Country by Michael Hughes review – the Iliad transposed to the Troubles

In his first novel, 2016’s The Countenance Divine, Michael Hughes proved himself to be daring, inventive and ambitious. It was a big novel of ideas and wild imaginings in the style of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, skipping across the centuries and interweaving multiple tales into an apocalyptic thriller. Country is his take on Homer’s Iliad. A writer’s second novel, it is often said, truly gives the tone: Hughes has set his standards high.

Homer’s epic poem begins with the word “menin”, meaning wrath or rage, which indicates what it is all about. It ends with the funeral of Hector. Hughes’s novel begins: “Fury. Pure fury. The blood was up. Lost the head completely.” It ends with the funeral of SAS captain Henry Morrow. In Country, as in the Iliad, what lies between is a vast territory of loss.

The novel is set in lawless border country, Northern Ireland, post-ceasefire, 1996. After a woman turns informer, an IRA gang takes matters into its own hands and storms the local British army base. But there is a falling out between Pig, the gang’s leader, and the sniper, Achill. Death and betrayal follow, with Sinn Féin in Belfast and the governments in London and Dublin looking on from a safe distance.

The book is full of excruciating details, such as this description of a kneecapping: “The lads were crowding in now to watch. A couple of them helped with the needful. Big thick towels around both legs, for the mess, and to muffle the noises. The end of the barrel dug in snug … Then both knees destroyed. Done right this time. Then a tin of emulsion poured on the fresh wounds, to slow up the surgery.”

There is much speechifying from the various combatants, as they seek to persuade one another of the right course of action, in a violent pounding demotic as memorable in its way as Homer’s hexameter. “You think you’re so smart, talking out of your hole about our target and our tactics, and proving only that you know sweet fuck all about nothing.” There are also a lot of omniscient authorial interventions, in the grand oral storytelling tradition. “There was a famous story told about how the last lot of weapons from the States got into the country, only a few years before. This is a good one. Wait now till you hear.”

Part of the thrill is recognising the correspondences between the characters and Homer’s originals. Achill, “the best sniper the IRA ever seen”, an outsider from the west, is Achilles, the outsider from the north. Pig – “the boss man, the OC in the area … known as Pig, because he farms pigs and smuggles them … And also, he’s a fucking pig” – is Agamemnon. Nellie is Helen. Brian is Menelaus. Henry is Hector. Pat is Patroclus. Bernard King is Priam. The whole gang – Dog, Sid, Budd, Macken, Merrion and old Ned – have their Homeric counterparts, the Myrmidons. The pub is called the Ships. And so on and so forth.

Even if you can’t recognise the correspondences, the language is enough to keep you enthralled. Hughes is an actor as well as as writer, originally from Armagh, whose stage name is Michael Colgan. The novel, as one might expect, is driven strongly by the sound of a rhythmic speaking voice. “And that was the start of it. A terrible business altogether. Oh, it was all kept off the news, for the sake of the talks and the ceasefire. But them that were around that part of the country remember every bit. Wait now till you hear the rest.”

There will always be writers who return to the wellsprings to see what they can discover anew. Kamila Shamsie used Sophocles in her Women’s prize-winning novel Home Fire. Preti Taneja used King Lear in We That Are Young. Soon to come is Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which gives voice to Homer’s women. In recent years there has been much poetry written in response to the Iliad specifically, such as Alice Oswald’s Memorial, Christopher Logue’s War Music. In his essay On translating Homer, Matthew Arnold described Homer as “eminently noble”, “eminently rapid” and “eminently plain and direct”. If anything, Hughes’s achievement is to prove the opposite: that Homer remains ignoble, messy and horribly familiar.

Country is published by John Murray. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99), go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.