A Less-than-Senseless Crime in Neil Jordan's Shade

"Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.  But men have killed for love, endlessly." Neil Jordan, Shade

Shade by Neal Jordan

Throughout her childhood, Nina Hardy was aware of a woman's presence around her family's home, a shade who haunted the vast grounds and watched over the girl and her companions.  As she grew up, became an actress, and took charge of the family estate, the men she grew up with went off to the Great War and returned scarred and vulnerable.  But the shade remained a presence in their minds.

It is only after her horrific murder and the discovery that, as a ghost, she can move back and forth freely through time that Nina sees her own image reflected in the eyes of her childhood self and realizes that she, all along, was the ghost that haunted the grounds.

I recently finished Neil Jordan's stunning novel Shade, a highly poetic and intricate text that, like Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones and Tom McNeil's Far Far Away, places a first-person narrator in an omniscient role and allows her to examine her life as a whole without being able to influence the events or outcomes.  Like Sebold's novel, Shade begins with a graphic (far more raw and graphic, actually, than The Lovely Bones) description of the narrator's murder at the hands of a man with whom she is familiar, her childhood friend George.  From there, however, the two stories diverge. While The Lovely Bones is primarily a story about the aftermath of Susie Salmon's death, Shade is primarily a story about what led to Nina's, going back as far as her parents' meeting and her own birth and examining not only the events of her death, but the more painful episodes of her life and the lives of her acquaintances. Throughout the book, the narrator attempts to understand the events that led up to her death and to discover the impetus behind George's actions, and as the truth of George's motivations are revealed, what seemed senseless acquires a chilling clarity that causes the reader to reevaluate the crime.

Jordan directed the film Interview
with The Vampire

An Oscar-winning filmmaker who directed Interview with the Vampire (a movie adaptation of a book in Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, the series that includes the book Queen of the Damned), Jordan writes in a style that is highly detailed and visual.  Take the following lines for example, where the narrator describes a section of the river near her home, where a young girl of "surpassing beauty" had drowned:

"There were long tendrils of seaweed beneath the water which rippled with the moving tide.  And looking down on them, she could well imagine a long bed hair beneath the shifting river, the young girl of surpassing beauty still beneath it, the waters perpetually washing her ever-growing hair" (p. 17).

Shade is filled with similar such images and descriptions that simultaneously reveal the physical environment and the characters' psychological states in a way that connects the two perfectly.

Not only was the book a frightening examination of the human psyche, but the story behind how I found the title is pretty frightening itself (and, in hindsight, pretty funny as well).  Having put my then six-month-old daughter to sleep one night, I pulled out some professional articles about horror fiction that I was reading for a grad school class.  I get my best work done early in the morning and just before bed at night, when the house is quiet and calm, and as I settled in at the dining room table the hush of the house and the darkness in the adjacent rooms set a spooky mood for my reads.  I was reading an article about autothanographical fiction that mentioned Shade when, suddenly, I heard the clang of metal in the kitchen.  I thought perhaps it was my cat playing around in a cabinet--until I heard the noise again and, looking through the doorway between the rooms, saw a hideous black claw appear from behind the oven.  In horror, I jumped out of my chair and ran to close the door just as another claw, then a black, winged shape shot out from behind the oven and began whirling through the air.

Somehow, a bat had found its way into our house.

After the police left--taking the bat with them to be tested, of course, for rabies--I knew two things: firstly, that I would have to call and leave another thank you for the officers who caught the creature, and secondly, that I had to read Jordan's book.

If you're up for a challenging and poetic read, pick up Shade and let me know what you think.  I'd love to hear about it.

Happy reading.