Synopses & Reviews
At the heart of this history of two families are the stories of two flawed and charismatic men. It is a narrative of murder, paranoia, espionage and fear, with one of the most notorious political killings in pre-war Ireland playing a key role in its characters' lives.
Joseph O'Neill's grandfathers one Irish, one Turkish were both imprisoned during the Second World War. The Irish grandfather, a handsome rogue from a family of small farmers, was an active member of the IRA, and was interned with hundreds of his comrades by de Valera's government. O'Neill's other grandfather, a debonair hotelier from the tiny and threatened Turkish Christian minority, was imprisoned by the British in Palestine, where he was travelling to buy lemons, on suspicion of being an Axis spy.
Joseph O'Neill set out to investigate these imprisonments of Joseph Dakad and Jim O'Neill, which were veiled by family silences, and found himself having to come to terms with memories of violence, with a legacy of fierce commitment and political blindness; with the enchanting power of nationalism and the fear and complicity of the bystander. He was changed by what he found, and he has written a remarkable book about the ties and limits of kinship. With great tact, he sets the stories of individuals against the history of the last century's most inhuman events. Blood-Dark Track is, above all, vivid, colourful, and moving, as full of interesting characters as a good novel.
Review
"[Blood-Dark Track] is an enormously intelligent plunge into the World War II era....[O'Neill] adeptly makes scene and character where otherwise there might be only chronology, but he also draws on his experiences as a lawyer for insight into the Realpolitik of armies, embassies, prisons, and families....O'Neill's investigation...might be called an exercise in cultural forensics, for he tirelessly turns the soil of his grandfathers' lives, discovering proofs of guilt or innocence....[We are lucky to] have writers like O'Neill, who are willing to recover secrets that the dead so wished we might never know." Colin Harrison, The New York Times Book Review
Review
"An unwieldy family memoir that also yields some choice scenes....The pleasures here are in the slow accretion of detail albeit too many details on occasion and awareness that allows O'Neill to create an abiding image of a two places during a moment in history." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"This is a voyage of self-exploration, a grandson coming to terms with family history previously forbidden. While the reader may not find the denouement as gratifying as did the author, the journey is worth the price. O'Neill's adventures in genealogy and the interviews he pursued keep the reader drawn close." Library Journal
Review
"O'Neill's investigations into his family's history and the surrounding events have the pace of a thriller; his evocations of the past, whether of the life of a British consul in Turkey or depicting the Ascendancy remnants in west Cork, are masterly." Erica Wagner, The Times (London)