The Guards

Believable, in-your-face, and real; you are there, sitting across the table, eavesdropping at the next bar stool. It leaps off every page and makes you part of Jack Taylor's world. I was grabbed from the first sentence of the first page by the self-destructive soul of Jack Taylor; a soul that could only be cauterized by alcohol and cocaine. Yes, that's dark. But it's too narrow an assessment. If you have a dark side ( and how many of us have, if we're honest) you will find a memory or two in the lost evenings and anguished mornings of Jack Taylor. But where there is dark, there must also be light. And that light is there, perhaps dim at times, but it's there. It's there in the women who love him, in the people who still trust him, in the friends who care for him, in himself too: his ability to pick himself up again, his sense of justice, his attempts to find and punish the evil ones. There's the humour too, always there, black humour maybe, but it's the fabric that saves Jack Taylor and the people who populate Ken Bruen's Galway from absolute despair. Yes, Jack Taylor finds his anaesthetic in cocaine and alcohol. But he also finds it in books. It seems at times that he could just as easily be tempted into Charlie Byrne's as into his local pub. If you love to read (and I suspect you wouldn't be reading this unless you do) you'll be able to 'stack' Jack Taylor's selections on your own book shelves as you get lost in this dark trek through the netherworld of Galway. Maybe Ken Bruen is doing for Galway what Joyce did for Dublin in Ulysses: giving us a map of a Galway that is rapidly disappearing under the paws of the Celtic Tiger. That's it. Buy the book, tell your friends, buy some more................

I'm not sure where Ken Bruen came from. The "Publisher's-Editors" notes/reviews at the top of the intro recite "The Guards" as Bruen's debut novel. This is misleading as the book reveals nine other novels Bruen has written, The Guards being the tenth.I am certain that if you read this one you'll be hooked. It's 2:30 in the morning and I couldn't put it down. That's the best compliment you can give an author.Jack Taylor is often drunk. He hangs around drinkers and flirts with the insanity that constant drunkenness and binge drinking create. All of his relationships have been gunned down in the crossfire of alcohol. His friend Sutton is a vicious man that on rare occasions of sobriety, Jack rationalizes and explains to himself. He is kind to winos as in the ancient Padraig. He says 'I drink with'em; then buy them a foolish wreath when they die.' His closest friend is Sean, a bar owner. All of this takes place in Galway, Ireland, where Jack Taylor has disgraced himself and been cashiered out of the Siochna Guards, nearly impossible to do, and lost everything along the way.A lovely woman, Ann, asks Jack to disprove the notion, public and private, that her teenage daughter committed suicide, and thereby proving that she was murdered. Jack begins to suspect that she stepped in front of harm's way from a part-time job she had at a business owned by shady characters.There's a lot of James Crumley's "The Wrong Case" in The Guards. There is one enormous difference: we generally dislike Milo Milodragovitch and we can't help rooting for Jack.Bruen's humor is infectious. Jack visits his father's grave when Ann takes him to see the marker for her daughter, Sarah, and mutters, "Da, I'm here by default. But aren't we all?" His assistant "finder," Cathy B. who is a (just past) teenage ingenue in the subculture of the Irish Rock world, is marrying another performer and asks Jack to give her away, explaining the criteria of her request, "You're the oldest man I know." Later, one of the characters asks of the recent disappearance of another character, "Did he die or did he go to England?"Twists and turns up to the last page, retribution, reality, dialogue, sadness, introspection, coming to grips with the consequences of one's acts. This may be the best mystery I read this year! Kudos to Bruen.

This is a very slim volume which I was unable to put down and therefore read it in one day.Jack Taylor is a former member of the Guards-the Irish Police force-who was thrown out for belting a higher officer in the mouth.He is fighting a mostly losing battle with the bottle on a daily basis-sometimes winning but more often backsliding. He becomes what is known in Galway as a "finder"-private detectives being unknown, and is hired by a woman to solve the mystery of her teenage daughter's suicide.His quest leads him to a ring of molesters who seem to kill for thrills.We meet several of Jacks friends who are also living on the edge of society and although this should make it a dark,bleak book, somehow it avoids being depressing because of his masterly writing style.Ken Bruens habit of using just 3 words to summarise a point worried me at first until I realised that this was a perfect way to express,very succinctly,his whole point.Brilliantly done and can't wait to read more.

The story is dark and the style is as elegant, smooth, spare and silky as best aged Irish whiskey. Narrator Jack Taylor has been fired from the Irish police, which is almost impossible. "You have to really put your mind to it. Unless you become a public disgrace, they'll tolerate almost anything." Drink was, and is, his downfall. He's trying to be a private eye, a non-existent profession in a land that distrusts "informers" of any stripe. One day, in his local, an attractive woman approaches, asking him to investigate the supposed suicide of her teenage daughter.The case proceeds in classic, character-driven PI fashion, only drunker, as Taylor begins to uncover a mess of corruption, blackmail, underage sex, revenge and callous cold-bloodedness. His investigatory style is desultory at best; addled from drink, with days lost to blackouts, he's not always sure what's real and who's who. He does dry out, which is a relief to almost all, including the reader, and he even gets a romance going with the mother, but it's all too precarious to last. The one solid presence in his life is books and the narrative is punctuated with quotes, from Francis Bacon to Walter Mosely to Elvis Costello to W.H. Auden; quotations for every mood, the more sardonic the better.The story is gritty and brutal and the telling is sharp, swift and blackly comic. Bruen ("The White Trilogy," "London Boulevard") is a must for all fans of Celtic noir.

Here's a book that stands the typical procedural format on its ear. There isn't another novel like it anywhere. With exemplary skill, Bruen makes plot secondary to characterization, and splendid characters abound--primarily his hero Jack, a fatalistic ex-cop with a wonderfully self-deprecating sense of humor, along with a great and vulnerable heart--and lists, of anything and everything. Chapter headers with quotes from here, there and everywhere--from popular mystery writers to classics. On top of all that, author Bruen writes about the disease of alcoholism with great accuracy and not a single maudlin note. The Guards reads like simultaneous gunshots to the head and the heart. It is a stunning accomplishment.My highest recommendation.