Silver's City (novel)

Silver's City

LC Class		PR6062.E46 S57 1995
Preceded by	Stamping Ground
Followed by	Chinese Whispers

Silver's City is a 1981

.

Publication

After some 15 years of

Ulster loyalists

, amid the killings and bombings, it is one of the seminal fictional portraits of the Troubles. Reassessing the book on its republication in 2017, Daniel Magennis wrote for the International Crime Fiction Research Group: 'Silver's City is a menacing and expertly written thriller which explores the disaffection of a people with their own home and lays bare the corrosive effects of casual and causeless violence. Silver's City is a place where violence seems woven into its fabric, a desolate stage for the self-defeating blood sport that was much – if not all – of the Troubles. '

Plot summary

While Belfast is torn apart by a vicious, undeclared war, two men are engaged in a bitter and equally destructive private battle for vengeance. Ned Galloway, a streetwise hired gun, has abducted 'Silver' Steele a jailed Loyalist folk-hero who fired the first shot of the Troubles. Galloway's purpose – to prove who wields the real power in the city's battle-torn streets. While Galloway believes his anarchic skills can buy him a kind of freedom, Steele, having swapped a cell for the illusion of freedom, discovers that he no longer understands the mechanism and principles of the city he once fought for. Together they plunge towards the final confrontation. A confrontation where all who believe they pull the strings are proved dangerously, murderously wrong.

Reception

Although "Poor Lazarus", Leitch's second novel, had won the

Silver's City was Leitch's fourth novel, written when he had left Northern Ireland for London. As Leitch recalled it in an interview with

Apart from winning the Whitbread, it received highly respectful reviews from the English press.

• Sunday Telegraph
  : 'It's not the action of the novel which stays in the mind so much as the precise delineation of the two personalities, both alien and both finely and unsettlingly rendered. '
• The London Review of Books, in a review by the literary critic Graham Hough,^[5] said: 'Maurice Leitch is a writer of considerable and sombre power. This is an arresting, imaginative evocation of a world so gangrened by hate and cruelty as to be beyond redemption. Its status, intended or achieved, as a historical report is something that an outsider can hardly judge.'
• When the first paperback edition of the book appeared in 1983, by Abacus, they quoted similar words from the Observer: 'Tight-lipped and tautly-bound venture into the destitutions of modern Belfast. The urban wilderness of Ulster... is well caught. But more, so is the spiritual desert of the embattled Ulster mind.'

Radio adaptation

In 1995, a new paperback edition of Silver's City was published by Minerva.^[6] In the same year, Leitch dramatised the book for BBC Radio 4's Monday Play,^[7] a slot for the harder hitting dramas on the network. Brian Coxtook the role of Silver Steele, the Glaswegian actor Freddie Boardley^[8] played Ned Gallagher, the Northern Ireland actor James Nesbitt was Billy Bonner and Northern Ireland's Clare Cathcart took the female lead as Nan.

References