#BookReview of #TheBureau by Eoin McNamee | @eoinmcnamee3

‘Some stories seem to tell themselves and other stories wish to remain untold.
It is uncertain which this is.’
– The Bureau

[ About The Bureau ]

Lorraine would say afterwards that she was smitten straight off with Paddy Farrell. You could tell that he was occupying the room in a different way, he found the spaces that fitted him. She was the kind of girl the papers called vivacious, always a bit of dazzle to her.

Could she not see there was death about him? Could he not see there was death about her?
Paddy worked the border, a place of road closures, hijackings, sudden death. Everything bootleg and tawdry, nobody is saying that the law is paid off but it is. This is strange terrain, unsolid, ghosted through.

There’s illicit cash coming across the border and Brendan’s backstreet Bureau de Change is the place to launder it. Brendan knows the rogue lawyers, the nerve shot policemen, the alcoholic judges and he doesn’t care about getting caught. For the Bureau crew getting caught is only the start of the game.

Paddy and his associates were a ragged band and honourless and their worth to themselves was measured in thievery and fraud. But Lorraine was not a girl to be treated lightly. She’s cast as a minx, a criminal’s moll but she’s bought a shotgun. And she’s bought a grave.

[ My Review ]

The Bureau by Eoin McNamee published March 27th with Riverrun and is described as ‘a hair-raising story of kidnap, murder and fraud, set on the Irish borderlands.’

Were Paddy and Lorraine Ireland’s answer to Bonnie and Clyde? How much of The Bureau is fact? How much is fiction? After watching the recent Kneecap movie I was left asking similar questions.

In 1997 the bodies of Paddy Farrell and Lorraine Farrell were discovered in Lorraine’s family home in Drogheda, Co. Louth. A brutal scene awaited those who attended the scene. Were they cut down in a paramilitary execution or was it a murder-suicide? These were some of the questions I was left with after reading this staggering and intense book from Eoin McNamee.

You can choose to read The Bureau as an exciting crime novel with hard-boiled fictional crime characters or you can shiver all over and read it as autofiction, knowing that Paddy and Lorraine were very very real. Many of the players in this menacing tale are frighteningly true and Eoin McNamee brings his own very personal edge to the tale with the addition of factual elements and people, including a mock execution, there for us all to absorb.

“I see a reflection of myself standing at my own grave weeping”

Paddy Farrell, a cross-border crime boss, was a married man with children, but he was also a player. When his eyes were drawn to Lorraine Farrell, she had no hope. Lorraine Farrell shared the same surname as Paddy but that was it as far as any previous connection went and she soon became smitten by his attention and his ardour. She easily slotted in with his crew and was soon a familiar face during the week at the bars and venues he frequented. One of the premises he could often be found in was the Bureau de Change on Water Street in Newry owned by Brendan McNamee, father of the author of The Bureau, Eoin McNamee.

Brendan McNamee was a one-time highly successful lawyer who was debarred following allegations of fraud. Now a gambling, drinking man who knew too much and had definitely seen too much, he kept his counsel and served a different element of society. The corrupt knew where to find him. They knew that he could look after their money and that he could clear paths for them. Brendan McNamee was a highly intelligent man but he landed on the wrong side of the law, at times carelessly dragging his children into his nefarious activities.

When Eoin McNamee discovered a letter that Paddy Farrell had written to his father from Cork Prison he was inspired to put flesh on this story and write about a part of his life that sounds like a TV Mafia series, but it was his reality.

The Bureau provides a backdrop of a different Ireland when the North/South divide was very much evident. Cross-border activity was the playground of violent criminal gangs and anyone caught in the crossfire was cannon fodder. Dominic and Mary McGlinchey, Brendan ‘Speedy’ Fegan and many, many more feature in this tale that will leave you completely stumped for words.

“This is a strange terrain, unsolid, ghosted through”

Eoin McNamee said it took him over thirty years to put his thoughts together and to bring his story to light. It’s exceptionally difficult to get one’s head around the fact that much of what happens was his reality. The Bureau is a smashing tale, a phenomenal story inspired by so much truth.

It is quite difficult to fathom the lives of all those involved at that time and the inhospitable world that they inhabited. Lorraine and Paddy lived fast and dangerous and suffered the consequences but it is a strange twist of faith that Paddy Farrell’s death was not as a result of a deal gone wrong but a love affair that imploded.

Provoking a visceral reaction, Eoin McNamee’s The Bureau is a challenging, authentic and shocking read, both powerful and raw. This is one not to be missed!

[ Thank you to Plunkett PR and Hachette Ireland for a copy of The Bureau in exchange for my honest review ]

[ Bio ]

Eoin McNamee is the author of eight novels including Resurrection Man, later filmed, and the Blue Trilogy. His work has been nominated for and won many major prizes including the Man Booker Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Kerry Fiction Prize, the Imison Award and the CWA Steel Dagger. Liam McIllvaney said of McNamee’s prose that it has the ‘cadenced majesty of McCarthy or DeLillo, but the vision it enacts is all his own.’