The Cartographies of Violence: Belfast's Resurrection Man

In this paper I seek to examine the relationships between fiction, violence, and the geographical imagination through an analysis of Eoin McNamee's debut novel Resurrection Man. In dealing with a universal theme—the will to kill—but set in 1970s Belfast and narrating the existential journey of a gang of Loyalist killers in their campaign of violence across the city, I suggest that this novel presents the modern city and the characters who inhabit its streets as individuals journeying through familiar and alien territories in search of a stable set of identities. Through an examination of the narrative style employed by McNamee–the structural devices, the metaphorical engagements, the linguistic tropes—I suggest that the novel reads the city beyond the scientific or social-scientific imagination. For geographers interested in the connections between cities, violence, and modernity, the novel invites us to establish a dialogic relationship with the literary text not to advance our own theories but to take seriously those which in structure, form, and content are radically different to our own.