The Guards: A Novel (Jack Taylor Series) | Ken Bruen

The Guards: A Novel (Jack Taylor Series) | Ken Bruen | The Guards - A real original

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The Guards: A Nove...

	The Guards: A Novel (Jack Taylor Series) Ken Bruen St. Martin's Minotaur, 2004 - 304 pages average customer review:based on 45 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

A Plus Story

Again had hard time putting down book. Finished in three sittings. Enjoyed the story line and the characters in the book. Recommend it...

The Guards - A real original

The language is unique, but it works like few others........

Galway depicted, background yet permeates this noir

Other reviewers have given you their take on the mystery element, the literary allusions, and Bruen's counterparts among which he is compared and ranked. I wanted to add, as a Galwegian once-removed, that Bruen captures well the transition of his hometown from a 1950s overgrown and decaying village into today's bustling tourist trap, gentrifying, selfish, and greedy. Like much of contemporary Irish life, the values of the past, however limited and blinkered they were, have collapsed and only a few like Jack Taylor uphold, on his better days and especially when he can back up his better nature with a bit of cash to share with those worse off than he (which is saying a lot)some humanistic generousity.

Bruen, interviewed on a website devoted to his works, has spoken of his wish to portray this secularising, grasping, and yuppified cityscape, and how it collides with those left on its remodelled streets in the gutter and at the barstool, too fragile to keep pace with a world around them that's too suddenly changed for not the better, despite the economic boom. All of this context comes very sparingly in this novel, and even the gardai to which the title's given over gain barely a supporting cast role. Jack's tale, unlike the cover blurb that links Elmore Leonard to James Joyce, by contrast takes nothing from the Irish forebear that for all his genius and ego has overshadowed those (like Bruen) who labour in his wake.

Instead, I would place Beckett as the true inspiration. After I had sensed this in The Guards, I found the author verifying Sam as one of his influences. The spare, bitter, yet somehow life-affirming and defiantly tender nature of Jack and those with whom he struggles to bond makes this book stick in my memory. I do not read "crime fiction" normally, but a desire to read about Galway today makes this, the first in a series that is nearing the half-dozen mark (abroad; American publication lags and has just reached three at the time of my post), valuable not only for its first-person testimony to a changing city, but for depths of honesty and humanity that lurk subtly under self-lacerating and chemically-altered surfaces.

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