"Jesus Christ," says Ryan Cusack, protagonist of Lisa McInerney's follow up to the hugely successful The Glorious Heresies, "this isn't Murder, She Wrote, girl." That's for sure. But The Blood Miracles could easily have been classified as crime fiction. It hinges on one of the clichés of the genre: the junior criminal who makes the potentially fatal mistake of falling for the senior gangster's moll.
Ryan, in this case, is talking to Natalie, the posh accountancy student from Cork’s prosperous south side who has a taste for a bit of north side danger and who is also involved with Dan, Ryan’s boss in the drug-dealing business.
But Dan in turn is venturing out into a new route for importing high-quality ecstasy from the Camorra (an organised crime syndicate), stepping on the toes of the even bigger crime boss, Jimmy Phelan (JP). Between his entanglement with Natalie and the fact that he’s ratting Dan out to JP, Ryan is living on the very edge of the abyss.
We already know Ryan from The Glorious Heresies: the musically talented working-class kid with a dead Italian mother and an alcoholic Cork father. We know how he's been sucked into Dan's orbit early on, done some time in St Patrick's institution for young offenders, but still got eight honours in his Junior Cert and formed a relationship with Karine, who wants a better life for them both. From that Bailey's Prize-winning first novel, we also know JP and Dan and Dan's enforcer Shakespeare, and JP's mother Maureen and Ryan's violent and pathetic father Tony. And all of these characters return in The Blood Miracles.
More disciplined
Following up directly on such a highly praised debut is risky precisely because it seems so safe. The difficult second novel syndrome is evaded by essentially carrying on with the first. But McInerney does have more business to conduct with these characters. The Blood Miracles never feels like a warmed-up rehash of past inspiration – it has its own energies. Nor, in spite of its use of familiar gangster story tropes, does it feel too much like an exercise in genre fiction.
The Glorious Heresies was praised above all for its exuberance, the wild pitches between the lurid and the tragic that gave McInerney's writing its distinctive quality. Even though its content is continuous with the first book, The Blood Miracles is somewhat different in style and form. It is less rambunctious and more disciplined, less explosive and more controlled, less panoramic in its portrait of Cork's underworld and more tightly focussed on Ryan himself.
It swaps the volatile verve of a fiery debut for the more finely calibrated rhythms of the well-made novel. There is still plenty of vivid action – at times the book reads like a straight thriller – and still the salty tang of the Cork dialect that gave The Glorious Heresies its pungent linguistic flavour, but the overall feel is more artful.
This matters because the plot is a deliberate mess. It is, as the opening sentence tells us it’s going to be, a “fuck-up”. The writer has to be in control because her central character can’t be. Ryan is smart and beautiful. At 20, he has a Golf GTI and €300 jeans and as much sex and drugs as he can (or, as it happens, can’t) handle. Karine loves him and he loves her back. He has a piano and the equipment and talent to make his own DJ mixes. For a kid from “the arse of the welfare class”, he’s doing well.
He doesn’t even feel guilty about his job as a supplier of drugs to anyone who can pay. He is no hard man – he has no taste for violence. He understands the disdain he provokes, but he doesn’t accept it: “Ryan gets it: who’d want the likes of him, who sullies all he sells to, except those who need to buy? But the men who sleep on the streets are alcoholics, the girls who stop you and ask for money are alcoholics; that’s Cork’s damage, Ryan thinks, he didn’t do that. People lose their jobs, people can’t pay their rent; he didn’t do that either.”
Betrayal
Yet, for all he has going for him, Ryan has nothing. He is essentially enslaved. JP owns him because Ryan’s father used to be JP’s “cleaner” of spilt blood. Dan owns him because he has groomed him since he was 13 to be his smart little sidekick. He can never do what Karine alone wants him to do, which is to escape into normalcy, so he is stuck in a spiral of depression and drug-taking and betrayal. The only thing he might escape is death – and, as the book goes on, even that seems increasingly unlikely. Between Christmas and spring, he slides ever faster towards nemesis.
Making a character who has so little real agency compelling to the reader is difficult, but McInerney pulls the feat off with great skill and aplomb. If The Glorious Heresies was riotous, The Blood Miracles is vertiginous. The pace is dizzying, the pulse ever-quickening. The drugs at the crux of plot are the high-quality MDMA "yokes" that Dan is importing, but the storytelling is fuelled more by the cocaine that Ryan uses to keep him going. He is like a hyped-up creature on a hamster-wheel, moving faster and faster to stave off the ultimate come-down of a TV news report dismissively announcing his demise: "Twenty-one-year-old-almost-father-of-one and known to the fucking gardaí."
McInerney never sentimentalises Ryan or asks our sympathy for him. He’s bad news: it couldn’t be clearer that Karine, who lit up his life in the first novel, would be much better off without him. For all his intelligence, he has a capacity to make things worse for himself, to get in a hole and keep digging. But he’s also human and complex and therefore his fate comes to matter. And by the end of this skilfully wrought and highly evocative novel, he is not just known to the gardaí – he is known to us as well.
