Blood-Dark Track: A Family History - Softcover

O'Neill, Joseph

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0307472957 ISBN 13: 9780307472953

Publisher: Vintage, 2010

Synopsis

From the bestselling and PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author of Netherland, a fascinating, personal, and beautifully crafted family history.

Joseph O'Neill's grandfathers--one Turkish, one Irish--were both imprisoned for suspected subversion during the Second World War. The Irish grandfather, a handsome rogue from a family of small farmers, was an active member of the IRA. O'Neill's other grandfather, a debonair hotelier from the tiny and threatened Turkish Christian minority, was interned by the British in Palestine on suspicion of being an Axis spy.

With intellect, compassion, and grace, O'Neill sets the stories of these individuals against the history of the last century's most inhuman events.

About this title

Review:

In a literary age awash with father-fixation, Joseph O'Neill goes back a generation to recall the lives of not just one but both his grandfathers. This is not mere indulgence: their experiences connect beyond their mutual grandson, and bear comparison with each other. On the one side was Joseph Dakad, a Christian Turk living in the port of Mersin, running a hotel and an import-export business. Jim O'Neill was a Corkman with a fiercely republican heart, who supplemented his graft with salmon poaching. Both grew up among conflict and prejudice, and both suffered at the hands of the British in the Second World War: Joseph was imprisoned as a spy in British-controlled Palestine after a misconceived business trip to import lemons, while Jim was interned in the Curragh as an IRA terrorist. However, the circumstantial meat, or fruit in Joseph's case, of their lives in these famously hospitable, yet divided, countries had remained shrouded by a veil of silence for decades.

While the impressively researched detail owes much to his legal training, O'Neill reconstructs his grandfathers' lives with the literary flair of the talented novelist he also is (The Breezes, and This is the Life), yet without ever losing sight of contemporary contexts such as the Good Friday Agreement, and the continuing turmoil in the Middle East. As an outsider with an "in", the conclusions he draws are subtle, profound, and in places bravely troubling, such as when considering the assassination of Protestants by Catholic extremists in the Irish Republic, and the Turkish massacre of the Armenians, of which each man respectively probably had knowledge. In identifying the unavoidable political stitch in the personal weave, though, he seeks to free both men from their exile in silence, if only, as he conjectures with admirable self-scrutiny, to perhaps "lock them up in words as a punishment for the hurt silence which they'd bequeathed my parents". The sense, however, in this splendid account, is of liberation; both of their stories, and from a silence that speaks louder than words could ever imprison. --David Vincent

Review:

"A superbly composed double-narrative....An extraordinary piece of detective work." -Esquire

"Essential reading....A fascinating exploration of the personal complexities and private intimacies that lie behind a crude word like 'terrorism.'" -The New York Review of Books

"An extraordinary book. . . . As thrilling as a murder trial. . . . The progress of [O'Neill's] investigations are imbued with all the darkening excitement of a novel by le Carré or Greene." --Times Literary Supplement (London)

"A gripping detective story, a thoughtful enquiry into nationalism, and a moving evocation of world war at the edges of its European theatre." --The Economist (London)

"Joseph O'Neill's voice in this book is often intimate and engaging, like someone whispering fascinating secrets, but it is also at times a public voice, deeply involved with the silences and lies which have surrounded the past and distorted the present in both Turkey and Ireland. O'Neill is a born story-teller with a sharp eye, a great style and a good wit. His sense of modern Ireland, with all its ghosts and contradictions, is superb." --Colm Tóibín

"A stealthy, evidential enterprise, it stalks its material, considers, reassesses and chews over the theories. It is a big cat of a book. It creeps up on you, then pounces. And once it has you in its grip, it doesn't let go in a hurry." --Evening Standard (London)

"Every word in this riveting book is carefully freighted. Unlike many books which claim to trace a 'journey, ' Blood-Dark Track achieves its ambition, leaving teller and listener at the end with a haunting sense of having arrived somewhere new." --The Times (London)

"Painfully honest and lucid. . . . Joseph O'Neill writes beautifully. The fascination of this book lies in watching him come to terms with the violence in his family's past." --Daily Mail (London)

"The book has certainly worked hard to earn the reconciliation it finally imagines. It is too honest to get what it hopes for; too uncertain to know for sure what it is that has to be reconciled or forgiven. In its very unease, it is a remarkable book." --Irish Times (Ireland)

"The story [O'Neill] tells here yields much evidence of [his] quickness of mind, analytical skill, contemplative ability and sheer endurance. But the book's greatest triumph is the delicate, sympathetic peeling back of layer after layer of two families before and after they overlap." --Observer (London)

"This is a beautifully written and complicated book, in which difficult perceptions are expressed with forensic honesty. Its author finds that he cannot quite define his elusive grandfathers, and their moralities; but he has certainly comer closer to defining himself, and his." --Sunday Telegraph (London)

"The premise for this book is a simple and utterly compelling one; a commonality that brings two heterogenous places and cultures and lives together. The fruit of those parallel journeys is a remarkable book, almost novelistic in form and in style. [O'Neill] is a born writer . . . with a gorgeous sense of history and emotion and timbre." --Sunday Tribune (Ireland)

"[O'Neill's] thoroughness and energy are phenomenal." --London Review of Books

"[O'Neill] uncovers fascinating parallels between the two men, illuminating the ways in which individual lives mesh with history." --Sunday Times (London)

"A moving account, judiciously mixing familial feelings with historical research to powerful effect." --New Statesman (London)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0307472957
• ISBN 13: 9780307472953
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352