past connections, which makes her a rarity in Lennon's world. And she is suspicious of Lennon.
Thus he is not in top form when he is contacted by a former lover, Rea Carlisle, for help. Rea's uncle, whom she barely knew, has died (of natural causes!) intestate, leaving his house to go to his sister, Rea's mother. The family decides that Rea, now in her thirties and unemployed, should have the house, but it has to be cleared before she can take possession. There's little enough inside, but there is one room that is firmly locked and barred. In a scene out of a cautionary fairy tale, Rea decides she must know what is within. Forcing the door, she finds very little save a sort of album recording the various murders that her uncle has been complicit in over the years, complete with souvenirs of the victims. Horrified, she calls her family, who try to convince her to forget what she's seen. After all, her father is a prominent Unionist politician, a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly and hoping for greater things - the scandal might ruin his chances.
But Rea is a good person and cannot get the families of the murdered out of her mind, and, along with the book, she has also found a photo of her father in his younger years in politically compromising company. So she enlists Jack to help her do something about what she knows. It is the first step on a path that will lead Jack into great danger, threaten him with the loss of the only person he genuinely cares about, his daughter, and cause him to be suspected of murder.
All of this takes place in the new Belfast, where the kind of normal civic and social life enjoyed by most modern cities has at last been allowed to develop. Standing under the glass dome of Victoria Square, the new shopping centre, Serena Flanagan thinks that a place like this couldn't have existed when she was a child. It would have been "irresistible for the paramilitaries. They would have called it an economic target when they claimed responsibility for whatever bomb destroyed the place. In truth, the men in balaclavas simply couldn't abide the people of Belfast having anything good....Such indulgences could not be tolerated by those who dealt in death and fear, and they would have burned it to the ground."
It is memories such as these that give gravity to the characters in the book. Compared to the earlier three, A FINAL SILENCE is more disciplined, more controlled. The previous novels each have ended in a grotesque burst of violence and vengeance; the ending of this one, while tense and terrifying, is kept within the boundaries of the possible.
The title is, however, a bit ominous. Does it imply that this is Neville's last word on the subject of Belfast and its troubles, both lower and upper case? I hope not. The events in this book spin out from the revelations of a non-political serial killer, but broaden to include memories of the political serial killings that dominated life before the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. As Neville doggedly reminds us, these are in the past, but not safely in the past. Indeed, only late last year a car bomb exploded outside that very same Victoria Square that Flanagan sees as an icon of a new and peaceful order. So if Jack Lennon can manage to get back up on his feet, get off the pain killers, and reunite with his daughter, he will still have a lot to say.
§ Yvonne Klein is a writer, translator, and retired college English professor who lives in Montreal.
Reviewed by Yvonne Klein, November 2014
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