The Last Crossing by Brian McGilloway

“Fiction,” says Neil Gaiman, “is the lie that tells the truth.”

Brian McGilloway’s latest novel exemplifies that truth. Set in Scotland and Northern Ireland in a roughly contemporary time, it is replete with references to lies and truth, trust and betrayal, as befits a work that portrays the long shadows cast by the Troubles, and not only on those who were involved. Indeed, one of the characters in this novel was not even born when under IRA orders, three people carried out a deed that changed the courses of their lives and has haunted them ever since.

Again and again the characters speak of trust and truth, lies and betrayal. Decisions made under pressure yield mixed results. An action that saves a life also leaves a secret soldier to a dreadful fate.

Condemning himself to silence, the man who has crossed his own moral line has to live with the consequences. Ironically, his frightened, distrustful silence betrays the both the woman he loves and the one he marries.

In the thirty years following the original deed, he has never managed to speak even to his priest about it, resorting instead to a “laundry list” of ordinary sins to get him through the confessional. The reader glimpses him as the kneeling board digs into his knee, a potent reminder of the past, he once more avoids confessing the only sin that really matters.

The book shows how good and ordinary people can be impelled — by peer pressure, emotional manipulation, and the machinations of the society that produced them — into taking actions they can never go back on.