In New York, a former professor of architectural theory at Columbia University, Ronan Treanor, writes a letter to his Finnish wife, who has left him and gone back to Turku, taking their young daughter with her. He seeks to explain his recent strange behaviour.
While on an “academic mission” to San Sebastián, Spain, he tells her, he saw an exhibition entitled MONAGHAN, the name of his home place. Among the works was an image of his mother’s great-uncle, an old IRA man known as “Generous” McCabe.
The artist himself turns out to have been an IRA sniper during the Troubles, operating under the name Ryan. He takes Treanor back to his lair in Labourd, France. There follow revelations about Treanor’s father and brother, who, unbeknown to him, were deeply embroiled in the Troubles-era IRA campaign.
Right from the beginning, plot wobbles under the weight of geographical co-ordinates, and things only get more complicated. Treanor’s letter is interspersed with scenes from Ryan’s past life, when he escaped to San Francisco, having murdered a British intelligence official.
Unless there’s a lot of other information ex-paramilitaries still aren’t sharing, Ryan’s experiences exceed their typical retirement expectations. He attracts the devotion of a “very beautiful” trans nomad with “dark amber” skin; the unquestioning loyalty of a Vietnamese designer called Ming; the raging envy of a larcenous Oxford-educated banker, Paul, and the confessions of a magnetic circus performer, dubbed “the Ice Queen”. All the while, he develops his craft as a painter.
Like three of O’Grady’s previous works, Monaghan involves a collaboration with a visual artist, featuring drawings by Anthony Lott. The novel’s characters also recall the interviews that form the basis of O’Grady’s non-fiction studies, their biographies activated like recordings in museum displays.
Treanor, onetime enthusiast for post-structuralism, sabotages his career because of guilt at never having “made anything”– and at having “run away” from what is referred to as “the war,” a conflict portrayed (uncritically, it would appear) as a continuing postcolonial struggle.
Both “the war” and the characters seem like paintings or drawings, fixed and emblematic. Actual interaction is signalled only by senseless destruction. Somewhere, unconfronted in the debris, lies a motif about fathers abandoning their children. As the Finnish wife wisely responds: don’t write, don’t call.
