Against the background of war-torn Belfast, two men engage in a bitter private duel. Ned Galloway, a street-wise gunman profiting from the people’s anxiety, is hired to spring “Silver” Steele, a jailed folk-hero, from a guarded hospital room. This book won the Guardian Fiction Prize.
“The Devil hath established/ His cities in the North” – Maurice Leitch quotes St Augustine, and the city in question is the Belfast of the late 70’s/early 80’s that Leitch knows and recreates so convincingly.
Silver is a Loyalist prisoner, his heroic status proclaimed on the gable walls of the working class Protestant areas of Belfast. He is sprung from his hospital sick bed by his erstwhile comrades but their intentions, he quickly realises, aren’t benign: Silver has, despite his legendary status, become a source of concern for the hierarchy on the outside – Silver has recorded his evolving inner thoughts (on old cassette tapes) and his orthodoxy, and loyalty, is in doubt.
He escapes from his old comrades but, in the crucible of Belfast, Silver’s city, where can he be free? In the rigid demarcation of the time, in all the middle class areas he would be an alien curiosity and soon recaptured, in the working class Catholic areas he would immediately be held as a trophy prisoner until his inevitable execution.
Silver’s City, in the end, is limited to the working class Protestant streets where he might see ‘Silver Rules OK’ scrawled on a wall but those familiar streets are now as dangerous as the others.
Silver escapes to the countryside with a woman who, at least initially, is intoxicated by his singular celebrity. Silver, with no other option, goes along for the ride but anticipates that he will betray her sooner rather than later.
He is hunted now by the Loyalist hit-man, Ned Galloway, more Hyde than Jekyll, who himself becomes estranged from the paramilitary leadership and who now seeks redemption by inflicting slow pain and death on Silver.
The Belfast described by Leitch is claustrophobic and cruel. Silver is treated to a night out in the local social club, the sort of place where all patrons are ‘sound’, where a stranger won’t be admitted or, if they are admitted, will immediately be assessed for the required loyalty quotient and, where they don’t meet the benchmark, may very well be found dead in a dark alleyway. The stark interior serves as a stomping ground for the enforcers in a not-so-secret army – everybody acknowledging the divine right of armed authority. Silver’s dilemna is that it was in such places his reputation, his power, was nurtured and burnished – now somebody else holds the power and he is a threat.
The basic plot of the story could easily be transplanted to any place where the powerful abuse their power. In Leitch’s hands, though, Belfast, Silver’s City, is an intractable character in its own right. Written over 35 years ago, much of the physical character of the city has changed but the ingrained sense of place, and the prerequisite loyalty to your own, and the attendant suspicion, or hostility, to the other may seem dormant but the levers to spark to animated fury can still be manipulated.
To Leitch’s great credit, he allows his characters the respect to be as they are without much in the way of overwrought moralising – many “Troubles” writers can’t resist the temptation to thread their own take on the conflict into the fabric of the story (often it is the ‘this would be a great wee country if the terrorists would leave it alone’ or ‘vulnerable and/or misguided idealistic youth duped by cunning criminal armchair godfathers on the make’, and sometimes with a couple of star-crossed lovers reaching across the barricades). Instead, we find Leitch’s characters doing what they do and being who they are – the pompous local commander Bonner, the sociopathic killer Galloway, exorcising his pent-up frustrations by cold-blooded executions of family men in front of young daughters, the disillusioned Nan taking Silver as her opportunity to escape her disappointment in her miserable Belfast life.
And Silver, his destiny determined at birth, capitulating to the fate the city demands:
“The light was beginning to fail outside, he could tell, despite his eyes. He thought of the city and the street-lamps lighting one by one, the city that had made him what he was. Old and cynical begetter, it watched its sons come, it watched them go. Despite dreams, he had been brought back down to the level of its streets, as it always knew he would… Perhaps they would lock him away from the others this time. He would have plenty of time to go-over the things that crammed his head. That would be his sentence, for the city always made you pay for your dreams.”