Blind Pilot by Ambrose Clancy

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


"Magnificent" is probably an oddly grandiose word for most readers about any book but, as a writer, that's what comes to my mind a day after I finished this novel.
There is a sweeping, epic effect even though the story line is essentially simple and focused on a couple of months' time. But there are so many vivid characters, so many twists and turns down dingy streets and alleys and into the bleak towns and open countryside and ragged shorelines, so much lyrical description of the essentially dreary wet and grey world, and so much background texture woven seamlessly into the story that it all feels like a very weighty part of one's own life in the end, as if I lived there for a while, which I never have; never even set foot. And to me, that is a magnificent effect that very few people could pull off by just putting words on paper.
This is such a big, sprawling book about such a big mess of a subject and yet it is carbon steel hard and cold -- another magnificent effect that reflects its subject: these cold, heartless people engaging in their pointless heroics and murders.
For that reason, it's not easy going (even though I found it easy to be swept along in it .. I am a ridiculously fussy reader and reject novels almost instantly when they hit a sour note) and I can't imagine the usually soft, silly American novel-reading public ever embracing a challenging book like this. And if it's lovable characters they want, they won't find them here.
I gather it was a hit in the UK 30 years ago and I sure can see it as a film or HBO mini-series except, of course, the topic is no longer hot. Too bad because the era should be revisited — it's history now, unknown to a new generation, at least in the US — and this story may be to the Troubles and Ireland what Moby Dick is to whaling and mid-19th Century America.
Although there is an undercurrent of love for Ireland — who could tell this harsh story without love driving them on — it is unsparing in its evocation of the elemental tragedy of the place.



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