The New Yorker
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.
Publishers Weekly
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.
Library Journal
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.
Kirkus Reviews
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
Seattle Times
"A dreamy and elegant period novel...like a good film noir...This tale of complex longing and doomed desire is hard to resist; Jordan's vivid imagination and exquisite craftsmanship light up the page as they do the screen."
New Yorker
"Atmospheric and filled with memorable images."
Baltimore Sun
"It's a fabulous prologue, rich enough to taste, and Jordan maintains the same vivid narration throughout…A dreamy, sensuous, and deeply engaging tale worthy of the best Irish fiction."
People (four stars)
"Seduces readers with the first sentence...Far from a filmmaker moonlighting as a fiction writer, he's a novelist at the top of his craft."
John Banville
"With this fierce, dark and yet luminous novel, Neil Jordan once again demonstrates that he is one of Ireland's most talented artists."
Patrick McCabe
"At once a human drama and a fascinating metaphysical mystery, Shade courses its way, like the river Boyne that runs through it, steadily, patiently but, thankfully, never predictably…before reaching its final, heartbreaking denouement. Triumphant."
JUNE/JULY 05 - AudioFile
From its opening sentence--“I know exactly when I died”--the listener is drawn into the life and death of Nina Hardy. George “held the shears to my neck,” Nina says, and “opened a moon-like gash on my throat.” From this point, time flows into and out of itself like the nearby Boyne River. Nina’s shade is the omniscient storyteller, able to enter each character’s thoughts, until the listener understands the reasons behind her murder. Narrator Terry Donnelly provides the precise otherworldliness called for by Neil Jordan’s lyrical vision. Her delicate handling of Nina’s childhood friendships, the pervasive class-consciousness, and the inevitable passions invests Jordan’s study of psychological and philosophical connections with a profound awareness of the thinnest separation between the tangible and the ethereal. A worthwhile, challenging listening experience. S.J.H. © AudioFile 2005, Portland, Maine
