Haunted by Fiction

In John Banville’s novel Ghosts (1993), an unnamed character arrives on an island. He has just been released from prison. He recalls that the authorities there

seemed to feel that I was special. Perhaps it was just that I had confessed so readily to my crime, made no excuses, even displayed a forensic interest in my motives, which were almost as mysterious to me as they were to them.

He served ten years: “life, that is, minus time off for good, for exemplary, behaviour.”

As part of his “copious reading,” he had found this quote from John Keats: “I have an habitual feeling of my real life having passed, and that I am leading a posthumous existence.” He himself “had shed everything I could save existence itself.”

Twice a week Banville’s ex-prisoner has to register at the local police barracks in the presence of the sergeant:

In the beginning I had worried that he would be impressed with me, in a professional way, that he might look on me as a sort of celebrity to be watched over and shown off—after all, it is not every day a man of my notoriety swims into his ken.

The narrator is a kind of ghost, his time in the novel an aftermath. He was more substantial, we must believe, before he was sent to prison, or perhaps even while he was incarcerated. He may, in fact, be the ghost of a man named Freddie Montgomery, who tells his story, or concocts it, or performs a version of it, in Banville’s previous novel, The Book of Evidence (1989).

Montgomery has committed a murder. Or that, at least, is one way of putting it. But he is more concerned with the ironies and ambiguities around the idea of selfhood, his own especially, than with the simple fact of a crime. The self, for him as narrator, is fluid, shifting, and deliciously inauthentic. Action, including murder, may be a form of aberration as much as the result of deliberation.

In The Book of Evidence Montgomery, ready to prowl the streets of Dublin, steps forth “gingerly, a quavering Dr Jekyll, inside whom that other, terrible creature chafed and struggled, lusting for experience.” In his doubleness, he feels a strange power:

It sprang not from what I had done, but from the fact that I had done it and no one knew. It was the secret, the secret itself, that was what set me above the dull-eyed ones among whom I moved as the long day died, and the streetlights came on, and the traffic slid away homeward, leaving a blue haze hanging like the smoke of gunfire in the darkening air. And then there was that constant, hot excitement, like a fever in the blood, that was half the fear of being unmasked and half the longing for it.

As he muses on his brutal murder of a young woman and his own vast irresponsibility, Montgomery himself is at a lofty distance from simple terms such as guilt. And what he has done is a shadowy version of a real crime that took place in Dublin in 1982 and is the subject of Mark O’Connell’s scrupulous and self-interrogating book A Thread of Violence.

In a small city like Dublin, where the homicide rate has traditionally been low, a double murder can have complex reverberations, not least in a novel written in its aftermath. A century before the events examined in A Thread of Violence, a double murder took place in the Phoenix Park in northwest Dublin. On May 6, 1882, the newly arrived chief secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, was taking a walk in the park, close to the Viceregal Lodge, with Thomas Henry Burke, the permanent undersecretary, when they were murdered with surgical knives by a splinter nationalist group known as the Invincibles. Five of them were hanged the following year on the evidence of a colleague, James Carey, who was shot dead in retaliation on board a ship to South Africa. The getaway driver, known as Skin-the-Goat Fitzharris, was sentenced to penal servitude for life but was released in 1899. He went to the United States and was deported back to Ireland in 1900.

In episode 5 of James Joyce’s Ulysses, Leopold Bloom cannot remember the first name of Carey the informer. He thinks it might be Peter or Denis. Three episodes later, he gets it right on the third try as he remembers “that Peter or Denis or James Carey that blew the gaff on the invincibles.” In episode 7, in a Dublin newspaper office, the case is discussed as though it were fresh news, reminding us that in the Dublin of 1904 nothing like this double murder committed more than twenty years earlier had occurred in recent memory. Mr. O’Madden Burke, one of those secondary figures in the novel, says, “Skin-the-Goat. Fitzharris. He has that cabman’s shelter, they say, down there at Butt bridge.” And then the conversation swerves to other matters.

Toward the end of the novel, when Bloom and Stephen Dedalus seem almost exhausted, they stop on their way to Bloom’s house at the cabman’s shelter at Butt Bridge. That Skin-the-Goat may run this establishment is a rumor that Bloom shares with Stephen:

The former having previously whispered to the latter a few hints anent the keeper of it, said to be the once famous Skin-the-Goat, Fitzharris, the invincible, though he wouldn’t vouch for the actual facts, which quite possibly there was not one vestige of truth in.

The rumor is enough to create an undercurrent of tension and low drama in the episode. When the surly late-night conversation turns to the efficacy of knives and their use in foreign cities, one of the company, unaware of the rumor that the man behind the counter is Skin-the-Goat, says, “They’re great for the cold steel…. That was why they thought the park murders of the invincibles was done by foreigners on account of them using knives.”

Bloom and Stephen look at each other and then

towards where Skin-the-Goat, alias the keeper, was drawing spurts of liquid from his boiler affair. His inscrutable face, which was really a work of art, a perfect study in itself, beggaring description, conveyed the impression that he didn’t understand one jot of what was going on.

Skin-the-Goat’s presence or nonpresence gives Bloom the chance to ponder violence, remaining of two minds on this subject, as on many others:

He disliked those careers of wrongdoing and crime on principle. Yet, though such criminal propensities had never been an inmate of his bosom in any shape or form, he certainly did feel, and no denying it (while inwardly remaining what he was), a certain kind of admiration for a man who had actually brandished a knife, cold steel, with the courage of his political convictions though, personally, he would never be a party to any such thing.

On July 22, 1982, Bridie Gargan, a young nurse on her way home from work, was sunbathing in the Phoenix Park when she was approached by a man who viciously assaulted her as he sought to make off with her car. But really, as O’Connell writes in A Thread of Violence,

there is no telling what happened. I don’t mean this in the sense that we don’t know what happened. We do know, more or less. We know that he hit her in the head with the hammer, many times and with tremendous force, and that although she didn’t die there in the car, in his presence, she did die, four days later, from the injuries he inflicted.

The murderer was Malcolm Macarthur. Some days later he traveled to the Irish midlands, ostensibly to purchase a shotgun that he had seen advertised by a man named Donal Dunne. Dunne accompanied him to a place where he could test the gun. “Macarthur,” O’Connell writes, “shot Donal Dunne in the face with the bullet he himself had loaded it with just moments before” and made away with the gun.

Soon the Gardaí—the Irish police force—managed to make a connection between the two crimes. One of the reasons why they were so shocking, two members of the Gardaí investigation team told O’Connell,

was that in the early 1980s, before the explosion of hard drugs on Dublin’s streets led to a rise in organized crime, there were relatively few murders in the Republic [of Ireland], and those that did occur were often linked to the paramilitary campaigns of the IRA.

After the murders Macarthur, increasingly desperate, lived on the streets for a few days before seeking out an acquaintance whom he attempted to rob and then, that same day, contacting a friend, Patrick Connolly, who offered him the use of his spare bedroom. Connolly was close to Macarthur’s girlfriend, Brenda Little, with whom Macarthur had been living in Tenerife with their six-year-old son. He was also, as it happened, Ireland’s attorney general. “And so it was that, on the evening of August 4, 1982,” O’Connell writes,

the Irish government’s most senior legal official had his housekeeper prepare the spare room for his friend, a man who had just days previously murdered two strangers, and who had that very evening botched an armed robbery at the home of an acquaintance.

On August 13 Macarthur was arrested at Connolly’s apartment and charged with the murders. Connolly was leaving for a vacation in New York City the following day and did not change his plans. On his arrival he was contacted by Charles Haughey, the Irish prime minister, and instructed to return. He came back to Ireland and resigned.

Haughey, at a press conference, commended the Gardaí for “slowly, painstakingly, putting the whole thing together and eventually finding the right man.” It was, it seems, a slip of the tongue rather than an effort to scupper the trial by prejudging its outcome, but as Haughey’s press officer later wrote, “in the highly charged atmosphere,” there were those who believed it was deliberate.

Macarthur pleaded guilty to the murder of Bridie Gargan, and no evidence was heard in court. Since he was going to receive a mandatory sentence of life imprisonment, the state dropped the charges against him for the murder of Donal Dunne, whose family, O’Connell writes, “gathered a hundred thousand signatures demanding an explanation…but nothing came of their efforts.”

The Macarthur case, strangely, was simpler than it looked. For example, the attorney general really had no idea until Macarthur was arrested that he was harboring a double murderer. Also, the deal made between the defense and the state prosecutors—that if Macarthur pleaded guilty to one charge then the second would be dropped—was not unusual.

The interesting part was Macarthur himself. Thirty-seven at the time of the murders, he had all the aura of an Anglo-Irish aristocrat. He had never, it seemed, worked a day in his life. In photographs of him on his way to court, he was handcuffed and sported a bow tie. His gaze was arrogant, unruffled. Since he was not claiming to be insane, it was hard to imagine what his motive had been or indeed what was on his mind when he committed such badly planned murders.

In a radio interview after his imprisonment, when asked about capital punishment, Macarthur’s mother said in an imperious tone that she was in favor of it. “So you feel,” the interviewer asked, “that your own son should be hanged?” She replied:

It’s very difficult for me to say that now. But I know that my first reaction, when I heard that there had been this murder in the park, was that I wouldn’t even waste money on a trial.

In September 2012, when Macarthur was released from prison on probation and began living in an apartment in the center of Dublin, it was as though Skin-the-Goat had returned to haunt us—the violent, virtual revenant living in what O’Connell calls “a state of abject freedom.” Macarthur was both an imposing figure, instantly recognizable despite the years that had passed since his trial, and a ghostly rumor. He appeared at literary events. Or rather, he was reported to have appeared at two and may have been at others. He was, O’Connell writes, “as much urban legend as historical fact.”

I saw him one day in Dublin at the corner of Merrion Square and Merrion Street Lower. It was the gaze I noted. His particular gaze is mentioned a number of times in A Thread of Violence. Like Leopold Bloom seeing Skin-the-Goat, I noted “his inscrutable face, which was really a work of art, a perfect study in itself.” But I wondered later if I really had noted that. Macarthur seemed to lend himself to invention.

O’Connell was a postdoc student at Trinity College Dublin at the time of Macarthur’s release—his doctoral thesis had been on the work of John Banville. One evening that autumn he saw a man who looked familiar:

Then I realized where I knew him from. It was Macarthur.

My expression, as we passed each other beneath the campanile, must have betrayed my surprised recognition, because he shot me a sidewise look of almost cartoonish wariness and culpability, swiveling his eyes toward me and then away, and then sharply back again. I could see that he knew why I was looking at him. He knew that I knew who he was. What he could not have known, though, was that mine was a reaction not just to seeing a famous murderer walking around the university campus, but to seeing a character from a novel manifested in the physical world, the realm of supposed reality. I could not help but think of it as a tearing of the thin fabric that separated fiction and nonfiction.

The novel O’Connell refers to is Banville’s The Book of Evidence, whose protagonist, he writes, “is loosely, but very obviously, based on Malcolm Macarthur.”

In early 2020, as the pandemic descended, O’Connell decided to write a work of nonfiction about the actual Malcolm Macarthur in which the idea of fiction and nonfiction and indeed the actual would be richly questioned. He sought to speak to the released prisoner and arrange a set of interviews. When finally, after lengthy efforts to manage what would seem like a casual encounter, he tracked Macarthur down on the street, he produced from his bag a book he had published and a copy of The New York Review in which he had an article. Macarthur, it seemed, was suitably impressed. Having turned down many other journalists, he agreed to speak to O’Connell.

“Macarthur’s early life was characterized by a precarious privilege,” O’Connell writes. His family had owned a farm of about 180 acres in County Meath north of Dublin. They’d had a large eighteenth-century house with a well-stocked library. He was an only child. Although his family might have seemed Anglo-Irish, they were, in fact, Catholic and had come from Lanarkshire in Scotland in 1907. Thus they were neither posh Protestants nor ordinary rural Catholics. However, as people of leisure—neither of his parents worked for a living—they would have been closer to the former group. Macarthur was taught by a governess and then, because of financial strain, attended the local school rather than the English public school to which his father had initially planned to send him. When he was a teenager, his parents separated.

In 1963, when he was seventeen, Macarthur went to California to stay with an uncle. He studied at various universities, including Berkeley. Between his return to Ireland in 1967 and 1982 he did what O’Connell calls “nothing of consequence.” “I was lucky in that I never had to,” he told O’Connell. “That is the wonderful thing, by the way, about inherited wealth. You become the master of your own days.”

Macarthur inherited a majority stake in the family farm when his father died, and he lived on the proceeds of the sale. He began to hang out in Dublin. Macarthur devoted much of his time, it seems, to reading, but he never sought any form of employment. “He lived,” O’Connell writes, “like a person with vast personal wealth,” but “while his inheritance was substantial, it was nowhere near large enough to fund such a life indefinitely.”

As far as O’Connell can ascertain, in the summer of 1982, when the murders were committed, Macarthur was flat broke. He traveled back to Ireland from Tenerife. Since he had no experience of work and no skills and no idea how to get money, he thought of robbing a bank. He seems to have developed this plan suddenly. It was like a brainstorm, a mad scheme. For the putative robbery, he determined, he would need a car and a gun. In the days before the murders, however, he had no notion of how to get a gun. He was in a state of “aimless urgency,” O’Connell writes. He knew he was going to “do something drastic” but had

no clear sense of how he might go about it…. An ordinary criminal will typically hire a gun from a contact…. Macarthur didn’t know any ordinary criminals; he had never knowingly encountered a person who had used a gun for anything other than shooting pheasants and foxes.

More than once Macarthur, aware that he came from a more privileged background than his two victims, told O’Connell that he had been irritated by a columnist in an Irish newspaper who presumed that his attitude toward protesters outside the court “was, Oh it was one of theirs that I killed. That it was a class thing. But I’m not a snob. I treat people as individuals.” But O’Connell could not find anything in the archives that made any such claim:

And then I realized why it was familiar: it was a line from The Book of Evidence. I took down my copy of the book and found the passage where Freddie [Montgomery] is mobbed outside the court after a hearing. “They shook their fists,” it read, “they howled. One or two of them seemed about to break from the rest and fly at me. A woman spat, and called me a dirty bastard. I just stood there, nodding and waving like a clockwork man, with a terrified grin fixed on my face. That was when I realized, for the first time, it was one of theirs I had killed.”

Macarthur had, it seemed, confused himself—and in a more literal fashion than he normally did—with a fiction based on his life.

O’Connell’s book has something in common with Marlow’s search for the truth in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. Indeed, there are moments when he sounds remarkably like Marlow. For example, he writes of Macarthur:

As naive as it sounds to me now, I wanted to know the truth of this story that had haunted me for so many years. I wanted to know who and what this man was.

I did eventually come to know him, and there were times when I felt that I had glimpsed this truth. But there were other times, far more frequent, when I understood that such knowledge was impossible, and that I had wandered into a labyrinth of endlessly ramifying fictions.

O’Connell is often unsure how to proceed. “Why do I want to make so much of Macarthur’s early life?” he asks. “The most obvious answer is that I want his crimes to make sense…. And yet there is a sulfurous whiff of madness emanating from the whole affair, a persistent sense that none of it remotely adds up.” And later: “All I have is the testimony of a man whose words I can’t take as truth, even if he believes them himself.”

What Macarthur seems to believe is that the murders were merely an episode. They do not define him. His tone becomes more stilted and self-important and evasive as he discusses his crimes. “I have committed the act of murder,” he told O’Connell. “I am somebody who has unlawfully killed. That’s an action that took place, at one point, in my life of seventy-five years.” His distance from the actions that made him notorious has echoes of Jim in Conrad’s novel, who describes his abandonment of his ship and its passengers in oddly detached terms: “I had jumped…it seems.”

In Lord Jim Marlow may search for meaning, but it is the gaps in the narrative, the prevarications and hesitations, that interest him most. In a way, he is seeking to establish a set of principles to apply or a set of proper questions to ask or a theory of behavior under pressure to formulate. And he seems almost comforted by his failure to do any of those things.

O’Connell also seems almost relieved when it is all beyond him. He begins by asking, “Was he crushed by the dull weight of his deeds?” and suggests that “what I wanted to approach was, for want of a better term, evil.” Soon, however, the questions become less grand, and then they fade away: “I don’t know what he is, other than a man. I don’t know what he is, other than what he did.”

Macarthur, under the terms of his parole, could not speak too freely. But he does, nonetheless, talk: we hear a version of his childhood and his early life, as we hear about his bookishness and his intellectual curiosity. But he hesitates each time O’Connell raises the subject of the murders. He circles and evades, changes the subject. He speaks of himself with an intense self-regard, as though he were known and sought out for his thoughts on ethics and logic and pure reason, rather than for having committed two horrible senseless crimes.

O’Connell does not push Macarthur toward some pure and simple-minded self-revelation. Rather than seeking to confront him or accuse him, he studies him, he listens. He is always ready not to be enlightened: “As soon as I begin to see him, as soon as I believe I have grasped him as a subject, he slips away into darkness, and I know no more, and perhaps even less, than I did to begin with.” When no satisfactory explanation emerges, that very failure seems to take O’Connell back to where he started, but with fewer illusions and some great sentences:

It was late in the afternoon by now, and the living room, which got little natural light at the best of times, was growing dimmer by steady degrees. I began to wonder whether I should ask him to switch on the light, but I did not. As the room got darker, Macarthur himself, in his beige jacket and beige trousers, seemed to fade into the lighter beige of the walls, so that at times I had a strange sense of his dematerializing completely, becoming a disembodied voice in the room, an unbroken stream of endless assertion, that no matter how closely or how long I followed it would never take me anywhere near to the truth. I had a strange intimation, in that moment, that this voice would never make sense, and that it would never leave me.

In the newspapers at the time of Macarthur’s arrest, it was reported, as a sign of his poshness, that when he was staying in the apartment of the attorney general, he had a taxi deliver the society magazine Town and Country as well as bottles of Perrier water. Macarthur, O’Connell reports, was fascinated that Banville in The Book of Evidence, in writing a version of this, had changed the Perrier to Apollinaris, a posher brand of bottled water. But the press had it wrong, it seems: what Macarthur had ordered, according to him, was in fact Apollinaris. O’Connell writes, “In attempting to turn fact into fiction, said Macarthur, Banville had inadvertently converted this small fiction back into fact.”

In 2022 Banville published another novel about a murderer released from prison. The opening sentence of The Singularities introduces a man who “has come to the end of his sentence.” Freddie Montgomery, it appears, has changed his name to Mordaunt. And his crime, despite all the time that has passed, still requires definition: “He murdered a fellow mortal, and thereby left a tiny rent in the world, a tiny fissure, that nothing can fix or fill. He took life, and got life.” The question of what it means to murder someone, how a murderer might be defined, is answered succinctly in Banville’s novel: “He wasn’t always a murderer, though he always will be.”

The Singularities is the fourth novel by Banville in which this murderer appears. O’Connell writes:

Two of Banville’s subsequent novels [after The Book of Evidence], Ghosts and Athena, also feature Freddie Montgomery as protagonist, though as the trilogy progresses the character strays further and further from the biographical realm of Macarthur’s life and crimes.

Even as he conducts “labyrinthine conversations” with the real Macarthur, O’Connell imagines him as a figure in a novel:

He was as vivid and complex as any character I had encountered in fiction. He had been a model for Banville’s Freddie Montgomery, certainly, but the more I came to know him, the more he put me in mind of Raskolnikov, the murderer-protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, or of Meursault, the dispassionate narrator of Camus’s The Stranger.

Thus a specter haunts O’Connell’s book. It is the specter of fiction. The idea never leaves him that his search is for a truth that has many elements that feel like fiction. When he considers a story Macarthur’s mother told in her interview with Irish radio, for example, he has his doubts about its veracity:

The problem is that I don’t have access to the moment…. But even if I had been there, how true could that really be? What I am trying to say is that my being there to witness it would only give me license to fictionalize the scene.

He is careful, however, not to make anything up. Instead, he confronts the fact, in all its ironies, that Malcolm Macarthur has both disappointed him and given him his subject: “In failing to confront the awful enormity of his sins—in failing to be annihilated by it—Macarthur had failed me as a character. He had denied me the satisfaction of an ending.”