Shade: A Novel

Neil Jordan's Shade is the story of Nina Hardy, who, as we find out at the beginning of the book, has been murdered by her childhood friend, George. The story revolves around a group of childhood friends, their journey through childhood, adolescence and their inevitable drifting apart, and ultimately leading to the reason for the gruesome murder. The narrator is the shade of the title, the ghost of Nina Hardy. Shade is beautifully written. Although the pace of this book is leisurely, the characters are compelling and the wonderful descriptions of the landscape around the River Boyne leave you with a real feeling of the place. If you're looking for a fast-paced ghost story, then this book is probably going to disappoint. However, if you enjoy a haunting story of human tragedy, then I highly recommend this book.

"The Crying Game" immediately signaled that here was an author with original and imaginative vision, a writer with the power to hold readers transfixed. "Shade" solidifies that impression. A member of Dublin's Abbey Theatre and the National Theatre in London, Terry Donnelly is both beguiling and bewitching as she inhabits the ghostly voice of Nina. Nina's death was not pretty. Her throat was cut with gardening shears by her childhood friend, George. He was many things, among them thorough as her body was never found. We learn this as she speaks to us from the afterlife. Her narrative recounts a happy Irish childhood spent beside the River Boyne. Her companions were George and his sister, Janie. They were not born as fortunately as Nina, so they lived on the other side of the river. Nonetheless they were all boon companions; friendships were formed. Nina's half-brother, Gregory, completed the once carefree foursome. However, time passes and things change, as do people. War takes its toll and one may never be the same. In true Jordan style the reason for the brutal killing is not revealed until the story's conclusion. It's unlikely that listeners will not be moved by this sometimes poetic, always powerful tale. - Gail Cooke

Shade is a strange, and beguiling novel. Beautifully written, with a mysterious, disparate undertone, the story combines timeless images of Hardyesque rural Irish landscapes with the horrors of the Great War. Oblique and multi-layered, Shade is part gruesome murder mystery, part mysterious fable, and part evocative love story that effortlessly brings the world of early twentieth century Ireland vividly to life. The viewer will certainly be challenged when reading this novel, as the structure is unconventional and the writing is often dense and heavily descriptive. Author, Neil Jordan - who has made a career out of making provocative movies - writes with such love, and affection for his daunting landscapes that the novel is impossible not to admire. Shade is about four young friends whose lives are inevitably shaped by the devastating effects of World War 1 and by the beauty of their home in Drogheda, a rural town in Ireland, next to the Boyne River. The novel effectively contrasts the horrors of the conflict in the Dardanelles with the ever-restless motions of the river as it "cuts new meadows" on its way to the sea. The novel begins with the spirit of the fifty-year-old Nina Hardy, describing how her gardener and best friend George, has brutally, and clumsily murdered her. The murder seems inexplicable, and the motivation remains unclear as George, a survivor of the Great War, was happily living and working for Nina. Nina, who grew up in the enormous, Anglo-Irish Baltray House on the Boyne River's northern bank, has just returned to the house after forty years of achieving fame as an actress. Nina is determined, with the help of George, to rebuild the family home in which she was once happy. But George has a history of mental problems and has previously been an inmate of the psychiatric hospital of St Ita's in Portrane. There's obviously a connection between Nina and George, but the relationship remains vague and somewhat indistinct. Switching to the early 1900's, the narrative then focuses on idyllic childhood of the two as they are growing up along the mudflats of the river Boyne, with Gregory, Nina's half-brother, and Janie, George's sister. George and Janie have both grown up in near poverty, but they find their friendship with Nina and Gregory exhilarating, and the fun and games of childhood soon lead to adult love. A fall from a large Tower leaves Nina and George somehow connected by their mutual injuries, and when George awakes from a six week coma, he seems disparate and detached, and somewhat jealous of the "ideal" relationship that Nina shares with her half-brother. Shade is all about the shades that history plays in life. Themes of love and art are symbolically woven into the story through the lives of the main characters. Growth, birth and death, are things frozen in the moments we perceive them, like a perfect picture, understandable and interchangeable. Nina is like a ghost of the past filling the narrative with almost

This is a comfortable-chair, rain-pelting-windows, curled-up-til-you-can-finish kind of book. You'll find yourself immersed, unable to get up to retrieve that next cup of coffee, resentful that you have to eventually get up to go into work or the john or anywhere that makes you exit this sensual world that Jordan has created. His imagery is evocative, haunting. One passage refers to rain as "the sound of a thousand watery hands drumming off the car's metal roof," and that quality of imagery is consistent throughout.