I expected the book to be set in Paris, but in fact this one takes place in Belgium. Maigret almost seems a minor character in the book. He doesn't turn up until well along in the story, when he turns out to have been trailing the murder victim, a wealthy Greek man whose body is found in a basket at the zoo. Of course he interferes with the case, bests the local police, and solves the crime for them. The more central figure in the book is a young man who is suspected of the murder – a good kid who's gotten caught up with a bad crows. When Maigret clears him of the murder, he cleans up his ways and is sent off to do the king's work in the Belgian Congo, so surely everything will have worked out for him in the long run!
Some minor spoilers follow.
Set in perhaps a near future, the book starts out with the narrator (Mew, for Bartholomew Port) traveling from London to Dublin, where he is due for a literary festival, via some sort of portal in a city park. After that things become more strange, though also somehow more realistic. The Dublin Mew arrives in is on the brink of a violent conflict between the people of the city and the moneyed interests with the state, police, and military apparatus that supports them. After a madcap, half paranoid scramble through the city, Mew finds himself caught up with a diverse group of insurrectionists planning a violent attack on the Garda. Most of the book is told in Mew's voice after these events have concluded, as he is writing the story for his partner, Mootie, who he's left behind in London, unsure if he'll ever see him again. But there are also small sections scattered through the book in the voices or testimonies of other witnesses. As if, perhaps, the full narrative has been gathered later on.
While the book is somewhat speculative in nature, and there are some aspects that seem farfetched, the central tension between the people and the state feels very informed by – and only barely removed from – our present reality. Or maybe not removed at all from the present in some parts of the world:
They drive us underground, then they say—look how they cower underground, in the dark, in their tunnels, in their secret, hidden places. How can they be trusted who lie in the dark? And when we come out they kill us.
I don't know that the Weather Underground would have been top of mind when I was reading this book had I not recently read this article from the L.A. Review of Books. With that in my mind, I feel Dooneen responds to the central question the article opens with: Was it worth it? But the response is not an answer to the question. The response is, we had no choice – we could not do otherwise in the face of the horrors around us.
