Book Review: Shade

 Shade, by Neil Jordan

    A ghost who sticks around to relive and review her life is the focus of this novel that reads like a movie script.

    Not that it is lines of dialogue. But the writing -- the descriptions, the settings and shifting of scenes, the lengthy thoughts and soliloquies -- shows Jordan's background as a playwright and screen-writer.

    As you get into the book, you can almost see the images on a screen.  It's a commendable style, but its takes a while to get used to. 

    Jordan shifts the narration from character to character, sometimes jumping around in time, other times telling simultaneous stories from different perspectives. The characters may be in different places at different times in their lives, with the alternate stories overlapping.

    As a movie or play, one might follow along without fail. But as a novel, it can be confusing because when a new story begins or returns, it's difficult to tell who is speaking and whose tale is being told. An unseen narrator simply begins.

    When we first meet Nina Hardy, she had just been killed by a childhood friend, who cut off her head with a pair of garden shears and dumped her body in a cistern. (None of this is a spoiler; it's all told in the opening pages.) She exists as a spirit, able to return to various points in her life and witness the days she lived, and able watch her friends and family in a new light.

    We see her loving father and unhappy mother. We meet her small group of friends -- the half-brother she first met as a young teenager, the strange but sensitive boy who wound up killing her, and that youth's small and relatively inconsequential sister.

    Nina's early years are set in rural County Louth, along the River Boyne, in an Ireland torn between Catholic and Protestant, with the desire for independence amidst loyalty to the king. It continues through World War I and beyond.

    Their stories jump around in time and space in the early going, and while the tales continue to meander at times, they eventually join to form a cohesive narrative. It's a about loss, and love, and family. It's about war and peace. It's about independence and loyalty. 

    It's about friendships, and saving lives, and avenging death.