ISBN 1-894838-03-3 - 222 pp - 5 x 8 - pb - $19.95 CAD

REVIEW OF THE BETRAYER

Fiction by Michael Hennessey

Review by Sharon Neill

At first I wondered if knowing the author was going to get in the way of my reading of The Betrayer, Michael Hennessey's first novel, now in print a decade after the publication of his second book of short stories, courtesy of Acorn Press. When I say I knew Michael, I mean it in the sense that people in smaller cities and towns know each other: he was familiar as a local newspaper columnist and, more important to my adolescent girl-self, he was half of one of Charlottetown's most strikingly attractive couples at a time when I was seeking out models of what I wanted my adult-self to be, or at least to appear to be. My parents were old, and lacked Style. Michael and Dolly were the age we wish we could be forever, and had It in spades. Entering university meant for me leaving the local scene behind and passing through a portal to other worlds. This grand place was all of two miles from my childhood home, and Michael was the Registrar there. We came to know each other then, in the way that you can on a campus not yet grown too large, where people do not "make strange" at you just because you haven't yet been formally introduced.

In any event, knowing Michael made no difference. The narrator and the reader share their story time alone together, the author's voice noted only for its absence. And what a narrator Mickey Casey is! We realize that he has told the story of the "third man" many times before without a reader present, lived it and lived with it for a lifetime, struggling with the rewrites, seeking his epiphany. When murder takes place, we know, even without gore or graphic detail, that truly we have descended into the dark. And Mickey is too forthright a storyteller, and a man, to leave us in any doubt as to guilt or innocence. There is not just one murder but two to be explained; not just two murders but a third life taken as well.

The true story of the 1941 hanging of two men in Charlottetown, P.E.I., for the murder of a local shopkeeper provides the basis for this fictionalized account. Charlottetown was and remains a place where, even when murder is the topic of the day, names are bandied about -- knowingly? -- in the ordinary discourse of the ordinary people. A man Michael Hennessey knew -- and a man I know, for heaven's sake, a man named right there in the book -- are both thought to have known the identity of the "third man" in the brutal 1941 killing. If so, neither man has been the betrayer. What unfolds is not simply the solution to a decades-old crime, though I found the book immensely satisfying as a mystery novel. But Mickey goes beyond merely chronicling what took place. From the time in his youth when he carries out a plan to avenge two generations of abuse, until the moment when release finally comes for Mickey after a lifetime of seeking, he shares his inner life with us.

For Mickey, redemption comes in Ireland, the same Ireland from which his family would have been uprooted. As surely as the young Mickey was thrust into an orphanage, cut off from the comfort and security of family life, so too were many Mickeys, and Michaels, thrust into Maritime cities and towns of unrelieved urbanness, cut off from even the possibility of working out their life struggles in nature or in solitude. Their lives come through starkly in Mickey's recollections of Queen Square School, the Charlottetown boys' school where he (and Michael and my father and brother) learned life lessons in how to protect oneself from thuggery (and not just that of one's schoolmates), or failed to learn them. And there they learned the code, too, that one never squeals. Boys who did not tell their mothers or sisters about the beatings at school would grow into men who would never betray the hand that held the knife.

Mickey is assisted in working out his redemption by Father Flaherty, a young Galway priest and a wonderfully realized character (as are all of the important personages in Mickey's story.) Throughout the novel the older Mickey speaks in dialogue with the same voice whether he is boy or man; the dialogue in the book varies depending upon what character is speaking with him. Nowhere is it better than between this priest, so well-rooted in place and whole in himself, and the lost man who has come from so far away to try to find out what is essential for him to know about his betrayal. I found myself thinking about how much those who have done unforgivable things in their lives could gain from reading these pages. It later occurred to me that the need we have to acknowledge who it is that we betray is universal.

The truly great themes of faith, love, truth, loyalty and, of course, betrayal are handled in the narration without Mickey ever once seeming to be pompous or false. He speaks throughout the novel of his love for Emily Kate, whose acceptance of him is necessary but not sufficient to heal him, with the same honesty with which he faces his alcoholism. He doesn't point out to the reader that this is a wounded character; we notice the wounds for ourselves. Mickey is totally believable as a sportswriter and when quoting Gide or Thoreau. As a once-celebrated athlete and a highly literate man, Michael wisely chose to not to try to hide his natural talents, but to incorporate them into his principal character. The only thought I had as Critic during the time I was actually reading The Betrayer, as opposed to thinking about it afterwards or discussing it with friends, was to notice the pacing of the story. No contrived attempts here to prop the sagging attention by introducing a new clue to the mystery. This is a narrator -- forgive me, Michael, this is an author -- in complete control of his material, the story unfolding as to a natural rhythm. It kept me reading through two days. I cannot recall when last I carried my novel around with me so that I could continue my reading during lunch hour.

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