The Midnight Choir A bit of fun! .mp3 (3.6 MB)
Gene Kerrigan
Harville Secker, 2006
Busted in the Blinding Lights
Kerrigan's first novel, Little Criminals, caused a sensation. Leave it to Critical Mick to judge whether or not this journalist-turned-novelist lives up to the hype.
Quoting a master like Leonard Cohen is well and good, but choosing old ground like "Bird on a Wire" for a title puts Gene Kerrigan among the throng groping Goldie Hawn's sloppy seconds. He's better than that. Judging from the setting, characters, pace, and gravity in The Midnight Choir, his superb second novel, Kerrigan's in a fresh, truthful league on par with Cohen himself.
As I whine in my essay on Irish Crime, the supercops and serial killers of much Emerald Isle fiction could very well be placed anywhere. The Midnight Choir is not so. In character, crime and conflict, this setting is resoundingly Modern Ireland. Its Gardai are demoralized and bogged down in bureaucracy- true to life. The crimes they clean up after daily are petty street affairs and DVD piracy, while rarer murders outrage national headlines- also true. Conflict arises from inability to nail the parties that cops know very well to be guilty, infighting and the requirement of kissing the Justice Minister's ass. All very true, very Irish. Incising with an insider's insight, Kerrigan makes The Midnight Choir setting sing.
To hum out the bars of the plot: an outcast, honest detective named Harry Synnott strives to nail a clever, violent jewellery store robber before departing Ireland for a plum job with Europol. His sidekick sets herself the mission of stopping a spoiled rich kid rapist. Harry's desperate junkie informer, Dixie Peyton, must reclaim her boy from foster care and escape. A crime lord rages against the tout (that Irish for "informer") in his organization, vowing to cut off that leak permanently once it is identified. And way over on the west coast, in Galway, a young beat cop is the only man that the bloody psycho thug he captured will spin his riddles to. Each strives, in their way, to be free.
Two weaknesses: first, this is one crowded choir. New characters introduce new threads of storyline even later than three-quarters of the way through the novel. The result was perhaps unnecessarily complicated. I had to stop and read back through to remember who had produced what note. I am a bit of an idiot, true, but I feel that The Midnight Choir would have felt tighter, hummed a little better, if it had been leaner. Kerrigan is guaranteed a long career. Some of these interesting characters, plotlines, and observations could sound more clearly if held back for a future novel.
Second: the various notes take a long time to form a chord. Inevitably the various threads of plot will weave and connect, but they really take their time doing so. This more resembles "Bohemian Rhapsody" than Cohen's simple titular tune.
There are other niggles, too. A running theme is that Harry's college-aged son is trying to get in touch with him throughout the book. This potential subplot never comes to anything. I suppose a note of unrealized potential, choices left hanging, is a part of every desperate man's daily life, but in literature it's mildly confusing. The Midnight Choir, like Cohen, improves with each revisiting, but the richness may fail to make it catchy the first time through.
To close this unruly review back where it started- regardless of the phrase on the cover, Kerrigan's The Midnight Choir is a mighty tower of a novel. It has well earned its place among Critical Mick's Best Books Read in 2006.
The opening chapter of this novel is absolutely perfect!
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Man, I hate the unworthy, recycled title. Here are eight Leonard Cohen lines that make a more appealing title than "The Midnight Choir."
Busted in the Blinding Lights
The Gates of Heaven Budged an Inch
The Johnny Walker Wisdom
Once for the Devil, and Once for Christ
The Angel of Compassion
With a Mighty Expectation of Relief
A Hungry Kiss
But it Feels like Death
To revisit the rubbish strategy of my review of John MacKenna’s A Year of our Lives--- read each stolen line in isolation, and conceive the story it would serve as the hook of or capper for. Or, in this case, title of. Actually stop, reread, and think. See it on the cover of a book, and imagine the dustjacket blurb. I'd buy Once for the Devil, and Once for Christ based on title alone.
Though any track will do, these eight phrases are ripped from a lesser-known Cohen, 1992's "Closing Time." The first is so strong, I've made it the title of this review. A tribute, in my own lame way.
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