The Snow Bees by Peter Cunningham

First published in Great Britain in 1988 

Peter Cunningham is an extraordinary writer of moving family dramas, including the Monument novels, set in rural Ireland during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He has also written more than a half dozen thrillers, including The Snow Bees.

The Snow Bees is a standard story of drug cops battling drug lords with a slight twist: the man who infiltrates the cartel, Patrick Drake, is an accountant, not a cop. Drake volunteers for the assignment after his brother-in-law, Alan Ridgeway, a fellow accountant in the same prestigious London firm, is murdered at a winery he was auditing in France. Ridgeway had discovered that the winery was shipping more wine than it produced. He suspected that the winery was involved in illicit activity and that the accounting firm's founder, John Abelson, was involved.

In a related plotline, a DEA agent working undercover in Spain is murdered, but not before telling his brother, D.C. drug cop Joe Vendetti, that someone high in the DEA's hierarchy was working with the cartel. It is Vendetti who recruits Drake to infiltrate the cartel. The novel's other key player is drug lord Marcellino Adarraga, who lives in Columbia but dreams of freeing his homeland, Euskadi, and uses his profits to fund Basque terrorists.

Patrick manages to join the cartel with improbable ease, and the relationship he develops with Adarraga's beautiful lover is both predictable and unlikely. As was customary twenty years ago, the "good guys" in The Snow Bees indulge in a fair amount of overwrought hand-wringing about the evils of cocaine. Notwithstanding those concerns and despite the all-too-conventional plot, The Snow Bees tells a rousing story that features strong characters and tense moments. Cunningham writes with the same grace and style that make the Monument novels so memorable. The Snow Bees is far from Cunningham's best work -- it hasn't aged as well as his other novels -- but the quality of Cunningham's writing and the excitement that he manages to generate make it worth reading.

RECOMMENDED

Consequences of the Heart by Peter Cunningham

First published in the UK in 1998; republished by GemmaMedia on May 4, 2011

On the strength of the only two Peter Cunningham novels I've read (this one and The Sea and the Silence), I have become a fan. Cunningham has written some thrillers and there are elements of a sedate literary thriller in Consequences of the Heart, but it is also a love story, a war story, and a generational story of two Irish families. Ultimately, this novel defies categorization other than to say it's a really good read.

Chud Conduit (sometimes known as Chud Church) is a bit of a cad. He has a gambling addiction, a lifelong problem with debt, and a chronic inability to keep his hands off other men's wives (and to be faithful to his own). His life in the small town of Monument, Ireland is inextricably tied with those of his childhood friends, Jack Santry and Rosa Bensey. In 1938, while they are coming of age, the three-way friendship leads Chud to the first defining moment of his life, the nature of which is slowly disclosed as the novel progresses, although the full truth is not revealed until the last page.

After spending some time in a Catholic reformatory, Chud takes a civilian job that leads to a position in the military. He rejoins Jack (who has become a colonel in the Santry family tradition of wartime service) and together they are part of the invading force on D-Day, where Jack's defining moment occurs -- one that, again, does not become clear until later in the story. Jack, Chud, and Rosa continue a difficult and evolving friendship after the war, leading Chud to commit a new life-defining act for the sake of Jack and Rosa.

I apologize for being a bit vague in that synopsis but I don't want to spoil what is quite a remarkable story. It is the story of Chud's life, summarized from interview transcripts that he has edited and arranged in twelve binders. The story begins with Chud's grandfather in the 1890's and ends with the marriage of Jack's granddaughter in 1999, save for a brief concluding chapter that takes place a year later. No synopsis could do justice to the rich tale that Chud tells. The pages are dense with information. Characters come and go, but Chud, Jack, and Rosa are the constants. Most of the novel is written in the first person from Chud's point of view, with a few passages written in the third person, describing events as Chud imagines them to have occurred. Although the novel covers much ground, the pace is often languid, creating the contemplative feel of a memoir. There are nonetheless times (particularly on D-Day) when action is intense and dramatic. Even at its slowest, the story is never dull. At nearly the midway point, when I was beginning to wonder if the novel would be a mostly uneventful chronicle of Chud's life -- a love story or one of love unrequited -- it took an unexpected turn. Dramatic events then began to pile on top of each other without ever reaching the point of melodrama. For the most part, the story feels intensely real.

Family conflicts and buried secrets are familiar turf for novelists, but when Peter Cunningham plows that ground in Consequences of the Heart, he makes it fertile. No matter how many character flaws Chud demonstrates -- and he manages a goodly number -- it's impossible to dislike him. At the very least, Cunningham makes it easy to understand Chud and to empathize with him. The war changed Chud because "if you land at dawn on the shore of a continent and actually take it by force, you are inclined ever afterwards to doubt the merits of caution." Chud is nothing if not incautious; that's one reason he's so likable.

My one quibble concerns Jack's daughter-in-law, who is very angry at Chud for the incident that occurred in 1938. That didn't seem credible to me, given that she wasn't alive when it happened. Her actions and the events that follow at the end of the novel are almost over-the-top, but I forgive Cunningham for that because it makes a good story. An odd story, to be sure, but this tale of lifelong friendships among three people who followed their natures, however unconventional, is one I'll remember.

RECOMMENDED

The Sea and the Silence by Peter Cunningham

First published in 2008; republished by GemmaMedia on February 1, 2010

The Sea and the Silence tells a bleak story of lost hope, a story that is tragic but rich with emotion. The story is set in Ireland.  Much of it takes place during World War II when (according to one of the characters) an independent Ireland was young "and time is all that is needed for it to come of age." By confronting her grief (over deaths and lost love), Ismay ("Iz") too comes of age; she must decide whether to base choices about her future on practicality or love -- only to find that some choices are out of her hands.

The Sea and the Silence begins quietly and ends dramatically. The novel is oddly structured -- at least it seems odd until the end, when it all makes sense. In a prologue, a solicitor is reading Iz's will; an epilog returns to the will and its impact on one of the characters. The bulk of the story is told in two parts, each written by Iz and delivered to the solicitor after her death. The first describes Iz's life from 1945 to 1963; the second begins in 1943 and ends in 1945. The first section is dominated by Iz's troubled marriage to Ronnie, their financial and marital problems, and her relationship with her son Hector. The second section addresses her family's financial woes, her uncertainty about whether their farmland will be taken and redistributed by the Land Commission, her strained relationship with her sister, the love she feels (to her sister's horror) for a dock worker, and the difficult choices she makes about her life (and those that are made for her) that lead her to marry Ronnie.

The novel explores a number of themes, including long-standing class prejudices and resentment of Irish landowners. Iz comes to wonder whether "the wedge driven by centuries between ... different classes could be removed by something as insubstantial as love." The story doesn't follow the classic pattern of American fiction: poor girl falls in love with rich boy, love triumphs over differences in financial status. The Sea and the Silence is more complex than that, a deeper exploration of the forces (including class, including love) that shape lives.

There are some wonderfully written, deeply moving scenes in The Sea and the Silence. The characters are created in full, carefully detailed and completely believable. The sea -- "resolute and unceasing" -- is a constant presence in the novel. Iz feels drawn to the sea yet learns to prefer the silence and anonymity of her small Dublin garden. I was lulled by Peter Cunningham's elegant prose, believing for most of the book that I was reading a quiet, uneventful story, until events in the final chapters turned it upside down and made me appreciate its structure.  This novel is the work of a skilled craftsman.

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