We may be 15 years into a ceasefire in Northern Ireland, but the country is still in transition, still coming to terms with its history. There is much talk of truth and reconciliation, those who suffered thinking back to try to go forward. Stuart Neville's superb debut novel understands this: in Northern Ireland, a nation "built upon violence and morose vendettas", in Louis MacNeice's famous phrase, it's still all about the past.
The Twelve opens in 2007, two months after the elections in which the province's voters finally chose a government of their own. Belfast is a city blinking in the sunlight, getting used to normality. Students, "probably not even born when they were scraping the body parts off the street", drink overpriced coffee and go to shiny nightclubs; Sinn Féin politicians, their teeth whitened for the cameras, sit in Stormont.
But Northern Ireland doesn't give up its history easily. "I don't like what's going on. Supporting the peelers, sitting at Stormont, all that," mutters Vincie Caffola, a thug whose violent streak saw him thrive during the Troubles, and who now feels redundant and anxious ("it'll never be over, not til the Brits get out").
It is far from over for Gerry Fegan, ex-IRA hitman and "Republican hero" who killed 12 in his day. Now a free man, his finances covered by a Sinn Féin-paid salary for a nonexistent community job, he is a loner and a drinker, the ghosts of his 12 victims stalking his every waking hour. To atone for his crimes, Fegan embarks on a killing spree through the IRA old guard - those too smart to have done the killing themselves.
It's a simple but inspired premise - the lone gunman turning on his former bosses as a form of absolution. The more he kills, the quieter the voices in his head become, the greater his chances of a peaceful night's sleep. But this is Northern Ireland, and peace has been secured at too high a price for a series of killings by an ex-IRA man, seemingly gone soft in the head, to be allowed to derail it. And so begins a complex game of revenge, blame and cover-up involving the Sinn Féin hierarchy, the new Police Service of Northern Ireland, the British government and the murky dissidents out in the countryside of south Armagh.
The Twelve is a brilliant thriller: unbearably tense, stomach-churningly frightening. Fegan and his nemesis, the government double agent Davy Campbell, are magnificent creations: not sympathetic, but never wholly repugnant. And just as haunting as Fegan's apparitions are Neville's stunning reimaginings of the darkest atrocities: the bombs, the beatings, the torture, the point-blank murders. Then there's the farm in south Armagh, setting for the novel's grisly climax, presided over by the almost mythically violent Bull O'Kane, the last bastion of the old guard, unchanged, impenetrable, rooted in the past.
It is impressive indeed to create an entertainment out of such material, but more than that, Neville has boldly exposed post-ceasefire Northern Ireland as a confused, contradictory place, a country trying to carve out a future amid a peace recognised by the populace as hypocritical, but accepted as better than the alternative. This is the best fictional representation of the Troubles I have come across, a future classic of its time. Stuart Neville has finally given Northern Ireland the novel its singular history deserves.