The Blood Dimmed Tide.
I will confess to some apprehension when I picked up The Blood Dimmed Tide for the first time. I knew Quinn as a writer of hard-bitten contemporary thrillers/crime novels set in the Northern Ireland countryside, and loved those works. (Disappeared, Border Angels, Silence)
I was worried that the leap from modern thriller to turn of the Twentieth Century mysticism would jar and might impair my relationship with the previous works. Within a page or two, this concern had completely disappeared, as the book is written wholly in the style of the novels of the era. This is quite an achievement; I have tried to write in this style and given up after a few chapters, and the last successful novel I encountered written in this manner was Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries . The stylistic device allows the reader to distance The Blood Dimmed Tide from the Celcius Daly trilogy referenced above, and to approach the book from a fresh perspective, without reference to preconceptions.
The book is a slim volume in relation to the broad sweep of its plot and locations, encompassing London in the grip of mystical hysteria caused by the brutal trauma of the First World War, a Dublin shaken to its core by the Easter Rising less than two years previous, and County Sligo during the start of the fall of the Protestant ascendency. Striding through these diverse and beautifully delineated settings are the figures of the recently married William Butler Yeats, his acolyte Charles Adams, the newly married and highly disgruntled Mrs Butler Yeats and the incendiary figure of
Maud Gonne.
The murder at the heart of the book is revealed in the earliest pages, the body of a vibrant, young servant girl washed up in a coffin on the beaches of Sligo, from whose spirit Yeats is soon to receive a letter, begging his intervention into the investigation of her death.
The book definitely bears comparison with Childers and Buchan, as twist upon twist reveals a little more of the poisonous, corrupt atmosphere of this end-of-an-era period in Ireland’s turbulent history. A little knowledge of the history of Ireland would be a benefit to the reader, but is not essential to enjoy what is (despite the magnificent writing, the stunning depiction of place and climate, the forays into mysticism and politics) essentially a page-turning thriller.
Quinn has recently released his fifth book, Blind Arrows, another historical drama set during the Irish insurrection of 1919, and having witnessed his masterful handling of the time period in The Blood Dimmed Tide, I anticipate another treat in store.
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The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. | Learn more
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