So he would have to procure both.Īnd in this script, Bridie Gargan and Donal Dunne were minor characters. He needed a gun for the stickup and a car to make his getaway, but he had neither. Macarthur thought of himself as a sort of writer – he had his outline script but he needed a few plot details to be put in place.
“It was all,” as Macarthur tells O’Connell, “in the cerebral cortex.” Within that twisted cortex was a fully enclosed logic. It would be a chapter before and after, which he would be a kind, generous, engaging man who never hurt a fly. This would not be the story of his life – it would be merely a colourful episode, an out-of-the-ordinary interlude that he could, perhaps, use to amuse in his old age a sophisticated dinner party. To let him speak is, inevitably, to dignify a chilling kind of circumlocution Macarthur’s articulacy is the eloquence of extreme evasion. It would be the thrilling tale of Malcolm the gentleman bank robber. To avoid the ultimate horror – which is that, having spent all the money he inherited from his wealthy parents, he would have to work for a living like inferior people – he would carry out a bank job. It gives O’Connell, when he tracks down Macarthur (who has been around Dublin since his release from prison in 2012) and gets him to tell his own story, a heightened awareness that it is indeed precisely that: yet another story, another linguistic construct in which the relationship between truth and fiction is murky, unstable and impossible to pin down with any certainty.įor what does seem reasonably clear is that Macarthur, when he committed the murders, was playing out a narrative he himself had already invented. But nothing could be further from O’Connell’s intent in this weird case, the impulse to explore and unravel fictions is just the right instinct. It suggests a dreadful essay in postmodern cleverness, where there is no distinction between what happened and how it is represented, and morality is an embarrassing anachronism. With other violent events, this might be a terrible place to start. He did a PhD on Banville and it was via The Book of Evidence that he became fascinated by the man whom the novelist had transformed into Montgomery.
He comes to the story, essentially, through the veil of fiction. O’Connell is not of that generation – he was a toddler when all of this was going on. Ireland seemed out of control, and it was all too tempting to believe that the mystery of Macarthur was the key to its secrets.
PEIG IRISH BOOK TRIAL
Macarthur’s evil is indeed banal, but it is inextricable from the dark fantasies of the time, the sense that if only the “real” story of his crimes could be discovered, we would know the truth about the State, that we would somehow make sense of a bizarre time when statues were moving and a witch trial was being conducted in the Kerry Babies case. Near the beginning of The Book of Evidence, Banville’s Freddie Montgomery remarks on “the way reality, banal as ever, was fulfilling my worst fantasies”. It seemed that only a fool would accept there was nothing more to this tale than the official narrative of breathtakingly unlikely coincidence – even though Connolly’s involvement was indeed innocent. In 1982 the national imagination ran wild. Episode one of seven.GUBU is researched, reported and narrated by Harry McGee and edited by Enda O'Dowd.Sound mix by JJ VernonTitle music by OrakhalGraphics by Paul /podcasts/gubu Macarthur took at least two lives, those of Bridie Gargan, whom he beat to death with a hammer on a sunny afternoon in Phoenix Park because he wanted to steal her car and Donal Dunne, whom he shot point-blank in the face in a bog outside Edenderry while stealing his shotgun.Ī killing shocks Ireland and prompts a manhunt that will eventually almost topple the government.
His murderous aesthete, Freddie Montgomery, kills just once. It is telling that when John Banville drew on the Macarthur story for his classic 1989 novel, The Book of Evidence, he had to tone it down to make the unbelievable more credible. The cliche that truth is stranger than fiction hangs over this story. The unbelievability is probably most resonant. It is this haphazard conjunction that has made these lurid events, in the acronym that Conor Cruise O’Brien distilled from the words of Connolly’s boss, the then taoiseach Charles Haughey, so gubu: grotesque, unbelievable, bizarre and unprecedented. O’Connell has a tenuous connection to the Macarthur story: his grandparents lived in Pilot View, the upmarket apartment complex in Dalkey where, in 1982, Ireland’s most wanted man was arrested in the flat of its chief law officer, the attorney general Patrick Connolly. In this sense, Mark O’Connell’s brilliant book about the double murderer Malcolm Macarthur is an exercise in the uncanny. Sigmund Freud defined the uncanny as the sensation we experience when something we have previously only imagined appears before us in reality.
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