In Ryan Ireland’s complicated double helix of a tale, the characters have no names. As the setting is, for want of a better term, the wild west, this seems a nod to Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name. In a lengthy novel with a plot that plays havoc with time and place, these non-names become rather wearing. “The stranger” turns up in the middle of nowhere where “the man” is living a simple life with a pregnant woman he has begun to care about. But when the stranger tells the man he must travel to the town beyond the mountains to register the woman and her unborn child, he sets off unquestioningly on a journey that becomes increasingly hellish and fantastical. Women do not feature much in this bleak narrative, except as victims of sickening crimes. Having sent the man out into the wilderness, the stranger then tracks him, passing through wrinkles in time and seeing both the past and the future overlaid on the barren landscape. The stranger, his malevolence notwithstanding, is perhaps a cipher for the role of the novelist: God in his own universe and with the advantage of knowledge not shared by his hapless characters.
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