Gene Kerrigan: the one Irish writer in recent years who has come closest to capturing society's dark side

Gene Kerrigan's third novel starts with an attempted gangland hit in an inner-city pub. Two gunmen arrive to murder a man called Walter Bennett. Fortunately for Walter, a man called Danny Callaghan intercedes and saves his life. Unfortunately, this impulsive act leads to complications for Danny; and he soon finds himself embroiled in a nightmarish scenario, which sees his world imploding around him.

Kerrigan gradually builds a larger story around Danny's spur-of-the-moment action. We meet Karl Prowse, a young thug who is on the first rung of a criminal career that is about to see him propelled into the big time. Prowse has been taken under the wing of Lar Mackendrick, an ageing gangland boss who looks out across Ireland's Eye from his mansion in Howth. Mackendrick has taken a shine to Tzun Tzu's The Art of War, and he uses it as a primer for an ambitious scheme of his own.

While our sympathies lie with Danny throughout the book, it's Mackendrick that really demands our attention. In him Kerrigan has succeeded in creating a monstrously compelling character. It's the near banality of the man that makes him so arresting. Here is a guy who swans about in an anorak, looking like an old man going to seed, while snuffing people's lives out with the click of a finger. He has a Machiavellian cunning, and a sureness of purpose that is terrifying.

Mackendrick, and the world he inhabits, is all the more disturbing because Kerrigan plays it straight. Not once does he fall back on easy cliché, and this in itself marks him out as a writer of real depth and quality. It could have been so easy to play up Danny's ex-con past. It could have been even easier to turn Mackendrick and those around him into cartoon villains. Instead we have a lean, spare quality to the narrative which emphasizes the predatory nature of these people. They are the embodiment of appetite melded with opportunism, and they kill in the most perfunctory manner, because it simply suits their purpose.

The test of any great novel should be its verisimilitude, and Kerrigan is the one Irish writer in recent years who has come closest to re-creating the underbelly of Irish society. There are no speeches here about the scourge of new money and development. There are no cranes and flash cars symbolising a world embracing greed heartily to its nouveau riche bosom. Instead he gives us a tight, grim microcosm; and a brutal, vivid, and unforgiving authenticity made all the more convincing because of his consistent effort to strive for realism. Kerrigan prefers to pare things down to the bone with writing that is disciplined and infused with real moral awareness and honesty.

It's also an unnerving read in which the realism takes on an extra resonance. When Mackendrick threatens to kill the members of someone's family you can't help but think about recent gangland murders. It further heightens the almost disgusting ordinariness of the people Kerrigan writes about. More than any other book of its kind in recent memory, this is a book that asks hard questions about how a supposedly civil society has facilitated the growth of a sub-culture which is allowed to play by its own rules. There has been a huge surge in the number of successful Irish thriller writers in the past few years; each in their own way has tried to address this question, but no one has addressed in it as brave, forceful, and articulate a manner as Kerrigan.

Dark Times in the City

by Gene Kerrigan

Harvill Secker

€11.99