Review by Max Dunbar
There’s lots of historical fiction around but generally it doesn’t work for me. I feel like the author is bludgeoning you with their research, having worked so hard on it, and I’m left feeling: why not just write history?
Yet there is something special about The Bureau, set in Ireland in the 1980s. Part of this is the theme that Eoin McNamee hammers into his narrative – the world is in constant flux. People in the past don’t think of themselves as living in the past. They will feel like pioneers of a new time. And so The Bureau doesn’t feel like a tableau of the past. It feels like a glimpse into other lives.
The action takes place around the border of Northern Ireland and the Republic. I don’t know Ireland at all, my impression of its physical geography is shaky, but McNamee maps out the territory with sensuous care. Close attention is paid to the country’s liminal spaces, places of departure and forgetting – the docks, the railway lines, old buildings, the empty or unoccupied homes the characters are always creeping around in. ‘This is the border,’ McNamee keeps saying. His characters don’t get around much in their small corner of the world but dream of escape to Florida, go to theme parties in new hotels, imagine themselves in other lives.
The Bureau itself is supposed to be a standard bureau de change but even a casual passerby can tell it’s really a one-stop shop for criminals. The windows are bulletproof and ‘The dual carriageway in front carried the majority of cross-border traffic going from Belfast into the border hinterlands and beyond to Dublin.’ The Bureau is owned and operated by a disbarred lawyer named Brendan and he has a simple vision.
It was all cash. You counted out the notes into hundreds, folded them over and banded them into five hundreds. Canvas bags full of used notes on the back seat. The banks demanded invoices for the goods you were buying so you faked the invoices.
‘We provide a service,’ Brendan said, ‘people need to change money crossing the border. We change it for them and charge a percentage. Simple.’
As you can see, money laundering in The Bureau is not that sophisticated. Brendan does not even need a bank account to set up his business. Travellers’ cheques can be faked with a little work, court cases rigged. People smuggle cigarettes and diesel and livestock. It is a cliche to call unregulated environments the Wild West, but that is how The Bureau feels sometimes – no law, or at least not much, in Deadwood. Most of the cops can be bought. There are no paramilitaries but we know they are there. There is no drug trade but we know it’s coming. The great regulatory web of neoliberalism is far on the horizon.
Perhaps it’s that sense of ease that draws people into the underworld. Most of this novel focuses on Lorraine Farrell, small town young woman who falls in love with a career criminal, Paddy Farrell (they are not related but have the same last name.) We apprehend everything through Lorraine, her senses and impressions of this world, and we get to know her more than any other character – her ideas about herself, her religious faith, her strange mix of intuition and naivety. I was struck by a scene where Paddy is on remand and the prison won’t let her see him because visitation is reserved for an inmate’s wife, not his mistress. Lorraine cries on the visitor’s bus all the way home, and the bus driver bars her from the bus because some of the women have husbands who are convicted and serving life. Lorraine lacks perspective and doesn’t understand these deeper layers of criminal experience.
McNamee’s characters seem like genuine people but also like archetypes of different eras. We meet the McGlincheys, Dominic and Mary, in a remote farmhouse somewhere in the dark. Dominic is a multiple murderer and Mary stands by him no matter what. Dominic has given an interview as a fugitive. The interview takes place in a hotel:
designed to resemble an American motel, long and low with car parking spaces painted to a slant to the bedroom block. But trade was sparse, the paint on the fascia boards was flaking and there was no sign of the glamour it had attempted to impart to this part of the Drogheda, the dreamed-of America with the myth of road, the thrumming freeways, midnight tyre hiss, the myths of the unlocated.
The dark and shabby farmhouse is Dominic’s level. The McGlincheys sit smugly in its shadows, drawing comfort from the narrowness of the bed they made.
But most of these characters are likeable. You’ll get to know them all; Lorraine’s hardheaded friend Jean, poor old Bann with his St Morgan’s, Hutchie the one-eyed ex-convict, Speedy the drug dealer who represents a new brand of criminal. Most of these people are headed for an early grave and the iconography of death hangs low over their heads. Tension climbs towards the end but the characters just keep moving and scheming without fear, passivity or resignation. People die, go to jail, the Bureau shuts down and reopens again in a new form.
Maybe there is a little glamour in these docks, railways and borderlands. The Bureau is a kind of door, which is what the best novels, and the best histories, feel like. Step inside, because the experience is unique.
Max’s blog can be found here.
Eoin McNamee, The Bureau, (riverrun, 2025). 978-1529440423, 272pp., hardback.
BUY at Blackwell’s via our affiliate link (free UK P&P)
