5th February 2024
The circumstances – serious and dramatic – of Jack Taylor’s dismissal from the Garda Síochána (or Gardaí, Ireland’s national police and security service), after 10 years service and on his third warning, are recounted in the opening chapter of Ken Bruen’s The Guards. It turned out that punching a pompous government minister in the mouth was not consistent with maintaining his then employment status.
Thus it is that we are introduced to him as an alcoholic Galway-based private eye, whose “office” is his usual seat in a basic, spit-and-sawdust public house called Grogan’s. His morning coffee routinely has a large measure of brandy poured in by the elderly and frail Sean, the bar-owner.
We are in no doubt about our sense of place. Grogan’s has three portraits above the bar – of a Pope (Jack is not sure which one), St Patrick and John Fitzgerald Kennedy – with JFK in the middle. (The Pope had previously been in centre field but, following the Vatican Council, had been “bounced” out to outside-left).
Likewise, our sense of the contemporary (i.e. turn of century) period is aided by the frequent references to what might broadly be described as popular culture: a song by Gabrielle, the television series ER, a Beckham haircut… In addition, Jack (and Bruen) occasionally step back to the previous generation – Joy Division, Gary Numan… It has to be said that not all these casual asides invoke a warm recollection from Jack’s perspective.
The early passages of the book also set the tone for the linguistic identity of the locality: “Jaysus”, “yah eejit”, “by the holy”, etc. There is a risk here that Bruen would draw too heavily on a clichéd “Oirishness”, but this is largely avoided thanks to the urgency of the narrative and the underlying presence of both a wry humour and unremittingly cynical take on the world.
Jack sits in the bar most mornings and, a minor reputation having been earned as an effective investigator, waits “for the world to come knocking”, in this case a distressed mother concerned about the drowning of her young daughter.
The story – narrated in the first person – progresses from this initial encounter. At first, Jack and his side-kick Cathy B make little progress and he is on the verge of giving up the case. However, a vicious beating after another evening in the pub convinces him that he might be on to something. And so the story evolves as Jack identifies the powerful figures behind the abuse of teenage girls. There are sudden – and, for the reader, unexpected – deaths.
Bruen’s default style is for short – often once-sentence – paragraphs that intersperse the consistently snappy dialogue in a series of brief (usually one or two-page) chapters. Jack’s conversations – or, more frequently, just his inner thoughts – add to the richness of the cultural references, particular of writers both Irish (JM O’Neill, Patrick Kavanagh) and non-Irish. The latter include Elmore Leonard, Derek Raymond and David Goodis – novelists in the noir genre – whom Bruen is clearly acknowledging as among his own influences.
Jack’s investigative work takes regular breathers, as his assaults on whatever booze comes to hand – beer, gin, whisky – have their predictable effects, notwithstanding his occasional efforts to bring things under control. At about the half-way stage of the book, he spends 12 days in the mental hospital in Ballinasloe following another drink-induced blackout. (Wikipedia informs us that St Brigid’s Hospital opened as the Connacht Asylum in 1833 and housed about 2,000 patients in the 1950s, but subsequently declined in importance, as the Irish mental health policy moved towards deinstitutionalisation. It closed in 2013).
This allows for a reflective – and poignant – interlude in which we learn more of Jack’s love of books and literature: “There’s always been books. All my bedraggled life, they’ve been the only constant”. He had begun with his father’s Zane Grey cowboy stories and advanced through Richmal Crompton and Robert Louis Stephenson until, thanks to the guidance of a kindly local librarian, Mr Kennedy – “a tall thin man with an air of other worldliness” – he graduated to Dickens, poetry, philosophy… and American crime novels.
The Guards – the first (to date) of 16 novels involving Jack Taylor – is not simply a story about a private eye investigating a mystery. In fact, Jack does relatively little investigating at all and it is an apparently minor character – another ex-Guardaí, who has turned to religion – who guides him to resolution. This includes the tidying up of a particular loose end that the author had seemingly left hanging, but which Jack dramatically – and shockingly – resolves on the last page.
Ken Bruen also explores other themes, including the mystery of individuals, even those close to you, such as Jack on his friend Sutton – “even now, I’m unsure of his nationality, his age, his background… the details shifted and swayed so often you could never nail down one particular fact”. We are touched by the references to acts of guidance or kindness, whether long in the past when Jack’s father and Mr Kennedy the librarian sowed the seeds of his lifelong bibliophilia – Ken Bruen is acknowledging another debt here, I feel – or in the present, as in the small acts of comfort provided to Jack by the homeless Padraig or Jeff, another barman.
And, underlying it all, there is the sad perspective of the alcoholic – “you know you’re bad when a publican’s glad you’re not drinking”. We are informed that the measure of brandy poured by Sean into Jack’s morning coffee was “to kill the bitterness”. What we are not told, however, is whether this is the bitterness of the coffee – or the bitterness of everyday life.
JR Alexander 