Bruen’s prose mirrors his life. Abrasive, rough, weathered. All novelists write their biography through their fiction; the character and the writer being too enmeshed to find separation. For fans of the crime noir genre, Bruen’s the master. Setting is modern day Galway, Ireland; main character is a former Garda, fresh out of alcohol detox, triggered by the accidental death of a friend’s young daughter, who he was supposed to be watching. Bruen writes like how a Guinness tastes: bitter, dark, and biting. Take this excerpt,
‘With horror, I realized I cared for more people in the graveyard then in life, which means you’ve lived too long or God has a serious vendetta going, with no sign of Him letting up in the foreseeable future. What all this transmuted into was rage, a blinding, encompassing, white rawness of fury. When I hit the guy on the bridge, the truth was I felt near released. Only massive control prevented me finishing him off, and man I wanted to – still did. The classic definition of depression is rage turned inward, so the way I figured it, I was born depressed. No f***ing more. I wasn’t going under that dank water which is depression, where your best daily moment is climbing into bed. Of course, the very worst is when you wake, the black cloud waiting, and you go ‘Not this s**t again.’
Bruen weaves in Pascal, Bono, Soren Kierkegaard, Cash’s ‘Hurt’, and dozens of other literary and musical references which helps to raise his work from the gutter of pain -where most crime noir novels reside.
2 comments:
I must read this. You had me at "Johnny Cash". Is this part of a series?
He has written a good number of books...There is the Inspector Brant series, which takes place in London and then this series which features Jack Taylor, set in Galway Ireland. Love his sparse yet literary infused writing.
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