Shade: A Novel

by Neil Jordan

Overview

The Oscar-winning filmmaker Neil Jordan returns to fiction with a haunting, highly praised novel, his first in ten years. Narrated by the ghost of Nina Hardy, an actress who is murdered in the opening scene of the book, Shade tells the story of two pairs of siblings growing up in Ireland in the first half of the century. Through a childhood that memory gives the luster of romance and the tragedy that strikes as the children reach adolescence and the two boys leave for the Great War, these unforgettable characters reach the 1950s to play their roles in a murder ultimately revealed as the opposite of the senseless crime it seems.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781596918207
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	08/06/2010
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	705,302
File size:	440 KB

About the Author

Neil Jordan is the award-winning writer and director of such films as Mona Lisa, The End of the Affair, and The Crying Game, for which he won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay in 1993. He is also the author of three previous novels-The Past, The Dream of a Beast, and Sunrise with Sea Monster-and a short-story collection, Night in Tunisia.

Neil Jordan is an Irish film director, screenwriter and author based in Dublin. His first book, Night in Tunisia, won a Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1979. He is also a former winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Irish PEN Award, and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. Jordan's films include Angel, the Academy Award-winning The Crying Game, Michael Collins and The Butcher Boy.

Editorial Reviews

Jordan is best known as the director of “The Crying Game” and other films, but he started out as a fiction writer. His fourth novel is set on the banks of the River Boyne, in Ireland, and opens, in 1950, with a murder. The victim is Nina Hardy, a middle-aged actress, who has returned from America to live in the riverside mansion where she and her half brother grew up. The murderer (revealed at the outset) is a childhood friend who, along with his sister, lived on the opposite bank of the river. The first half of the novel tells the story of the quartet’s childhood friendship, an idyll that ends when the boys go off to fight in the First World War and Nina runs away to join an acting troupe. Jordan’s writing is atmospheric and filled with memorable images, but the second half of the novel, building toward the murder, sometimes feels perfunctory.

The New Yorker

Elegantly sober narration from beyond the grave ("George killed me with his gardening shears.... He held the shears to my neck in the glasshouse, and with quite spectacular clumsiness opened a moonlike gash on my throat") distinguishes this ghost story from novelist and Oscar-winning filmmaker (The Crying Game) Jordan. His gloomy tale, spanning the first half of the 20th century, begins where the story ends: Nina Hardy is murdered by her childhood friend, George, now the gardener on the estate where she spent her youth. The rest of the book looks backward, as Nina reflects on her life and the lives of her half-brother Gregory, George and George's sister, Janie. The familiar, theatrical plot-with its traumas of unrequited love across class lines, incestuous longings, war-is secondary to Nina's voice: "I am everywhere being nowhere, the narrative sublime...." Her ghostly omniscience leads to echoing motifs, including drowned women, pendulums, dolls and childhood accidents, in "a shifting, uncertain world, where each question could be referred to an entity that wasn't there," even as the reasons behind the murder become more unsettlingly clear. Nina's ghost sometimes takes a backseat to stretches of exposition from less engaging characters, and the novel as a whole can feel dreamily disjointed. Such lapses are forgiven, though, in this otherwise daring and well-crafted whole. Agent, Kim Witherspoon. BOMC and Doubleday Book Club selection; 5-city author tour. (Oct.) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

This fourth novel by award-winning writer and film director Jordan is as cryptic as his Oscar-winning The Crying Game. Set in Ireland, it begins with a brutal murder and continues with the story of four characters, alternating between past and present and including the voice of the murder victim until the story culminates in a gasp-out-loud ending, for which Jordan is known. The two male protagonists, Gregory and George, give vivid descriptions of World War I battles, from which George emerges physically and emotionally scarred. Nina, the "shade," tells of her career as an actress, while Janie is left behind in Ireland to hold together the pieces of their joint past. Jordan's prose is dramatic, poetic, and surprising by turns. Recommended for large public libraries. Karen Traynor, Sullivan Free Lib., Chittenango, NY Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

The ghost of a murdered woman relives and evaluates her life in this elaborately orchestrated tale from the Irish novelist (The Dream of a Beast, 1989, etc.) and filmmaker (Mona Lisa, The Crying Game, etc.). Employing a narrative method similar to that of Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (not to mention Billy Wilder's film classic Sunset Boulevard), Jordan tells his strange story through the disembodied voice of retired film and theater actress Nina Hardy. It's a tale that cuts a melodramatic swath through the period 1900-50, beginning with Nina's dispassionate account of her murder by her childhood friend George, whose unrequited love for her was frustrated by Nina's close attachment to her brooding half-brother Gregory, a brain-damaged simulacrum of Emily Bronte's Heathcliff. There are also pronounced echoes of Dickens's Great Expectations in Nina's remembrance of growing up in Baltray House, located on an estuary of the River Boyne-to which element Nina will eventually "return" (for George had decapitated her and thrown her headless body into a septic tank that emptied into it). Shade (a nice title, incidentally) exhibits both lyrically precise writing and overstraining for effect. The specific detail with which Nina describes her early years (marked by her vivid imagination and by the foreshadowing -presence of her ill-fated alcoholic governess) and her experience of the movies' transition from silent films to "talkies" is invariably dramatic and interesting. But it was surely a mistake to credit her "shade" with total godlike omniscience even if this does enable Jordan to create compelling images of the WWI experiences of the two men who figure most importantly in her life and death.There are many beautiful moments here, but the vivid particulars do not consistently cohere. Still, Jordan undoubtedly has the skills to turn it into a movie that will be well worth seeing. Agent: Kim Witherspoon/Witherspoon Associates

Kirkus Reviews