TRIBAL KILLER

By John Skow

They notice him, the sectarian haters who suck whiskey and resentment in Belfast's bars, and they accord respect. Victor Kelly is a young swaggerer, a gifted thug with the flash and cold nerve to force a terrified man of the opposing tribe to his knees, then cut his throat with a filleting knife. Kelly's bunch are Protestants, and the enemy tribe Catholics, though it matters not a Mass or a damn because pure enmity on both sides, cherished and nurtured from childhood, now and forevermore, is the city's religion.

Kelly makes his first kills as a teenager; becomes known; acquires hangers-on, women, a car; kills more people; is jailed; gets out; kills; is shot. As Irish writer Eoin McNamee, 33, imagines the progression in Resurrection Man (Picador USA; 233 pages; $21), his terse, forceful first novel, it is not the fact of random murders, which of course are normal, that makes the city uneasy and somehow complicit. It is the gaudiness of the knifework, the unseemly calling of attention, that feels wrong. As the killings continue, the language of official statements quoted in news reports slides instinctively toward euphemism. People speak in ambiguities. Belfast does not want to know its own nature, not with any discomfiting precision.

The author's edged, chill language fits his subject. Of tribal elders in a bar, he writes, "The three older men looked like the frail members of a government in exile, deeply versed in the politics of failure." Of a newly alcoholic reporter who covers the killings, McNamee observes, "He had somehow acquired the psychic credentials of the drinker, the sad, proclaiming spirit." There is an eerie exactness in these passages that pins meaning to the wall with a knife blade. Now and then, as in his evocation of a mother's "low-keyed and costly cries of love," his reach for the stinging, pivotal word--that "costly" fails the "huh?" test--produces a clinker. But McNamee is a writer, a name to mark down.