Truth and reconciliation commissions have been used in South Africa and Chile, but not in Northern Ireland. A reader of David Park’s new novel, however, could be forgiven for thinking that an Ulster version already existed, so convincingly rounded is his portrayal of one. Park imagines how a single case before such a commission would affect the individuals compelled to testify to it, as well as the man appointed to preside over it. Henry Stanfield is the truth commissioner of Park’s title, and it is not a post that this fastidious, cynical lawyer is looking forward to: “He will spend the next two years living in a city that he considers much the same way as he might think of a piece of dirt that he hoped he had shaken off his shoe.” Stanfield sees the job as a good move in a stalled career and is, to say the least, sceptical of the value of the process, reminded by it of “an old manged, flea-infested dog returning to inspect its own sick”.

That originally biblical image is set alongside another, which provides the book’s epigraph and is echoed variously throughout. It is of the healing power of the waters of Bethesda, “troubled” by an angel in the Gospel of St John. The more starry-eyed among Stanfield’s colleagues seem to hope for a similar effect from the commission, as if the truth really will make victims whole. In the case of Connor Walshe, a teenage police informant “disappeared” by the IRA during the Troubles, there seems little prospect of healing, but plenty of trouble. The case will suck in a former senior IRA man, who is now occupying the role of minister for children and culture; a retired RUC officer for whom Connor was a “tout”; and another IRA volunteer, not much older than the boy at the time of his disappearance, who has tried to build a new life in Florida.

Park occupies the interiors of all these men with a sympathy that does not shy away from the squalor of what they have perpetrated and witnessed. The refusal to draw facile lessons is reinforced by the fact that the least likable character is the one with ostensibly the highest moral standing: truth commissioner Henry Stanfield. Unfaithful, venal and irresolute, he is a reminder that whatever the motives behind an institution, it is administered by flawed individuals.

Park overlays all his characters’ daily compromises with history and the present with a metaphorical reiteration of images of water: Fenton, the RUC officer, falls into a stream and imagines himself “carried and cribbed by the stone sides . . . until his body is borne to the sea”; in America, Danny looks at the lake he lives by each morning and also draws from it a sense of calm, “it lulls his senses, reminds him of where he is”.

Not the least of the achievements of this impressive, many-layered novel is its combination of the hardest of realities with a measure of poetry and of humanity.

THE TRUTH COMMISSIONER by David Park
Bloomsbury £14.99 pp372

David Horspool is an editor on the TLS. The Truth Commissioner is available at the Sunday Times Books First price of £13.49 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585

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