No Country begins with a murder and ends with its solution. From the discovery of the bodies, the tale wanders back in time and space, beginning its intricate weave in Ireland, just before the start of the great potato blight that devastated the land and its people. The narrative spanning two centuries really gets going in County Sligo, Ireland, in 1843 with a sweet, seemingly simple love story of Padraig and his Brigid. They lie together in passion, but are discovered by the fanatical Father Conlon, who forces the situation into crisis. Padraig vanishes, Brigid dies in childbirth, their daughter is rescued by Brendan and taken to North America. Father Conlon goes along as well, but dies en route in a marine nightmare of massive proportions. The child, Maeve, grows up in Vermont under the loving eye of Brendan, marries an immigrant Polish Jew and gives birth to a daughter, Bibi. And history repeats itself — Bibi falls in love with an Italian immigrant and has a child, but dies soon after in a fire at the garment factory she works in.
Another slice of history is given an Indian setting: the story of Padraig’s grandson Robert Aherne as an Ango-Indian in Calcutta of 1911 and after. Is he Indian or Irish? He struggles to figure it out even as Ray takes a stroll through history. Robert and his father watch as the horrific massacre at Jallianwala Bagh plays out, the fate of Brigadier General Reginald Dyer followed from the initial praise for his actions to his censure and the subsequent change in the way authority was trained to deal with crowd control and mass uprising. There is a small window through which a reader watches Robert fall in love with an Ango-Indian girl with a rather mysterious — or was it shady? — life, the young woman finally emerging as Hollywood star Merle Oberon, her life retold as a romantically-embellished fairy tale.
Told from the varying perspectives of the different characters and delving into their lives and interactions, No Country moves location, time and frame of reference with dizzying swings across emotion and the globe. It is a novel written with worthy ambition but crams perhaps too much into too little space. There is a choppiness that gives it a feeling of being a string of shorter stories stuck together with verbal glue, albeit very nicely written segments put together with the best adhesive possible. There is a huge amount of history that the writer attempts to describe, and in not too much detail or depth, which makes it more suitable for an audience that has not inherited that backdrop. The Irish section is the most fluent and convincing, with the pathos of the situation and the people overriding any feeling of incompleteness. And when the murder is resolved towards the end, the killer’s psychological state is eerily realistic, riveting.
Criticism does not imply that No Country is not a book worth reading. It is indeed. And one that is most enjoyable, almost un-putdownable. Ray writes beautifully, his prose simple yet graphic, his words carefully chosen and his sentences crafted. There is a lovely logic to his words and his intent is laudable. But, like the many turns of fate that he describes, there is a feeling of ‘if only…’
