Pray for us Sinners by Patrick Taylor

It’s 1974, and the Troubles are in full swing. On her way in to a department store in Belfast City Centre, a young woman is searched by security people, who find nothing to raise suspicion. Her purse contains small change and a tube of coral pink lipstick, and she’s carrying a ladies’ reversible raincoat. Not surprising — as it often rains in Northern Ireland.

Later in the story, a middle-aged man, stubborn, proud, and secretly suffering from guilt and uncertainty, throws a muddy raincoat with a torn sleeve in the bin. The one he buys to replace it fails to keep him dry.

Trained interrogators know that when people tell lies, they often touch their noses. And no matter how good someone is at keeping a poker face, the body still subtly records emotional reactions. The pupils contract — only slightly, but enough that this brief sign can be seen by a careful watcher seeking to discern surprise, excitement, or fear.

What makes people kill, and hate, and maintain their loyalty to flawed and violent causes? During the Troubles of the 1970s, a violent offshoot of the IRA believed that by carrying out a campaign of terror on ordinary citizens, they could render Northern Ireland ungovernable by the British, who would then give up and leave.

For many of Belfast’s ghettoized young Catholics from the Falls Road, joining the Provos, the Provisional Irish Republican Army, provided income and a focus for their anger and frustration. Praising loyalty to the Cause and offering promises to end political oppression, the IRA also gave people who had little else a source of pride.

For Provo bomb-maker Davy, who continues running in the same rut hoping to redeem his tortured past, doubt has long since set in. To avoid provoking extra violence, he holds his temper when soldiers roughly search his home, showing rampant disrespect his household belongings, his cat and his person. Still, he cannot help but betray “the contempt all oppressed feel for their oppressors.”

As background to his page-turning story, Patrick Taylor gives a comprehensive portrayal of the effects on ordinary people of the increasingly violent civil war. Rebel leaders attack police stations and army patrols and escalate attacks on “soft targets,” killing civilians at random in the belief that such “accidents” and “collateral damage” are justified by the Cause. The behaviour of the social institutions charged with keeping the peace are little better. Security and intelligence forces are run from far-off London and mired in self-serving bureaucratic competition. Northern Irish police and the army distrust each other, and under a special law passed in 1973, suspected terrorists can be “tried in secret by a judge alone — a judge…sympathetic to the Security Forces.” As reported in the Irish Times, these special Diplock Courts were still in use in 2000.

In her recent book War, Margaret Macmillan discusses how war has always been with us. In spite of the violence and horror inherent in war, human society remains chained to its dark allure. As well as providing us with a cracking good story, Taylor allows us a few glimpses of hope, when characters who have been using the war to distract themselves from their inner demons find the courage to look within their own hearts.

The intractable internecine struggles of Northern Ireland are not as extraordinary as readers might like to think. This absorbing novel dives beneath the surface to reveal the complexities of history and identity that underpin the Irish conflict, revealing it to be emblematic of the violence engendered by political oppression, tribal loyalty and fear of the other. As we witness increasingly violent rhetoric and even open contempt for political institutions in the world’s democracies, it is also a cautionary tale.