Murder among friends

Like a game of Clue run backward, Irish writer and director Neil Jordan’s elegiac fourth novel, “Shade,” opens with what you would expect to be its climax: the murder of 50-year-old actress Nina Hardy by her childhood friend George Truite. It is Ireland in 1950. Nina has returned to her parents’ big, neglected country house at the mouth of the river Boyne and tries to liberate George from his semipermanent residence in the local insane asylum. Instead, she becomes the dead narrator of her own story -- an incorporeal observer, like the narrator of Alice Sebold’s “The Lovely Bones,” of the aftermath of her death and the story of her lonely girlhood.

An only child, Nina had invented invisible friends and endowed her doll Hester with the powerful insight she was herself developing. Her English father, who founded a shellfish-export business, brought her to the river’s edge sometimes and recounted the myth of its origins, how the maiden Boinn had leaned over the well at its source and the waters were so struck by her beauty that they rushed up, spilled over and eventually captured her. The river was named for the drowned girl, and the sea grasses were her hair.

Gauging the effect of these legends on her dreamy daughter, Nina’s mother concluded that she needed a companion. Rather than shoulder this heavy task herself, she hired a starchy, port-sipping governess named Miss Isobel Shawcross. No more was she allowed to speak to Hester, let alone to report Hester’s thoughts and feelings. And neither was an extra place set at the table for the vaporous woman who stood near and watched Nina -- the ghost of her murdered self, 40 years hence.

Before she could do further damage to her young charge, Miss Shawcross came to an undignified end, her dipsomania landing her in the drink, as it were, as she stumbled off a quay and drowned. Now there were two spirits in the river. Nina herself discovered the governess’ body while playing with Janie and George, the children of a boatman, who would become her first friends.

George and Janie’s devotion was taken in stride by beautiful Nina, who drew her new friends immediately into her imaginative world. George, whose knight-like virtues were physical strength and loyalty, tingled as Nina kissed him, promising that they would marry one day.

Into this joyful trio came 10-year-old Gregory, the surprise half-brother of Nina. Nina’s mother never fully recovered from the shock, using it as an excuse to withdraw more completely from her husband and from Nina. Gregory’s own mother, an artist, was dying, and there was nothing to do but bring him to Ireland.

The unbelievable romance of this revelation spun Nina closer to adolescence. Waiting for his arrival, “she tried to think of him as a new species of being like the gnu or the ocelot, one she had never seen but heard rumours of from distant places. If she had been told his name, she soon forgot it, took to calling him Half-brother, and then, simply Half. And the name Half was suitably diffident, if also alarmingly engaging. For if he, Half, was one half, she, Nina, was surely the other.... Half, she thought, will soon be whole.”

Gregory is pulled into the group of friends, while George, who leaves school early to become a farmworker, is left slightly out. But the alliances are too desperately needed to be easily severed. The ways in which the children’s maturing love for each other plays out are unpredictable -- sometimes staggering -- and the final revelations, years later, before George raises the garden shears, will bring a gasp of shock or admiration from even the most worldly reader.

Very few novels improve dramatically at the halfway point, and fewer still surge into brilliance in their final pages. Though there are no secrets here on a scale with those in Jordan’s best-known work, the film “The Crying Game,” there is far more whipping the reader forward than the why-dun-it of the opening scenes.

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Regina Marler is the author of “Bloomsbury Pie: The Making of the Bloomsbury Boom.”