Shade: A Novel

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.

Amazon.com Review

We know from the earliest pages of Neil Jordan's numinous, slow-building fourth novel, Shade that its narrator, 50-old Nina Hardy, has been murdered with a pair of gardening shears by her childhood friend George Truite. The mystery is not who has committed this crime, but why. And although George has been for some years a resident of the local insane asylum, only recently allowed to experiment again with independent living, his madness is but a small part of the answer to that question. Set in Ireland near Drogheda, at the mouth of the river Boyne, Shade casts a wistful eye on childhood desires and alliances, and its lonely-girl-in-a-big-house beginnings will call to mind William Trevor's The Story of Lucy Gault. But like Jordan's greatest success, the film The Crying Game, this novel is full of surprises--and the biggest shocks are not always the most telling. --Jill Harvey

From 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. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From 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. Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

From Booklist

Jordan's latest novel is a lyrical experiment in point of view. It begins with actress Nina Hardy's death--her head hacked off with garden shears, her body lowered into a septic tank. But Nina remains, narrating as a ghost. She is everywhere and nowhere, and to her, the past is as immediate as the present. During her privileged childhood, she forms a fast foursome with George and Janie, poor kids from across the river Boyne, and Gregory, her late-discovered half brother. (The children shiver at a ghostly presence they call "Hester"--is it Nina, looking back?) They're soon separated by class and ability, by war, by brutally punished mistakes. In the present, Gregory returns to hold a funeral and wake the body that was never found. It's not surprising that Jordan, writer and director of The Crying Game and Michael Collins, would have a lot to say about identity and sexuality, acting and observing, and politics. But as this quiet novel steps surely toward its powerful conclusion, it's also a testament to the simple but profound power of storytelling. Keir GraffCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From 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-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

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. He is also the author of three previous novels and a short-story collection.

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