Novel truths and post-troubles fiction: Eoin McNamee's the ultras

Writing in The Guardian newspaper in 2004, Northern Irish author Eoin McNamee comments: 'There is something out there in the world of fiction, not defined enough to be a trend, a genre or even a subgenre - It is writers looking to engage with real people and real events, and stitch them into their fiction in a way that is hard-nosed and relevant and edgy'. These words are part of a broader artistic manifesto, one that pertains to McNamee's own fictional project, which, for over two decades, has used 'real people and real events' to interrogate some of the most 'hard-nosed and relevant and edgy' aspects of Northern Irish history. For McNamee it is this versatility, the ability to combine the real and the imaginary, which distinguishes and elevates his own brand of fiction. He continues: 'In fiction of this kind you get the sense of a kind of truth being displayed. And you're not going to get it any other way. Even if journalism wasn't more part of the consensus than ever before, and documentary makers weren't hunkered down in their trenches, you feel that they'd never find a way into this'. For McNamee such fictions put the reader in a position of privilege, allowing them access to certain 'kind[s] of truth' that remain hidden and obscure within other modes of discourse. The following essay is a critical examination of these claims. It asks: how exactly does McNamee combine fact and fiction? And moreover, what 'kind of truth' does such a hybrid form enable his work to realise? The author's claims for the truth-value of this form of fiction are rendered more significant when we read them alongside notions of transitional justice and the importance attached to truth recovery as a mechanism for reconciliation and social healing. In the foreword to Patricia Hayner's book, Unspeakable Truths: Transitional Justice and the Challenge of Truth Commissions (2010), Kofi Annan writes: 'national healing can be a halting and painful process. But ultimately, it seems our natural instincts are confirmed: while the truth is painful, burying the past is much less likely to lead a country to a healthy future'. In what follows I will argue that McNamee's fiction offers a timely riposte to the very possibility of such redemptive truth-seeking in the context of post-Troubles Northern Ireland. The title of this article, 'novel truths', is to be read in a double sense: as a gesture to both the literary locus of McNamee's own truth claims and his assertion that particular works of fiction are capable of containing new truths about the world. It is the exact nature of these new truths that the following essay aims to outline and discuss.