Blood-Dark Track: A Family History
A fascinating family memoir from Joseph O'Neill, author of the Man Booker Prize longlisted and Richard & Judy pick, ‘Netherland’.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. O'Neill's other grandfather, a hotelier from a tiny and threatened Turkish Christian minority, was imprisoned by the British in Palestine, on suspicion of being a spy.At the age of thirty, Joseph O'Neill set out to uncover his grandfather's stories, what emerges is a narrative of two families and two charismatic but flawed men – it is a story of murder, espionage, paranoia and fear, of memories of violence and of fierce commitments to political causes.
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JOSEPH O’NEILL
Blood-Dark Track
A Family History
Fourth Estate
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF
This Harper Press edition published 2009
First published in Great Britain by Granta Books in 2000
Copyright © Joseph O’Neill 2000
Joseph O’Neill asserts the moral right to be identified
as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780007309252
Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780007380770
Version: 2017-01-19
From the reviews of Blood-Dark Track:
‘This is a beautifully written and complicated book, in which difficult perceptions are expressed with forensic honesty’
Sunday Telegraph
‘Joseph O’Neill is a corporate lawyer, a novelist … a philosopher. The story he tells here yields much evidence of the quickness of mind, analytical skill, contemplative ability and sheer endurance that these three roles demand … He also writes beautifully … But the book’s greatest triumph is in the delicate, sympathetic peeling back of layer after layer of two families before and after they overlap’
Financial Times
‘Blood-Dark Track is a superbly composed double-narrative … an extraordinary piece of detective work, removing the veil of silence that had been drawn across a history of the two branches of his family, and of the turbulent and often violent times in which O’Neill and Dakad lived’
Esquire
‘A gripping detective story, a thoughtful enquiry into nationalism, and a moving evocation of world war at the edges of its European theatre’
The Economist
‘An extraordinary book. The progress of [O’Neill’s] investigations are imbued with all the darkening excitement of a novel by le Carré or Greene’
TLS
‘His thoroughness and energy are phenomenal’
LRB
‘He uncovers fascinating parallels between the two men, illuminating the ways in which individual lives mesh with history’
Sunday Times
‘Joseph O’Neill writes beautifully. The fascination of this book lies in watching him come to terms with the violence in his family’s past’
Daily Mail
‘A most intriguing beast, this … An unusual and fascinating book’
Evening Herald
‘In its very unease, it is a remarkable work’
Irish Times
‘Blood-Dark Track moves adroitly between Ireland and the Middle East, and interlaces O’Neill’s own quest to discover what his grandfathers were up to with fascinating and unfamiliar insights into the history of their times … the result is riveting’
Sunday Express
‘An exploration into his secretive family history … makes compulsive reading’
Tatler
‘A book of remarkable virtuosity and illumination … This wonderful account is a joy to read, not least for the chance it gives us to understand ourselves’
The Herald
‘Blood-Dark Track is full of good things’
Independent
‘Unusual, expressive and absorbing. It is a rare triumph’
Irish Independent
To the memory of Joseph Dakad (1899–1964) and James O’Neill (1909–1973); to my sons; and to Sally.
Some day we shall get up before the dawn
And find our ancient hounds before the door,
And wide awake know that the hunt is on;
Stumbling upon the blood-dark track once more,
That stumbling to the kill beside the shore
– W. B. Yeats, ‘Hound Voice’
Contents
For me it began in far-off Mesopotamia now called Iraq, that land of Biblical names and history, of vast deserts and date groves, scorching suns and hot winds, the land of Babylon, Baghdad and the Garden of Eden, where the rushing Euphrates and the mighty Tigris converge and flow down into the Persian Gulf.
It was there in that land of the Arabs, then a battle-ground for the contending Imperialistic armies of Britain and Turkey, that I awoke to the echoes of guns being fired in the capital of my own country, Ireland.
– Tom Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland
At some point in my childhood, perhaps when I was aged ten, or eleven, I became aware that during the Second World War my Turkish grandfather – my mother’s father, Joseph Dakad – had been imprisoned by the British in Palestine, a place exotically absent from any atlas. A shiver of an explanation accompanied this information: the detention had something to do with spying for the Germans. At around the same age, I also learned that my Irish grandfather, James O’Neill, had been jailed by the authorities in Ireland in the course of the same war. Nobody explained precisely why, or where, or for how long, and I attributed his incarceration to the circumstances of a bygone Ireland and a bygone IRA. These matters went largely unmentioned, and certainly undiscussed, by my parents in the two decades that followed. Indeed, the subject of my late grandfathers was barely raised at all and, save for a wedding-day picture of Joseph and his wife, Georgette, there were no photographs of them displayed in our home. Dwelling in the jurisdiction of parental silence, my grandfathers remained mute and out of mind.
