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Monaghan
Moving from West Belfast and County Monaghan to the streets of San Francisco, Timothy O’Grady’s exhilarating new novel is an epic portrait of art and war, authenticity and selling out, told through the fates of three men.
Ronan Treanor, Monaghan native and teller of this tale, is a celebrated theorist of post-modern architecture in New York. Paul Crane, single son of a hotel maid in Indiana, turns his mathematical gift into a multi-million-dollar career as an investment banker. And the mysterious Ryan, who drew as a boy in besieged West Belfast, but was swept up in the war against the British and lived a decade of extreme and escalating violence as a sniper. Through him, the war in Ireland and its psychic legacy are brought into close focus in a way rarely seen in contemporary fiction.
Their lives merge and conflict, rise and fall, as one man becomes the undoing of the next. Hauntingly beautiful, lyrical and profound, this is a novel about what happens when you cannot escape your past, featuring drawings and paintings by Anthony Lott.
Ronan Treanor, Monaghan native and teller of this tale, is a celebrated theorist of post-modern architecture in New York. Paul Crane, single son of a hotel maid in Indiana, turns his mathematical gift into a multi-million-dollar career as an investment banker. And the mysterious Ryan, who drew as a boy in besieged West Belfast, but was swept up in the war against the British and lived a decade of extreme and escalating violence as a sniper. Through him, the war in Ireland and its psychic legacy are brought into close focus in a way rarely seen in contemporary fiction.
Their lives merge and conflict, rise and fall, as one man becomes the undoing of the next. Hauntingly beautiful, lyrical and profound, this is a novel about what happens when you cannot escape your past, featuring drawings and paintings by Anthony Lott.
- GenresFiction
304 pages, Hardcover
Published August 26, 2025
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June 22, 2025
Sometimes now I think I should introduce myself to you again.
Ronan Treanor, aged forty-two, provisionally single, former holder of the Mclvor Chair in Architectural Theory at Columbia University, presently resident in New York City, born and raised in Bough town-land. It seems I couldn't escape. It pulled me back. Generous killed a man nearly a century ago on another continent and it reaches down to me now, in this moment, writing to you. Event became story, story was told, one who heard it laughed in a way that haunted a boy, boy became man, man married woman …
Ian Sansom's review of Monaghan in the TLS comments on one of the novel's protagonists Paul Crane - a maths genius, banker and accordionist in a punk-zydeco band - as "like all of O’Grady’s characters, as utterly improbable as he is weirdly believable" and another "Ryan, a former IRA sniper, but now – again improbably, but also, why not? – a painter living in Spain."
However improbable an IRA sniper turned artist might seem, Ryan was in fact inspired by a real-life figure Frank 'Lucas' Quigley, as O'Grady explained when Quigley passed away in 2022.
Monaghan is narrated in 2013 by Ronan Treanor, from Monaghan in the Republic of Ireland. Ronan is a theorist of architecture, and something of a minor celebrity with a BBC series in the UK and tenure at Columbia in New York.
As a boy, a great-great uncle in his mid 80s, Generous McCabe was very dear to him, and Ronan tells us as he opens his account of an incident whose significance was only clear to him many years later:
I first saw the man who caused my downfall when I was thirteen years old, in Drumshevra, County Monaghan, not six miles from my home.
I was high up in a tree, collecting apples. It was early morning, bright and sharp. I’d left my bicycle and our red dog with Generous McCabe, a relation of ours known all around the district for his wildness and his wealth and who was as old as the century itself.
(from a long extract here)
Ronan's attention is attracted by a man, unknown to him, waiting for something - He studied the light and I studied him. Still as he was he seemed to be doing something and whatever it was there was nothing else in the world for him but it.still as he was he seemed to be doing something and whatever it was there was nothing else in the world for him but it - and then to Ronan's surprise what appears to be his brother Dermot - except he's been told Dermot was away on a building job in Birmingham - appeared and some goods are passed from Dermot's car to the man's van.
Generous some 60-70 years earlier had fought against the British in the Anglo-Irish War in the 1916-1923 period. And around the same time as the apple tree incident he tells Ronan and his Uncle Sean - at their prompting - a sobering tale of how he first killed someone in the conflict: It was bestial, he said. The lot of it. War of liberation or no. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The romance comes in to it afterwards, and it's all a lie, a story he goes on to tell in a television interview two years later, just before he dies, where he adds that, despite that, he has no regrets.
Sean tells the story again at Generous's funeral, and during the telling a stranger enters the wake, which Ronan recognises as the man he has seen from the tree, and as the story concludes:
I heard a sound then away to my left. I knew it was the stranger by the window. I turned towards him. There was nothing you could read on his face. He was just quietly laughing. It was a shocking thing to do on a funeral day, after a story like that, the dead man a few yards away in his coffin and his daughter weeping in the corner, even if it was meant for no one but himself. He must have earned the right to it somewhere, I reckoned. I only knew I'd never heard a sound like it, strange, sad, chilling laughter, soft as the beating of wings. It weighed more than it could carry. It had been released but could not expire. There was knowledge in it beyond my own, beyond anyone's there I'd say, bar the dead man's. From it I could tell that he knew Generous in a way I never could. It was the loneliest laughter I'd ever heard. And yet there was a privilege in it I almost envied. It cut right into me. If I'd never heard it I'd not be writing these words to you in this lunatic room.
From the interview linked above, the Generous story is based on that of Martin Walton, a real-life IRA soldier features in the book O'Grady co-authored Curious journey: an oral history of Ireland's unfinished revolution, and it was O'Grady himself telling the story at a Republican gathering that prompted the 'strange, sad, chilling laughter' from a man he was told afterwards was perhaps the IRA's top sniper, and post the Good Friday agreement, an artist, Frank Quigley (see also this interview at the Beyond the Zero podcast).
This incident, the laugh in particular as well as Quigley's unusual story gave O'Grady the idea for the novel: "Perhaps certain kinds of art and certain kinds of war are not so far apart when there is a belief in the transformative power of both."
It's Generous who inspires Ronan to study architecture, as an undergraduate in Edinburgh, but later at the AA (Architectural Association School of Architecture) in London where he is introduced to theory:
It was Generous who had led me to architecture. We sat between the shelves of his library. Ideas are no use unless you can touch them, he said. He'd blown up barracks and burned big houses like his own to the ground, but now we looked at pictures of pyramids and temples and skyscrapers and read about how they were made, so that, I understood, I might go out into the world and learn and then come back to Ireland and make beautiful and meaningful things. It's our own state now, he said. We've no one else to blame. Let's not make fools of ourselves. He told me the stories of Gaudi, Nash, Bellini, Wright, Callicrates and Gropius as though they were heroes in a fable. I'd dream about taking my place among these people one day.
Later I collected things - leaves, tide-worn stones, cross-sections of trees, magnified fragments of illuminated manuscripts. I set them up on mounts in my room and drew them into my projects. I studied light, texture, density, sound. Frozen music, architecture is called. I wanted to make a building that would survive everything, fashion, my death, even its own destruction. I believed I could do it.
Le Corbusier's Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, a particular early inspiration for Ronan
In the novel around 25 years later, in 2012, Ronan is visiting San Sebastian on an architectural fieldtrip to see the Plaza de la Constitución - an ovoid in the city's old part with tiers of numbered doors rising from a floor that had at different times been the site of bullfights, a food market and open-air masses. I was to write about it in a special number of a scholarly journal devoted to multi-use urban spaces - when, in a coincidence which is at the book's heart he stumbles across an art exhibiton called 'Monaghan' by an artist who lives locally, Niall Dempsey.
Doors at the Plaza de la Constitución, San Sebastian
Ronan is struck by a piece that portrays the beautiful countryside in the area of Monaghan where he grew up, but also the violence endemic to the area, but more significantly another that, while ostensibly a picture of Saint Jerome, part of a series of Saints begging on the streets of New York, he realises is actually a portrait of Generous:
Ronan realises that "Niall Dempsey" is the man he saw from the top of the tree, the former leading IRA sniper. Dempsey is one of his many aliases - he had many names. Some lasted less than an hour - and it later transpires he's found a new identity and a safe haven in the Basque Country after his cover in San Fransisco, where he'd initially moved, was blown.
When Ronan spends the evening with Dempsey he discovers that his own family's role in the Troubles, and the Provisional IRA, was far more extensive that he had realised. And what he learns causes him to abandon his architectural studies - he loses his tenure via some academic self-harm - and causes the break-up of his marriage, the novel an account addressed to his wife, who is moving back to her native Finland with their young daughter. And instead, he digs into the stories of the sniper/artist, which he tells us - and his wife - in this book.
In another link with real-life, the paintings featured in the novel are those of a real-life artist, Anthony Lott, who O'Grady came across in Utah, as the author explains in the podcast linked above. O'Grady had wanted Ryan's art to actually feature in the book, rather than simply leave the reader to imagine them, and worked with Lott on the novel which features both his existing paintings and (I think) some pieces created for the novel. Black and white replications of some are included in the printed work, but there is also a QR code which links to a site containing more of the works, and (where applicable) in full colour.
This enhances the reading of the novel considerably, and this can perhaps be regarded as two works of art in dialogue (although as a small aside, the page references in Lott's website don't reflect the final published work).
The bulk of the novel does then cover Ryan/Dempsey/?s story, primarily centered on time he spent in San Francisco, and it's there that the third main character - the mathematician and wealthy trader Paul Crane comes in to the story. Although I'd have to express some disappointment there - this is an area where my own experience I suspect is rather more direct than that of the author, and Crane's trading activity wasn't particularly convincing - indeed I think he is better regarded as a minor character (despite the novel's blurb - "told through the fates of three men") and others in that milieu - the Vietnamese interior designer Ming, who wins the contract to refurbish Crane's San Francisco house (*), and Nicky, a circus performer rather more interesting.
(* which creates a relevant link to the US sense of history apparently only beginning a few hundred years ago, conveniently erasing those who were there 15,000 years earlier, as this is the oldest building in San Fransisco - built in 1852 - causing the awed comment "before baseball, Ryan, before the Presidency of Lincoln")
There is a telling scene later in the novel when, realising that his identity may have been revealed, Ryan hikes into a remote area, encountering a survivalist American. The two recognise each other as having military experience and, unusally, Ryan reveals his IRA past. The two compare notes - except the US man served in Vietnam, and Ryan identifies more with the Vietcong. In the tribute to Frank Quigley linked above, O'Grady comments:
And that leads to an issue that needs to be highlighted. The novel Harry's Game, set in Belfast during The Troubles, featured the aphorism "One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter" O'Grady's view of Ryan, and his real-life inspiration, are clear - and indeed Gerry Adams is one of the first names featured in the list of crowd funders - and some readers (including this one) might take the other side, or at least a more balanced view, but the novel's power is that this doesn't impact the reading experience, nor in any way is violence glamourised, indeed quite the opposite.
The novel also features a number of unattributed (but sourced in the appendix) quotations that are relevant to the discussion, including this from Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth:
A thought-provoking, lyrical and haunting read. 4.5 stars - rounded to 4 for the disappointment of the Crane character, but nevertheless a book that - had its publisher not fallen into bankruptcy - would I think be in contention for literary honours.
Ronan Treanor, aged forty-two, provisionally single, former holder of the Mclvor Chair in Architectural Theory at Columbia University, presently resident in New York City, born and raised in Bough town-land. It seems I couldn't escape. It pulled me back. Generous killed a man nearly a century ago on another continent and it reaches down to me now, in this moment, writing to you. Event became story, story was told, one who heard it laughed in a way that haunted a boy, boy became man, man married woman …
Ian Sansom's review of Monaghan in the TLS comments on one of the novel's protagonists Paul Crane - a maths genius, banker and accordionist in a punk-zydeco band - as "like all of O’Grady’s characters, as utterly improbable as he is weirdly believable" and another "Ryan, a former IRA sniper, but now – again improbably, but also, why not? – a painter living in Spain."
However improbable an IRA sniper turned artist might seem, Ryan was in fact inspired by a real-life figure Frank 'Lucas' Quigley, as O'Grady explained when Quigley passed away in 2022.
Monaghan is narrated in 2013 by Ronan Treanor, from Monaghan in the Republic of Ireland. Ronan is a theorist of architecture, and something of a minor celebrity with a BBC series in the UK and tenure at Columbia in New York.
As a boy, a great-great uncle in his mid 80s, Generous McCabe was very dear to him, and Ronan tells us as he opens his account of an incident whose significance was only clear to him many years later:
I first saw the man who caused my downfall when I was thirteen years old, in Drumshevra, County Monaghan, not six miles from my home.
I was high up in a tree, collecting apples. It was early morning, bright and sharp. I’d left my bicycle and our red dog with Generous McCabe, a relation of ours known all around the district for his wildness and his wealth and who was as old as the century itself.
(from a long extract here)
Ronan's attention is attracted by a man, unknown to him, waiting for something - He studied the light and I studied him. Still as he was he seemed to be doing something and whatever it was there was nothing else in the world for him but it.still as he was he seemed to be doing something and whatever it was there was nothing else in the world for him but it - and then to Ronan's surprise what appears to be his brother Dermot - except he's been told Dermot was away on a building job in Birmingham - appeared and some goods are passed from Dermot's car to the man's van.
Generous some 60-70 years earlier had fought against the British in the Anglo-Irish War in the 1916-1923 period. And around the same time as the apple tree incident he tells Ronan and his Uncle Sean - at their prompting - a sobering tale of how he first killed someone in the conflict: It was bestial, he said. The lot of it. War of liberation or no. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. The romance comes in to it afterwards, and it's all a lie, a story he goes on to tell in a television interview two years later, just before he dies, where he adds that, despite that, he has no regrets.
Sean tells the story again at Generous's funeral, and during the telling a stranger enters the wake, which Ronan recognises as the man he has seen from the tree, and as the story concludes:
I heard a sound then away to my left. I knew it was the stranger by the window. I turned towards him. There was nothing you could read on his face. He was just quietly laughing. It was a shocking thing to do on a funeral day, after a story like that, the dead man a few yards away in his coffin and his daughter weeping in the corner, even if it was meant for no one but himself. He must have earned the right to it somewhere, I reckoned. I only knew I'd never heard a sound like it, strange, sad, chilling laughter, soft as the beating of wings. It weighed more than it could carry. It had been released but could not expire. There was knowledge in it beyond my own, beyond anyone's there I'd say, bar the dead man's. From it I could tell that he knew Generous in a way I never could. It was the loneliest laughter I'd ever heard. And yet there was a privilege in it I almost envied. It cut right into me. If I'd never heard it I'd not be writing these words to you in this lunatic room.
From the interview linked above, the Generous story is based on that of Martin Walton, a real-life IRA soldier features in the book O'Grady co-authored Curious journey: an oral history of Ireland's unfinished revolution, and it was O'Grady himself telling the story at a Republican gathering that prompted the 'strange, sad, chilling laughter' from a man he was told afterwards was perhaps the IRA's top sniper, and post the Good Friday agreement, an artist, Frank Quigley (see also this interview at the Beyond the Zero podcast).
This incident, the laugh in particular as well as Quigley's unusual story gave O'Grady the idea for the novel: "Perhaps certain kinds of art and certain kinds of war are not so far apart when there is a belief in the transformative power of both."
It's Generous who inspires Ronan to study architecture, as an undergraduate in Edinburgh, but later at the AA (Architectural Association School of Architecture) in London where he is introduced to theory:
It was Generous who had led me to architecture. We sat between the shelves of his library. Ideas are no use unless you can touch them, he said. He'd blown up barracks and burned big houses like his own to the ground, but now we looked at pictures of pyramids and temples and skyscrapers and read about how they were made, so that, I understood, I might go out into the world and learn and then come back to Ireland and make beautiful and meaningful things. It's our own state now, he said. We've no one else to blame. Let's not make fools of ourselves. He told me the stories of Gaudi, Nash, Bellini, Wright, Callicrates and Gropius as though they were heroes in a fable. I'd dream about taking my place among these people one day.
Later I collected things - leaves, tide-worn stones, cross-sections of trees, magnified fragments of illuminated manuscripts. I set them up on mounts in my room and drew them into my projects. I studied light, texture, density, sound. Frozen music, architecture is called. I wanted to make a building that would survive everything, fashion, my death, even its own destruction. I believed I could do it.
Le Corbusier's Chapel of Notre Dame du Haut in Ronchamp, a particular early inspiration for Ronan
In the novel around 25 years later, in 2012, Ronan is visiting San Sebastian on an architectural fieldtrip to see the Plaza de la Constitución - an ovoid in the city's old part with tiers of numbered doors rising from a floor that had at different times been the site of bullfights, a food market and open-air masses. I was to write about it in a special number of a scholarly journal devoted to multi-use urban spaces - when, in a coincidence which is at the book's heart he stumbles across an art exhibiton called 'Monaghan' by an artist who lives locally, Niall Dempsey.
Doors at the Plaza de la Constitución, San Sebastian
Ronan is struck by a piece that portrays the beautiful countryside in the area of Monaghan where he grew up, but also the violence endemic to the area, but more significantly another that, while ostensibly a picture of Saint Jerome, part of a series of Saints begging on the streets of New York, he realises is actually a portrait of Generous:
Ronan realises that "Niall Dempsey" is the man he saw from the top of the tree, the former leading IRA sniper. Dempsey is one of his many aliases - he had many names. Some lasted less than an hour - and it later transpires he's found a new identity and a safe haven in the Basque Country after his cover in San Fransisco, where he'd initially moved, was blown.
When Ronan spends the evening with Dempsey he discovers that his own family's role in the Troubles, and the Provisional IRA, was far more extensive that he had realised. And what he learns causes him to abandon his architectural studies - he loses his tenure via some academic self-harm - and causes the break-up of his marriage, the novel an account addressed to his wife, who is moving back to her native Finland with their young daughter. And instead, he digs into the stories of the sniper/artist, which he tells us - and his wife - in this book.
In another link with real-life, the paintings featured in the novel are those of a real-life artist, Anthony Lott, who O'Grady came across in Utah, as the author explains in the podcast linked above. O'Grady had wanted Ryan's art to actually feature in the book, rather than simply leave the reader to imagine them, and worked with Lott on the novel which features both his existing paintings and (I think) some pieces created for the novel. Black and white replications of some are included in the printed work, but there is also a QR code which links to a site containing more of the works, and (where applicable) in full colour.
This enhances the reading of the novel considerably, and this can perhaps be regarded as two works of art in dialogue (although as a small aside, the page references in Lott's website don't reflect the final published work).
The bulk of the novel does then cover Ryan/Dempsey/?s story, primarily centered on time he spent in San Francisco, and it's there that the third main character - the mathematician and wealthy trader Paul Crane comes in to the story. Although I'd have to express some disappointment there - this is an area where my own experience I suspect is rather more direct than that of the author, and Crane's trading activity wasn't particularly convincing - indeed I think he is better regarded as a minor character (despite the novel's blurb - "told through the fates of three men") and others in that milieu - the Vietnamese interior designer Ming, who wins the contract to refurbish Crane's San Francisco house (*), and Nicky, a circus performer rather more interesting.
(* which creates a relevant link to the US sense of history apparently only beginning a few hundred years ago, conveniently erasing those who were there 15,000 years earlier, as this is the oldest building in San Fransisco - built in 1852 - causing the awed comment "before baseball, Ryan, before the Presidency of Lincoln")
There is a telling scene later in the novel when, realising that his identity may have been revealed, Ryan hikes into a remote area, encountering a survivalist American. The two recognise each other as having military experience and, unusally, Ryan reveals his IRA past. The two compare notes - except the US man served in Vietnam, and Ryan identifies more with the Vietcong. In the tribute to Frank Quigley linked above, O'Grady comments:
In the story 'The Things They Carried' Tim O’Brien lists some of the things carried by American soldiers in Vietnam: can openers, flak jackets, photographs of girlfriends, M-16s, Claymore mines, ghosts, their lives and the lives of comrades, fear, grief, shame. What they didn’t carry was an understanding of why they were there or a belief in their mission. Unlike the Viet Cong. Or Frank Quigley.
And that leads to an issue that needs to be highlighted. The novel Harry's Game, set in Belfast during The Troubles, featured the aphorism "One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter" O'Grady's view of Ryan, and his real-life inspiration, are clear - and indeed Gerry Adams is one of the first names featured in the list of crowd funders - and some readers (including this one) might take the other side, or at least a more balanced view, but the novel's power is that this doesn't impact the reading experience, nor in any way is violence glamourised, indeed quite the opposite.
The novel also features a number of unattributed (but sourced in the appendix) quotations that are relevant to the discussion, including this from Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth:
The existence of an armed struggle shows that the people are decided to trust to violent methods only. He of whom they have never stopped saying that the only language he understands is that of force, decides to give utterance by force. In fact, as always, the settler has shown him the way he should take if he is to become free. The argument the native chooses has been furnished by the settler, and by an ironic turning of the tables it is the native who now affirms that the colonialist understands nothing but force.
A thought-provoking, lyrical and haunting read. 4.5 stars - rounded to 4 for the disappointment of the Crane character, but nevertheless a book that - had its publisher not fallen into bankruptcy - would I think be in contention for literary honours.
July 19, 2025
The best writing I have encountered all year, or for several years. O'Grady brings alive the realities of growing up, into and past for the people affected by the Irish-British war, more commonly referred to as the troubles. In addition to an excellent, intergenerational, interwoven story his writing is rich and rewarding.
July 21, 2025
might be my favorite novel of the first half of 2025. Incredible
August 21, 2025
This is a brilliantly written book from start to finish. I've rarely enjoyed reading a book as much as this. Every character is given the room to have a full life. Enjoy!
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